The land run of 1893 Credit 16Because the Osage had purchased their land, it was harder for
the government to impose its policy of allotment. The tribe, led by
one of its greatest chiefs, James Bigheart—who spoke seven
languages, among them Sioux, French, English, and Latin, and
who had taken to wearing a suit—was able to forestall the process.
But pressure was mounting. Theodore Roosevelt had already
warned what would befall an Indian who refused his allotment:
“Let him, like these whites, who will not work, perish from the
face of the earth which he cumbers.”
By the early twentieth century, Bigheart and other Osage knew
that they could no longer avoid what a government official called
the “great storm” gathering. The U.S. government planned to break
up Indian Territory and make it a part of what would be a new
state called Oklahoma. (In the Choctaw language, “Oklahoma”
means “red people.”) Bigheart had succeeded in delaying the
process for several years—the Osage were the last tribe in Indian
Territory to be allotted—and this had given the Osage more
leverage as government officials were eager to avoid any final
impediments to statehood. In 1904, Bigheart sent a zealous young
lawyer named John Palmer across the country “to keep his finger