on the Washington pulse.” The orphaned son of a white trader and
a Sioux woman, Palmer had been adopted as a child by an Osage
family and had since married an Osage woman. A U.S. senator
from Oklahoma called Palmer “the most eloquent Indian alive.”
For months, Bigheart and Palmer and other members of the
tribe negotiated with government officials over the terms of
allotment. The Osage prevailed upon the government to divide the
land solely among members of the tribe, thereby increasing each
individual’s allotment from 160 acres to 657 acres. This strategy
would avoid a mad dash on their territory, though whites could
then attempt to buy allotments from tribe members. The Osage
also managed to slip into the agreement what seemed, at the time,
like a curious provision: “That the oil, gas, coal, or other minerals
covered by the lands...are hereby reserved to the Osage Tribe.”
The tribe knew that there were some oil deposits under the
reservation. More than a decade earlier, an Osage Indian had
shown John Florer, the owner of the trading post in Gray Horse, a
rainbow sheen floating on the surface of a creek in the eastern
part of the reservation. The Osage Indian dabbed his blanket at the
spot and squeezed the liquid into a container. Florer thought that
the liquid smelled like the axle grease sold in his store, and he
rushed back and showed the sample to others, who confirmed his
suspicions: it was oil. With the tribe’s approval, Florer and a
wealthy banking partner obtained a lease to begin drilling on the
reservation. Few imagined that the tribe was sitting on a fortune,
but by the time of the allotment negotiations several small wells
had begun operating, and the Osage shrewdly managed to hold on
to this last realm of their land—a realm that they could not even
see. After the terms of the Allotment Act were agreed upon, in
1906, Palmer boasted to Congress, “I wrote that Osage agreement
out in longhand.”