more or less familiar with their filthy sores and iniquitous
cesspools. Yet I never wholly appreciated the story of Sodom and
Gomorrah, whose sins and vices proved their undoing and their
downfall, until I visited this Indian nation.”
He implored Congress to take greater action. “Every white man
in Osage County will tell you that the Indians are now running
wild,” he said, adding, “The day has come when we must begin our
restriction of these moneys or dismiss from our hearts and
conscience any hope we have of building the Osage Indian into a
true citizen.”
A few congressmen and witnesses tried to mitigate the
scapegoating of the Osage. At a subsequent hearing, even a judge
who served as a guardian acknowledged that rich Indians spent
their wealth no differently than white people with money did.
“There is a great deal of humanity about these Osages,” he said.
Hale also argued that the government should not be dictating the
Osage’s financial decisions.
But in 1921, just as the government had once adopted a ration
system to pay the Osage for seized land—just as it always seemed
to turn its gospel of enlightenment into a hammer of coercion—
Congress implemented even more draconian legislation
controlling how the Osage could spend their money. Guardians
would not only continue to oversee their wards’ finances; under
the new law, these Osage Indians with guardians were also
“restricted,” which meant that each of them could withdraw no
more than a few thousand dollars annually from his or her trust
fund. It didn’t matter if these Osage needed their money to pay for
education or a sick child’s hospital bills. “We have many little
children,” the last hereditary chief of the tribe, who was in his
eighties, explained in a statement issued to the press. “We want to
raise them and educate them. We want them to be comfortable,