Killers of the Flower Moon

4: UNDERGROUND RESERVATION
The money had: In describing the history of the Osage, I benefited from several excellent
accounts. See Louis F. Burns, History of the Osage People; Mathews, Wah’kon-Tah;
Wilson, Underground Reservation; Tixier, Tixier’s Travels on the Osage Prairies; and
Bailey, Changes in Osage Social Organization. I also drew on field reports and Tribal
Council documents held in the Records of the Osage Indian Agency, NARA-FW.
“we must stand”: Louis F. Burns, History of the Osage People, 140.
“finest men”: Ibid.
“It is so long”: Quoted in Ambrose, Undaunted Courage, 343.
“to make the enemy”: Mathews, Osages, 271.
Lizzie also grew up: Existing records do not indicate her Osage name.
“industrious”: Probate records of Mollie’s mother, Lizzie, “Application for Certificate of
Competency,” Feb. 1, 1911, NARA-FW.
“The race is”: Tixier, Tixier’s Travels on the Osage Prairies, 191.
“the beast vomits”: Ibid., 192.
“I am perfectly”: Quoted in Brown, Frontiersman, 245.
“Why don’t you”: Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, 46–47.
“The question will”: Quoted in Wilson, Underground Reservation, 18.
“broken, rocky”: Isaac T. Gibson to Enoch Hoag, in Report of the Commissioner of Indian
Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1871, 906.
“My people”: Mathews, Wah’kon-Tah, 33–34.
“The air was filled”: Quoted in Louis F. Burns, History of the Osage People, 448.
the most significant: The Office of Indian Affairs was renamed the Bureau of Indian
Affairs in 1947.
“This little remnant”: Gibson to Hoag, in Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to
the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1871, 487.
“It was like”: Finney and Thoburn, “Reminiscences of a Trader in the Osage Country,”
149.
“every buffalo dead”: Quoted in Merchant, American Environmental History, 20.
“We are not dogs”: Mathews, Wah’kon-Tah, 30.
“Tell these gentlemen”: Information on the Osage delegation, including any quotations,
comes from Mathews’s account in ibid., 35–38.
“Likewise his daughters”: Frank F. Finney, “At Home with the Osages.”
“There lingers memories”: Ibid.
“The Indian must conform”: Louis F. Burns, History of the Osage People, 91.
“for ambush”: Mathews, Wah’kon-Tah, 79.
“big, black mouth”: Mathews, Sundown, 23.
“It is impossible”: Quoted in McAuliffe, Deaths of Sybil Bolton, 215–16.