4 UNDERGROUND RESERVATION

The money had come suddenly, swiftly, madly. Mollie had

been ten years old when the oil was first discovered, had
witnessed, firsthand, the ensuing frenzy. But, as the elders in the
tribe had relayed to Mollie, the tangled history of how their people
had gotten hold of this oil-rich land went back to the seventeenth
century, when the Osage had laid claim to much of the central part
of the country—a territory that stretched from what is now
Missouri and Kansas to Oklahoma, and still farther west, all the
way to the Rockies.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased, from the
French, the Territory of Louisiana, which contained lands
dominated by the Osage. Jefferson informed his secretary of the
navy that the Osage were a great nation and that “we must stand
well, because in their quarter we are miserably weak.” In 1804, a
delegation of Osage chiefs met with Jefferson at the White House.
He told the navy secretary that the Osage, whose warriors typically
stood well over six feet tall, were the “finest men we have ever
seen.”

At the meeting, Jefferson addressed the chiefs as “my children”
and said, “It is so long since our forefathers came from beyond the
great water, that we have lost the memory of it, and seem to have
grown out of this land, as you have done....We are all now of one
family.” He went on, “On your return tell your people that I take
them all by the hand; that I become their father hereafter, that
they shall know our nation only as friends and benefactors.”