man cannot put iron thing in ground here. White man will not
come to this land. There are many hills here...white man does not
like country where there are hills, and he will not come.” He went
on, “If my people go west where land is like floor of lodge, white
man will come to our lodges and say, ‘We want your land.’...Soon
land will end and Osages will have no home.”
So the Osage bought the territory for seventy cents per acre and,
in the early 1870s, began their exodus. “The air was filled with
cries of the old people, especially the women, who lamented over
the graves of their children, which they were about to leave
forever,” a witness said. After completing their trek to the new
reservation, members of the tribe built several camps, the most
significant one being in Pawhuska, where, on a prominent hilltop,
the Office of Indian Affairs erected an imposing sandstone
building for its field office. Gray Horse, in the western part of the
territory, consisted of little more than a cluster of newly built
lodges, and it was here where Lizzie and Ne-kah-e-se-y, who
married in 1874, settled.
The series of forced migrations, along with such “white man’s
diseases” as smallpox, had taken a tremendous toll on the tribe. By
one estimate, its population dwindled to about three thousand—a
third of what it had been seventy years earlier. The Indian Affairs
agent reported, “This little remnant is all that remains of a heroic
race that once held undisputed ownership over all this region.”