after he and the delegation pressed their case, the commissioner
agreed to end the ration policy. Wah-Ti-An-Kah picked up his
blanket and said, “Tell this man it is all right now—he can go.”
Like many others in the tribe, Mollie’s parents tried to hold on
to their customs. Bestowing a name was one of the most
important Osage rituals; only then was someone considered a
person by the tribe. Mollie, who was born on December 1, 1886,
was given the Osage name Wah-kon-tah-he-um-pah. Her sisters
were also known by Osage names: Anna was Wah-hrah-lum-pah;
Minnie, Wah-sha-she; and Rita, Me-se-moie.
But the process of acculturation was accelerating as settlers
began to move onto the reservation. They didn’t look like the
Osage, or even like the Cheyenne or the Pawnee. They seemed
unwashed and desperate, like William Hale, who would eventually
appear on his horse, in his ragged clothes—this man from
nowhere. Even settlers like Hale who formed close ties to the
Osage argued that the white man’s road was inevitable and that
the only way for the Osage to survive was to follow it. Hale was
determined to transform not only himself but the wilderness from
which he came—to cross-fence the open prairie and to create a
network of trading posts and towns.
In the 1880s, John Florer, a Kansas frontiersman who referred
to Osage territory as “God’s country,” established the first trading
post in Gray Horse. Mollie’s father, Ne-kah-e-se-y, liked to linger
outside it, in the shade, and sell animal pelts, and Mollie got to
know the son of a trader, who was one of the first white people
she’d ever seen; his skin was as pale as the belly of a fish.
The trader’s son kept a journal, and in it he noted a profound
existential change experienced by Mollie and her family, though
he remarked upon it only in passing, as if it were no more than a