In front of her, the prairie stretched to the horizon like an ancient
seabed. There were no settlements, no souls. It was as if she’d
slipped over the edge of the world and fallen, to borrow Willa
Cather’s phrase, “outside man’s jurisdiction.”
Hour after hour, mile after mile, lurching back and forth in the
wagon, Mollie crossed the wild, empty landscape, not yet carved
into a country. Eventually, the light began to fail, and the driver
and Mollie had to stop and set up camp. When the sun sank below
the prairie floor, the sky would turn blood red and then black, the
density of the darkness diluted only by the moon and the stars,
from where the Osage believed that many of their clans
descended. Mollie had become a traveler in the mist. She was
surrounded by the forces of night, heard but not seen: the
gibbering of coyotes and the howling of wolves and the screaming
of owls, which were said to carry an evil spirit.
The next day, the monochrome prairies gave way to
timber-covered hills, and Mollie and her driver rode up and down
the slopes, past shadowy blackjacks and sunless caves—perfect
places, as an Indian Affairs agent once fretted, “for ambush.” (He
added, “Let me tell you there are...ignorant criminals who would
do anything.”) They rode until they came upon a sign of human
habitation: a single-story, dilapidated, red-painted wooden
structure. It was an Osage trading store, and nearby was a grubby
rooming house and a blacksmith shop with an immense pile of
horseshoes. The muddy trail turned into a wider, even muddier
trail, with a scattering of trading stores on either side. These
businesses had sagging duckboards out front to help customers
avoid the treacherous mud and hitching posts for horses and
weather-beaten façades that looked as if they might tumble over in
the breeze, some of them with trompe l’oeil second stories to
create an illusion of grandeur.