...It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and
superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to the
children.”
Many Osage students at Mollie’s school tried to flee, but
lawmen chased after them on horseback and bound them with
ropes, hauling them back. Mollie attended class eight months each
year, and when she did return to Gray Horse, she noticed that
more and more girls had stopped wearing their blankets and
moccasins and that the young men had exchanged their
breechcloths for trousers and their scalp locks for broad-brimmed
hats. Many students began to feel embarrassed by their parents,
who didn’t understand English and still lived by the old ways. An
Osage mother said of her son, “His ears are closed to our talk.”
Mollie was forced to attend the St. Louis School. Credit 15Mollie’s family was straddling not only two centuries but two
civilizations. Her family’s distress increased in the late 1890s as
the U.S. government intensified its push for the culmination of its
assimilation campaign: allotment. Under the policy, the Osage
reservation would be divvied up into 160-acre parcels, into real