Books: Osages Before Oil

WAH’KON-TAH—John Joseph Mathews —University of Oklahoma Press ($2.50).

Osage Indians did not always ride in limousines, squat in blankets among Grand Rapids furniture and generally give a pathetically good imitation of nouveaux riches the world over. Long before chance made them oil tycoons they had a Golden Age. It is not of the prehistoric greatness of the Osages that Author Mathews writes, nor of their bloated capitalist days, but of the time when, still poor and still noble, they lived a benevolently restricted life on the Osage reservation.

Central figure and near-hero of Wah’Kon-Tah is the late Laban J. Miles, a plump little Indian Agent who went to live with the Osages in 1878, died among them last year. An honest, endeavoring man, a Quaker like his nephew Herbert Hoover, who spent part of his boyhood at his uncle’s agency, Agent Miles minded not only his charges’ ways but his own, became the Osages’ trusted friend. He kept a journal and kept it to himself. One of the ways Agent Miles fought the Indians’ inevitable degeneration was by administering white man’s education. A prize result of his policy is Osage Author John Joseph Mathews, whose Wah’Kon-Tah, based on Agent Miles’s journal, is a movingly dignified memorial of his people.

In 1878 the Osages were still known as “the great Osages”—not only because of their height (most of them six feet or over) but because of their reputation as one of the bravest tribes of Plains Indians. When they left their old hunting grounds in Kansas for the Indian Territory, buffaloes were getting so scarce that government allowances and rations were welcome, and even their wild mourning dances did not always end in a war party, hungry for scalps. Between the noble savagery of the Osages and the greed of half-civilized whites nibbling at the Reservation’s borders, Major Miles (all Indian Agents were automatically ”Major”) had his hands full. The dice were loaded: “civilization” was bound to win. The quiet, unbitter history closes with Eagle That Dreams singing his chant to the rising sun. “When the lower edge of the sun barely touched the horizon the chant stopped and the early morning world seemed to be listening, except for the coughing of the pumps carried from the oil fields on the heavy air.”

The Author’s great-grandfather, William Shirley (“Old Bill”) Williams, famed eccentric Methodist missionary, renounced his God for the Osages’ Wah’Kon-Tah, married into the tribe. Author John Joseph Mathews, born near the Osage Agency (at Pawhuska, Okla.), was one of Major Miles’s favored youngsters. After graduation from the University of Oklahoma he went to Oxford; after three and one-half years at Merton College he emerged with a natural science degree. Major Miles’s notes on the Osages were coveted by many writers, including Edna Ferber (whose Cimarron covers the place and time), but Major Miles kept them for young John Mathews, willed them to him at his death. Urged on by the University of Oklahoma, aided by his own and his tribesmen’s memories, Author Mathews settled down in the Osage hills to write. A first book, his work reads like the matured wisdom of a man civilized but unspoiled. Wah’Kon-Tah finished, Osage Author Mathews lives alone, far from the highroad, spends his time shooting, reading, hunting coyotes. Wah’Kon-Tah is the November choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.