Osage-Cherokee War
The arrival of white-dominated American civilization did not inaugurate encroachment upon and conquest of Indian lands in the American Southwestor elsewhere on the North American continent. Long before, the tribes themselves threatened, feuded with, stole from, conquered, enslaved, and slaughtered one another. Over a span of centuries, the Osages migrated all the way from the Ohio Valley to present-day Oklahoma, attacking and displacing other tribes as they went. In Oklahoma they violently forced two of the area’s earliest inhabitants—the Wichitas and Caddos—south, across Red River.
Claremore Mound, a few miles northwest of present Claremore, where a seven hundred-strong force of Cherokees and their allies decimated the population of an Osage village in the 1817 Battle of Claremore Mound. As so often was the case in the sanguinary Western wars, both between tribes and between Natives and whites, one side attacked when the other’s warriors were mostly absent and the women, children, and elderly men present. Far from settling conflicts, such horrors typically sparked reprisals or at least attempted reprisals. Most of the Osage dead and captured at Claremore Mound were women and children. Courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society.
Read the entire Oklahoma story in John J. Dwyer's The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People volume 1 of a 2-part series on the 46th state and the people who make this state very special. |