The paper’s ads reflected the change. The old livery stable, with its buggies and phaetons, its plugs to be hired, its tobacco-chewing loungers, its odor of straw, manure, and axle grease, was swept away, and in its place was Fink’s Garage and Auto Livery. Repairs of All Kinds. Buy a Stimson Salient Six. The smell of gasoline, the hiss of the hose, lean young lads with grease-grimed fingers, engine wise.
Come to the Chamber of Commerce Dinner. The Oklahoma City College Glee Club will sing.
Osage began to travel, to see the world. Their wanderings were no longer local. Where, two years ago, you read that Dr. and Mrs. Horace McGill are up from Concho to do their Christmas buying, you now saw that Mr. and Mrs. W. Fletcher Busby have left for a trip to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land. You know that old Wick Busby had made his pile in oil and that Nettie Busby was out to see the world.
Most astounding of all were the Indian items, for now the Oklahoma Wigwam and every other paper in the county regularly ran news about those incredible people who in one short year had leaped from the Neolithic Age to Broadway.
The Osage Indians, a little more than two thousand in number, who but yesterday were a ragged, half-fed, and listless band, squatting wretchedly on the Reservation allotted them, waiting until time, sickness, and misery should blot them forever from the land, were now, by a miracle of nature, the richest nation in the world. The barren ground on which they had lived now yielded the most lavish oil flow in the state. Yancey Cravat’s news story and editorial had been copied and read all over the country. A stunned government tried to bring order out of a chaos of riches. The two thousand Osages were swept off the Reservation to make way for the flood of oil that was transmuted into a flood of gold. They were transported to a new section called Wazhazhe, which is the ancient Indian word for Osage.
Agents appointed. Offices established. Millions of barrels of oil. Millions of dollars. Millions of dollars yearly to be divided somehow among two thousand Osage Indians, to whom a blanket, a bowl of soffica, a mangy pony, a bit of tobacco, a disk of peyote had meant riches. And now every full-blood, half-blood, or quarter-blood Osage was put on the Indian Roll, and every name on the Indian Roll was entitled to a Head Right. Every head right meant a definite share in the millions. Five in a family—five head rights. Ten in a family—ten head rights. The Indian Agent’s office was full of typewriters, files, pads, ledgers, neat young clerks all occupied with papers and documents that read like some fantastic nightmare. The white man’s eye, traveling down the tidy list, with its storybook Indian names and its hard, cold, matter-of-fact figures, rejected what it read as being too absurd for the mind to grasp.
| Clint Tall Meat | $523,000 |
| Benny Warrior | $192,000 |
| Ho ki ah se | $265,887 |
| Long Foot Magpie | $387,942 |
The government bought them farms with their own oil money, and built big red brick houses near the roadside and furnished them in plush and pianos and linoleum and gas ranges and phonographs. You saw their powerful motor cars, dust covered, whirling up and down the red clay Oklahoma roads—those roads still rutted, unpaved, hazardous, for Oklahoma had had no time to attend to such matters. Fifty years before, whole bands of Osages on their wiry little ponies had traveled south in the winter and north in the summer to visit their Indian cousins. Later, huddled miserably on their Reservation, they had issued forth on foot or in wretched wagons to pay their seasonal visits and to try to recapture, by talk and song and dance and ritual, some pale ghost of their departed happiness. A shabby enough procession, guarded, furtive, smoldering.
But now you saw each Osage buck in his high-powered car, his inexpert hands grasping the wheel, his enormous sombrero—larger even than the white man’s hat—flapping in the breeze that he made by his speed. In the back you saw the brilliance of feathers and blankets worn by the beady-eyed children and the great placid squaw crouched in the bottom of the car. The white man driving the same road gave these Indian cars a wide berth, for he knew they stopped for no one, kept the middle of the road, flew over bridges, draws, and ditches like mad things.
Grudgingly, for she still despised them, Sabra Cravat devoted a page of the Wigwam to news of the Osages, those moneyed, petted wards of a bewildered government. The page appeared under the title of Indian News, and its contents were more than tinged with the grotesque.
“Long Foot Magpie and wife were weekend visitors of Plenty Horses at Watonga recently.
“Grandma Standing Woman of near Hominy was a visitor at the home of Red Paint Woman.
“Mr. and Mrs. Sampson Lame Bull have returned from Osage after accompanying Mrs. Twin Woman, who is now a patient in the Osage Hospital.
“Albert Short Tooth and Robert White Eyes are batching it at the home of Mrs. Ghost Woman during her absence.
“Laura Bird Woman and Thelma Eagle Nest of near here motored to Grey Horse to visit Sore Head but he was not at home.
“Woodson Short Man and wife were shopping in Osage one day last week.
“Red Bird Scabby has left the Reservation for a visit to Colorado Springs and Manitou.
“Squaw Iki has returned recently after being a patient at the Concho Hospital for some time.
“Joe Stump Horn and his wife Mrs. Long Dead are visiting Red Nose Scabby for a few days.
“Sun Maker has given up the effort to find a first-class cook in Wazhazhe and is looking around in Osage.”
The Osages were Wigwam subscribers. They read the paper, or had it read to them if they were of the older and less literate generation. Sabra was accustomed to seeing the doorway
