“Disclaimer: I tend to drive this places where it’s not supposed to go,” J.J. Edwards maniacally grinned as he shifted the Polaris ATV into four-wheel drive and gunned it up the steep muddy embankment.
The door handle was stuck from the inside, basically trapping me, so there was nothing to do but hang on, pretending to study my books and maps, as we climbed what felt like an almost 90-degree ascent.
We were on the hunt for the location of an Osage village that was rumored to be on land once owned by J.J.’s father, Donnie, where the native people had camped during the latter years of the Civil War.
The group of about 1,000 people was composed of 600 warriors, many of whom had brought along their wives and children, after being hired by the U.S. government to protect settlers who’d been moving into the area.
The politics of the tribe seems to have been complicated, with some people having ties to the Confederacy.
As J.J. and I stood on what at one time had been the south bank of Turkey Creek (as opposed to a small lake built in 1974), feeling the wind and sunlight die in the summer evening, I dreamed them there, imagining the laughter of children, the men leaning against rifles, murmuring, the women perched over fires around teepees.
Few stories of the village remain, unfortunately, save tired tales of “thieving Indians” who couldn’t help but steal ropes, saddles and someone’s kitchen stove; and another wherein a white fellow had “gone native” because he liked having an Osage wife do all his work.
One genuinely fascinating detail that remains from their daily lives, however, is the story of a young Osage boy who’d been fiercely — and perhaps mortally — kicked upside the head by a horse.
A woman who lived nearby named Elizabeth Miller had traveled to the camp with fresh milk and a resolve to heal him, though her daughter Eliza J. left no mention of whether or not he survived.
In the 1970s, though, local historian Lester Harding mentioned how he and others had watched the opening of a grave at the site belonging to a small native child.
The ground being on the eastern edge of the Flint Hills, and “hard like concrete,” as J.J. had put it, the grave had been rather shallow, capped with a piece of flat native limestone and covered with only meager earth.
Whether it was the same boy cared for by Miller, Harding did not speculate.
He’d only suggested that the exhumation was prompted by a farmer who’d wanted to convert the ground for agricultural use.
AS FOR most land in the area, however, given its harsh and rocky nature, it’s far more suited for cattle than crops.
A few of J.J.’s own cows had just escaped that afternoon, and so as we bounced across the prairie in the ATV, we kept our eyes peeled.
“The old thistle’s getting high! Damn!,” he shouted over the grumbling engine as the grasses were ground beneath the hungry treads.
