"A very strange looking cloud appeared in the sky northward. It whirled and churned in a most picturesque and frightful manner. The danger was imminent. A small farmhouse stood near the road to which we hurried with all possible speed. Such a place for shelter! It was not only small, but looked old and very insecure.
Others had entered the house before us, and more followed from the fields and road until there were about twenty persons in the house. The storm was on at once in great fury. The old house swayed like a tent, and groaned as if in pain. How blessed now to be well prayed up!
Oh, the intensities of those few minutes! I have no idea how long this storm was passing over us, but it did not seem to have lasted more than a few minutes. The house ceased to sway and grown; the tornado was past, and then followed a very few minutes of the most torrential rainfall I ever witnessed. When the storm ceased, we went out to look around. We climbed a little bluff and saw as far as eye could see everything swept from the face of the country. Nothing could now be seen of the buildings, groves and crops we had passed just before."
-"Thrilling Experiences of Frontier Life in Western Oklahoma", by La Fayette Cassler
Today we traveled from Tulsa northwest to the Osage Nation. The Osage are a small tribe (25,000 citizens, compared to 500,000 for the Cherokees or Navajo), but they hit the popular consciousness due to the best-selling book and popular movie "Killers of the Flower Moon". The Osage had become the richest per capita people in the world after a massive oil strike on their land. Ironically, the Osage got their land because it was "worthless" and all they could get as a late-coming tribe to Indian Territory. The book and movie detail the "Reign of Terror" during the 1920's, where whites systematically married then murdered Osages in order to capture their "headrights", which carried a share of the oil field profits. We wanted to see: What does Osage Nation really look like today? How do they feel about their past and their present?
Two days before I arrived in Oklahoma, the small town of Barnsdall was hit by the strongest tornado to hit the state in eight years -- 2 dead, a third of the town leveled. I realized I had planned to pass through Barnsdall on my way to the Osage Nation -- making this my second straight trip passing through a recent tornado disaster.
The day started calm, and I enjoyed the first 17 miles north from Tulsa on the Osage Prairie Bike Trail. I startled a group of three young bucks drinking from a water hole. No one else on the trail. Reaching the trail's end, I hit the rural back roads, listened to the birds, rolling along. Then, I noticed the wind picking up and the sky was darkening in the west. I pulled out my phone and checked the radar (thank you Jason for the tip on that) -- big thunderstorm cell headed at me. I felt the first raindrops -- time to find cover.
The road I was on had farmhouses, but well back from the road, with driveways that were gated. I finally found a driveway after a couple of miles (getting increasingly wet) with an open gate, and also a sign: "Due to rising costs of ammunition, no warning shots will be fired". I decided to take my chances, rolled down the driveway, and saw the owner mowing his yard. I waved and asked if I could take cover under his carport, which we did together just as the heavy rain started and the lightning started flashing. We had an hour together while the storm rolled through -- he and his wife were delightful people, interested in my story and happy to share theirs. He had grown up in Barnsdall, worked different jobs in big cities for many years after college, but decided to come back home to raise their four kids. A 40 acre plot cost $50,000. He works remotely now, has plenty of money to travel for vacation, pointed out several neighbors who have recently bought "from California, from New York" -- bringing money to the rural economy. He has been helping as a volunteer with the Barnsdall cleanup and suggested how to best get a look at what is going on without being in the way.
Barnsdall was only a few miles up the road, and I took a peek as he suggested -- FEMA trucks and insurance tents everywhere, still in the early stages of cleanup. I included a picture below of the massive pile of debris that is getting larger every day. I didn't talk to people in town, but the town looked alive, school is running normally -- people are moving on with their lives.
Pawhuska, the Osage capital, is a town of old brick buildings, built during the oil boom a hundred years ago. It's clear the movie is driving traffic to the town -- the restaurant was bustling. The Osage Nation museum is modest but nice. Its primary exhibition: a room full of hundreds of photographs of the original Osage headrights owners -- there were 2,200 of them, they have photographs of more than half, including all of the principals in the book and movie. We had a wonderful, lengthy discussion with a 76 year old staffer -- she had grown up on the reservation (she pointed out her grandmother on the wall, one of the original 2,200), had left, married outside the tribe, raised her family in Chicago, but when her mom got sick, came back to Pawhuska to help.
Headrights are still a thing -- there is still oil produced on the reservation (we saw many working wells), and a full share of rights pays $4,000-9,000 per quarter free from taxes. Rights are inherited, divided among siblings -- what is received by any given Osage depends on how many kids their parents and grandparents had.
We asked how she feels looking back at the Reign of Terror. Her response was interesting: "It was a long time ago, at a time where it was really the Wild West. Lawlessness was everywhere. It was terrible, of course. But we as a people have moved forward. We are happy with the attention we are getting because of the movie, and Scorcese did a wonderful job faithfully portraying the Osage people in the movie. We now get 50-75 people a day in the museum, a few years ago it was basically zero. We are building an expansion of the museum as a result. But -- dwelling on the past is not what we should do, not what we are doing."
We concluded our day in Osage Country visiting the Tallgrass Prairie Reserve -- saw dozens of buffalo on land managed by the Nature Conservancy. Plus more scissor-tailed flycatchers. Well worth the visit.
