Osage and Quapaw Removal: The Nations Behind the Gateway

Lewis and Clark set out from the Camp Dubois staging area on May fourteenth, eighteen oh four, moving northwest up the Missouri River to survey a territory the United States had just purchased from France. They were surveying land that the Osage, the Quapaw, the Missouria, and the Otoe had occupied for generations. The purchase from France did not require the consent of the people who lived there. France sold what it had claimed to govern. What it had actually governed was contested.

The Missouria nation, whose name the state carries, had been devastated before Lewis and Clark arrived. Smallpox epidemics in the early seventeen hundreds and raids from neighboring peoples reduced them from an estimated several thousand to fewer than three hundred survivors, who merged with the Otoe. The Osage, the region's most powerful nation at European contact, engaged in sustained diplomacy with French, Spanish, and then American governments. They ceded territory treaty by treaty: the eighteen oh eight treaty, negotiated just a few years after Lewis and Clark passed through; the eighteen eighteen treaty; the eighteen twenty-five treaty that relocated them entirely to Kansas. Within a generation they were moved again, to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma.

The Osage Nation is today federally recognized and based in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. They have pursued repatriation of cultural materials and ancestral remains from Missouri institutions, and in several cases they have won. The Gateway Arch stands at the departure point for the expedition that opened the territory where these removals would occur. The Arch memorializes westward expansion. The nations displaced by that expansion are not named on its interpretive panels.