The Osage and the Missouri, First Peoples of the River Country

Long before Columbia existed, long before any European cartographer had a name for this part of the continent, the land between the Missouri and Osage rivers was Osage country. The Osage Nation, known in their own language as the Wazhazhe, were one of the most powerful Native nations in the center of North America, controlling a territory that stretched from present-day Missouri and Arkansas into Kansas and Oklahoma. Their principal towns were organized villages, not nomadic camps, and their political structure was sophisticated enough that both French and American governments found them formidable negotiating partners.

The river that runs past Columbia's northern edge takes its name from the Missouri people, a Siouan-speaking nation who lived along its banks before European contact and were devastated by disease and warfare in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By the time American settlers arrived in force, the Missouri people had been largely incorporated into other nations. The river carried their name forward even as their political existence had been broken.

The Osage were removed from Missouri under pressure beginning in the early nineteenth century. A series of treaties, each one extracting more land in exchange for promises that were often broken, pushed the Osage westward first into Kansas and then into Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, where the Osage Nation is headquartered today. The removal was completed by the eighteen thirties, roughly the same decade that Columbia's university was chartered and its first buildings were raised.

The land on which the University of Missouri stands, the land the Booneslick settlers farmed, the ground under every building in Columbia, was Osage land. That history is not marked on most campus signs, but it is part of every landscape in Boone County. The Osage call themselves the People of the Middle Waters.

The rivers here were theirs.