[An American anthropologist, ethnologist, and prolific writer, Ewers is a specialist of Native American culture. In the following review, he praises the literary qualities of The Osages.]

Oxford-educated John Joseph Mathews, great-grandson of an Osage woman and a missionary who translated the Bible into the Osage language, has written a sympathetic history of his great-grandmother's tribe [in The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters]. Likening his task to the reconstruction of a dinosaur from many scattered fragments, he has fitted together ingeniously the Indians' oral traditions and the writings of explorers, traders, travelers, missionaries, government officials and ethnologists, making allowances for white men's fragmentary knowledge, and the prejudices and special pleadings which impeded their understanding of Osage life and values.

Historians will question the author's heavy reliance upon tongue-to-ear Indian traditions to explain events that occurred centuries ago. Anthropologists will question his contention that Osage social and political organization and Osage religion, rich in natural symbolism and overburdened with ceremonial ritual, were entirely of their own making, uninfluenced by borrowings from other and closely related Siouan tribes. However, there can be no question of the literary merit of this sensitive account of an important Midwestern tribe.

The proud, warlike Osages were the dominant power in the lower Missouri Valley at the dawn of history in that region (1673). Yet these tall giants of men humbled themselves before their creator Wah'Kon-Tah by calling themselves The Little Ones. Theirs was a country teeming with game of both plains and woodland species, for which they thanked their creator and which they regarded as brothers.

For 140 years the Osages were involved in the conflicts among the French, Spanish and English for control of the interior parts of North America. They overcame their initial dislike for the body odors of heavily clad, hairy French traders who came among them, and whom they dubbed Hairy Eyebrows. They supplied Pawnee slaves as well as furs to the French. At the same time they prevented their French allies from carrying guns to their Indian enemies north and west of their villages on the Osage River. Spanish horses and French guns modified their culture, but the Osages clung tenaciously to their fine country and to their traditional religion.

Rivalry for their lucrative trade produced the first split in the ranks of the Osages when the Chouteaus (a family of fur-traders) persuaded about half the tribe to move south to the Arkansas in 1802. Pressures from Cherokee Indians resettled west of the Mississippi as well as from white settlers disturbed them after the United States acquired Louisiana. Resenting the killing of their game even more than the loss of their land, the Osages fought back.

Between the years 1808 and 1870 Federal commissioners, exploiting the vanity and ambitions of Osage chiefs, and professing to protect them from their Indian and white enemies, negotiated a series of treaties in which they gradually ceded all of their lands in Missouri and Kansas. They finally settled on land purchased from the Cherokees in northeastern Oklahoma.

After the buffalo disappeared, the Osages suffered from hunger on their new reservation, which was poorly suited to the growth of crops. Yet the present century witnessed both economic and spiritual revival among them. Oil and gas royalties brought undreamed-of wealth to these Indians who had stubbornly refused to relinquish the mineral rights to their reservation. By 1925 the Osage Nation had become the wealthiest nation in the world in terms of average individual income. Meanwhile conservative full-bloods found in the Peyote Cult an acceptable faith which combined traditional Indian religious values with some of the symbols of Christianity.

The predominant theme of [The Osages] is a spiritual one—the Osage Indians' struggle to achieve and to preserve a meaningful and satisfying system of beliefs and values, in the face of numerous strong and conflicting pressures. The author has dramatically and quite successfully portrayed this struggle from the Osage point of view.