Niukonska

The Niukonska, known to Europeans as the Osage, are a Dhegiha Siouan people who call themselves Wazhazhe, the Middle Waters people. Their traditions recall a homeland in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, from which the Haudenosaunee Beaver Wars drove them west in the seventeenth century; by the 1690s they had settled along the Osage River and taken to horses.

Marquette and Jolliet met them in 1673, and the Osage became French allies. Bourgmont built Fort Orleans in their territory and led an Osage delegation to Paris in 1725. In 1804 they numbered about five thousand, farming and hunting bison between the Missouri and Red rivers.

In 1833 they destroyed a Kiowa camp at Cutthroat Gap. Through treaties of 1818 and 1825 they ceded most of their lands to the United States and accepted a reservation in southern Kansas.