The Coolidge examiner., 1931-11-27

in the country regularly ran news
about those incredible people who
in one short year had leaped froW
the Neolithic age to Broadway.
The Usage Indians, a little more
than two thousand in number, who
but yesterday were a ragged half
fed and listless band, squatting
wretchedly on the reservation Al
lOtted them, waiting until time,
sickness, and misery should blot
them forever from the land, were
now. by a miracle of nature. the
richest nation in the world. The
barren ground on which they had
lived now yielded the most lavish
oil flow in the state. Yancey Cra-
watts news story and editorial had
been copied and read all over the
country. A stunned government
tried TO bring order out of chaos of
riches. The two thousand Osages
were swept off the reservation to
make way for the flood of oil that
was transmitted into a flood of
gold. They were transported TO a
new section called Wazhazhe. which
is the ancient Indian word for
Usage.
Agents appointed. Offices estab-
lished. Millions of barrels of oil
Millions of dollars. Millions OF
dollars yearly TO be divided some
how among two thousand Usage
Indians, to whom a blanket, a bowl
of soffica, NANCY pony, bit of
tobacco, a disk of peyOte had
meant riches. And now every full
blood, half blood, or quarter blood
Usage was put on the Indian roll
and every name on the Indian roll
was entitled to head right Every
head right meant a definite share in
the millions. Five in a family
five head rights. Ten in a family
ten head rights. The Indian
agents office was full of typewrit-
ers, files, pads, ledgers, neat young
clerks all occupied with papers and
documents that read like some fan.
tastic nightmare. The white mans
eye, travelling down the tidy list,
with it's stOry-book Indian names
and its hard, cold, matter-of-fact
figures, rejected what it read as be-
ing too absurd for the mind to
grasp.
Clint Tall Meat, $523,OOO
Benny Warrior, 1892 600.
Ho XII ah Sc, S265,SS7.
The government bought them
farms with their own oil money
and built big red brick houses near
the roadside and furnished them in
plush and pianos and linOleum and
gas ranges and monographs. You
saw their powerful motor cars, dust
covered, whirling up and down the
red clay Oklahoma roads-those
roads still rutted, unpaved, haz,
ardous, for Oklahoma had had no
time to attend to such matters.
Fifty years before, whole bands OF
Osages on their wiry little ponies
had Travelled south in the winter
and north in the summer to visit
their Indian cousins. Later, huddled
miserably on their reservation, they
had issued forth on foot or in
wretched wagons to pay their sea-
sOnal visits and to try to recap
ture. by talk and song and dance
and ritual, some pale ghost of their
departed happiness. A shabby
enough procession, guarded, furtive.
smoldering.
But now you saw each Usage
buck in his high-pOwered car, his
ineXpert hands grasping the wheel.
his enormous SOmbrerO-large
even than the white mans hat
Tapping in the breeze that he made
by his speed. In the back you saw
the bFilliance of feathers and blan-
kets worn by the beady-eyed chill
dren and the great placid squaw
crOuched in the bottom of the car.
The white man driving the same
road gave these Indian cars a wide
berth, for he knew they stopped
for no one, over bridges, draws and
bitches like mad things.
CTO BE CONTINUEDD
Miscasting Pearls
A movie star who returned from
a party at midnight and discovered