Gray Horse is an Osage settlement where the book’s broad history of dispossession becomes local and intimate: a childhood home, a ceremonial gathering place, a community marked by murdered relatives, and a landscape reshaped by the rise and decline of oil. Though little remains of the original settlement, Gray Horse endures as a place where Osage traditions are practiced and family histories are carried forward.

Settlement and Dispossession

Gray Horse belongs to the history of Osage efforts to find and keep a homeland. After the United States forced the Osage to surrender vast areas of ancestral territory, the people sought refuge in a much smaller region. In 1870, after being expelled from their Kansas homes and after settlers plundered graves and massacred Osage people, the Osage agreed to sell their Kansas lands. Gray Horse was among the places where the Osage first settled after coming to the reservation in the 1870s. The settlement’s history therefore begins within a larger pattern of coerced removal, not as an isolated choice of location.

That pressure continued through policies aimed at changing both landholding and culture. In the late nineteenth century, the government’s allotment campaign proposed dividing the reservation into individual parcels and opening remaining land to settlers. The Osage negotiated a different arrangement: allotments were made to tribal members, while the tribe retained rights to oil, gas, coal, and other minerals. The provision would later shape the region’s economy, but it did not undo the forced transformation of communal territory into allotments or the continuing pressures on Osage life.

Mollie Burkhart’s Childhood Home

Gray Horse was part of Mollie Burkhart’s childhood world. As a girl, she lived with her family in a lodge, slept on the floor, and did demanding chores; she also experienced dances, feasts, games in the creek, and pony races across the fields. The settlement and its surrounding landscape offered a life rooted in family and Osage community before government policy intruded more directly into her daily existence.

In 1894, when Mollie was seven, her parents were told to enroll her at the St. Louis School, a Catholic boarding school for girls in Pawhuska, capital of the Osage Nation. The threat that the family would lose its annuity payments if they refused made compliance a matter of survival. In March, Mollie left by wagon. As Gray Horse receded from view, the familiar limit of her world gave way to the long, sparsely settled journey to school. Her departure shows how assimilation policy reached into family life: the removal of a child from her home was enforced not only through schooling but through economic coercion.

Ceremonial Life and Community

Gray Horse remains one of three places associated with the Osage’s early settlement on the reservation where I’n-Lon-Schka dances are held. Over several June weekends, the dances in Gray Horse, Hominy, and Pawhuska bring Osage people from near and far together to see relatives and friends, share food, and remember. The gatherings preserve traditions and bind a dispersed community; they are not merely remnants of an earlier era but a recurring occasion for people to meet in the present.

When the book’s reporter visits, almost nothing remains of the original settlement beyond rotted beams and bricks in the grass. The dance pavilion, however, is full. Its circular earth floor is ringed by wooden benches, each bearing an Osage family name. At the center, musicians and singers gather around a sacred drum used to commune with Wah’Kon-Tah. Men dance in a circle, their bells sounding as they step in time; women also join in a slower circle. The named benches make kinship visible in the gathering place: on one of them, the reporter finds “Burkhart.”

That name leads to Margie Burkhart, Mollie’s granddaughter, who has traveled from Tahlequah to attend the dances. Her family story connects the ceremony to the history of the murders. Her father, James “Cowboy” Burkhart, was the son of Mollie and Ernest Burkhart, and he and his sister Elizabeth witnessed the Reign of Terror from within their father’s household. Margie describes the losses Ernest caused in her father’s life, while also recalling Cowboy’s tenderness toward Mollie: as a child, he remembered her trying to soothe his earaches. Gray Horse holds both the public continuity of ceremony and the private, complicated inheritance of a family marked by crime.

Oil, Decline, and a Changed Landscape

Oil wealth transformed the Osage region, but its benefits were neither permanent nor evenly protected. The Great Depression sharply reduced oil prices and headright payments, while guardians and thieves had already diminished many Osage fortunes. In 1931, oil that had sold for more than three dollars a barrel fell to 65 cents; the next year, an article reported that Osage oil income was rapidly disappearing. As the fields were depleted and the boomtowns faded, Gray Horse also declined.

Margie takes the reporter to the small wooden house where she grew up, a cabin-like dwelling rather than a mansion. She remembers hearing the oil wells pump, then the day they stopped. Wells still dot the reservation, but most are low-producing; a 2012 auction of Osage leases brought less than $15,000 for three leases. Margie inherited a little more than half a headright and receives quarterly payments from the mineral trust, usually a few thousand dollars in recent years—helpful, but not enough to live on. The contrast between the earlier boom and the modest present-day payment gives the settlement’s economic history a household scale.

Graves and Living Memory

The cemetery near Gray Horse gathers the family losses into one place. Margie pauses at Mollie’s grave, whose epitaph remembers her as a wife, mother, and friend. Nearby are the graves of Mollie’s murdered sisters, her murdered brother-in-law Bill Smith, her mother Lizzie, and her first husband Henry Roan. Margie has placed flowers at the graves and stops to straighten one. The gesture is small and deliberate: care for the stones becomes one way of tending to a history that has not ended simply because the crimes are decades old.

The settlement’s surviving traces—its cemetery, its pavilion, the family names on the benches, and the few old building remains—give Gray Horse several connected roles in the book. It is a childhood home shaped by forced assimilation, a site of recurring Osage gathering, and a landscape where the consequences of oil extraction and financial decline remain visible. Most importantly, it is a place where memory is maintained through family stories and ceremony, even as the physical settlement has largely disappeared.