Unity of purpose has ever been lacking to the red race. No federation
has been possible to it except as that federation is controlled by the
European brain. The controlling power in the execution of this dastardly
crime lay with desperate but eminently able white men. Their appeal to
the Osages, however, was a fruitless one. For a third of a century the
faithful Jesuits had labored with this tribe. Not in vain was their
seed-sowing.

Le Claire reached the Osages only an hour before an emissary from the
leaders of this infamous plot came to the Mission. The presence of the
priest counted so mightily, that this call to an Indian confederacy fell
upon deaf ears, and the messenger departed to rejoin his superiors. He
never found them, for a sudden and tragic ending had come to the
conspiracy.

It was a busy day in Kansas annals when that company of Rebel officers
came riding up from the South to band together the lawless savages and
the outlawed raiders against a loyal commonwealth. Humboldt was the most
southern Union garrison in Kansas at that time. South of it the Osages
did much scout duty for the Government, and it held them responsible for
any invasion of this strip of neutral soil between the North and the
South. Out in the Verdigris River country, in this Maytime, a little
company of Osage braves on the way from their village to visit the
Mission came face to face with this band of invaders in the neutral
land. The presence of a score of strange men armed and mounted, though
they were dressed as Union soldiers, must be accounted for, these
Indians reasoned.

The scouts were moved only by an unlettered loyalty to the flag. They
had no notion of the real purpose of these invaders. The white men had
only contempt for the authority of a handful of red men calling them to
account, and they foolishly fired into the Indian band. It was a fatal
foolishness. Two braves fell to the earth, pierced by their bullets. The
little body of red men dropped over on the sides of their ponies and
were soon beyond gun range, while their opponents went on their way. But
briefly only, for, reinforced by a hundred painted braves, the whole
fighting strength of their little village, the Osages came out for
vengeance. Near a bend in the Verdigris River the two forces came
together. Across a scope five miles wide they battled. The white men
must have died bravely, for they fought stubbornly, foot by foot, as the
Indians drove them into t