Daisy Bates (1914-1999) has long been renowned as the mentor of the Little Rock Nine, the first African Americans to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. For her work guiding the Nine through one of the most tumultuous civil rights crises of the 1950s, she was selected as 1957 Woman of the Year in Education by the Associated Press, and was the only woman invited to speak at the Lincoln Memorial ceremony in Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963. But her importance as a historical figure has been overlooked by scholars of the civil rights movement.
The tales here presented were collected by the author while engaged in making an ethnological collection among the Osage for the Field Columbian Museum, in 1901-1903. The Osage are of Siouan stock, and made their home, when first known to the whites, in southern Missouri, northern Arkansas and eastern Kansas. In 1871 they were removed to a reservation in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, which they still occupy.
