History of the Osage Nation #219989

Osage that the name Kah-sah, Kansa or Kaw, was a term of ridicule given by the Osages to the Kaw band because they would not help the Osage in war against their common enemy, the Cherokee and other tribes, the term in Osage meaning coward. Mr. Wisemeyer, one of the Grey Horse merchants for years and now at Fairfax, and many years among the Osages, in speaking with the Omaha and Sioux Indians, found that they could speak the Osage language, all using the same dialect, showing that they belonged to the same or closely allied tribes. Rev. J. Owen Dorsey, an Episcopalian, who was connected with the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian institute at Washington, D. C., wrote an alphabet of the Sioux band, and discovered on meeting the Osage, Kaw and allied tribes, that it was applicable to these whose dialect he could speak fluently on first meeting them.