More than a thousand years ago, the Osage people migrated from the Ohio Valley up the Mississippi River and onto tributaries of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, occupying a diverse landmass rich in game and natural resources. Before European settlers arrived, they built villages and camps along riverways, and their hunting, trading, and warfare territory extended across parts of Missouri and Arkansas and the plains of Kansas and Oklahoma. They cultivated corn, beans, and squash, gathered nuts, berries, and fruit, and hunted game animals. From their villages in Missouri, they traveled to the plains in Kansas and Oklahoma and into the Ozarks highlands of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, holding three annual hunts in early spring, summer, and fall for buffalo, elk, deer, and bear before returning to permanent lodges along the Osage and Missouri river valleys. They followed trails southward from the Osage River to just west of Carthage, Missouri, where the Continental Trail met Spring River, and the area around Joplin, known as the County of the Six Boils, was one of their hunting grounds in what is now southwest Missouri, southeast Kansas, and northeast Oklahoma, where several streams converge into Spring River. An early Jasper County pioneer, W.C. Cooley, who arrived in 1841, recalled seeing 500 Osage marching single file on a hunting trail and droves of 200 deer crossing the area. From the early 1800s to 1850, aggressive Euro-American infiltration and the pressured westward relocation of Eastern tribes uprooted the Osage and forced them from the Ozark forests to a reservation in unorganized territory that later became Kansas. Their Kansas reservation was conceded with the signing of the Drum Treaty of 1870 with the U.S. government, and under that treaty they were forced to buy a reservation in what would become Oklahoma, on land that had previously been Osage property. Thereafter, they were restricted in their movement and no longer free to travel throughout their original domain, join their annual bison hunts on the plains, hunt deer and bear in the Ozarks, or conduct war ceremonies and mourning parties. These consequences devastated the Osage people, causing a fractured community, population loss, erosion of tribal identity, and the loss of many time-honored traditions. Today the Osage have a vibrant culture, a population of over 22,000, a three-branch government with executive, legislative, and judicial systems, a strong economic structure, and enduring cultural traditions.