Historic Harmony Mission, a school for the Indians of Missouri, once stood east of Rich Hill on the north bank of the Osage River near the centuries-old camping sites of the Great and Little Osage tribes. It was founded in 1821 by the United Foreign Missionary Society of N.Y., supported by Presbyterian, Congregational, and Dutch Reformed churches. Among the 41 members of the mission family were teachers, mechanics, and farmers, headed by minister Nathaniel B. Dodge. The Osage gave land and the U.S. provided a building fund, and the missionaries soon built homes and a school. With the help of "Bill" Williams, later famed as the "Mountain Man" but then serving as interpreter at a nearby U.S. trading post, an Osage-English dictionary of some 2000 words was made. The school achieved only moderate success, largely because the Osage ceded the last of their Missouri land to the U.S. in 1825 and began to move away, and the mission closed in 1836. Harmony Mission, Missouri's first Indian mission school, was also the first county seat and first white settlement in Bates County, which was organized in 1841 and named for Missouri Governor Frederick Bates. Later Papinsville, a thriving Osage River town named for a French trader, became county seat, and in 1856 centrally located Butler, named for a Kentucky congressman, took that role. During the Civil War, Bates County was one of the counties depopulated by Union General Thomas Ewing's Order No. 11 of 1863; the next year only 390 persons were living there, but by 1868 the postwar years had brought over 10,000 settlers to farm fertile land and mine rich coal deposits. In the Osage Valley of Bates and Vernon counties were the villages of the Wazhazhe Indians, called Osage by the French. In 1808, less than 100 years after their first recorded visit by the white man Du Tisné in 1719, they ceded most of their Missouri land to the U.S., and they ceded the rest in 1825. The first chief called Pahuska, or White Hair, once lay buried in Blue Mound, and for years the Osage returned to honor him.