This border area between the Ozarks and Osage Plains once belonged to the Osage nation, whose lands included southern Missouri, eastern Kansas, and northern Arkansas and Oklahoma. For several centuries the Osage remained the regional power, witnessing the coming and going of the French, Spanish, and first wave of American settlers in the early 1800s. Because Spain and France governed their North American territories with small militaries, and because the Osage had a large population and a central place in the fur trade in the 1700s, they controlled the flow of firearms and dominated their Indian rivals with superior weaponry. Missouri's prairies, rivers, and woodlands provided abundant resources; while men hunted, Osage women cultivated corn, beans, squash, and pumpkins and gathered wild foods. Fort Osage on the Missouri River opened in 1808 as a fort and trading post, establishing an American presence in the new Louisiana Territory, and under George Sibley it encouraged the Osage to trade furs there, though it later lost influence as other trading posts appeared. Harmony Mission, founded in 1821 by the United Foreign Missionary Society of New York about eight miles from an Osage village in southwest Missouri, sought with limited success to turn the Osage from their semi-nomadic and communal life toward Christianity and sedentary farm life. American settlers coveted the natural resources of Osage lands, while from the west the Osage were harassed by Comanche, Kiowa, and others, and smallpox and measles epidemics severely weakened the tribe. In the 1808 Fire Prairie treaty, the Osage lost all Missouri and Arkansas lands except for a narrow strip on the western border, and after further treaties with the United States in 1818 and 1825 they surrendered most of their remaining territory, amounting to half of today's Kansas and Oklahoma plus northwest Arkansas and western Missouri, and moved to a 50-by-125-mile rectangle in Kansas. In 1872 the Osage were moved from Kansas to Indian Territory, later Oklahoma, and today the tribal reservation is in Osage County, Oklahoma.