Osage County

The county in brief

A traveler's read on Osage County

Osage County is the only county in the United States whose boundaries are coterminous with an entire Native American reservation — the Osage Nation Reservation was established by an 1872 federal treaty when the Osage purchased the territory outright from the Cherokee Nation with proceeds from earlier land cessions, giving the Osage Nation a uniquely strong legal title to mineral rights and a 2010 Supreme Court ruling (Osage Nation v. Irby) that affirmed the reservation's continuing legal existence. The 1894 discovery of oil under the reservation made tribal headright-holders the wealthiest per-capita population in the world by the early 1920s; the resulting 'Reign of Terror' murders documented in David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon and the 2023 Scorsese film were prosecuted out of the federal courthouse in Pawhuska.

The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve at 39,650 acres is the largest tract of protected tallgrass prairie remaining on Earth — owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy since 1989, with a 2,500-head American bison herd that has roamed continuously since 1993, the largest free-ranging bison herd east of the 100th meridian. Osage County is also the largest county by area in Oklahoma (2,304 sq mi). Osage Hills State Park accepts rigs to 40 ft with electric hookups across 21 sites; the park's CCC-era stone bathhouse and shelter pavilions are on the National Register. The Pawhuska Mercantile (owned by Food Network's Ree Drummond) anchors weekend tourism on Kihekah Avenue — Pawhuska's commercial historic district was depopulating until the Mercantile reopened in 2016 and now draws crowds on Saturdays and Sundays that fill the downtown 4-block grid.