Last Updated: 3 July 2021

The Family's Osage Native American Connection

Oliver Stembel and Margaret Sharp were married in 1850. Oliver was a farmer in Ohio. They had five children, four boys and a girl. Sometime after 1880 they moved west, eventually settling in western Missouri. Their daughter, Elenor, married Frank Lanham and they set up household in Missouri, but just before the 1900 census, Frank and Elenor moved their family to the the Oklahoma {Indian) Territory and settled in the land of the Creek Nation, most likely just south of Tulsa.

Frank and Elenor Lanham had nine children, eight boys and one girl, the girl being Sadie Marie Lanham.

About this time, in another part of the country, John (Hum Pah See) Long and his wife, Mary Louise, both full-blood Osage Indians, had a daughter, Josephine (Pah Skah) in 1882. They may have lived along Quapaw Creek, in present Osage County, Oklahoma. When Josephine was 16 she married 35-year-old Isaac Tell Bratton, a white man born in Ohio. Josephine gave birth to her first child soon after. They named him William Ernest Bratton. Josephine had six children in all, three sons by Isaac (who died in 1908) and three daughters by a second husband, John Nix. They owned a large homestead which they named Turkey Creek for the creek that ran through it. They raised their children in the Osage culture.

In 1918, Sadie Marie Lanham, granddaughter of Oliver Stembel, married William Ernest Bratton. By now Oklahoma was a state (the 46th) and Osage County (which included Quapaw and Turkey Creeks) was now an Osage Indian Reservation with 2,228 registered Osage Indians living within. One of them was William Bratton.

Sadie and William lived on the Bratton's Turkey Creek homestead and raised their seven children with pride in their heritage. Their large homestead, located in the southeast corner of Osage County, 11 miles northwest of downtown Tulsa, is a ranch and is still owned by the Bratton family as of 2014.

When I first realized we had a distant cousin who married a Native American and they chose to live on a reservation in the early 1900s, I jumped to the conclusion that they probably lived in near poverty based on my preconceived idea that Native Americans living on reservations in the early 1900s lived in near poverty. This was a time when Native Americans, and other people of color, were not held in high esteem by a significant portion of our population. As I began to research this family, I found I had underestimated the Osage Nation's leaders in the early 20th century. They had bargained hard and intelligently to extract as much from Congress as possible for their people when they were setting up the new state of Oklahoma. In the end, the 1906 Osage Allotment Act contained many benefits for the tribal members. Each registered member of the tribe was allotted 657 acres of land (the normal allotment was 150 acres), and more importantly, they retained the mineral rights to their shared reservation land. Oil had been discovered on their reservation in 1896, but there was not much demand for oil in 1906 when the bargain was negotiated, but by the mid-1920s oil was much in demand as automobile sales soared, and the Osage Indians had plenty of it, and soon they were among the wealthiest people in Oklahoma, the U.S, and even the world.

Researching this branch of the family required learning the history of the Osage tribe. The Osage had close relationships with French traders in the early 19th century (apparent in the names of two of Josephine Bratton's grandparent's: Louis Baltimore and Francois Celeste Cardinal). I learned of the many failed treaties and forced moves. After reviewing their history one can only feel outrage at the duplicity and disturbing failures of our government, and the cruelty of many of the white encroachers, even to the point of murdering Osage Indians for their oil money. To learn more about Osage history, read the Wikipedia entries for Osage Nation, and Osage Indian Murders. A best-selling book was written about the depredations of the encroachers and schemers, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. Also helpful is the book The Death of Sybil Bolton by a Washington Post editor, Dennis McAuliffe, Jr.

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