* NOTES AND DOCUMENTS
"Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame-
John Joseph Mathews"
By Bob L. Blackburn
Delivered at the OHS Annual Meeting Awards Banquet, April 19, 1996
Unlike this year's first inductee, John Hope Franklin, whose
career followed an academic track, John Joseph Mathews was a
self-taught historian. But like Dr. Franklin, he was an innovator
who found new ways to look at our history, then used a forceful
literary style to communicate with the rest of us.
The son of a Pawhuska banker, Mathews was born in 1894.
Although the 1906 tribal roll says he was one-eighth Osage, any-
one who knew him, and all of us who have read his books, know
that he was simply Osage.
His early education was in the Pawhuska Public Schools and in
the hills of Osage country, where his Indian heritage mixed with
an understanding and love of nature to create John Joseph
Mathews, the historian. He attended the University of Oklahoma,
served in World War I, and graduated as a geologist in 1920. He
then went on to Oxford, where he graduated in 1923.
After wandering the world, he returned to the Osage country
to collect, preserve, and interpret the history of his people. He
served on the Osage Tribal Council, helped develop the tribal
museum, and started recording the oral tradition of his fellow
Osages. In 1932 the University of Oklahoma published Wah'Kon-
tah: The Osage and the White Man's Road, chosen as a selection of
the Book of the Month Club. Fifty thousand copies were sold.
That was followed by The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters,
Talking to the Moon, and The Career of E. W Marland.
Books
Wah'Kon-tah: The Osage and the White Man's Road. Norman: University of Okla-
homa Press, 1932.
Sundown. New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1934.

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