John Joseph Mathews
John Joseph Mathews was one of the Osage Nation's most important spokespeople and writers of the mid-20th century, and served on the Osage Tribal Council from 1934 to 1942. Mathews was born into an influential Osage family, the son of William Shirley Mathews an Osage Nation tribal councilor. He studied at the University of Oklahoma, Oxford University, and the University of Geneva and served as a pilot during World War I.
Mathews' first book was a history, Wah'kon-tah: The Osage and The White Man's Road, which was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club as their first by an academic press, became a bestseller. His second book, Sundown is his most well known, an exploration of the disruption of the people and their society at the time of the oil boom, which also attracted criminal activities by leading whites in the county and state, including murder of Osage.
His third book, Talking to the Moon, has been compared to Henry David Thoreau's Walden and was written while living at The Blackjacks. The work is a reflection on his time living in Osage County. In 1951 Mathews published a biography of E. W. Marland, a noted oilman, governor of Oklahoma, and friend of Mathews. His book fifth book The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters was a life work, preserving many collected stories and the oral history of the Osage.
In 1996 Mathews was posthumously inducted into the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame. The Blackjacks in the Osage Hills, where he did much of his writing, was acquired in 2014 by the Nature Conservancy of Oklahoma to be incorporated into the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. He is buried in his garden near the home.
Early life and family
Mathews was born in Pawhuska, Indian Territory, on November 16, 1894, to William Shirley Mathews and Pauline Eugenia Girard, one of eight children. Three of his siblings died before adulthood. He had one older sister and three younger sisters who survived to adulthood. William Shirley Mathews was the son of John Allen Mathews, a blacksmith who settled among the Osage circa 1840 and later founded Oswego, Kansas, and Sara Williams. Sara was the daughter of A-Ci'n-Ga, an Osage woman, and William S. Williams. Because the Osage had a patrilineal kinship system, the Mathews descendants were excluded from belonging to one of the tribe's clans, as their Osage ancestry was through the maternal line of A-Ci'-Ga, rather than through a direct male ancestor. John Joseph Mathews' mother's family had immigrated from France. The family had an "active interest in Osage culture." The Mathews children were one-eighth Osage according to blood quantum laws. He was on 1906 Osage rolls and received one osage headright, like every member of the tribe.Education and World War I
University of Oklahoma and World War I
Mathews grew up in Osage County playing with his dog, Spot, and his horse, Bally. He attended Mrs. Tucker's Preparatory School, a local school founded for white children, and later Pawhuska High School in May 1914 where he played on the basketball and football teams. He attended the University of Oklahoma in the fall of 1914 and played on the freshman football team, but quit the team after one season. He joined Kappa Alpha Order in February 1915. He joined the Oklushe Degataga Indian Club when it was founded in 1914 and was one of two Osage members during his tenure. He took a short break from school in March 1915 when his father was ill and arrived home before his death on March 15, 1915. In the summer of 1916 he participated in an archaeology expedition near Grove, Oklahoma alongside notable Oklahomans such as Joseph B. Thoburn, Elmer Fraker, and Lynn Riggs. Afterward he traveled through South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Montana. Starting in 1916 he wrote for the University Oklahoman and in 1917 he wrote for the University of Oklahoma Magazine.His schooling was interrupted when the United States entered World War I and he enlisted in the United States Army on May 9, 1917, hoping to be a cavalryman. He was later selected for ground school in Austin, Texas and then selected for bombing training. He never saw combat and left the army in the summer of 1919 as a second lieutenant, despite an offer to join the United States Army Air Service. He returned to the University of Oklahoma in the fall of 1919 and graduated in the spring of 1920 with a degree in geology. After graduation, he visited Yellowstone National Park with his family.
Oxford and Geneva
He was admitted to Michaelmas term at Oxford University, but skipped his first semester to go big game hunting in the Rocky Mountains. He arrived at Oxford in April 1921 for the Trinity term. While at Oxford, he traveled to England, Scotland, and France. While at Oxford, he met and befriended the Earl of Cardigan. In 1922, he traveled to Sidi Okba in Algeria, hoping to hunt the wild barbary sheep, but failed to find one, insteading shooting a barbary leopard. Later that year he visited Germany, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. He graduated from Oxford in June 1923.He spent the summer of 1923 attending the University of Geneva studying international relations and french. While there he attended meetings of the League of Nations and worked as a correspondent for the Philadelphia Ledger. There he met Virginia Winslow Hopper and the couple married on April 20, 1924. He studied again at Oxford in February 1924. While on his honeymoon, he ran into Hermann Goring at the Hotel de Russie in Rome. Their brief conversation greatly upset his wife and Mathews later claimed his first daughter was conceived trying to console her from the meeting. In November 1924, the couple returned to the United States.
Return to the United States
New Jersey
Mathews and his wife returned to the United States in November 1924, first staying at the Hotel Edgemere in East Orange, New Jersey. By December they had found an apartment in Montclair, New Jersey, near his wife's family in Newark. While in Montclair, the couple hired a Black servant, Bobbie Green. On March 9, 1925, their first child, Virginia Mathews, was born. The family summered in Cape Ann, Massachusetts before moving to Pasadena, California that fall via the Panama Canal.California
Mathews claimed later in life he went to California to work for Standard Oil, but was turned down for the job. A niece claimed he told family he went to be a screenwriter in Hollywood. Between 1927 and 1929, he worked in real estate, buying and selling land between Pasadena and Los Angeles.On August 3, 1926, his first son, John Hopper Mathews, was born in Los Angeles. In September 1928, Mathews left his wife and children. He returned to his mother's home in Pawhuska for Thanksgiving. He returned to Pasadena in February 1929, telling his wife he was not coming back and began selling his land investments in California. In April 1929, while living in the University Club of Los Angeles, he wrote his first piece for Sooner Magazine, "Hunting the Red Deer of Scotland."
Return to the Osage Nation
Mathews returned to Pawhuska in October 1929 and continued to write for Sooner Magazine until April 1933. After returning home, Mathews rarely mentioned his first wife and children. Historian Michael Snyder suggests that Mathews attempt to remove them from his biography was out of embarrassment of the failure of his first marriage and absence from his children's lives. His wife and child struggled to pay their bills, while Mathews was not obligated to pay support since the divorce was not finalized until 1941. In 1946, a court found he had failed to pay $225 in support.''Wah'kon-tah'' and ''Sundown''
In addition to Sooner Magazine, he started writing the "Our Osage Hills" column for the Pawhuska Journal-Capital between 1930 and 1931 and joined the Izaak Walton League. His friends, Joseph A. Brandt and Walter Campbell, encouraged him to write a book.His first book, Wah'kon-tah:The Osage and the White Man's Road, was published in November 1932. The work, published with the University of Oklahoma Press, was the first work by an academic press to be selected by the new Book-of-the-Month Club, and the book became a bestseller. It is based on the diaries and letters of Major Laban J. Miles. Miles had given Mathews his diaries before his death in 1931 and Joseph A. Brandt encouraged him to write a book based on them. He wrote the book between July 4, 1931, and November 1931. In January 1932, Thomas Gore arranged for Mathews to meet Herbert Hoover, to see if the president would write the introduction for his book. Hoover met with Mathews and told him about his time in Oklahoma and with the Osage, but did not write the introduction. Snyder notes Mathews did not meet with Charles Curtis, who was part Osage, likely because Mathews, a Democrat, did not agree with his pro-assimilation policies towards Native Americans. After returning home in the summer of 1932, he built his home, which he dubbed "The Blackjacks," in the Osage Hills. When the novel became a bestseller in January 1933, Walter Ferguson and his wife Lucia Loomis hosted a large celebration for Mathews in Tulsa at their home.
His most well-known work is Sundown, his only novel. Mathews is described as introducing "the modern American Indian novel", a pattern for future works by Native American authors. It is marked by its realism, as Mathews wanted to represent the Indian in a way that had not been recognized in European-American cultural stereotypes. The novel was written rather quickly between 1933 and 1934, after being solicited by the publisher Longmans, Green, and Co. The book was published in November 1934. Mathews maintained he wrote the book "without any inspiration" and that he never fully read it after publication. Although he later admitted he read part of it in 1948 and found it "not in the least bad."
The semi-autobiographical work is about Challenge "Chal" Windzer, a young Osage man of mixed-blood ancestry. After leaving home to study at the University of Oklahoma and serve in the military, Chal feels estranged when he returns to his tribal community. He suffers from alienation and hopelessness as his life takes a downward swerve. The novel is set during the turbulence of the oil boom that took place on Osage land in Oklahoma in the early 1900s, which generated great wealth for the many Osage enrolled citizens who had Osage headrights. It portrayed some of the Osage Indian murders during the 1920s, a period they termed the "Reign of Terror", as white opportunists tried to get control of the Osage headrights.