Life & Style
FUN FACTS
DOWNTOWN ON KIHEKAH AVENUE CAPTURES THE SPIRIT OF DECADES PAST.
3,590 P O P U L AT I O N
PHOTO COURTESY PAWHUSKA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
FIRST
BOY SCOUT TROOP
CIT Y LIFE
The Heart of the Osage
Pawhuska has modern appeal while retaining its Old West roots.
T
he Osage Nation’s home, Osage County’s seat, Pawhuska has had cultural significance long before a Pulitzer Prize-winning play and popular store came to town. The Osage people understood something special in opening their government here in 1872 and naming it after Chief Paw-HiuSkah, whose name means White Hair in English. Some say they sensed the oil that would briefly turn Pawhuska into one of America’s richest cities. Others say they recognized the nutritional value of omnipresent bluestem grass, which can add 3-4 pounds daily to a bovine. Pawhuska is the southern gateway to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, the largest protected area of its kind on Earth. A typical auto tour is delayed by some of the 2,500 roaming bison, North America’s largest land mammal. Past and present unite in Pawhuska. Cowboys and cowgirls, from the preserve or nearby ranches, make the short drive into town daily to conduct business and pack their pickups with goods. “It’s an old western town that’s not out West,” says Joni Nash, executive director of the Pawhuska Chamber of Commerce. “Many of our historic buildings downtown are from the 19th century. The building I’m in at the Chamber was the old cobblestone house of the town’s first blacksmith, hired
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OKLAHOMA MAGAZINE | FEBRUARY 2017
by the Osage. It was built before any of the tribal leaders’ houses. “Visitors from all over the world just wind up here. I ran into a couple from Germany and asked why they came. They said they’d just heard that Pawhuska is a cool little town.” Pawhuska’s financial apex came during the oil boom of the Roaring ’20s. RollsRoyce opened its first dealership west of the Mississippi River. Scores of four- and five-story buildings popped up. The No. 1 customer of Tiffany’s was the Osage Nation, which handed out place settings from that New York retailer as gifts. “Money wasn’t an object back then,” Nash says. Today, Pawhuska continues to evolve. It gained attention in 2007 as the setting for Tracy Letts’s acclaimed August: Osage County; many scenes were filmed downtown when it became a movie. Since October, when The Pioneer Woman Mercantile store and cafe opened, downtown has had a regular stream of patrons, who also visit the Osage Tribal Museum, the oldest tribally owned and continuously operating museum in the country, and the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church with its storied stained-glass windows. Every turn on Kihekah Avenue or Main Street reveals historic nuance. “It’s definitely an interesting area,” Nash says. BRIAN WILSON
in the United States was organized in May 1909 by John F. Mitchell. HOME OF
REE DRUMMOND owner of The Pioneer Woman Mercantile, cookbook author, blogger and TV host;
,
BEN JOHNSON
, the late Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy; and
CLARENCE L. TINKER, the late U.S. Air Force general and namesake of Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City.
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More than buildings in downtown are on the National Register of Historic Places. The annual
Cavalcade Rodeo, years 70 world’s largest
operating for more than
, is the
amateur rodeo.