As America marks its 250th birthday this year, the spotlight falls on the places where the nation was born — the cobblestones of Philadelphia, the harbor at Boston, the fields of Yorktown. But the Revolution had a western edge that history has nearly forgotten, and it ran right through the river valleys now lying beneath Lake of the Ozarks. The Osage Nation’s trading network was the economic spine of Spanish Louisiana when Spain joined the colonists against Britain — and it was Osage country being fought over at the westernmost battle of the Revolutionary War, won on the Missouri frontier in 1780.
