24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Pawhuska, OK

Pawhuska is a city and the county seat of Osage County, and it has been the seat of the Osage tribal government since 1872, when the Osage Nation's reservation was established in Indian Territory.

Pawhuska was named for the 19th-century Osage chief Paw-Hiu-Skah, whose name means "White Hair"; the town was originally known as Deep Ford and grew up around the Osage Indian Agency on Bird Creek.

Osage County, which Pawhuska governs, is the largest county by area in Oklahoma and is coextensive with the Osage Nation Reservation.

The 2020 census counted 2,984 people in Pawhuska - down 16.7% from 3,584 in 2010 - living in roughly 1,255 households, and about 41.5% of residents were American Indian or Alaska Native alone or in combination with another race.

Oil discovered under Osage land made Pawhuska boom in the 1920s, when its population swelled to about 6,400 and the Osage became famously wealthy - the era of the Osage murders later chronicled in "Killers of the Flower Moon."

Pawhuska's Osage Nation Museum, founded in 1938, is the oldest tribally owned museum in the United States.

In 2016 Food Network star Ree Drummond opened The Pioneer Woman Mercantile on Pawhuska's Main Street, and by 2018 its restaurant was serving up to 6,000 people a day; she later added the eight-room Pioneer Woman Boarding House hotel.

Downtown Pawhuska packs 86 buildings onto the National Register of Historic Places, an unusually dense historic district for a town of under 3,000 people.

Pawhuska is the gateway to the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve just north of town, a nearly 40,000-acre Nature Conservancy preserve that is the largest protected remnant of tallgrass prairie on Earth, with a free-roaming bison herd of more than 2,000 animals.

The Ben Johnson Cowboy Museum in Pawhuska honors the Osage County-born actor and rodeo champion Ben Johnson, the only person ever to win both a world steer-roping championship and an Academy Award.