John Joseph Matthews "The Osages, Children of the Middle Waters" has quite a bit about the other Jon Mathews' (just one letter "t" in surname) influence among the Osage and his role in the Border War and Civil War, pp, 627-634. It includes a very interesting take on the confusion of Osage, who having been pushed out of Missouri and to a small portion of their former domain, wondered how they should align with the "superior spiritual power" of the whites and on the question of slavery.

"It seemed not enough that hundreds of the Little Ones (Osage) would die with the measles and the smallpox and the free men of both sides (pro-slavery and free-state) steal their horses and use their old men and old women for target practice, but they must now be confused by the opposing interests of the Metal Maker, the trader (Mathews was also the blacksmith assigned to The Osage per treaty), and the Black Robe (Schoenmakers and the other Jesuit missionaries, the man of mystery. They had great respect for both. The things which which the trader brought to them were like gifts to them, and the generous giver was every honored among them. They did not ever consider the great value of the furs and hides which they traded to him for the wah-don-skas they cherished. They knew nothing of his magnificent profits. For the Black Robes they had great respect. They had seen the great power of the God of the Heavy Eyebrows (white man), and these men of mystery, the men of Wah'Kon could do them great harm through the many sacred things they had, and when they could, they tried to protect themselves with the Black Robes' medicine. Many of them wore crucifixes around their necks just below the mussel-shell gorget which symbolized the Sun, god of day...

Now the Little Ones, after generations of playing as the balance of power between Spain and France, Spain and England, and France and England, between Choteau and Lisa, which they could understand, at least partially, were now asked to play that role between abstract ideologies which they could never hope to understand, which had something to do with the Nika-Sabe, the Black Man".

The first raid of Mathews through the neutral strip was in 1856.

"Then one night in 1856 free men who happened to be in the pay of the Free-Staters burned one of his barns, and Mathews was awakened by squealing of horses. He immediately formed a company of proslavery men and set out to run the settlers out of the buffer strip called now the Cherokee Neutral Lands. While the Missourians who lived on the east side of the twenty-five-mile strip were proslavery, the Free-Staters were settling families loyal to them on the forbidden buffer lands."

The formation and intent of the strip, including its subsequent sale to the Cherokee, is described on page 523.