Raymond Red Corn remembers every bit of the drive up to Kansas to buy back his people’s land. Red Corn, who was the assistant principal chief of the Osage Nation, had gotten up early one morning in January 2016 and, with a colleague, loaded up in a Ford SUV they jokingly called “the chief mobile.” It wasn’t a long drive from Osage County, in northern Oklahoma, to Hutchinson, where a ranch broker stood ready to collect bids for the sprawling patch of prairie, but Red Corn wasn’t taking any chances. There was a backup plan: If he crashed or the truck broke down, Osage Nation police would leave him on the side of the road. Their only job was to make sure the sealed envelope they were carrying got to Kansas.
“It was all done with a smirk and a wink,” Red Corn says. “And we also knew that if we got in a wreck of some kind, that somebody was going to get this on up there.”
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The drive ended up being uneventful. Red Corn and RJ Walker, then a member of the Osage Nation Congress, got to Hutchinson with so much time to kill that they stopped at a Goodwill and picked up a couple of $2 blazers. Then they hung out in the broker’s office, waiting to submit their bid closer to the 4:30 p.m. deadline—just to make sure there wasn’t any funny business. They parted with their envelope with 20 minutes to spare.
That bid, in the amount of $74 million, was the best and highest that media mogul Ted Turner got for his Bluestem Ranch. In 2016 the Osage Nation became the owner of 43,000 rolling acres of golden grass. Again.
The Bluestem acquisition was more than a financial maneuver for the Osage Nation. At the turn of the 20th century, the US dismantled the Osage government and pressured the tribe’s leaders to accept a deal that took land owned collectively and parceled it out to individuals instead. This policy, known as allotment, was meant to assimilate Native Americans by forcing them to adopt the federal government’s preferred form of property ownership. The US passed the Osage Allotment Act in 1906, and in the decades that followed, the Osage lost hundreds of thousands of acres through sale, theft, and foreclosure. Today, many of the biggest landowners are massive ranching incorporations, led by White families, out-of-state investors, even the Mormon Church.
When Red Corn got the call that the nation’s bid was the winner, the ground all but shifted beneath his feet. “I’ll never have that feeling again,” he says. “With the purchase of this ranch and no liens against it, we would be able to do something we had not done for 200 years if we needed to. And that is feed ourselves. That represents an enormous amount of sovereignty and independence from everyone else.”
These hills hold the dark history of the allotment era. The Osage were a wealthy people whose money became the basis of other people’s fortunes—all under the watch of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Now the Osage are trying to buy the land back and protect their ownership of the minerals that lie beneath it.
For some of last year, parts of Osage County looked like they did 100 years ago. Antique cars bumped along the street in downtown Pawhuska, the county seat and headquarters of the Osage Nation. Buildings were covered with old-timey facades. There was a sense of excitement, and also unease.
The Osage Nation is about to have a spotlight shone on one of the most traumatic chapters of its history. Martin Scorsese is directing a movie based on David Grann’s bestselling Killers of the Flower Moon, which details a criminal conspiracy that plagued the Osage Nation in the 1920s, a period often referred to as the Reign of Terror. Dozens of Osages were murdered by groups of White men. They were shot and poisoned. One couple’s house was blown up. The men who planned and executed these crimes were after Osage headrights.
Headrights represent shares of a federally managed trust that holds all the oil and gas rights under Osage County, which was established on top of the Osage Reservation. When the government coerced the Osage Nation to agree to break up its surface land, Osage leaders negotiated to keep the mineral rights communally owned. Each Osage citizen received a share of the mineral estate, 2,229 shares in all. Those shares later became known as headrights, a term initially used to describe land granted to settlers, one right per head. Osage headright payments have been made quarterly ever since. (Last year, a headright paid out $15,790. From 1913 to 2021, the 2,229 headrights paid out a combined $2.3 billion, or $9.8 billion adjusted for inflation.)
In the years following Osage allotment, oil production in Osage County took off, making headrights incredibly valuable. A New York Times article from 1921 called the Osages the wealthiest people per capita in the world. Osage families traveled and bought luxury cars and built handsome homes. In other words, they did what other wealthy people in the country did—but tales of Osage extravagances abounded in the White press.
When an Osage headright holder died, their share would fall to their heirs, Osage or not. White people saw an opportunity. They poured into Osage County, eager to marry Osage women. In the most famous case, a White man married to an Osage woman conspired with his uncle to have her family murdered, funneling the headrights to her. The mastermind of this plot, William K. Hale, was eventually convicted for aiding and abetting just one of the many murders he was known to be behind. The tribe had to pay the FBI $20,000 to investigate.
Today, about a quarter of all headrights are held by non-Osages. Many of those shares were sold; some were donated or transferred via estates. The percentage of surface land owned by non-Osages is likely higher—it’s difficult to calculate. It didn’t take a Reign of Terror to produce that result. The legal system was more than enough.
The largest landholder in Osage County is the extended Drummond family, whose members operate some of the biggest ranches in Oklahoma. Outside the state, the name is recognizable because of Ree Drummond, known as the Pioneer Woman, who has built a blogging and TV personality around the family name and her romantic view of life on their vast ranch. Another Drummond, Gentner, the scion of the ranching empire, is running for Oklahoma attorney general—he’s a Republican running without a Democratic challenger in a deep red state. Today, the family operates a number of distinct ranching incorporations that, combined, amount to roughly 130,000 acres, with an estimated value of at least $275 million. It was a member of the Drummond family who sold that ranch to Turner in 2001, a rare exception for a family known for almost never selling land.
A review of archived financial records, decades-old interview tapes, and government reports shows the family’s original patriarchs were able to acquire so much land in part by using money they made off, or borrowed from, Osages themselves—often using business practices that bumped up against the line of what was considered legal, even then. They were put in charge of Osage families’ finances, borrowed from Osage estates, probated Osage wills, and collected on debts that they claimed as owners of a government-licensed store. They bought headright fractions, even as they lobbied for the headright system to be abolished. And they bought land. Lots of it.
Ask just about anyone in Osage County how the Drummonds got their start, and they’ll point to the same thing: a store run by a Scottish immigrant named Frederick Drummond. He moved to the Osage Reservation in the late 1800s, before Oklahoma was a state, and got a government license to trade with the Osages.
After a series of treaties in the early to mid-1800s stripped the Osage of more than a million acres of land, the tribe was left with just a fraction of their ancestral territory: a reservation in Kansas. They were then pressured by the government to sell that land. The Osage Nation used the proceeds to buy a new reservation from the Cherokee Nation, in what’s now Oklahoma, and leased grazing land there to cattlemen. That brought wealth to the tribe before the headright system even existed, which in turn brought traders like Drummond.
He started at a store in Pawhuska before moving his family to Hominy, where he took over the Hominy Trading Co. But to call the Hominy Trading Co. a store dramatically understates the power that traders in Osage County would come to have. Because when oil production exploded and the Osage became even wealthier, those merchants were positioned to capitalize on it. The Hominy Trading Co. was one of the most successful.
Drummond died in 1913, but his sons kept the company going. Their names were Fred Gentner, Roy Cecil, and Alfred Alexander; they went by Gentner, Cecil, and Jack. Fred Gentner, the business brains of the three, was most closely involved with the store, but all three brothers benefited from the foundation the Hominy Trading Co. provided.
The Drummonds’ store sold Pendleton blankets and hogs and even caskets, often on credit. These were the early days of credit in America, but White merchants saw good borrowers in their Osage customers—rich, with big accounts held by the US government. By the late teens of the 20th century, some families had come to owe thousands of dollars to their local trading stores, turning shops like the Hominy Trading Co. into something akin to a financial institution. And Osages only became more dependent on the credit they could get at stores when, in the early 1920s, Congress limited the amount of their own money Osage individuals could access to $1,000 a quarter.
“You would be issued a credit account,” says Elizabeth Lohah Homer, an Osage citizen and lawyer in Washington who sits on the Osage Nation’s Supreme Court. “You just went there, and you’d sign your book. And that was not at all unusual even during my childhood.”
Many Osage families remember systemic price gouging. “Everybody just knew that there was an Osage price when you go to the store,” says John Maker, an Osage congressman who grew up in Hominy. “That was just a common practice.”
Maker recalls one day in the 1960s, when his family put that suspicion to the test. His mother’s White aunt was in town for a visit. Maker says she liked visiting during the summertime so she could watch the Inlonshka, traditional Osage dances that take place in June. Maker’s mother wanted to get her sons material for the shirts they would wear, so the family loaded into the car to go to the Drummonds’ store, which by that point had been renamed the Pioneer Store. According to Maker, his mother had an idea: She and her aunt would go in separately to buy the same goods. Then they’d see what it cost each of them. Sure enough, Maker says, his mom had paid significantly more than her aunt.
“My aunt was just, like, flabbergasted,” he says. “She couldn’t believe it. It was really true.”
The ledgers available in public archives aren’t detailed enough to compare individual transactions. Gentner Drummond says he’s reviewed them and never seen any signs of exploitation.
In the late 1970s, when he was in his 80s, Jack Drummond spoke with a biographer about his life and career in Osage County. Dozens of taped interviews are in an archive at the University of Central Oklahoma outside Oklahoma City. Jack never mentions a two-price system, but he does offer insight about the environment in which county merchants operated at the time. In a tape from 1978, he describes a period in the early 1920s, when he was running the menswear and shoe departments at the Hominy Trading Co. The department had lost money the year before, and Jack had an idea to turn things around: silk shirts.
“I found a manufacturing outfit that would make silk shirts for those big Indians up to 52, 54, even 56 sizes,” he said. “But those shirts would cost maybe $6 or $7 a shirt, and I’ll get $50 or $60 a shirt.”
That’s close to $1,000 in today’s money. Joe Bush, Jack’s grandson and the owner of the Tower Hills Ranch in Osage County, says his grandfather was always proud he got the idea to sell those shirts. He sourced something his Osage customers really wanted, and he marked it up like you would any luxury good. Bush says his grandfather prided himself on his integrity and community service. “He made his money honestly and traded fairly,” Bush says.
Some of the biggest charges at the store came when an Osage person died. The Hominy Trading Co. and other stores operated as undertakers. The cost would be presented as a claim on a person’s estate. Many times, the person responsible for vetting that claim was one of the Drummond brothers. They would be able to approve claims from their own store and collect a significant fee for doing so. Fred Gentner alone served as the administrator or executor of at least 28 Osage estates.
In one case he administered the estate of a prominent Osage religious leader named Charles Wah-hre-she, who died in 1923. According to congressional testimony, the Hominy Trading Co. handled his funeral expenses, which totaled roughly $9,000. A couple of years later, perhaps to cover that cost, Fred Gentner issued his own store a promissory note for about $11,000. That note collected interest until it was presented as a claim on the estate of Wah-hre-she’s wife, Wah-hu-sah-e, when she died seven years after her husband. At that point, the claim was worth roughly $17,800—the equivalent of more than $300,000 today. Fred Gentner handled the estate of Wah-hu-sah-e as well, approving the claim by the store and an executor’s fee for himself.
During this time, Fred Gentner had also taken a leading role among the White community in Hominy. He owned shares in the local bank and sat on the board of the company that published the Hominy newspaper. He’d been the head of his local Masonic Temple in the early 1920s and led a committee to pave a road to Tulsa.
Ford Drummond, Fred Gentner’s grandson and another rancher in Osage County, says he’s unfamiliar with any particular transactions but he’d always heard his grandfather was trusted by his Osage neighbors. Ford has Choctaw ancestry on his mother’s side and is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation. That doesn’t excuse any “misconduct” by the Drummonds, he says, but it does show the complexity of this past. Oklahoma history is complicated, Ford says.
The Drummond brothers were also able to build some of their wealth by borrowing from Osage estates. This was made possible because of the people, most of them White men, who’d been put in charge of Osage finances. The federal government had labeled thousands of Osages and other Indigenous people “incompetent.” It was the default assumption; individuals had to petition to be considered competent. In many cases, people classified as incompetent were appointed a so-called guardian to oversee their affairs.
Guardianships existed in the years following the 1906 Osage allotment, but they gained traction when Congress restricted how much money Osage families could get access to each quarter. According to congressional testimony in the early 1920s, some men in Osage County saw an opportunity in the new limitations: They told Osages who could no longer get to their funds that if they had them appointed as guardian, they’d change that. Some Osages rushed to be placed under a guardian, giving rise to what became known as the professional guardian—men who oversaw the affairs of multiple Osages.
The guardianship system allowed for horrific exploitation. In many cases, the men in charge of Native money simply stole from their wards. Garrick Bailey, a professor emeritus at the University of Tulsa who’s written and edited books about the Osage Nation, says the root of this was envy and racism—the guardians couldn’t tolerate Native Americans having money. “You’ve got a county full of wealthy Indians and poor Whites,” Bailey says. “You have to remember there was such resentment.”
Guardians didn’t have to embezzle money to benefit from the guardianship system. There were myriad opportunities to put Osage money to work for themselves. The Drummond brothers were able to borrow from the wards of their associates, and their associates borrowed from the Drummonds’ wards. The three Drummond brothers served as guardians to at least 10 Osages, both children and adults.
This all happened under the watch of the US government, another reason the relationship between the Osages and the government is complicated and fragile. There are still significant concerns over how the BIA manages the Osage Mineral Estate and whether the US is upholding its fiduciary obligation to Osage headright holders and the tribe overall. The Osage Nation brought a lawsuit over this issue more than a decade ago. In 2011 the US settled for $380 million, which paid out to all headright holders, including non-Osages holding shares.
One such share can be traced to an Osage woman named Nah-me-tsa-he. In 1924 she died in her 60s of tuberculosis. Her husband, OV Pope, a White man in his 30s, inherited 1.5 of her 3 headrights. Within five years, he sold those shares for more than $65,000. Each sale was reviewed by a slew of federal officials, including an oil and gas inspector and the superintendent of the BIA’S Osage Agency. In the end, the transfer was approved by the assistant secretary of the US Department of the Interior.
While those officials were approving the sale, another development was playing out in the Oklahoma court system: Nah-me-tsa-he’s daughter, Rhoda, was seeking a divorce from OV’s brother Troy Pope.
In the court records she details how, before her mother’s death, OV encouraged Rhoda to get a divorce from her previous husband, King Ridge. The Pope brothers packed up her things and moved her and her children to Colorado, where they kept them while Rhoda’s mother was dying back home. She learned about her mother’s death via telegram. In the months that followed, Rhoda was coerced into marrying Troy. She said in her divorce case that the two brothers frightened her. They carried a gun. She said the preacher had to tell her three separate times to say “I do.” Their marriage was one of “extreme cruelty,” Rhoda’s lawyers said—Troy abused her and took money from her mother’s estate, which was being administered by OV.
In the end, Rhoda freed herself from her husband. She lived for another 40 years and is buried in Hominy, next to her first husband, whom she’d remarried. Her family says her five children grew to live full lives. Rhoda was a humble and private person, they say, but most importantly, she was strong.
None of the flags Rhoda raised over the Pope brothers drew action from the US government, whose stamp of approval meant two White men and one royalty company (a business set up to hold mineral rights) took ownership of half of Nah-me-tsa-he’s shares. Jack Drummond was one of the men. In 1925 he bought half of a headright from OV for $20,050, almost $340,000 in today’s dollars. Three years later he bought another quarter headright for $11,250.
Over the years, the shares OV sold have paid members of the Drummond family the equivalent of about $2.4 million when adjusted for inflation, and that doesn’t include the settlement that came in 2011. Jim Drummond, Jack’s son and a criminal defense attorney in Texas, is the beneficiary of a family trust that holds the half share. He says it’s averaged a pretty modest return on his father’s initial investment. He doesn’t have the ability to make any decisions about it, he says, and he doesn’t like to form opinions on things he can’t control. Ford Drummond, who’s set to inherit a portion of the quarter share, says he and his cousins want to return it to the Osage Nation but it’s essentially impossible to do so, given the complexity of the current process. The Osage Minerals Council, which represents Osage headrights holders, is seeking to change that. Last year, the council announced it was pursuing federal legislation that would make it easier for non-Osage headright holders to give or sell their shares to the tribe.
The Osage Nation’s efforts to reclaim property both above and below ground are about more than wealth. Land is power. Osage leaders knew this when they used the property title they held to negotiate to retain ownership of the mineral rights.
Gentner Drummond, the lawyer who will likely be Oklahoma’s next attorney general, is the biggest landowner of the extended Drummond family in Osage County, owning more than 25,000 acres. He says he didn’t inherit this land. He bought it from siblings and neighbors, taking on significant debt to do so.
He’s fought ardently to protect his holdings. Because everything beneath the surface is part of the Osage Mineral Estate, landowners like him have few rights when it comes to oil and gas drilling on their property. When a company wants to drill a well on his land, he gets money for surface damage, but there’s little he can do to prevent them from coming onto his property.
It’s not unusual for subsurface owners to be different from the surface owners. Mineral rights are divided from land ownership in many states, including Texas, where “Never sell your mineral rights” is as common a financial cliche as “Buy low, sell high.” But in Osage County, non-Osage landowners hoped the condition wouldn’t last. When the 1906 act allotted the Osage Nation’s surface land and established that the mineral rights would be held in trust, it only guaranteed that system would exist for 25 years.
The Osage Tribal Council, the tribe’s governing body at the time, lobbied Congress for that time frame to be extended. In the late 1910s they got a bill introduced to that effect. Big landowners pushed back. Fred Gentner and a handful of others formed the Osage County Home Owners Association to fight the proposed bill.
As the Wichita Eagle pointed out, many members of the Osage County Home Owners Association were guardians meant to protect their wards’ financial interests—and yet, here those same men were arguing to end a major source of income for Osage families.
Ultimately the Osage Tribal Council prevailed, and the trust relationship over the mineral estate was extended, eventually in perpetuity. Gentner Drummond says he didn’t know his family was involved in lobbying against the extension but, had he been alive then, he would have done the same thing. His forebears bought land thinking they’d own the mineral rights come 1931, he says. The 1906 act should have been the final say on the matter.
A century later, all the oil and gas rights beneath Drummond land still go into that big pot. The BIA is responsible for issuing drilling permits and ensuring cleanup. The agency has faced repeated allegations that its process for doing so is outdated and insufficient. Among the people saying that is Gentner Drummond, whose firm has represented other landowners in several lawsuits against oil companies and the US government for failing to ensure proper cleanup.
One of his firm’s most sweeping lawsuits—a case brought in 2014 on behalf of an Osage rancher and another landowner against dozens of oil companies and the federal government—is still blamed for a slowdown in drilling and a slump in headright payments. Drummond says he was a “convenient scapegoat” for a drop that had more to do with a collapse in oil prices than his lawsuit. Nonetheless, when he met with the principal chief of the Osage Nation, Geoffrey Standing Bear, ahead of the Republican primary this year, Standing Bear told him he would give his backing only if Drummond promised to never again bring a case affecting the Osage Mineral Estate. According to Standing Bear, Drummond refused to make that promise, and so Standing Bear withheld his endorsement.
Other tribal leaders, meanwhile, see Drummond as their best hope to have someone in state office who supports tribal sovereignty. He ran on a promise to repair the tattered relationship between tribal nations and Oklahoma. “Our governor, for some reason, just can’t see it in himself to act rationally,” Drummond says. “And so he’s driven a wedge between the Native American tribes and the state of Oklahoma. And I think that I can undo that.”
Standing Bear says he hopes that’s the case, but it’s too early for him to declare Drummond’s likely win a victory for the Osage Nation. “We have to be cognizant that the new attorney general of Oklahoma—or we believe he’ll be the new attorney general—has displayed interests adverse to our legal interests and our policy interests,” Standing Bear says.
The Standing Bear administration is now working to put the land it bought in 2016 in trust with the US government. Trust land is inalienable. Osage leaders see this as a way to use the government to support their quest to reclaim land and wealth after a century of loss. “The federal government has deep claws into what has happened with the Osage Nation and continues to,” says Wilson Pipestem, an Osage headright holder and attorney who represented the Osage Nation in the case the US settled in 2011. “It’s still an unprecedented level of control that has been exercised here. We embrace that in some ways because it’s created protection, but in other ways it’s caused, you know, significant hardship as well.”
That hardship is etched into the maps that show all the non-Osages who own land in Osage County today. But Red Corn says that when he looks at a map, he focuses on a giant chunk of ranch land southwest of Pawhuska—43,000 acres. The Osage Nation holds the title.
“I was there when Chief signed the deeds to close it and said, ‘This is the day we stop going backwards. This is the day we begin to go the other direction—toward buying all of this reservation back,’ ” Red Corn says. “And it will take as long to buy back as it did to sell it, perhaps even longer. If the Drummonds can build a small land empire, there’s no reason we can’t.” —With Allison Herrera, Linly Lin, and Devon PendletonRead next: Setback in Quest for Indigenous Rights Roils Chile, Creating Challenges for Its New President
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