In Trust

She was hailed by the local press as a hero of Oklahoma’s drive for statehood, which divided communal Native lands into individual parcels that could be leased or sold. A few years later, she was assembling tracts of Osage lands that she flipped to ranchers including Jack Drummond. But Anna Marx LaMotte’s tactics were anything but heroic. This is the story of how one White woman worked to reshape Osage County in the years after all...

Charles Wah-hre-she was an influential Osage religious leader. He died in Oklahoma City of a gallbladder illness, according to his 1923 death certificate. But for decades, Wah-hre-she’s family has heard a different story of his death. A descendant searches for answers, and tries to understand how a funeral bill grew so big it triggered alarms in the US Congress. Learn more and see archival documents and photos from the episode: htt...

By the 1920s, Fred Gentner Drummond was deeply embedded in Osage financial affairs. His store extended credit to Osages. He administered the estates of many of these same Osages – approving big debt repayments from them to his own store. But Fred Gentner and his brothers had another lever – a way to make Osage money work for themselves, and their friends. Hear how it worked, and how one Osage man fought back. Learn more and see bon...

The Drummonds’ story, and a lot of the family’s early wealth and influence in Osage County, grew from one of their first businesses here, a store that the family patriarch took over in the early 1900s. It sold everything from flour to caskets. Much of it on credit. But the store had another function: It provided its owners financial leverage over Osage customers, in life and in death. Learn more and see bonus material from the epis...

The extended Drummond family includes TV’s “Pioneer Woman,” Ree Drummond, and Oklahoma Attorney General candidate Gentner Drummond. If you add up the holdings of scores of family members, the Drummonds today are the biggest landowner in Osage County.  Many Osages have long wondered: How’d the family get so much land? An out-of-print book and hours of forgotten tapes reveal clues. They also point to an untold story of one Osage woma...

For years, Osage citizens had to sift through rumors and wrinkled pieces of paper for clues to one pressing question: Who ended up with shares of their reservation’s mineral rights? The answer was a secret, guarded by the federal government. Until one day in 2009, when a local newspaper published a list of those names – including some familiar ones. Learn more and see bonus material from the episode: https://bloom.bg/3xujL9x 

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A hundred and fifty years ago, the Osage Nation bought a stretch of prairie the size of Delaware, in what's now Oklahoma. The Osage owned the land and everything beneath it. Today, much of present-day Osage County has left Osage hands. In some cases, appropriation was swift and brutal: Dozens of Osages were murdered for their share of lucrative mineral rights to this oil-rich land, a period often referred to as the Reign of Ter...