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 Terror. But other transfers of wealth played out more subtly—dollar by dollar and acre by acre, over decades—helped along by policies created by the US government.
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Episode Transcript
This is a story about land in oil, about family,
about wealth, about the stories we passed down and the
stories we don't. More than a hundred years ago, the
Osage Nation negotiated something unique. Okay, a lot the surface lands,
but the subsurface remains as a mineral state. The O
(00:26):
s Age knew they needed to protect the oil and
gas wells beneath their reservation, because not long after that deal,
oil production in O Sage County, Oklahoma exploded, bringing a
lot of money to O s Age families. For the
past year, I've been trying to figure out who ended
up with that wealth and how they got it. The
(00:47):
truth has got to come out, you know, and it's
it's not always pretty and it's not always flattering. This
story took me across Oklahoma, across Texas, into people's homes
and state archives, to a sea of grass in the
middle of the prairie, through over a hundred years of history,
to the source of the money, land, and power that
(01:08):
shapes Osage County today. I'll tell you, Terry, our money
is involved. Seemed to pry out the windows regards. This
is in Trust, an investigative podcast about a massive transfer
of wealth out of O s age hands and into
White Ones, and how the H nation is fighting to
(01:30):
get it back in. Trust is a new series from
Bloomberg and I Heeart Media, reported and hosted by me
Rachel Adams. Heard Listen to Intrust starting on September six
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
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