September 27, 2022 • 45 mins
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: https://bloom.bg/3CdQum6
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I was starting to get a better idea of how
the Drummond brothers made some of their money. They had
the store where they could charge a lot, They handled
the states or proved their own claims. They were guardians
and could borrow O s age money from other guardians.
They had so many different roles when it came to
O s age finances. I kept seeing this pattern, and
(00:21):
apparently I wasn't the only one. I mentioned. That letter
I found from nineteen thirty four for the tribal attorney
Lewis Divers said essentially the same thing. He called it
an association men who were using their positions over O
s Age families to advance their own interests. He names
(00:42):
names too, in addition to the Drummond brothers, and these
men he named either worked at the Drummond Brothers store
or the local bank where Jack Drummond worked and Fred
Genner sat on the board. What Stivers seemed to say
in this letter was that it wasn't just a coincidence
that all the same men kept coming up in the
O s he guardianships and the states they handled. It
(01:02):
was a whole strategy, an association that was a shocker,
huh That was a shocker of a letter. I sent
this to Elizabeth Loha Homer, the lawyer in Washington, d c.
Who's on the oath Age Nations Supreme Court, because for
everything I had heard about that time period, I hadn't
really seen any federal officials back then who seemed to
(01:23):
catch that this was happening over and over again among
the same people. In hominy, you don't hear about that
very often where those bad behaviors actually get caught. The
name Stivers mentioned have come up again and again in
my reporting. There's Fred L. Shed, the guardian who lent
out his words money to the Drummond brothers, and Carl T. Matthews,
(01:45):
who was the guardian of Rhodoa Wheeler Rich, the o
s Age woman who accused the pope brothers of arranging
a marriage with her to take her money. A man
named Barlow. I recognized his name from Iron Banks Junior's audit.
Fred Gettner loaned him from Myron's account. Stiver's list a
few others he writes at all at the end, so
(02:06):
I can only assume there were more. The archives have
other letters and documents the offer a look inside how
(02:26):
all this seemed to work. In one case, the Office
of Indian Affairs set a field agent to look into
one of Fred L. Shed's guardianships. The superintendent had heard
someone exerted quote influence over an O s age woman,
so she would sign a paper saying she wanted Shed
to remain her guardian. That agent reported back that Jack
(02:46):
Drummond visited her instead of she told the Office of
Indian Affairs that she wanted to keep Shed as her guardian.
He'd make sure she'd get more money each quarter and
a new car. From what I've read in the papers
from this time period, these were prominent members of the
white community in Hominy. This was a town of three
(03:09):
or four thousand people back then with the Young Rotary Club.
That all but one of the men on this list
were members of the club. Came up in an article
about a local game of donkey ball. A bunch of
white businessmen writing donkeys tossing the ball around, and Fred
Gettner specifically seemed to have a lot of sway. He
owned those shares in the store and the bank. He
(03:31):
had been the head of his local Masonic temple in
the early nineties and led a committee to pave the
road to Tulsa. Fred Getner was also on the board
of the company that published the Hominy newspaper, and while
he was doing all that, according to Stivers, he was
also using his connections with other white businessmen to access
money from O. S He guardianships and probates. When I
(03:54):
showed this letter to Gettner Drummond in his office, he
didn't think it said these men were using O. S
Age estates to enriched themselves, just that someone was objecting
to having business men administered these estates. There was one
sentence in this letter from Louis Divers that stood out
to me. After he lifts off examples where he's seen
(04:15):
the association play out, he writes, all of these are
sufficient to cause one to raise this question, to say
nothing of Mr Drummond's conduct in the Wahusa estate in
connection with certain disbursements. Do Josephine lohawk Hip. This was
a new name to me, but Elizabeth she actually knew Josephine. Well.
(04:38):
I always thought that Josephine was my grandma, but it
turns out Josephine was not my grandma. Josephine was my
grandpa's first wife. Elizabeth says she thought Josephine was her
grandma because she was at her house so much. They
lived just outside of Hominy in a big house hosted dinners,
would have people over all the time. She was like
(05:01):
the you know, kind of the center of the social
scene for oh stages in Homony, and so we were
over there all the time. It's like, what literally walking
distance from our house. I wanted to know why Stivers
singled out Josephine and her stepmother, a woman named Wahusai.
What conduct he was talking about that warranted its own
(05:23):
sentence and a letter that was already about a bunch
of questionable stuff he seemed to think was going on.
So I pulled bahusas probate file the once Divers mentioned
she died in and what I saw in her probate
was another letter from Stivers. He flagged something and almost
seventeen thousand, eight hundred dollar claim from the Hominy Trading
(05:46):
Company debt. The store said Bahusai is a state owed
and that claim it was approved by Bahusai's executor, Fred
Gettner Drummond. This is the strange part. According to Stivers,
it wasn't Waho sized debt at the store who was
money her husband's estate owed when he died seven years earlier.
(06:07):
In his name was Charles wa Rishi. At this point
I had seen some pretty enormous claims on o s
age estates, but nearly seventeen thousand, eight hundred dollars to
a trading post that's more than a quarter million dollars today,
And according to this letter, Fred Getner was administrator of
(06:27):
Warishi's the state too. I started looking around for any
information I could find about Charles Waichi because he seemed
like he might hold the key to figuring out what
conduct Divers was talking about. In that letter, the example
he seemed to find most questionable that Fred Getner Drummond
(06:48):
was behind. And I learned that Charles Warreschi was actually
pretty famous at the time. He was a religious leader
influential in hominy. I found a newspaper article calling him
one of the most potographed Native Americans of the time.
He took a trip to Mexico once and made headlines
across the country. I found mentions in newspapers from El
(07:08):
Paso in Washington, d C. He was also a source
for a well known ethnologist named Francis la Flesh, who
spent decades documenting Osage culture. His work comes up in
a lot of books, and Waishi is mentioned by name.
There was so much about him out there, But what
stood out to me the most was a social media
(07:29):
post on Reddit of all places, from five years ago.
The title said Osage Priest of Puma Clan, Charles Waishi
and the comment this is my great great grandfather born
eighteen sixty two, murdered December during o Sage Reign of Terror. Yeah,
(08:01):
this is in trust. I'm Rachel Adam's hurt. I didn't
(08:25):
set out to do a story about murder, not that
those stories don't deserve to be told. There was just
so much focus on the murders from the Reign of Terror, books,
now a movie, and I wanted to understand the financial
schemes going on around them, the ones that don't get
as much attention but still have these massive generational impacts.
But what I've learned from talking to o Stage families
(08:48):
is that it's impossible to look at what happened during
the twenties and nineteen thirties in oh Sage County without
coming across murders that were never investigated or deaths that
don't make sense. There was no meat, say he who
died while married to a man half her age, a
man who sold her head rights. Just a few years later,
(09:08):
Myron Banks Junior's mother who got sick just when a
man who wanted her money married her. Suspicious circumstances, definitely,
but no one ever said they knew for sure what happened.
But now I was looking at this Reddit post from
someone who said definitively that their great great grandfather, Charles
Wa Rishi was murdered, the same man whose debt at
(09:31):
the Hominy Trading Company had come up in the Stiver's letter.
I sent a message to the account on the post,
explained what I was working on that I wanted to
know more about Charles wal Rishi. For days, I refreshed
the page over and over again, wondering if i'd hear back.
While I waited, I went to someone else who might
(09:51):
have heard about Charles Wa Rishi, John Maker, who told
me about the O s Age price. His great grandmother
was Wahusa, and even though Rishi was her second husband
and not John's direct ancestor, I thought maybe he would
know how a Rishi died. Well. I heard from that family,
(10:11):
Angie Jake, who was his great great granddaughter, that he
had been murdered on that road going out to their
old place called Cotton Gin Road. Of course, he was
back in those days as a horse and buggy in
the dirt road, and they had found him murders shot
in his buggy, just leaned over, but it was a
(10:35):
bullet woun to the head and the horse was just
standing there, stopped, and somebody was just coming or going
and found him like that. What was Angie like when
she told you that? Well, I know she she was
hesitant to tell me. It's like Kama and no skeleton
closet story. You know, she was real revering about it
(11:00):
when she was telling me. And and I think we're
just riding around in the car. Yeah, I mean, it's
just kind of like, by the way, I'm oh, my
grandfather was murdered on this road. It's like I had
never heard that. Of course I had heard that name,
Charlie Warry. She was a well known name around hamby
(11:20):
real respected oh religious leader. So John Maker had heard
Charles Barbrichi was murdered during the Reign of Terror, and
he had heard this story from a woman named Angie.
John told me, like a lot of deaths from this time,
this wasn't something people talked a lot about that people
were scared the same thing could happen to them. The
(11:43):
corruption of the time is well documented now, but John said,
for a long time this was only ever something that
was whispered about, and back in those days it was
common practice for these corners or medical people. Yeah, we did,
all right, you know, no wall tops, none of that.
(12:03):
I mean that corruption. What was the corners, the medical exam,
the doctors, all the way to okcom a city, on
all these sad I found out Andy had actually talked
to someone else about it, an Osage woman she was
distantly related to, who wrote her thesis paper on the
o s Age Native American Church. In that paper, there's
(12:24):
a passage from a conversation with Angie where she says
wa Rishi didn't live very long. He was murdered, but
Angie says her parents never really sat her down and
told her anything. Angie has since passed away, so I
don't know how she knew about water She's death, or
if she knew any more than what she told John
were this researcher at this point, I knew Louis Divers
(12:48):
suspected the Drummond brothers and other men around Hominy of
being in an association, and that Stivers thought fred Gettner
Drummond took a bunch of money from wa who size
the state money. Fred Getner said this war was ode
by her late husband wa Rishi. And now I was
learning that there was this whole other element, this belief
by waar Rishi's family that he was murdered. I was
(13:12):
looking around for more information on Charles wa Rishi one
day when I went to check read it again, this
time I had a new message from that account behind
the post that said wah Rishi was murdered. His name
is John horse Chief. He's an O Sage citizen, an
I T expert who works with a lot of old
O Sage records. We talked on the phone a few times.
(13:34):
He said he was interested in seeing the documents I
had found, so I sent him the letter from Louis Divers,
the reason I had come across his post to begin with.
John invited me out to his family's house and Hominy,
John Rachel, it's nice to finally meet you in person.
John had two crock pots on in the kitchen. There
(13:56):
were jugs of tea on the table. His son had
big cookies. I was gonna tell you guys, if you're hungry, Yeah,
I made like traditional Indian corn with buffalo, his real corn,
the kind of girl here. My uncle grows it, and
it's been like tested. It's got like protein in his corn.
I sat down with John in the living room. His dad,
Alfred was also there. John said, his sister Geneva and
(14:19):
his cousin Mary Joe, we're going to come by later.
The man they were going to tell me about he
was extraordinarily important, not just to their family but to
the os Age nation's history. He was a religious leader
at a time when O s Age society was changing dramatically.
He had been educated, but he chose to live a
(14:40):
O s Age life. He wore traditional clothing, he preferred
to speak his language, and you know, he lived traditional
life as much as he could to that point. And
so those are the things that we really value about
the man of who he is. And it's really why
I want my pops to be here, my son and
all my family is because we have this big, large
family and we like really take care of each other
(15:01):
and our kids and but it's all to this culture,
and it's all to what our grandpa left. So I
was kind of war Rischi died long before John or
his dad were born. And even though wau Rischi was
technically his great great grandfather, John calls him Grandpa, says
he's always felt a strong connection to him. When we
sat down, John told me about a moment when he
(15:24):
felt that connection, a moment that changed everything for him.
At the time, John was working in the O s
Age Nation's I T department. He says that first his
job was mostly dealing with the typical I T stuff,
mesting with printers, network management, plugging, and keyboards. But one
day there's a big old box of dusty materials in
(15:45):
the I T room, a box of old audio recordings,
real to real tapes waiting to be digitized, and they're
trying to pass it off to people. No one want
to do it. And I was a new guy in
I T and so I needed to do something. And
then the first tape by Digiti was one of our
leaders named Bacon Ryan, and he's a very famous chief
of ours, and I heard his actual voice, and from
(16:06):
that moment I knew that's what I wanted to do.
John started digitizing and converting more and more of these recordings,
cataloging them. Some were tapes, others were from files from
old wax cylinders at the Library of Congress. Yeah, that's
what's when I started doing, knows, that's when I started,
you know, really getting into it. And it was just
opened up a new world for me, you know, because
(16:26):
I didn't think we had recordings that old. John says,
these tapes were organized by catalog number, so we'd have
to compare the numbers with field notes from the time
to figure out who was talking. And as he's doing that,
one day he notices something they had our grandpa's name
wrote down a whole different way, So lories you can
get written down a bunch of different ways, right, And
(16:47):
so it was like with the c H, I think,
and then uh, I looked, and I was like, is
that grandpa? Sure enough, I started listening to it, and
it was and I was like, man, this is really him,
this is it? And what was his voice when you
heard that? You know, it was beautiful, it was haunting,
and it was just like he's talking to me. John
(17:07):
told me a lot of the recordings with Waishi were
religious songs powerful important Warisci lived at a time when
the Native American Church was first forming. John told me
he was trying to hold on to parts of traditional
oth Age beliefs and culture, and these songs were part
of that. When you hear that and then you think
(17:28):
about it and you go home, when you pray, and
you think about, man, why did Why was I the
one who got to hear my grandpa's voice? And so,
you know, I don't want to say it's like about
me or something like that, but you know, we believe
everything happens for a reason, and if it's meant to be,
it's meant to be. And so I took it as
a sign, a good sign, and so that's what I
(17:49):
got into. And then the more I learned about it,
I just totally went into it. Waishi was born in
the eighteen sixties. He lived on the oth Age Reservation
before the land was divided up and parceled out to individuals,
before head rights. Then allotment came and everything changed. I
(18:09):
imagine that would have been like taking you and dropping
you in the middle of another country where you don't
speak the language. This is Mary Joe, John's cousin She said,
wa Rishi would have watched the impact of allotment firsthand
and seeing the US government's efforts to force the Sage
Nation to assimilate, and so taking someone out of something
(18:30):
that would have been a community type environment where we
don't look after the survival of ourselves, we look after
survival of the community, and then separating purposely doing the separating.
There you see the evolution, forced evolution. John and his
family told me. When oil money started pouring in and
(18:52):
more and more white people moved to Osage County, Waishi
knew things were going to get bad. He watched just
traders and bankers and ranchers all thought to get rich
off the o s Age Nation. It's land, it's oil money.
This whole time, both aged children were being forced to
attend Native American boarding schools, a lot of it paid
(19:13):
for with Native money money held in trust by the
United States. These boarding schools punished children for speaking their
own language and forced them to wear certain clothes. They
were also rife with abuse. Where she was like wanting
to say, this culture so he knew that we were
getting wiped out. Here is the table stacked against us.
(19:34):
The lawyers, the policemen. They were all against us. They're
taken away our religion, our culture. So he was like,
let's go somewhere else and start over, or we can
get the religion going as much as we can make
it work. And the times that we live in, so
they thought about Mexico and they went down there in Mexico.
I've seen references to this trip all over the newspaper archives,
(19:56):
and one from December it says what Raci is quote
proposing to remove the Indians from the right Pahaska jurisdiction,
a reference to the os Age Agency superintendent at the time.
There's also another newspaper clipping from June. It says more
Raci hosted a feast at his house outside of Hominy.
(20:19):
At this feast, he reportedly said he had already met
with President Ubergon of Mexico and he was supportive of
the plan to make Mexico the os Age nation's new home.
The paper says, well, Rasci quote has the idea that
this is too much of a white man's country. We
went down there with a sack of dollars and we
(20:39):
got to Mexico. He turned into a bag of pesos
and he paid for everything, he talked to, everything, he
managed everything. He was never scared. You know, he was
on a mission to do something. He was trying to
preserve our culture or people, you know what I mean.
So that's how bad it was here. That's how deadly
and bad it was here that they were getting murder.
(21:00):
I mean, they could see the writing on the wall.
But the Mexico plan didn't work out. After he visited,
Waishi determined the land was no good for farming, and
by the time he came back to Hominy, just as
he had predicted, disaster had struck os Age County. The
Reign of Terror was well under way. Just a year later,
(21:22):
Waishi too was dead. Wow. During our conversation, John offered
to take me out to a Rishi's land. It's still
in the family. Only a couple of buildings are still standing.
(21:44):
There was a fire out here, the family says, an
accident back in the seventies. Here is where Charles where
she lived, and it was a big giant brick house
that he built, and after it burned down, some of
the bricks are over my little house I have over there.
I used it to kind of make my little driveway.
But this is where he had his big This is
where Charles Richie's big house was at and they called
(22:05):
this the farm out here. It's just a few miles
away from where John lives now. The foundations still there.
A couple of other buildings too, one called the summer house,
kind of like a big guesthouse. Different people come visit
for like two weeks a time, and that's where they
would live in the summer house, or relatives come over.
We'd have our dances. It was like for guests, and
(22:25):
it was like for big occasions. This is the same
house Elizabeth Loha Homer mentioned where she had all those
memories from growing up of big dinners and social gatherings.
Being there with John, I could imagine kids running around,
adults visiting. And so this is our family's specific church
house right here. Waichi's church is also on the property.
(22:47):
It has eight sides appointed roof, and so you'll see
these around. At one point there was forty five or
so these churches active in the county. Each family had one.
There's about four of them active left, and this was
active till about ten fifteen years ago. And so that's
what me and Mary, Joe and Geneva are here we're
gonna We're trying to We're trying to get build, build
back right because the tribe is having a renaissance. You
(23:09):
know of our culture and who we are. You know,
we've been through the worst, worst times, you know what
I mean, and the ones who are left, we're coming
back stronger and we want to get back the stuff
that we lost, you know, our family, our church, our culture,
our language. And you know this is like for me
personally now that I'm becoming an elder. You know, I'm
(23:29):
talking to Mary, Joe and Geneva. This is something I
want to fix up and get back together. And you know,
in a hundred years, our boys and our grandsons are
gonna sit in here and they're gonna know what to do,
and this is gonna be their place again. So that's
what we want. I've heard that Charles bo Rischi was
(23:50):
murdered from a few different people at this point. Unfortunately,
everyone who would have had firsthand knowledge of this, the
people who were there back then, they've all died. But
the stories out there and the details are remarkably consistent.
Charles bar Rischi was on his way home in a
buggy on Cotton Gin Road when someone shot him in
(24:12):
the head, but the official story was completely different. Even
(24:34):
though Wa Rishi was the subject of a bunch of
articles while he was alive, I could only find a
couple of newspapers that mentioned his death. It's the same
article republished one on December twelve by a newspaper in
Pahaska and the other on the next day in the
o Stage Journal. The headline was Charles ba Rischi dead
(24:55):
at Hominy. His name is spelled differently fifty seven words
that say he died at row Leader Hospital in Oklahoma City,
that his wife and daughter were there. The service is
at ten a M. Row Leader Hospital all the way
in Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City is a two hour drive
(25:16):
from Hominy today way longer in It's the same location
on his death certificate, which says he died on December
tenth from empaima of gallwater with stones. Basically, the doctor
who filled out this death certificate was saying Wa Richi
(25:36):
died of complications from gallblater inflammation. Today it's pretty rare
to die from that, but it can happen if left
and treated. The undertaker was in Oklahoma City too. His
name was ed L. Hahn. In the funeral home he
worked at. It still exists today on Cook Street and Drinker.
(26:04):
This is Cheryl, Can I help you? Hi, Cheryl, My
name is Rachel. I told Cheryl I was looking for
anything she could get me on Marie. She I would
have to look and see if we actually have the
record or not. Uh, that far back. I mean we
do have some that far back, but they're a little
sketchy sometimes and I will need to go upstairs and
(26:25):
look for that, so I will need to call you back.
Cheryl dug around in the records for a while. She
called me back when she found something. I don't have
a lot of information. This is all handwritten, so it's
kind of hard to read. It's just a little card,
is all it is. Back then, that's about all we
all we ever had. Cheryl told me some of the
basic facts. The funeral home had his name, that he
(26:48):
was married, that he was sixty eight years old. There
was an informant, I guess the gentleman that took care
of him was um fred Gie Drummond, and he died
at Rollators are Rollaters hospital, So what would be the
(27:09):
role of an informant that would give us the information
as to what like mother and father's names, date of birth,
date of death, Uh, that sort of thing. Thanks for
the death certificate. Is there any information about how he died? No,
there's nothing on here at all about how he died,
just where he died, and uh, that's it. So Fred
(27:33):
Gettner was the informant on this record at the funeral home.
He was the one who called to give La Riche's
background information, his age, that he was married. Cheryl sent
me a copy of the card and a separate itemized
claim for what Ricci's undertaking services. It was eight hundred
thirty seven dollars and cents. The most expensive part was
(27:55):
the casket fifty dollars. An account at the home trading
company paid for it. But there was no mention of
how Waishi died. The funeral bill, the death certificate, the
paper they all put Charles BA Rishi in Oklahoma City
when he died, apparently from some sort of gall butter inflammation.
(28:17):
When I'd find something like this, I'd sent it to
John Horse Chief and I'm just like, that doesn't make
any sense. That's not what we heard. So do you
think he would like because you said that you still
believe that he was absolutely murdered. Yes, I believe that.
John and I have talked a lot about this. Why
the paperwork doesn't match the story. He's heard that a
(28:39):
lot of people have heard that Wau Rishi was shot
in the head. John told me he hasn't changed his mind.
There are enough stories and enough proof that corruption was
rampant back then. I've tried to find out more about JB.
Role later, the doctor of the hospital was named after
who signed off on Moa Rishi's death certificate. It There's
(29:01):
nothing I've seen that indicates he was ever suspected of
being part of the reign of terror, of the criminal
conspiracy that reached far beyond William Hale to lawyers, medical examiners, doctors.
There are some murders that have been solved from that
time period thanks to these archives and family stories. They
come up in books like Killers of the Flower Moon
(29:24):
or the Deaths of Sybil Bolton, and I wish I
could tell you this was one of those stories, and
I figured out definitively whether Wa Rashi was murdered, and
if he was, who did it. But for every case
that's been solved, there are more like Wa Raci's. We're
finding the answer seems almost impossible. The records say one thing,
(29:46):
but knowing the corruption of the time, it's hard to
know whether you can trust them. The family story says
something else, but it's been a very long time, and
no one who is there is still alive. Yeah, but
(30:19):
there was still this whole other element to war Rishi's
death that John still had questions about the money, why
war Rishi's estate would have owed so much, and where
it went. That's after the break, John said he was
(30:47):
as sure as he ever was that Waishi was murdered.
The official documents that placed him in Oklahoma City on
December tenth just didn't seem right to him. Why would
he have gone to a hospital so far away if
he wasn't murdered. Why had John heard the specific story
that Waishi was shot in the head on Cotton Gin
Road his entire life, John said, when he was reading
(31:11):
all this paperwork, the death certificate, the card from the
funeral home where Fred Getner was the informant, the receipt
paid for by an account at the Drummond store, it
was enough to make him want to know more. Why
Fred G. Drummond was all over war Rishis and his wife,
who says paperwork. He wanted to know how Fred Getner
(31:31):
ended up with so much of his family's money. So
John went to the courthouse and asked for the records
on Waishi's estate. Sure enough, I went up there yesterday
to pull up those records and it's a big Manila envelope,
this thick, very first name Freggie Drummond, oh Ship. So
he became his executor after Grandpa died. Right And in
the very first day, Fredgie Drummonds in there trying to
(31:53):
correct the letter and get paid for this and get
paid for that. When John went to the courthouse that day,
I actually ran into him in the parking lot. He
told me he put in an order to have Va
Rishi's entire probate copied and printed out so he could
keep it. They told him it would take a couple
of days. He said I could come with him when
he picked it up from y It's so very it's
(32:22):
kind of intimidating Corey House in the way. Yeah, how
are you feeling. It's a different feeling, you know, Like
the first time he came up here. I could really
feel it the first time we asked about it. Thanks
(32:42):
the tones, Yeah, the old books with the golden red spine. Yeah.
I scanned every single one of the white one thing
for you guys. Yes, ma'am, I'd like to pick up
a probade I ordered on Friday, John Horse Chief, Where
(33:10):
is she? Yeah? John handed over his card. The woman
behind the counter walked over to her computer, only to
return a few seconds later. She told us the machine
couldn't take a card with a pen. John needed to
come back with cash. Okay, Well, we have to go
get some money to come back. Okay, John, let me
(33:39):
ride with him to an ATM nearby. We drove past
three Drummonds mercantile, past your hotel. The Pioneer Woman boarding
house Downtown Pahaska was busy that day, a lot of
tourists around. John's told me before he doesn't have anything
against Re Drummond. She never did anything to him or
his family. And I've heard a version of this before
(34:01):
from some other Sage citizens that Reath brought jobs to
the community and helped revitalized Pasca. But John also said
he feels conflicted about eating at her restaurants, knowing the
broader suspicions around the Drummond family's history and Osage County.
It's no secret what they did. They took advantage through
hook and crook, and you know they can say that
(34:24):
we signed the paper and it was all legal. Button.
I mean, they're sitting here holding all the money. I
just want to know the truth. John withdrew the cash
and we drove back to the courthouse. He paid for
Riche's probate left with a few hundred pages double sighted.
We made a plan to meet up later after he
(34:46):
had a chance to read through it. M Later that week,
one night, after John had gotten off work, I went
back to his house. He had all the papers from
the probate file on his kitchen table with a magnifying glass. Yeah,
(35:11):
so what do you make of like these dates? Oh
there's even more so likes this one. And then there's
a thousand dollar charge from the hospital from the Rollers
Hospital to my grandpa's bill. As farther down here, I
think in addition to the role leaders hospital charge, there's
also a claim from the Hominy Trading Company. In the
first week of December. It shows mo Rishi bought some
(35:33):
coffee and eggs, a couple of boxes of jello, and
on December eight, two days before he died, there's another
claim from the Drummond store two d dollars cash for
quote expense to Oklahoma City. Fred Getner approved that, and
all the other claims. It's even worse. And you see
all these this guy's name all over it, right, he's
(35:55):
the one getting all the money out of it and
directly benefitting from it. Stud's names, all of my grandpa's paperwork. Right,
even seeing the probate, it still wasn't clear how A.
Rashie's estate would have owed so much money to the
how Many Trading Company about seventeen eight hundred dollars by
the time the store collected on it. Yeah, it's so interesting, Like,
(36:16):
so we have the we have the congressional record, and
we have that funeral hard from Oklahoma City funeral home
with expenses that went into the funeral. But then I'm
not even like really seeing where those would be. Maybe
those are yeah, they're not even any here, are they?
Maybe those are paid out of his own pocket. I
(36:37):
don't know, But I don't even know what goes on.
It's just so confusing. It was confusing. You have to
make a lot of assumptions to get the numbers tat
up because there aren't many receipts showing how the debt
could have piled up so much. But I have been
able to put together a rough idea of how that happened.
(37:01):
The congressional record I mentioned to John it was the
same hearing we're one lawmaker called the extreme funeral bills
worse than teapot dome. They cite an example an o
Sage citizen whose funeral expenses were around nine thousand dollars.
They called the persona Risha and later war rec But
(37:22):
it's clear from the other details they mentioned they're just
missed saying Wai Shi because they're talking about an oh
stage man who lived in Hominy, whose undertaker was an
Oklahoma city whose administrator was Fred Gettner Drummond. I've looked
at all the other estates fred Gettner handled wais She
(37:43):
is the only one that makes sense here. According to
this hearing, the monument for ware She's grave cost four thousand,
eight hundred dollars and the casket was three thousand dollars.
The funeral came out to more than nine thousand dollars.
A couple of years later, as the administrator of Vershi's estate,
(38:04):
Fred Gettner Drummond issued the Hominy Trading Company a promisory
note basically, and I owe you it said. Wahi's estate
owed the store a little over eleven thousand dollars because
fred Getner gave his store a promisory note from the estate,
it was collecting interest every year until one day when
(38:25):
Wahusai dies and the store makes the claim with interest
on her estate for roughly seventeen thousand, eight hundred dollars
more than three hundred thousand dollars today. So that's where
the seventeen eight hundred dollar claim on Wahusai's estate must
have come from Ushi's funeral, the one that came up
(38:47):
in a congressional hearing that one lawmaker called worse than
teapot Dome. This is what Louis Divers, the tribal attorney,
was complaining about in that letter I found the one
that sent me looking for Charles Marrichi's family that led
me to John Horse. Chief Stivers was objecting to how
much that debt increased, and how the guy who issued
(39:10):
the promisory note from Marishi's estate was also the guy
collecting on it, Fred Getner, and I owe you to
himself effectively from the estate of an o s age
man who couldn't dispute it. But despite all the flags
from Stivers from US Congressmen, fred Getner never had to
pay the money back. A county judge overruled Stiver's objections
(39:35):
and said the Hominy Trading Company could keep the roughly
seventeen thousand, eight hundred dollars. He also said fred Getner
could keep the executor's fee. He paid himself another three thousand,
two hundred ninety four dollars in eighty cents, and fred
Getner's lawyer, a man named G. K. Sutherland, made one
thou five hundred dollars from all who say's estate. It's
(40:05):
like an open check. You can just start writing money
against this guy. And when you think about that, this
used to be yours, and you actually see the paperwork,
and you know, I think you look at things a
lot differently, you know what I mean, You look at
people a lot differently. You think about yourself differently. John
(40:26):
told me he was going to keep looking through barbary
She's records, reading the probate, piecing together just what happened
to his family in the twenties and thirties. You know,
one of these days are gonna make sense of all
his paperwork and and it will be some more closure.
But I'm just barely kind of like putting together all
that happened, and like the repercussions of what it did
(40:50):
to us personally, you know what I mean, on a
personal level, not just financially, right, you know, So the
bigger loss is just that he meant more to us
the person, right it. You know, it's it's bringing us
together as a family, and it's just like, you know,
just something we can kind of I guess now we're
ready to talk about it, because I have a feeling
they didn't talk about it for a long time, you
know what I mean. It was just so painful and
(41:11):
just such a loss, and so it was very very
hard on our family. So and I think a lot
of you know, it's just so much stuff cloes through
my head, right because my grandpa was resistant to all
this stuff like let's keep our culture, let's keep our language,
let's keep what makes us us. And then he was
actively trying to move the tribe to where we could
(41:33):
practice our culture and stuff. And it's just definitely makes
you think that this culture is not strong. It can
withstand all of this, all these millions of dollars, all that,
and if we just lead into that, you know, we'll
be all right. John and I went through more of
(41:58):
the probate. We talked for a while out it was
getting dark outside thirty something degrees. A winter storm was
rolling in. He told me about other things he was
up to, projects he was working on with people around town.
He showed me some bead work he was doing for
his son, a other hat he made. John told me
(42:19):
before I left there was something he wanted to show me.
He had just gotten back from Nebraska from a buffalo hunt.
You know, I had a gun and I was about
seventy yards away, and I wasn't a four by four.
You know, I just kind of got out of four
by four. Wait. I couldn't shoot nothing else, because if
you should know that one, you got paid for that
one too. I got it, I got it. I got
so the wait until you have to wait till nothing
(42:41):
behind him or nothing in front of him. And then
I did, and I prayed, and I was very thankful,
and I was a good feeling, good experience the blessing.
So I'm very happy for that. And you know, that's
the kind of good things I want to spread around.
John pulled up a video on his phone. He had
a brush in his hand, combing it through the hide.
But yeah, it's a buffalo. Rub I'm making a buffalo
(43:01):
when first I would say, just kill a buffalo over
a hundred years. That's what I'm saying until someone pops
up it's a picture. But this is what I'm trying
to take back. And I don't say, Hey, we need
you start eating buffalo, going on corn, learn how to
do this again? Does it make you feel close to it? Does? Yeah?
It makes me feel like his blessings are coming to me.
(43:21):
You know, he's helping me out and just gotta fall
this way. No no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no
(43:47):
no no no no no no no no no. In
Trust is a production of Bloomberg and I Heart Media.
(44:09):
It's reported and hosted by me Rachel Adam's Heard additional
reporting by Alison Edita Davis Land is our senior producer.
Samantha Story is our executive producer. Jeff Grocott is our
senior editor. Additional editing by Francesco Leavy and Daniel Ferrara.
Additional production by Victor Ebayez. Production support from Jelda de Carle,
(44:34):
Sound engineering by Blake Maples, fact checking by Molly Nugent,
the music by Laura Worman. Photography by Shane Brown. Special
thanks to Brett Goldstein, a forensic handwriting consultant, and Brodie
Forward with Bloomberg News. You can email us at Podcasts
at Bloomberg dot net. Find more about this episode at
(44:57):
Bloomberg dot com slash in trust. For maps, newspaper archives,
photos and other documents related to this episode, go to
Bloomberg dot com slash in trust, find in trust anywhere
you get your podcasts m
I was starting to get a better idea of how
the Drummond brothers made some of their money. They had
the store where they could charge a lot, They handled
the states or proved their own claims. They were guardians
and could borrow O s age money from other guardians.
They had so many different roles when it came to
O s age finances. I kept seeing this pattern, and
(00:21):
apparently I wasn't the only one. I mentioned. That letter
I found from nineteen thirty four for the tribal attorney
Lewis Divers said essentially the same thing. He called it
an association men who were using their positions over O
s Age families to advance their own interests. He names
(00:42):
names too, in addition to the Drummond brothers, and these
men he named either worked at the Drummond Brothers store
or the local bank where Jack Drummond worked and Fred
Genner sat on the board. What Stivers seemed to say
in this letter was that it wasn't just a coincidence
that all the same men kept coming up in the
O s he guardianships and the states they handled. It
(01:02):
was a whole strategy, an association that was a shocker,
huh That was a shocker of a letter. I sent
this to Elizabeth Loha Homer, the lawyer in Washington, d c.
Who's on the oath Age Nations Supreme Court, because for
everything I had heard about that time period, I hadn't
really seen any federal officials back then who seemed to
(01:23):
catch that this was happening over and over again among
the same people. In hominy, you don't hear about that
very often where those bad behaviors actually get caught. The
name Stivers mentioned have come up again and again in
my reporting. There's Fred L. Shed, the guardian who lent
out his words money to the Drummond brothers, and Carl T. Matthews,
(01:45):
who was the guardian of Rhodoa Wheeler Rich, the o
s Age woman who accused the pope brothers of arranging
a marriage with her to take her money. A man
named Barlow. I recognized his name from Iron Banks Junior's audit.
Fred Gettner loaned him from Myron's account. Stiver's list a
few others he writes at all at the end, so
(02:06):
I can only assume there were more. The archives have
other letters and documents the offer a look inside how
(02:26):
all this seemed to work. In one case, the Office
of Indian Affairs set a field agent to look into
one of Fred L. Shed's guardianships. The superintendent had heard
someone exerted quote influence over an O s age woman,
so she would sign a paper saying she wanted Shed
to remain her guardian. That agent reported back that Jack
(02:46):
Drummond visited her instead of she told the Office of
Indian Affairs that she wanted to keep Shed as her guardian.
He'd make sure she'd get more money each quarter and
a new car. From what I've read in the papers
from this time period, these were prominent members of the
white community in Hominy. This was a town of three
(03:09):
or four thousand people back then with the Young Rotary Club.
That all but one of the men on this list
were members of the club. Came up in an article
about a local game of donkey ball. A bunch of
white businessmen writing donkeys tossing the ball around, and Fred
Gettner specifically seemed to have a lot of sway. He
owned those shares in the store and the bank. He
(03:31):
had been the head of his local Masonic temple in
the early nineties and led a committee to pave the
road to Tulsa. Fred Getner was also on the board
of the company that published the Hominy newspaper, and while
he was doing all that, according to Stivers, he was
also using his connections with other white businessmen to access
money from O. S He guardianships and probates. When I
(03:54):
showed this letter to Gettner Drummond in his office, he
didn't think it said these men were using O. S
Age estates to enriched themselves, just that someone was objecting
to having business men administered these estates. There was one
sentence in this letter from Louis Divers that stood out
to me. After he lifts off examples where he's seen
(04:15):
the association play out, he writes, all of these are
sufficient to cause one to raise this question, to say
nothing of Mr Drummond's conduct in the Wahusa estate in
connection with certain disbursements. Do Josephine lohawk Hip. This was
a new name to me, but Elizabeth she actually knew Josephine. Well.
(04:38):
I always thought that Josephine was my grandma, but it
turns out Josephine was not my grandma. Josephine was my
grandpa's first wife. Elizabeth says she thought Josephine was her
grandma because she was at her house so much. They
lived just outside of Hominy in a big house hosted dinners,
would have people over all the time. She was like
(05:01):
the you know, kind of the center of the social
scene for oh stages in Homony, and so we were
over there all the time. It's like, what literally walking
distance from our house. I wanted to know why Stivers
singled out Josephine and her stepmother, a woman named Wahusai.
What conduct he was talking about that warranted its own
(05:23):
sentence and a letter that was already about a bunch
of questionable stuff he seemed to think was going on.
So I pulled bahusas probate file the once Divers mentioned
she died in and what I saw in her probate
was another letter from Stivers. He flagged something and almost
seventeen thousand, eight hundred dollar claim from the Hominy Trading
(05:46):
Company debt. The store said Bahusai is a state owed
and that claim it was approved by Bahusai's executor, Fred
Gettner Drummond. This is the strange part. According to Stivers,
it wasn't Waho sized debt at the store who was
money her husband's estate owed when he died seven years earlier.
(06:07):
In his name was Charles wa Rishi. At this point
I had seen some pretty enormous claims on o s
age estates, but nearly seventeen thousand, eight hundred dollars to
a trading post that's more than a quarter million dollars today,
And according to this letter, Fred Getner was administrator of
(06:27):
Warishi's the state too. I started looking around for any
information I could find about Charles Waichi because he seemed
like he might hold the key to figuring out what
conduct Divers was talking about. In that letter, the example
he seemed to find most questionable that Fred Getner Drummond
(06:48):
was behind. And I learned that Charles Warreschi was actually
pretty famous at the time. He was a religious leader
influential in hominy. I found a newspaper article calling him
one of the most potographed Native Americans of the time.
He took a trip to Mexico once and made headlines
across the country. I found mentions in newspapers from El
(07:08):
Paso in Washington, d C. He was also a source
for a well known ethnologist named Francis la Flesh, who
spent decades documenting Osage culture. His work comes up in
a lot of books, and Waishi is mentioned by name.
There was so much about him out there, But what
stood out to me the most was a social media
(07:29):
post on Reddit of all places, from five years ago.
The title said Osage Priest of Puma Clan, Charles Waishi
and the comment this is my great great grandfather born
eighteen sixty two, murdered December during o Sage Reign of Terror. Yeah,
(08:01):
this is in trust. I'm Rachel Adam's hurt. I didn't
(08:25):
set out to do a story about murder, not that
those stories don't deserve to be told. There was just
so much focus on the murders from the Reign of Terror, books,
now a movie, and I wanted to understand the financial
schemes going on around them, the ones that don't get
as much attention but still have these massive generational impacts.
But what I've learned from talking to o Stage families
(08:48):
is that it's impossible to look at what happened during
the twenties and nineteen thirties in oh Sage County without
coming across murders that were never investigated or deaths that
don't make sense. There was no meat, say he who
died while married to a man half her age, a
man who sold her head rights. Just a few years later,
(09:08):
Myron Banks Junior's mother who got sick just when a
man who wanted her money married her. Suspicious circumstances, definitely,
but no one ever said they knew for sure what happened.
But now I was looking at this Reddit post from
someone who said definitively that their great great grandfather, Charles
Wa Rishi was murdered, the same man whose debt at
(09:31):
the Hominy Trading Company had come up in the Stiver's letter.
I sent a message to the account on the post,
explained what I was working on that I wanted to
know more about Charles wal Rishi. For days, I refreshed
the page over and over again, wondering if i'd hear back.
While I waited, I went to someone else who might
(09:51):
have heard about Charles Wa Rishi, John Maker, who told
me about the O s Age price. His great grandmother
was Wahusa, and even though Rishi was her second husband
and not John's direct ancestor, I thought maybe he would
know how a Rishi died. Well. I heard from that family,
(10:11):
Angie Jake, who was his great great granddaughter, that he
had been murdered on that road going out to their
old place called Cotton Gin Road. Of course, he was
back in those days as a horse and buggy in
the dirt road, and they had found him murders shot
in his buggy, just leaned over, but it was a
(10:35):
bullet woun to the head and the horse was just
standing there, stopped, and somebody was just coming or going
and found him like that. What was Angie like when
she told you that? Well, I know she she was
hesitant to tell me. It's like Kama and no skeleton
closet story. You know, she was real revering about it
(11:00):
when she was telling me. And and I think we're
just riding around in the car. Yeah, I mean, it's
just kind of like, by the way, I'm oh, my
grandfather was murdered on this road. It's like I had
never heard that. Of course I had heard that name,
Charlie Warry. She was a well known name around hamby
(11:20):
real respected oh religious leader. So John Maker had heard
Charles Barbrichi was murdered during the Reign of Terror, and
he had heard this story from a woman named Angie.
John told me, like a lot of deaths from this time,
this wasn't something people talked a lot about that people
were scared the same thing could happen to them. The
(11:43):
corruption of the time is well documented now, but John said,
for a long time this was only ever something that
was whispered about, and back in those days it was
common practice for these corners or medical people. Yeah, we did,
all right, you know, no wall tops, none of that.
(12:03):
I mean that corruption. What was the corners, the medical exam,
the doctors, all the way to okcom a city, on
all these sad I found out Andy had actually talked
to someone else about it, an Osage woman she was
distantly related to, who wrote her thesis paper on the
o s Age Native American Church. In that paper, there's
(12:24):
a passage from a conversation with Angie where she says
wa Rishi didn't live very long. He was murdered, but
Angie says her parents never really sat her down and
told her anything. Angie has since passed away, so I
don't know how she knew about water She's death, or
if she knew any more than what she told John
were this researcher at this point, I knew Louis Divers
(12:48):
suspected the Drummond brothers and other men around Hominy of
being in an association, and that Stivers thought fred Gettner
Drummond took a bunch of money from wa who size
the state money. Fred Getner said this war was ode
by her late husband wa Rishi. And now I was
learning that there was this whole other element, this belief
by waar Rishi's family that he was murdered. I was
(13:12):
looking around for more information on Charles wa Rishi one
day when I went to check read it again, this
time I had a new message from that account behind
the post that said wah Rishi was murdered. His name
is John horse Chief. He's an O Sage citizen, an
I T expert who works with a lot of old
O Sage records. We talked on the phone a few times.
(13:34):
He said he was interested in seeing the documents I
had found, so I sent him the letter from Louis Divers,
the reason I had come across his post to begin with.
John invited me out to his family's house and Hominy,
John Rachel, it's nice to finally meet you in person.
John had two crock pots on in the kitchen. There
(13:56):
were jugs of tea on the table. His son had
big cookies. I was gonna tell you guys, if you're hungry, Yeah,
I made like traditional Indian corn with buffalo, his real corn,
the kind of girl here. My uncle grows it, and
it's been like tested. It's got like protein in his corn.
I sat down with John in the living room. His dad,
Alfred was also there. John said, his sister Geneva and
(14:19):
his cousin Mary Joe, we're going to come by later.
The man they were going to tell me about he
was extraordinarily important, not just to their family but to
the os Age nation's history. He was a religious leader
at a time when O s Age society was changing dramatically.
He had been educated, but he chose to live a
(14:40):
O s Age life. He wore traditional clothing, he preferred
to speak his language, and you know, he lived traditional
life as much as he could to that point. And
so those are the things that we really value about
the man of who he is. And it's really why
I want my pops to be here, my son and
all my family is because we have this big, large
family and we like really take care of each other
(15:01):
and our kids and but it's all to this culture,
and it's all to what our grandpa left. So I
was kind of war Rischi died long before John or
his dad were born. And even though wau Rischi was
technically his great great grandfather, John calls him Grandpa, says
he's always felt a strong connection to him. When we
sat down, John told me about a moment when he
(15:24):
felt that connection, a moment that changed everything for him.
At the time, John was working in the O s
Age Nation's I T department. He says that first his
job was mostly dealing with the typical I T stuff,
mesting with printers, network management, plugging, and keyboards. But one
day there's a big old box of dusty materials in
(15:45):
the I T room, a box of old audio recordings,
real to real tapes waiting to be digitized, and they're
trying to pass it off to people. No one want
to do it. And I was a new guy in
I T and so I needed to do something. And
then the first tape by Digiti was one of our
leaders named Bacon Ryan, and he's a very famous chief
of ours, and I heard his actual voice, and from
(16:06):
that moment I knew that's what I wanted to do.
John started digitizing and converting more and more of these recordings,
cataloging them. Some were tapes, others were from files from
old wax cylinders at the Library of Congress. Yeah, that's
what's when I started doing, knows, that's when I started,
you know, really getting into it. And it was just
opened up a new world for me, you know, because
(16:26):
I didn't think we had recordings that old. John says,
these tapes were organized by catalog number, so we'd have
to compare the numbers with field notes from the time
to figure out who was talking. And as he's doing that,
one day he notices something they had our grandpa's name
wrote down a whole different way, So lories you can
get written down a bunch of different ways, right, And
(16:47):
so it was like with the c H, I think,
and then uh, I looked, and I was like, is
that grandpa? Sure enough, I started listening to it, and
it was and I was like, man, this is really him,
this is it? And what was his voice when you
heard that? You know, it was beautiful, it was haunting,
and it was just like he's talking to me. John
(17:07):
told me a lot of the recordings with Waishi were
religious songs powerful important Warisci lived at a time when
the Native American Church was first forming. John told me
he was trying to hold on to parts of traditional
oth Age beliefs and culture, and these songs were part
of that. When you hear that and then you think
(17:28):
about it and you go home, when you pray, and
you think about, man, why did Why was I the
one who got to hear my grandpa's voice? And so,
you know, I don't want to say it's like about
me or something like that, but you know, we believe
everything happens for a reason, and if it's meant to be,
it's meant to be. And so I took it as
a sign, a good sign, and so that's what I
(17:49):
got into. And then the more I learned about it,
I just totally went into it. Waishi was born in
the eighteen sixties. He lived on the oth Age Reservation
before the land was divided up and parceled out to individuals,
before head rights. Then allotment came and everything changed. I
(18:09):
imagine that would have been like taking you and dropping
you in the middle of another country where you don't
speak the language. This is Mary Joe, John's cousin She said,
wa Rishi would have watched the impact of allotment firsthand
and seeing the US government's efforts to force the Sage
Nation to assimilate, and so taking someone out of something
(18:30):
that would have been a community type environment where we
don't look after the survival of ourselves, we look after
survival of the community, and then separating purposely doing the separating.
There you see the evolution, forced evolution. John and his
family told me. When oil money started pouring in and
(18:52):
more and more white people moved to Osage County, Waishi
knew things were going to get bad. He watched just
traders and bankers and ranchers all thought to get rich
off the o s Age Nation. It's land, it's oil money.
This whole time, both aged children were being forced to
attend Native American boarding schools, a lot of it paid
(19:13):
for with Native money money held in trust by the
United States. These boarding schools punished children for speaking their
own language and forced them to wear certain clothes. They
were also rife with abuse. Where she was like wanting
to say, this culture so he knew that we were
getting wiped out. Here is the table stacked against us.
(19:34):
The lawyers, the policemen. They were all against us. They're
taken away our religion, our culture. So he was like,
let's go somewhere else and start over, or we can
get the religion going as much as we can make
it work. And the times that we live in, so
they thought about Mexico and they went down there in Mexico.
I've seen references to this trip all over the newspaper archives,
(19:56):
and one from December it says what Raci is quote
proposing to remove the Indians from the right Pahaska jurisdiction,
a reference to the os Age Agency superintendent at the time.
There's also another newspaper clipping from June. It says more
Raci hosted a feast at his house outside of Hominy.
(20:19):
At this feast, he reportedly said he had already met
with President Ubergon of Mexico and he was supportive of
the plan to make Mexico the os Age nation's new home.
The paper says, well, Rasci quote has the idea that
this is too much of a white man's country. We
went down there with a sack of dollars and we
(20:39):
got to Mexico. He turned into a bag of pesos
and he paid for everything, he talked to, everything, he
managed everything. He was never scared. You know, he was
on a mission to do something. He was trying to
preserve our culture or people, you know what I mean.
So that's how bad it was here. That's how deadly
and bad it was here that they were getting murder.
(21:00):
I mean, they could see the writing on the wall.
But the Mexico plan didn't work out. After he visited,
Waishi determined the land was no good for farming, and
by the time he came back to Hominy, just as
he had predicted, disaster had struck os Age County. The
Reign of Terror was well under way. Just a year later,
(21:22):
Waishi too was dead. Wow. During our conversation, John offered
to take me out to a Rishi's land. It's still
in the family. Only a couple of buildings are still standing.
(21:44):
There was a fire out here, the family says, an
accident back in the seventies. Here is where Charles where
she lived, and it was a big giant brick house
that he built, and after it burned down, some of
the bricks are over my little house I have over there.
I used it to kind of make my little driveway.
But this is where he had his big This is
where Charles Richie's big house was at and they called
(22:05):
this the farm out here. It's just a few miles
away from where John lives now. The foundations still there.
A couple of other buildings too, one called the summer house,
kind of like a big guesthouse. Different people come visit
for like two weeks a time, and that's where they
would live in the summer house, or relatives come over.
We'd have our dances. It was like for guests, and
(22:25):
it was like for big occasions. This is the same
house Elizabeth Loha Homer mentioned where she had all those
memories from growing up of big dinners and social gatherings.
Being there with John, I could imagine kids running around,
adults visiting. And so this is our family's specific church
house right here. Waichi's church is also on the property.
(22:47):
It has eight sides appointed roof, and so you'll see
these around. At one point there was forty five or
so these churches active in the county. Each family had one.
There's about four of them active left, and this was
active till about ten fifteen years ago. And so that's
what me and Mary, Joe and Geneva are here we're
gonna We're trying to We're trying to get build, build
back right because the tribe is having a renaissance. You
(23:09):
know of our culture and who we are. You know,
we've been through the worst, worst times, you know what
I mean, and the ones who are left, we're coming
back stronger and we want to get back the stuff
that we lost, you know, our family, our church, our culture,
our language. And you know this is like for me
personally now that I'm becoming an elder. You know, I'm
(23:29):
talking to Mary, Joe and Geneva. This is something I
want to fix up and get back together. And you know,
in a hundred years, our boys and our grandsons are
gonna sit in here and they're gonna know what to do,
and this is gonna be their place again. So that's
what we want. I've heard that Charles bo Rischi was
(23:50):
murdered from a few different people at this point. Unfortunately,
everyone who would have had firsthand knowledge of this, the
people who were there back then, they've all died. But
the stories out there and the details are remarkably consistent.
Charles bar Rischi was on his way home in a
buggy on Cotton Gin Road when someone shot him in
(24:12):
the head, but the official story was completely different. Even
(24:34):
though Wa Rishi was the subject of a bunch of
articles while he was alive, I could only find a
couple of newspapers that mentioned his death. It's the same
article republished one on December twelve by a newspaper in
Pahaska and the other on the next day in the
o Stage Journal. The headline was Charles ba Rischi dead
(24:55):
at Hominy. His name is spelled differently fifty seven words
that say he died at row Leader Hospital in Oklahoma City,
that his wife and daughter were there. The service is
at ten a M. Row Leader Hospital all the way
in Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City is a two hour drive
(25:16):
from Hominy today way longer in It's the same location
on his death certificate, which says he died on December
tenth from empaima of gallwater with stones. Basically, the doctor
who filled out this death certificate was saying Wa Richi
(25:36):
died of complications from gallblater inflammation. Today it's pretty rare
to die from that, but it can happen if left
and treated. The undertaker was in Oklahoma City too. His
name was ed L. Hahn. In the funeral home he
worked at. It still exists today on Cook Street and Drinker.
(26:04):
This is Cheryl, Can I help you? Hi, Cheryl, My
name is Rachel. I told Cheryl I was looking for
anything she could get me on Marie. She I would
have to look and see if we actually have the
record or not. Uh, that far back. I mean we
do have some that far back, but they're a little
sketchy sometimes and I will need to go upstairs and
(26:25):
look for that, so I will need to call you back.
Cheryl dug around in the records for a while. She
called me back when she found something. I don't have
a lot of information. This is all handwritten, so it's
kind of hard to read. It's just a little card,
is all it is. Back then, that's about all we
all we ever had. Cheryl told me some of the
basic facts. The funeral home had his name, that he
(26:48):
was married, that he was sixty eight years old. There
was an informant, I guess the gentleman that took care
of him was um fred Gie Drummond, and he died
at Rollators are Rollaters hospital, So what would be the
(27:09):
role of an informant that would give us the information
as to what like mother and father's names, date of birth,
date of death, Uh, that sort of thing. Thanks for
the death certificate. Is there any information about how he died? No,
there's nothing on here at all about how he died,
just where he died, and uh, that's it. So Fred
(27:33):
Gettner was the informant on this record at the funeral home.
He was the one who called to give La Riche's
background information, his age, that he was married. Cheryl sent
me a copy of the card and a separate itemized
claim for what Ricci's undertaking services. It was eight hundred
thirty seven dollars and cents. The most expensive part was
(27:55):
the casket fifty dollars. An account at the home trading
company paid for it. But there was no mention of
how Waishi died. The funeral bill, the death certificate, the
paper they all put Charles BA Rishi in Oklahoma City
when he died, apparently from some sort of gall butter inflammation.
(28:17):
When I'd find something like this, I'd sent it to
John Horse Chief and I'm just like, that doesn't make
any sense. That's not what we heard. So do you
think he would like because you said that you still
believe that he was absolutely murdered. Yes, I believe that.
John and I have talked a lot about this. Why
the paperwork doesn't match the story. He's heard that a
(28:39):
lot of people have heard that Wau Rishi was shot
in the head. John told me he hasn't changed his mind.
There are enough stories and enough proof that corruption was
rampant back then. I've tried to find out more about JB.
Role later, the doctor of the hospital was named after
who signed off on Moa Rishi's death certificate. It There's
(29:01):
nothing I've seen that indicates he was ever suspected of
being part of the reign of terror, of the criminal
conspiracy that reached far beyond William Hale to lawyers, medical examiners, doctors.
There are some murders that have been solved from that
time period thanks to these archives and family stories. They
come up in books like Killers of the Flower Moon
(29:24):
or the Deaths of Sybil Bolton, and I wish I
could tell you this was one of those stories, and
I figured out definitively whether Wa Rashi was murdered, and
if he was, who did it. But for every case
that's been solved, there are more like Wa Raci's. We're
finding the answer seems almost impossible. The records say one thing,
(29:46):
but knowing the corruption of the time, it's hard to
know whether you can trust them. The family story says
something else, but it's been a very long time, and
no one who is there is still alive. Yeah, but
(30:19):
there was still this whole other element to war Rishi's
death that John still had questions about the money, why
war Rishi's estate would have owed so much, and where
it went. That's after the break, John said he was
(30:47):
as sure as he ever was that Waishi was murdered.
The official documents that placed him in Oklahoma City on
December tenth just didn't seem right to him. Why would
he have gone to a hospital so far away if
he wasn't murdered. Why had John heard the specific story
that Waishi was shot in the head on Cotton Gin
Road his entire life, John said, when he was reading
(31:11):
all this paperwork, the death certificate, the card from the
funeral home where Fred Getner was the informant, the receipt
paid for by an account at the Drummond store, it
was enough to make him want to know more. Why
Fred G. Drummond was all over war Rishis and his wife,
who says paperwork. He wanted to know how Fred Getner
(31:31):
ended up with so much of his family's money. So
John went to the courthouse and asked for the records
on Waishi's estate. Sure enough, I went up there yesterday
to pull up those records and it's a big Manila envelope,
this thick, very first name Freggie Drummond, oh Ship. So
he became his executor after Grandpa died. Right And in
the very first day, Fredgie Drummonds in there trying to
(31:53):
correct the letter and get paid for this and get
paid for that. When John went to the courthouse that day,
I actually ran into him in the parking lot. He
told me he put in an order to have Va
Rishi's entire probate copied and printed out so he could
keep it. They told him it would take a couple
of days. He said I could come with him when
he picked it up from y It's so very it's
(32:22):
kind of intimidating Corey House in the way. Yeah, how
are you feeling. It's a different feeling, you know, Like
the first time he came up here. I could really
feel it the first time we asked about it. Thanks
(32:42):
the tones, Yeah, the old books with the golden red spine. Yeah.
I scanned every single one of the white one thing
for you guys. Yes, ma'am, I'd like to pick up
a probade I ordered on Friday, John Horse Chief, Where
(33:10):
is she? Yeah? John handed over his card. The woman
behind the counter walked over to her computer, only to
return a few seconds later. She told us the machine
couldn't take a card with a pen. John needed to
come back with cash. Okay, Well, we have to go
get some money to come back. Okay, John, let me
(33:39):
ride with him to an ATM nearby. We drove past
three Drummonds mercantile, past your hotel. The Pioneer Woman boarding
house Downtown Pahaska was busy that day, a lot of
tourists around. John's told me before he doesn't have anything
against Re Drummond. She never did anything to him or
his family. And I've heard a version of this before
(34:01):
from some other Sage citizens that Reath brought jobs to
the community and helped revitalized Pasca. But John also said
he feels conflicted about eating at her restaurants, knowing the
broader suspicions around the Drummond family's history and Osage County.
It's no secret what they did. They took advantage through
hook and crook, and you know they can say that
(34:24):
we signed the paper and it was all legal. Button.
I mean, they're sitting here holding all the money. I
just want to know the truth. John withdrew the cash
and we drove back to the courthouse. He paid for
Riche's probate left with a few hundred pages double sighted.
We made a plan to meet up later after he
(34:46):
had a chance to read through it. M Later that week,
one night, after John had gotten off work, I went
back to his house. He had all the papers from
the probate file on his kitchen table with a magnifying glass. Yeah,
(35:11):
so what do you make of like these dates? Oh
there's even more so likes this one. And then there's
a thousand dollar charge from the hospital from the Rollers
Hospital to my grandpa's bill. As farther down here, I
think in addition to the role leaders hospital charge, there's
also a claim from the Hominy Trading Company. In the
first week of December. It shows mo Rishi bought some
(35:33):
coffee and eggs, a couple of boxes of jello, and
on December eight, two days before he died, there's another
claim from the Drummond store two d dollars cash for
quote expense to Oklahoma City. Fred Getner approved that, and
all the other claims. It's even worse. And you see
all these this guy's name all over it, right, he's
(35:55):
the one getting all the money out of it and
directly benefitting from it. Stud's names, all of my grandpa's paperwork. Right,
even seeing the probate, it still wasn't clear how A.
Rashie's estate would have owed so much money to the
how Many Trading Company about seventeen eight hundred dollars by
the time the store collected on it. Yeah, it's so interesting, Like,
(36:16):
so we have the we have the congressional record, and
we have that funeral hard from Oklahoma City funeral home
with expenses that went into the funeral. But then I'm
not even like really seeing where those would be. Maybe
those are yeah, they're not even any here, are they?
Maybe those are paid out of his own pocket. I
(36:37):
don't know, But I don't even know what goes on.
It's just so confusing. It was confusing. You have to
make a lot of assumptions to get the numbers tat
up because there aren't many receipts showing how the debt
could have piled up so much. But I have been
able to put together a rough idea of how that happened.
(37:01):
The congressional record I mentioned to John it was the
same hearing we're one lawmaker called the extreme funeral bills
worse than teapot dome. They cite an example an o
Sage citizen whose funeral expenses were around nine thousand dollars.
They called the persona Risha and later war rec But
(37:22):
it's clear from the other details they mentioned they're just
missed saying Wai Shi because they're talking about an oh
stage man who lived in Hominy, whose undertaker was an
Oklahoma city whose administrator was Fred Gettner Drummond. I've looked
at all the other estates fred Gettner handled wais She
(37:43):
is the only one that makes sense here. According to
this hearing, the monument for ware She's grave cost four thousand,
eight hundred dollars and the casket was three thousand dollars.
The funeral came out to more than nine thousand dollars.
A couple of years later, as the administrator of Vershi's estate,
(38:04):
Fred Gettner Drummond issued the Hominy Trading Company a promisory
note basically, and I owe you it said. Wahi's estate
owed the store a little over eleven thousand dollars because
fred Getner gave his store a promisory note from the estate,
it was collecting interest every year until one day when
(38:25):
Wahusai dies and the store makes the claim with interest
on her estate for roughly seventeen thousand, eight hundred dollars
more than three hundred thousand dollars today. So that's where
the seventeen eight hundred dollar claim on Wahusai's estate must
have come from Ushi's funeral, the one that came up
(38:47):
in a congressional hearing that one lawmaker called worse than
teapot Dome. This is what Louis Divers, the tribal attorney,
was complaining about in that letter I found the one
that sent me looking for Charles Marrichi's family that led
me to John Horse. Chief Stivers was objecting to how
much that debt increased, and how the guy who issued
(39:10):
the promisory note from Marishi's estate was also the guy
collecting on it, Fred Getner, and I owe you to
himself effectively from the estate of an o s age
man who couldn't dispute it. But despite all the flags
from Stivers from US Congressmen, fred Getner never had to
pay the money back. A county judge overruled Stiver's objections
(39:35):
and said the Hominy Trading Company could keep the roughly
seventeen thousand, eight hundred dollars. He also said fred Getner
could keep the executor's fee. He paid himself another three thousand,
two hundred ninety four dollars in eighty cents, and fred
Getner's lawyer, a man named G. K. Sutherland, made one
thou five hundred dollars from all who say's estate. It's
(40:05):
like an open check. You can just start writing money
against this guy. And when you think about that, this
used to be yours, and you actually see the paperwork,
and you know, I think you look at things a
lot differently, you know what I mean, You look at
people a lot differently. You think about yourself differently. John
(40:26):
told me he was going to keep looking through barbary
She's records, reading the probate, piecing together just what happened
to his family in the twenties and thirties. You know,
one of these days are gonna make sense of all
his paperwork and and it will be some more closure.
But I'm just barely kind of like putting together all
that happened, and like the repercussions of what it did
(40:50):
to us personally, you know what I mean, on a
personal level, not just financially, right, you know, So the
bigger loss is just that he meant more to us
the person, right it. You know, it's it's bringing us
together as a family, and it's just like, you know,
just something we can kind of I guess now we're
ready to talk about it, because I have a feeling
they didn't talk about it for a long time, you
know what I mean. It was just so painful and
(41:11):
just such a loss, and so it was very very
hard on our family. So and I think a lot
of you know, it's just so much stuff cloes through
my head, right because my grandpa was resistant to all
this stuff like let's keep our culture, let's keep our language,
let's keep what makes us us. And then he was
actively trying to move the tribe to where we could
(41:33):
practice our culture and stuff. And it's just definitely makes
you think that this culture is not strong. It can
withstand all of this, all these millions of dollars, all that,
and if we just lead into that, you know, we'll
be all right. John and I went through more of
(41:58):
the probate. We talked for a while out it was
getting dark outside thirty something degrees. A winter storm was
rolling in. He told me about other things he was
up to, projects he was working on with people around town.
He showed me some bead work he was doing for
his son, a other hat he made. John told me
(42:19):
before I left there was something he wanted to show me.
He had just gotten back from Nebraska from a buffalo hunt.
You know, I had a gun and I was about
seventy yards away, and I wasn't a four by four.
You know, I just kind of got out of four
by four. Wait. I couldn't shoot nothing else, because if
you should know that one, you got paid for that
one too. I got it, I got it. I got
so the wait until you have to wait till nothing
(42:41):
behind him or nothing in front of him. And then
I did, and I prayed, and I was very thankful,
and I was a good feeling, good experience the blessing.
So I'm very happy for that. And you know, that's
the kind of good things I want to spread around.
John pulled up a video on his phone. He had
a brush in his hand, combing it through the hide.
But yeah, it's a buffalo. Rub I'm making a buffalo
(43:01):
when first I would say, just kill a buffalo over
a hundred years. That's what I'm saying until someone pops
up it's a picture. But this is what I'm trying
to take back. And I don't say, Hey, we need
you start eating buffalo, going on corn, learn how to
do this again? Does it make you feel close to it? Does? Yeah?
It makes me feel like his blessings are coming to me.
(43:21):
You know, he's helping me out and just gotta fall
this way. No no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no
(43:47):
no no no no no no no no no. In
Trust is a production of Bloomberg and I Heart Media.
(44:09):
It's reported and hosted by me Rachel Adam's Heard additional
reporting by Alison Edita Davis Land is our senior producer.
Samantha Story is our executive producer. Jeff Grocott is our
senior editor. Additional editing by Francesco Leavy and Daniel Ferrara.
Additional production by Victor Ebayez. Production support from Jelda de Carle,
(44:34):
Sound engineering by Blake Maples, fact checking by Molly Nugent,
the music by Laura Worman. Photography by Shane Brown. Special
thanks to Brett Goldstein, a forensic handwriting consultant, and Brodie
Forward with Bloomberg News. You can email us at Podcasts
at Bloomberg dot net. Find more about this episode at
(44:57):
Bloomberg dot com slash in trust. For maps, newspaper archives,
photos and other documents related to this episode, go to
Bloomberg dot com slash in trust, find in trust anywhere
you get your podcasts m
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