The List

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh. This is a story about land and oil, about family,

(00:06):
about wealth, about the stories we passed down and the
stories we don't. It's about a Native American reservation and
the people who own the land today. This story took

(00:28):
me to northern Oklahoma, to os Age County on the
border with Kansas, one and a half million acres covered
in blue stem grass with pools of oil below the ground,
and that oil a century ago it brought tremendous wealth
to some of the people who lived here, at least

(00:49):
for a while. Hello, this is Tara Dameron. She's a
citizen of the os Age Nation. Tears in charge of
an oth Age history center called the White Hair Memorial
outside of a small town called Hominy. The building is

(01:12):
an old house shrouded by trees, tucked away from the
miles and miles of blue stem grass you see from
the highway. And I'm here because I wanted Tear to
tell me what she remembers from June of two thousand nine.
It is hot. I just remember just having to, let
you know, get myself prepared for the heat. And June

(01:38):
for o s Ages is a really busy month. That's
when we have our Ilanshka our ceremonies, and it's kind
of like a reunion because you know, you get to
see a lot of your family members, and you know
a lot of people will come home for that and
come back to that and make a point to be there.
Tara has been going to the June ceremonies, the big

(01:58):
meals and traditional dances since she was a kid. But
I wanted to know what she remembered about one specific
day from that month, June. It was a Thursday. It
was the start of the Homedy dances. You know, everybody's
sort of keyed up and excited. Everybody was talking about
the list and his names were on it the list.

(02:28):
This is why I wanted to talk to Tara. I'm
a reporter. I'd gotten a tip about one of the
names on that list. She mentioned the name of a
prominent family you might have heard of. We'll get to that,
but first you should know that this list, when it
came out, it was a big deal. Tara had been
hearing about it all day at lunch her parents house

(02:50):
earlier while her dad read the paper. The first time
she heard was from her uncle, Charles Pratt. He called
her that morning. Excited, baby was his term of affection
and he's like maybe the list came out, you know,
like what, But he was like a little kid. Charles
was in the middle of a lawsuit, and his lawsuit

(03:11):
is the reason this list became public. Charles and his
co plaintiffs were suing the United States government over how
it is managing something called the O Sage Mineral Estate.
The mineral of state dates back more than a hundred years.
The US had been breaking up Native reservations, trying to
privatize the land and take it out of the control

(03:32):
of tribal nations. But when it came to the O
s Age Reservation, everything underground, the mineral rights the oil,
the O s Age Nation fought to hold onto it,
and they succeeded. Congress passed a law in nineteen o six,
and the mineral rights to the reservation were put into
one big pot that was divided into shares like a corporation.

(03:54):
The shareholders were two thousand, two hundred nine citizens. Each
share would come to be called a head right, and
everyone who had a head right was entitled to some
of the money from oil and gas drilling in the area.
It's money from the mineral estate set aside for the
O s Age Indians that our leaders set up to

(04:16):
help us provide a financial foundation. The government paid out
royalties to head right holders each quarter. Over the years,
most shares have been divided into smaller and smaller fractions.
Pasta descendants, head rights are a lot more than just
a check in the mail for oil money. For a
long time, the federal government didn't even consider someone a

(04:39):
citizen of the os Age nation unless they had a
head right or a fraction of one. They couldn't vote
in O s Age elections without them. When Charles Pratt
and his co plaintiffs filed that lawsuit, they were arguing
the government was doing a bad job of managing all
the money that belonged to os Age head right holders.
They wanted the US to provide an accounting where all

(05:00):
this money oh Stage money was going and had gone
over the last hundred years. For a long time, the
way the US government managed this trust has been wrapped
in secrecy. Even the people who were meant to benefit
from the trust couldn't see the financial details. The government
had long kept the names of head right holders private too,

(05:21):
but as part of that lawsuit, a court ordered the
government to produce a list the names of people, churches,
oil companies and other groups that were not oth age,
but it somehow ended up with the share of the
mineral estate. Nearly two thousand names made public because of
a surprise decision by the court that all those non
sages would need to be sued too. This was the

(05:43):
first time in over a hundred years that we use
O sages were able to see in black and white
an official list, you know, from the government, of all
these NONO sages that had head rights. M let's see yea.

(06:04):
A local paper had published the list in full that morning.
The paper was The Big Heart Times. It's tagline reads
the only newspaper in the world that really gives the deadly.
So this is dated Thursday, June eight, two thousand and nine,
the Big Heart Times, and the headline raids suit names,
not O stage shareholders. The list of defendants is vast,

(06:28):
one thousand, seven nine people and entities. That includes ranchers, lawyers, churches, schools,
and even a former Library of Congress who wants to
join the Communist Party. That's an amazing So in addition
to individuals, there were corporations, there were a number of churches,

(06:53):
a lot of trust. You see that a lot. Jean Harlowe,
the hiss And Memorial Center, University of Oklahoma, the University
of Texas as several oil companies are on there. Of course,
the Drummonds were on there. Um they're a big ranch family.
Hand O Sage County. Some of these names Tera told
me we're pretty surprising. The family of Jean Harlowe, a

(07:13):
famous Hollywood actress in the nineteen thirties. The his Some
Memorial Center, an institution that was forced to shut down
decades ago because staff were accused of abusing the intellectually
disabled patients who lived there. Like, how in the world
did they get ahold of os Age head rights? Which
is the next logical question. You know, anyone looking at

(07:34):
that lift would ask, we do know how some non
oth ages would have ended up with head rights for
a long time. They could be sold to no oth ages.
Sometimes oth ages use their head right share as an
investment for a stake in a company. If you scan
through the list with all the churches and nonprofits, it
seems likely that a lot of them received head rights

(07:55):
from oz Age citizens who died and left them as
a charitable donation. But there was another way non oth
Ages got head rights. For a long time, someone outside
the Osage Nation could inherit one if they married an
oth s Age man or woman and that person died.
And when oil was discovered in Osage County and head

(08:16):
rights became incredibly valuable, os Ages who had them became targets.
Often you'll hear that time the referred to as the
Reign of Terror, when dozens of Osages were targeted and

(08:37):
widespread violent schemes. These weren't just one off crimes. It
was an entire criminal conspiracy led by white people who
would marry Osages for their head rights and then kill them.
And what I hope you'll see as we get into
this is that the Reign of Terror left a profound
impact on the Osage Nation. It devastated the community at

(09:00):
family's apart, and the effects are still present today. Terra says,
for a long time, the Rain of Terror just wasn't discussed.
It was too painful and the risk of becoming a

(09:20):
target again seemed too high. So when this lift came out,
people started asking questions. They were asking family members, So
it started sort of this unearthing of this sort of big, huge,
giant secret that you know O Stages or local people
that you know grew up in a Toronto Stage County
sort of always knew or suspected it was huge. It

(09:42):
was a significant moment. Think about that nineteen sixty, two
thousand and nine. Imagine being defrauded all those years. I
think you're going to be pissed, right, Yeah. Yeah. Para
laughed sometimes when she talks about the but I don't
get the sense she thinks it's funny. There's this outrageousness

(10:04):
to it all that the Osage Nations Trustee, the US
federal government is keeping this information from the very people
this trust is for, even after that system created one
of the worst tragedies in the O s Age Nation's history.
Terris says when the list came out and people started
talking about where those head rights ended up, it gave

(10:26):
more momentum to what her uncle Charles was saying in
his lawsuit that the federal government wasn't doing a good
job managing OH Sage money. It absolutely made made us
start to question and wonder and ask, and you know
all these things that someone like in a shareholder of corporation,
those would be normal things, financial reports, and you know,

(10:50):
we have a right to know where our money is going.
Just so you know. I've asked the government agency that
manages the mineral estate, the Bureau of Indian Affair, about
some of the names on that list, like his him,
where those checks are going and who's getting paid, especially
if the organization literally doesn't exist anymore. A spokesman said

(11:11):
they don't comment on issues involving ongoing litigation. When it
comes to head rights, the federal government tends to say
it's a matter of privacy that the protections in place
for o s Age head right holders are the same
ones in place for non os Age ones. It's important
to remember that when it comes to the os Age
nation and tribal nations across the country, the United States

(11:33):
isn't just a bureaucrat. It's a trustee, a relationship born
from the treaties that were signed and often forced more
than the century ago. It means the federal government has
a fiduciary obligation to tribal nations and tribal citizens whose money, land,
and mineral rights are held in trust by the US

(11:54):
on their behalf. And that fiduciary obligation it's a big deal.
Consider er. The highest degree of duty that exists in
the American legal system. What I always tell people is
that that government that relationship can't end. Like we can't
divorce each other, you know what I mean, Like it's

(12:14):
it is what it is. We can't just say, you
know what, we really don't like you, um and we
want we want someone else to manage our money. It
doesn't it doesn't work like that. So we're sort of
we are stuck with each other for better or worse.
Over the last several decades, the US has settled multiple
lawsuits for falling short of its trust duty when it

(12:35):
comes to managing Native American assets. That includes a case
the Osage Nation brought more than twenty years ago that
the U s settled in twenty eleven for three d
eighty million dollars. The settlement paid out to all head
right holders sage or not, meaning someone with one head
right received a little over a hundred fifty thousand dollars.
But Terra says the fact that NONO Sages continue to

(12:59):
get head right money shows the US is still falling
short of its obligation to the O s Age Nation.
When Terra's uncle Charles died, she took his spot as
one of the plaintiffs on the case. They've been successful
in getting a partial accounting, but the lawsuit is still ongoing. Meanwhile,
the os Age Nation has been working to get federal
legislation passed so that some of those head rights can

(13:21):
be returned. Today, a little over a quarter of all
head rights are owned by people or groups that are
not O s Age. When you account for inflation, head
rights owned by non os Ages have paid out half
a billion dollars over the last few decades. It's not
their money, it's our money. It's not Gane Hardlo's money,
it's not his a memorial center. It's it's our money.

(13:46):
You know, those those original lattas and their descendants. The
story starts with head rights, but it brought me far
beyond that, because when I started asking about how a
bunch of non os ages ended up on that list,
I found another story too, a story about a whole

(14:10):
system that worked to move oc age wealth into the
hands of white people, A system that shapes to his
land and influence here today, a system set up by
the federal government. You're listening to in trust, I'm Rachel
Adams heard. I want to tell you more about that

(14:47):
list of non os Age head right holders. But to
really understand what it meant for that list to go public,
you have to know how the os Age Nation got
to its reservation and how the head right system was created.
For a long time, o s Age Territory stretched across
the land that would eventually make up Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri,
and Arkansas. But the US government pressured the os Age

(15:11):
Nation into a series of treaties until it was left
with just a small fraction of that land, a reservation
in Kansas. But after a conflict with white settlers on
that reservation, the os Age Nation went south to what
would later become os Age County. The tribe had soldier
lands in Kansas use that money to buy this reservation.

(15:33):
This is Jim Gray. He was chief of the os
Age Nation from two thousand to two thousand. We didn't
just get moved here by treaty. We bought it. We
had a property title to it. The os Age Nation
purchased its new reservation from the Cherokee Nation in the seventies.
Jim told me that property title would prove to be

(15:55):
massively important because not long after the os Age Nation
moved the US government wanted to change things again. The
government wanted to take the Sage Reservation, which the nation
as a whole, health the title too, and parceled out
to individuals Age citizens instead. This was called allotment. This

(16:17):
individual o Sage receiving an individual allotment. That was new.
We never went down that road of individual landowners, even
in Missouri or Arkansas. It was all everyone benefited from
the collective ownership of this land, and they whatever bounty
came from it was spread with all the people. Allotment

(16:38):
started on a lot of Native land after Congress passed
the DAWs General Allotman Act in seven. This was part
of a broader, deliberate and violent strategy to try and
assimilate Native communities, kill off their traditions and lifestyles, and
make their land available for white settlement. According to the book,

(16:58):
Uneven ground At reduced Native American controlled land from two
billion acres to one fifty million acres. But the oth
Age Nation was initially exempt from the DAWs Act and
allotment because of that property title Jim mentioned. So when
they tried to a lot the oth Sage lands, they

(17:19):
couldn't do it without our consent. Where they could just
do whatever they wanted with everyone else's land. That was
an Indian territory they had. The tribe had some political
rights that protected their property interest, negotiating power, but not
not enough to stop it all together. Statehood was coming.

(17:40):
There's no way you can stop that. And the tribal
leader at that time, James Bigheart, who was a brilliant
man and way ahead of his time, did what he thought.
You know, what he thought was the right thing to do.
Is so we cut a deal. Okay, a lot to
surface lay, but the subsurface remains as a mineral state.

(18:05):
This was a savvy and unique deal that O s
Age leaders negotiated. It's all laid out in a law
called the nineteen o six os Age Allotment Act, and
that law is where head rates come from, all those
shares of all the oil and gas rights beneath the land.
The year after that law, Oklahoma became a state and
it established O Sage County directly on top of the

(18:28):
O s Age Reservation. There were already some white families
living there, traders and cattlemen, but after allotment, more and
more settlers moved there and started trying to get land
and head rights for themselves. Starting in the nineteen teens,
head rights became incredibly valuable. Oil production took off and

(18:48):
money was pouring in. A lot of os Age families
could afford the finest cars, the nicest furniture. There were
tales of this wealth across the country, many of them exaggerated.
In June, the os Age Nation made the New York
Times the headline os Age our richest people in all

(19:09):
caps and then greatest per capital wealth in world results
from oil deal. But that wealth and all that attention
it brought tragedy. There was the dominant society's view that
these savages weren't entitled to anything, and if they got something,

(19:34):
then it was within your right as a white person
to take it. And that mentality spilled out into the
entire society. In an inspector from the Department of Interior
was sent to oth Age County to report on the
explosion of wealth. Two years later, that inspector, a man

(19:54):
named hs Trailer, submitted to Congress of racist tirade against
os Age is and how they spent their money. He
called it sinful, and he said if something wasn't done
about o s Age wealth, then quote their everlasting damnation
is as sure and certain as the daily sinking of
the sun in the West. He neglected to mention the

(20:16):
uptick and crime against O. S Age head right holders.
No acknowledgment that this money belonged to O. S Age
citizens and they could do whatever they wanted with it,
or that OH Stage spending was largely in line with
that of white Americans in the same income bracket. These
guys were friends of the Native American community. And the

(20:37):
fact that these particular Native Americans ended up with a
credibly wealthy something something's wrong with the system, you know.
And if one of them got killed and someone sought
justice in the state courts, they didn't get it. Do
you think these guys lost any sleep over it. It's

(20:57):
hard to communicate the full breadth and impact of the
reign of terror, but you can't understand the importance of
the list without knowing that this was a tragedy that
many white people in Osage County were complicit in. Groups
of white people conspired to manipulate and murder O s
Age citizens. The FBI confirmed as much nearly a hundred

(21:19):
years ago. O Stages were shot, they were poisoned, their
cars were run off the road. One couple's house was
blown up, and it was just like a cottage industry
of finding different ways to off O Sages. And in
all those cases there was always some non Indian benefiting
from that, whether it was a guardian or spouse, creditor, whatever.

(21:44):
We don't have exact numbers on how many people were
targeted then, because what researchers have found is that a
lot of these cases were investigated, a lot of times
they were covered up. Official figures put it somewhere between
twenty four and six oth Ages who were killed in
the early nineteen twenties, but at least one federal investigator

(22:06):
thought it could be in the hundreds. Corruption was rampant
and local officials often couldn't be trusted, but the reign
of terror wasn't limited to murderer. It was shady financial
maneuvering on behalf of bankers and lawyers, intricate schemes involving
probates and powers of attorney. Sometimes it was more blunt,

(22:28):
getting someone drunk and tricking them into signing away their land.
It was like every institution that existed in O Sage
Nation at the time, or OUs Age County, whoever you
want to call it was not there for any other
purpose but to separate the O Sages from their land
and their money. That's how O Sages fell. It's worth

(22:50):
remembering the US legal system, the English language, This was
all almost totally new to a lot of oth Ages
at the time. The government, specifically the Department of Interior's
Office of Indian Affairs, they were supposed to make sure
that didn't lead to exploitation, but they didn't do a
very good job. What the government chose to do was

(23:13):
label O Stage citizens incompetent, that was the official word
they used, incompetent, and put white people in charge of
their finances. This was an official system. At one point,
hundreds of Stages and other Native Americans were by default
appointed a guardian, an educated white person, usually a lawyer

(23:35):
or a businessman, who had managed their money for them,
a paternalistic policy steeped in racism that white politicians justified
as a way to protect Native Americans from getting swindled
and stolen from But often those guardians were in on
the very schemes the government said it was trying to prevent.

(23:56):
We don't really see them as incompetent. Full rules who
lost everything. We see him more as a horrible victim
of an of a greedy society that while they were
trying to learn to walk in both worlds, this world
just came and stomped on them. You know. Some of

(24:16):
them survived, some of them didn't, you know. But it's
a difficult, difficult chapter in our tribe's history that unfortunately
has created a form of generational trauma, and and not
so much in the way that you think, but that
it robbed us of a generational wealth. A single head

(24:38):
right today, adjusted for inflation, would have paid out about
four million dollars over the last hundred years. Could you
imagine if if we were able to hang on to
that fourth of the head rights that have gone out
of the tribe, and those dollars got reinvested in our
children's education or buying land, or building the land up,
or protecting our tribal community and in ways that we

(25:01):
can imagine, and have the children raised in that environment
do the same in their lives and have those head
right moneyies coming in and they're building wealth. But that
was never gonna happen to us because of all these
different interests from the outside that were bent on either
exploiting the laws, or bending the law or ignoring the

(25:24):
law to get away with whatever they would needed to
do to get their hands on the money. It's hard
to know how many head rights left oh s Age
ownership because of the reign of terror. A big part
of that is because very few people were investigated back then,
much less convicted. The most famous conviction from that time
was of a rancher named William K. Hale, who was

(25:47):
accused of masterminding the murders of several oh s Ages.
He only got caught because the oth Age Nation hired
the FBI to look into the murders dollars out of
pocket to get federal authority used to investigate. Yeah, this
took a long time to get this guy behind bars.
He had vast resources at his disposal that you know,

(26:10):
manipulated the media that influenced the judges, influenced juries, influenced
the prosecutors, and public sentiment was all in his favor
at the time. Eventually, Hale was found guilty of just
one of the murderers he allegedly ordered. He was convicted
for eating and abetting the killing of an O s

(26:30):
Age man named Henry Ron Ron was shot in the
head in his car. He was Jim's great grandfather, being
the last of seven kids. I guess mom was running
out of names to give us. I don't know, but
she named me James Brown Gray. I think it was

(26:50):
her way of making me aware of that past. The
mayor of Fairfax said Ron considered Hale a friend of
his best friends. But there isn't much surviving knowledge about
Henry Brown's life outside of the FBI files. Looking back,
and I think about how many O sage families just

(27:14):
stopped talking about the Rain of Terror for fear it
would bring about some tragic consequences to their lives. People
just stopped talking about it. Mom grew up in environment,
and since she didn't really talk about it that much,
you could see this generational trauma that it cost. My

(27:38):
education is whatever I read, it wasn't any oral stories
that were passed town. It wasn't until the nineties, when
Jim was a young adult that he would ask his
mom about the Reign of Terror. Jim had just read
a new book from Washington Post journalist Dennis mccauliffe Jr.
It's called The Deaths of Simple Bolton. I talked to

(28:00):
her about it we had one conversation. In the book mccaulliffe,
whose osage himself, investigates the murder of his grandmother, a
woman named Sybil Bolton. Mccauliffe had grown up believing his
grandmother died from kidney disease, but what mcculloff found was
that she was murdered, shot in front of her home,

(28:20):
likely by her guardian, her white stepfather. While the FBI
was focused on getting hail, her stepfather was after her
head right. One of the things that startled me about
reading Dennis's book was that he was writing about killings
in his own family, but also scenarios that he could

(28:41):
tell through his research that there was a lot of
unsolved murders going on, you know. And he explained how
the the mortuaries would right the death certificates in such
a way where they would not draw any attention. Henry
Rowne is mentioned in that book, and that got Jim

(29:01):
curious about other members of his family. So one day,
when he was visiting his mom back home, he decided
to ask her about it. She was in living room
and I was in the kitchen, and I was just
shouting questions at her because I was reading the book.
I said, have you read the book? Have you read
what Jujiah read? And you know, so, how did Grandpa
Gray die? You had a heart attack. How did Grandma

(29:23):
Gray die? She died giving birth to your your uncle Clarence.
How did your mom die? She died in a car,
right as did your uncle when he was an infant.
So you read the book, you have this conversation with
your mom and next thing, you know, what Dennis was

(29:45):
writing was arguably could be happening in this family, but
we just didn't talk about it. What did you think

(30:07):
after that conversation. She's way too smart to be naive,
but she was that. She was trying to pretend she was.
That's what I thought. I'm trying to put myself in
my mom's place right now. She lived through all that

(30:31):
as a child, and here she is, you know, under
late sixties in the trying to explain it to her
young son who's in his twenties, and how much do
you share? Whatever? More she knew she it went to
her grave, you know. But just that one little conversation

(30:54):
we had about how everyone passed away, she acknowledged in
that ten year span, my grandfather, my grandmother, my grandmother
on my other side, and my uncle on that same side,
and my great grandfather all. But what were those ten

(31:15):
years from the reason that this is important is that
it has not gone away with our tribe. Our people
have not made peace with this yet. We were forced
into silence out of fear and fear It is probably

(31:37):
not the right word, because fear is something that you
imagine in your mind that's not really happening. No, it
was happening. You know, it's not fear if it's really happening. Right,
Jim Gray is not the only oc Age citizen who's
had to piece together parts of his family history with
books and research that generation their elders, they just didn't

(32:01):
talk about it. What I took from that conversation with
Jim and the many other phone calls and sit downs
we've had over the last several months, is that it's
not just the Bureau of Indian Affairs that's keeping details
about non os Age head right holders a secret. There's
this big gap and a lot of Osage famili's history
when it comes to that time period, and that's made

(32:23):
it difficult for even the os Age nation to piece
together which outsiders have shares of their mineral estate. Jim says,
people have tried. We got a list that was handwritten.
It was copied and copied and copied and handed out
at different meetings. There was just a list of names,

(32:43):
organizations and individuals, but no value next to each one
of them where they owned one head ride or ten
head rights or fraction of one. When Jim became chief,
he says that handwritten list had already been circulating within
the os Age Nation's government. That list that I had,
that all wrinkled up over copied list, It wasn't actual.

(33:04):
I couldn't attribute it to anybody at the b I
as an official list. The b I would never go
on the record and say these are the people who
got head rights and who wrote the list. We don't know.
No one at the b I would ever acknowledge who
authored that list. They've been protecting. Those names are over

(33:32):
a hundred years. You know, names of non no stages
who have our money and get our money. You know
that today. Yeah, when the official list came out, the
one Tara Damon saw in the paper with all the
nonoc ages who had head rights. It wasn't just o
s Age citizens who noticed a lot of people, a

(33:55):
lot of namely that probably those people that were on
that list, Um, we're not happy, you know. And they
were very vocal and I know that from you personal
communication with Charles Pratt, and they came up to him
and we're just so angry that this list had come out.
This had all been kept under wraps for so long.
Now it was out there in the open. You should

(34:16):
have seen the amount of attorneys that showed up to
represent the white people. Kara told me about one time
when her uncle Charles brought her to court with him.
I had driven him and you know, we went to
court and I said, who were those people? And he said, oh,
those are the Chorneese for the white people. You know,
they're all here. One attorney told me after the list
came out, the courtroom was like an Oklahoma Bar Association meeting.

(34:40):
A bunch of people on that list got a lawyer.
But in the end they didn't really need the lawyers.
After all that, the court said it wasn't necessary for
all these people to be at it as defendants for
the case to go forward. But the list. They couldn't
undo the list. It was just out there, lingering, no explanations,
no amounts just names, and for the last thirteen years,

(35:04):
lots and lots of questions about how on earth they
ended up with. Os Age had rights Worker is underway
in Pajuska, or director Martin Scorsese will make his next movie,
Killers of the Flower Movie. People talk more than ever
about the Reign of Terror now, maybe partly because of
that list, but mostly because of a movie about it
said to come out within the next year or so.

(35:27):
A lot of the movie was filmed in Osage County
and features Osage citizens crews recreating the nineteen twenties tearing
out metal to restore what the streets of a Huska
wants looked like. It's directed by Martin Scorsese. Leonardo DiCaprio
and Robert de Niro are starring in it. So is
Lily Gladstone, who grew up on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation

(35:48):
in Montana. As filming started, o s Age leaders met
with Scorsese. If the story was going to be told,
they wanted it told right. The movie is based on
a book also called Killers of the Flower Moon. It's
from a few years ago by a journalist named David Grant.
The book focuses a lot on the murders William Hale
was behind, including Henry Rownes. There have been a few

(36:11):
books about the Reign of Terror, but none of them
took off quite like Grands. The book's success has met
a lot of people across the country are now learning
about this history for the first time, and as that
history becomes more widely known, people have even started traveling
to Osage County to see where it all happened. An
o s Age News article from June of counted four

(36:33):
tours being offered in the county at the cemetery where
many of the victims are buried. The Osage Nation had
to put up offense to keep tourists out. This history
didn't end a hundred years ago. It still shaped Osage
County today, and not just its tourism. It's left behind
questions about who gained wealth back then and how, questions

(36:55):
that could have painful answers. I asked Tara, would it
be better to leave that past alone? I don't want
it to be like unnecessarily opening old wounds. You know,
It's there's never been any closure, So the truth has

(37:17):
got to come out, you know, and it and it's
it's not always pretty and it's not always flattering. Um,
but I think that's one thing that as O sages
were we as if people have to acknowledge that and
and go through that, and then the same thing for
everyone else that was involved. You know that that is involved.

(37:38):
And it's probably gonna depend on who you talked to,
you know, because some people will feel differently about it. Um.
And then I was just you know, they're too powerful
or just stop or you know, um, they they being
like you know, like the Drummonds or someone that has
so much property, Oh, sage property. How did you get it?

(38:02):
How they get it? I haven't fully told you yet.
Why I'm telling you this story, why I first called
Tara more than a year ago. Why we're talking about
this list. I'm telling you all this because on that list,
alongside the Catholic church oil companies, the family of a

(38:22):
movie star is another name Drummond. I'm read Drummond. I
live on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, and
all my recipes have to be approved by cowboys, hungry kids,
and Nate. Here's what's happening on the ranch. If you
know the name Drummond, it's probably because of the pioneer

(38:45):
woman read Drummond. She's another reason Pahaska is getting so
much attention right now. We told you last night at ten.
Read Drummond, also known as The Pioneer Woman and for
her hit show on the Food Network, How the Job
Fair in Tulsa Today for or the Pioneer Woman Mercantile
store opening in Pasco. Reads a Food Network star. She's

(39:06):
become famous for her down home cooking recipes for chicken
fried steak and chocolate peanut butter pies and not You
Naked Brownies. Her restaurants in downtown Pahaska bring a bunch
of tourists. You can shop at her store called The
Mercantile and stay at her hotel, The Pioneer Woman Boarding House.
Re started out as a blogger, but over the last

(39:27):
ten years or so, her brand is kind of exploded.
She has a lifestyle website published by Hearst and Walmart.
Carries a line of dishes and fro towels and clothing,
all with her trademark floral design. Refashions herself as a
city girl turned branchwife. She married into the Drummond family.
Her brand sells a lifestyle call it Upmarket Pioneer and

(39:49):
her books and blog posts. She calls her husband Lad
Drummond the Marlborough Man. He runs a massive ranching operation
alongside his brother Tim. His family has been her and
cattle for four generations here in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, near Tulsa.
I've asked for an interview with her and Lad, but

(40:10):
so far she hasn't responded. And I want to be
clear that while she's built her brand around the drum
and ranching legacy, a lot of what I'm going to
tell you about in this series happened long before Re
or any other present day members of the family were
even born today. When you look at a map of
os Age County, a place that was once owned entirely

(40:32):
by the OCGE Nation, a huge chunk of it is
now owned by the Drummond family and other large non
o s Age ranching incorporations. A lot of Drummonds are
still ranchers. Some are lawyers all right. The following segment
is sponsored by a Blue Sky Bank. One of them
runs a bank like this is a bank has been

(40:52):
around for a long long time. We are one of
the last remaining true community owned banks. Began in Pahuska
in nineteen o four or the Drummond in this interview.
The one who owns Blue Sky Bank is named getting A. Drummond.
He's also the Republican nominee for Oklahoma Attorney General. The
election is this November, and it comes out a pretty
critical time for the state and tribal nations in Oklahoma.

(41:15):
If Gettinger wins, he'll be leading the way Oklahoma responds
to a series of Supreme Court decisions that have huge
impacts on tribal sovereignty. No Democratic candidates filed the run
for a g in this race. The victory comes as
a big relief for Drummond, who lost in a close
Republican primary runoff. I could go on about the various
ways the Drummonds are deeply rooted in Oklahoma. The family

(41:38):
has been here since before it was a state. They
were some of the first white people on the O.
S H. Reservation. The first Drumman who came here, named Frederick,
was a Scottish immigrant. He moved to the O. S H.
Reservation in the late eighteen hundreds. But the reason I'm
telling you all this is that a hundred years ago,
members of the Drummond family were intertwined with the financial

(41:59):
affair of generations of o s Age families. They owned
a store that almost the whole town of Hominy shopped at.
They ran the town bank, helped oversee the publisher of
the local paper, owned part of a funeral home. They
were financial guardians, administered estates, and they bought land, lots
of it. Today, a bunch of members of the extended

(42:21):
Drummond family have land in ranching businesses in os Age County.
When you put the dozens of Drummond individuals and entities together,
the broader family owns more land there than anyone else,
almost nine of the county. In fact, there's some of
the biggest landowners in the state. The name Drummonds on
that list of non os Age head right holders too.

(42:43):
It's right there in black and white. The Alfred Alexander
Drummond Trust, Frederick Drummond, someone named Jeane Drummond. Those last
two have died since the list was published, meaning those
head right shares have passed down to someone else. I've
been reporting on energy, oil and gas for the most
part for a few years now, and one day I

(43:06):
got a call from a source, an Oklahoma oil guy.
He had a tip. The source told me there was
more to the Drummonds than people outside Osage County knew.
He told me the Drummonds had head rights, maybe even
a lot. This was just a rumor, but knowing the
history of the place, all the tragedy surrounding head rights,

(43:27):
I wanted to know if it was true. We'll be
right back. The list in the Big Heart Times told
me some of the Drummonds had head rights, or at
least pieces of them, But I wanted to know if
this was the name that stood out to folks. There

(43:47):
are so many people out there that have access to
head right payments that are nono sage. They have no
business whatsoever with them. I started asking around at head
rights and then on oath ages who had them, and
I learned that Drummond is one of the first names
people bring up. There's always, you know, the tales that

(44:08):
you hear that the Grummans have head rights, Conico Phillips
has some, the Drummonds have some. I asked everyone who
would talked to me what they had heard about the
Drummonds history, what they might be holding onto today. And
the more people I talked to, the more I started
to hear a lot of different numbers. Anywhere seven there

(44:32):
was a number in the nights that i've you know,
because people talk to you so like all the checks
go through this thing called the b I A. Someone
told me you were in a meeting one time and
you said that the Drummonds have two head rights approximately.

(44:53):
What's the exact quote. I don't know the real answer.
I haven't seen the list. Sometimes times the numbers were
lower more. I thought it was like dat, I don't
see any you have. Do you think that the number

(45:13):
is a lot lower? I think it's a lot lower,
probably two three. I've talked to members of the Drummond
family for the story. You'll hear from some of them
later in this series, and I want to note that
their family history, Oklahoma history, it's complicated. One member of
the Drummond family told me he's a citizen at the

(45:34):
Choctaw Nation that his mother's side has its own history
with the fallout of white settlement. We'll get to that,
but for now, just know that when I asked some
of the Drummond family about head rights, they also said
the numbers a lot lower. My name is Jason Ahmat
and an attorney at a law firm called the Indian
and Environmental law group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Jason Ahmat

(45:58):
has seen the list, the one with numbers. Jason spent
the past twenty years working on the mismanagement case that
made the list public. He represented Charles pratt Ter, his uncle.
At the heart of the lawsuit is this idea that
the government has mismanaged the mineral estate and never had
to fully account for where all the money's gone. You said, look,

(46:18):
not only are the is the fellow government failing to
account for these things, but when they're failing to account
for them, they're also paying some people too much money,
not paying other people enough money, not paying some people
who are entitled any money at all. And when Jason
and his co council made that argument to get an accounting,
the government turned around and said, it's not just us

(46:40):
you should be suing. There's all these other people who
are out here who are non Indians. And if the
if the planeffs are saying that we're paying those people money,
right then um, and we shouldn't that you should have
they should have to name them as defendant. And initially
the court bought that really crappy argument right um, and

(47:03):
ordered us to do that. The court's order got the
government to turn over the list to Jason. That version
has numbers, but Jason's bound by a protective order. The
court has limited how much he can talk about this,
so we have to be careful what he says. And
while we complied with very carefully with the court's protective order,
we were required to name each of those entities and

(47:26):
people in the complaint that was filed in the case,
and so they're all named in the caption of the case.
So that's how the names without numbers ended up in
the big Heart times. All of them were listed as
defendants in this case, which was public and not bound
by the protective order. That's the list that tear us saw.

(47:47):
So even though the court changed its mind and said
all those nonoth age head right holders didn't actually need
to be involved in the case, the list is out there.
Jason still has the original list, the one with head
right amounts, alongside the names. I've tried to get Jason
to give me his list over the phone in his

(48:07):
office at lunch. I've asked specifically about the Drummonds too.
If I if I could tell you, I might try to,
But I don't really know. I just don't know that number.
I've got it out of c D wrong, which is
back in the day. UM, but I don't know the answer.

(48:30):
What happens if if you share that information, I'll probably
lose my bar lescens I asked if the Drummonds had
a lot. He wouldn't say. I asked if the number
was only a few. No answer, And it did seem
like Jason wanted to tell me. I don't get it.
I don't understand why the management of these resources is
kept a secret from the people who are the beneficiaries. Right,

(48:56):
every other trust situation in the world. Right, your family trust. Right,
if you have a family trust, there'll be a trustee
who provides on demand and regularly and accounting for what
it is that they've been doing. Right, We've got here's
your money, this is your land. These are the other
things that we've been managing for you as your trustee, UM,

(49:18):
your stocks or whatever it is. This is how they've performed. Right.
Beneficiary is entitled to know that. This is the only
trust I know of where that information is a secret,
even from the beneficiary. Around the time I first started
asking about this, I filed the public records request. I

(49:41):
asked the Bureau of the Need Affairs for a list
of all the nonos head right holders and how many
shares each of them had. When I met with Jason,
that request had just been denied. The government said it
would violate the privacy of non O head right holders
to disclose how many they had in the government, the
federal and it's great at this if they've got a

(50:02):
situation and there's lots of them in Indian country where
there's a resource that benefits the individuals but is managed
by the tribe. The federal government plays this game of well,
you're not the tribe, we can't talk to you. Well,
you're not the individuals, we can't talk to you. We
have this Privacy Act concern. Therefore, we can't give you
any information about this. This is what they're doing to

(50:23):
you and your FO. Your request for that information is
their m o. That's the way. That's the way they play.
I wasn't surprised when the government denied that for our request.
Everyone told me this would happen. I'm not the first
person to ask, but each time someone presses the b

(50:44):
i A, this privacy argument comes up. The Bureau of
Indian Affairs is the only one able to answer this
for sure, but I want to let you know I
have found records about the Drummonds head rights. I've had
to go by what I've seen in old documents deep
in the National Archives. What I've found is a much
smaller number than those I originally heard. I've been able

(51:06):
to confirm only three fourths of one head right owned
across a couple of branches of the drum And family.
I haven't found any indication there may be more. But still,
when I started asking around, I've realized this feeling, this suspicion,
has been lurking for decades in Osage County, a deep
sense of distrust over the origins of the drum And

(51:29):
family's wealth. That a big cache of head rights must
be in the hands of the extended drumm And family,
a family that owns so much land, land once owned
by o Sage families. What was the source of that wealth?
Was it head rights or something else? This question it

(51:54):
took me across Oklahoma, across Texas, into people's homes, courthouse faults,
warehouses of records, to a sea of grass in the
middle of the prairie, through over a hundred years of history,
I'm going to tell you the story of the Drummonds
head right share, but I'm also going to tell you
about something else, Because once I started looking into head

(52:16):
rights and what I heard might be an unknown oil dynasty,
I realized this story wasn't what I thought. What I
found was another chapter of this country's history of white settlement.
After the forced removals and the land runs, something more
gradual than the murders of the Reign of Terror still
resulted in a massive transfer of wealth and land from

(52:38):
Native Americans to white people. It was an entire system
that puts certain people in positions of power, power that
could be used to gain wealth and influence for future generations,
a system that some of the earliest Drummonds in Osage
County learned to operate and build businesses around. This story
is about that system in the place that she aped,

(53:00):
a place that's reckoning with that history today. It's a
story about the Drummonds and the Osage Nation, but it's
also a story about America, about the land and the
people who ended up with it. Next time on in Trust,
a clue left behind by one of the first Drummonds
in Osage County and what it reveals about their head right.

(53:23):
Share in Trust is a production of Bloomberg and I
Heart Media. It's reported and hosted by me Rachel Adams
Heard Additional reporting by Alison Edita Davis Land is our
senior producer. Samantha Story is our executive producer. Jeff Grocott

(53:44):
is our senior editor. Additional production by Victor Evayez, Production
support from Hilda de Carly. Sound engineering is by Blake Naples,
Additional editing by Francesca Leavy and Daniel Ferrara, fact checking
by Molly Nugent. Our theme music is by Laura Wortman.
Photography by Shane Brown. Bloomberg Digital is run by Jared

(54:06):
Standberg and Katie Boyce. This story wouldn't have been possible
without the research and reporting of a long list of others.
They include Shannon Shaw Duty and Louise Redcorn, The Osage News,
Jean Dennison in her book Colonial Entangleman, The Underground Reservation
by Terry P. Wilson, A Pipe for February by Charles H. Redcorn,

(54:28):
The Deaths of Sybil Bolton by Dennis mccaulloff Jr. And
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grant. Additional thanks
to Linley Lynn, David Ingold, Evan Applegate, Devin Pendleton, Ariel Brown,
Jane Yeoman's, Eugene Resnick, Cynthia Hoffman, Frank Coleshaw, Jackie Kessler,

(54:49):
Bernadette Walker, Emily Ingleman, Michael Fraser, Thomas Houston, Stephanie Davidson, McKinnon,
Da Kaeper, Carly Snyder, Melissa Shadrick, Rakheetas, Luca Flynn mc roberts,
Robert Blow and Margaret Sutherland. You can email us at
podcasts at bloomberg dot net for a map, photos and

(55:09):
other information about this episode. Visit bloomberg dot com slash
in trust, find intrust anywhere you get your podcasts