October 4, 2022 • 46 mins
She was hailed by the local press as a hero of Oklahoma’s drive for statehood, which divided communal Native lands into individual parcels that could be leased or sold. A few years later, she was assembling tracts of Osage lands that she flipped to ranchers including Jack Drummond. But Anna Marx LaMotte’s tactics were anything but heroic. This is the story of how one White woman worked to reshape Osage County in the years after allotment, and how US policies furthered what she started. See archival photos and documents from the episode at https://bloom.bg/3eaycsW.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
When I've talked to present day members that the extended
Drummond family, they've told me their ancestors got a lot
of their land from non Osage landowners who had already
gotten it from the original Osage lat And from what
I can tell from mill land records in the courthouse,
that's true. The three Drummond brothers purchased a bunch of
their land from white people. There was the bill Hale ranch,
(00:24):
another one called the Tiger that Jack Drummond talks about,
a lot. They even bought land from Ovi Pope's family.
And in some cases there was a middleman, actually a
middle woman, Alan large let Anna. Jack Drummond tells Terry,
(00:46):
his biographer, about a woman who made selling O sage
land twit ranchers her whole business. And then she would
charge of it at a high rate. And then she
had later from the Indians of the much less. She
was a the middle man then right yeahs Anna Mark
themat would acquire individual O s age allotments on sixty
(01:10):
acres here and there and packaged them together as one
big chunk that she would then lease or sell two
ranchers who wanted large contiguous pieces of land that meant
Anna could charge more, and the difference between what she
paid O s Ages for the land and what she
got from the ranchers was her profit. Yeah, she knew
the Indians and she knew the counman about the command
(01:34):
one was a grass and what the Indians one was
money whenever they wanted to see. Anna started out with leases.
She'd leased out a bunch of oce Age allotments, then
stub leased the combined land to ranchers. After a while,
she moved beyond leasing. She started buying oth age land
outright and selling the pastors she'd put together for a profit.
(01:55):
Both Jack and Cecil Drummond bought land from her. She
was the richest person in the os. That's fascinating about
her now. She was sure, And do you know Terry
that later I used that land from that time on
(02:16):
and then I said, Mrs Lamont, I want to buy
your land. She's all right, I'll sell it to you.
And we agreed on the prize at thirty dollars an acre.
It's clear Jack respected Anna. Terry brings her up a
lot in the tapes, and every time he does, Jack
speaks highly of her. Jack saw her tactics flipping oce
(02:37):
age Land at a markup as good business, kind of
like the shirts he was charging a markup on at
the store. Well, she was also she was the smartest
woman I I've known lots of women that she was.
She was, she was a businessman. But at one point
in those tapes, as he's again praising Anna LaMotte and
crediting her with a lot of his ranching success, Jack
(03:00):
says something a little more candid about what Anna was doing.
The fifty sounds and the difference between what the command
paid her unless she paid the end of the party,
and a lot of this land she just steal, just
get for nothing, diffused for nothing. She just steal, just
(03:24):
get for nothing, just used for nothing. When I started
looking into Anna LaMotte, I learned she was accused of
doing just that. Anna faced lawsuits and at one point
criminal charges over how she was getting O s Age Land.
When I talk about the system the Drummond Brothers learned
(03:46):
to operate to store the probates, the guardianships, I want
to make clear the brothers weren't the only ones getting
rich off the OCGE nation. There was the Association, sure,
the group of men who funneled O s Age my
me through the store and bank, but there was also
simply everyone else. The Drummond family didn't build their ranching
(04:08):
empire alone. They had help, not just from the store, guardianships,
other white people in hominy. At the core of it
all was allotment and help in the form of policy
and money from the federal government. Today, I'm going to
tell that story, the story of An Lamott. It's a
(04:29):
story wrapped up in the project of allotment in Oklahoma statehood,
the story about how the US expanded west and built
the country we know today. This is in trust. I'm
Rachel Adams. Heard to understand how Jack was able to
(05:02):
get land from Anna LaMotte, you need to understand how
Anna LaMotte got it in the first place. And she
couldn't have done it without Oklahoma statehood, without allotment. I
told you before the under allotment, the government divided up
land the O s Age Nation held Title two as
a whole and parceled it out to individual O s
Age citizens instead. In the decade leading up to those
(05:25):
allotment negotiations, the US had dismantled the os Age Nations
government and started cutting os Age families off from their culture.
They forced children to go to Native American boarding schools
and withhold their parents money they refused. This all worked
to severely weaken the os Age nation's power. Even still,
(05:46):
oth Age leaders traveled to Washington to argue against allotment.
An O s Age chief named Black Dog pointed to
the promises the United States had made in past treaties.
Another chief, James big Heart, told US government and officials
to look at the effects of allotment on other tribal nations.
He argued that all the disparate parcels of land were
(06:06):
too small to farm. Successfully incited examples of white men
who had tried and failed to farm their own plots
of land nearby. This comes up and Terry P. Wilson's
book The Underground Reservation. According to Wilson, the Secretary of
Interior brushed aside the concerns of Black Dog and Big
Heart and other prominent O s Age leaders from the
(06:27):
time and ended the meeting. He warned them allotment was coming.
Black Dog had raised another problem with allotment. The US
government was going to base who got those individual pieces
of land on a roll of Osage citizens at the time,
but that process was fraught outsiders tried to claim they
were O s Age, knowing they could get a chunk
(06:48):
of the reservation and a share of the mineral rights
that they succeeded. Apparently that included the Drummond family. According
to a newspaper article from nine two, so one tried
to enroll a member of the Drummond family in the
Osage Nation. The article in the Osage Journal list a
bunch of last names of children whose families applied to
(07:10):
have them added to the role of O s Age citizens.
Some sixty names were approved by Osage leaders, but two
were rejected. Names of people the O s Age Nation
said weren't O Sage, but it tried to get on
the role, and one of those names was Drummond. But
back to the people who were on the O Sage
(07:30):
roll two thousand, two hundred nine people, they were called
a lattas and every O Sage a latt was assigned
a head right and pieces of land in three rounds.
One of those parcels was known as a homestead allotment,
the others were called surplus land. Those chunks of land
could be far away from each other, making it difficult
(07:51):
for O Sage families to have any sort of profitable
ranching or farming operation. Just like Chief Big Heart warned,
So the entire economic city Asian changed and white ranchers
were able to sort of take advantage of this situation.
This is Michael Snyder and I teach at the University
of Oklahoma. Michael has written a couple of books about
(08:11):
a famous O Sage writer named John Joseph Matthews. Matthews
wrote a newspaper column and several books, and while Michael
was researching his work and reading hundreds of old newspapers,
he kept seeing Anna LaMotte's name. She was all over
the papers in the early nineteen hundreds, so they described
her as attractive and charming. Anna LaMotte was associated with
(08:32):
political power and Oklahoma State, who had declared a romantic
figure by the press, even amidst their scandals. It turns out,
before Anna LaMotte made it her business to acquire O
Sage land and flip it for a profit, she was
heavily involved with Oklahoma becoming a state, the reason the
Osage Nation and other tribal nations were forced into allotment.
(08:53):
To begin with, She had been married to an Oklahoma
Republican congressman named Bird S. McGuire, who was a lawyer
and a rancher who owned a large acreage, so she
knew about ranching and large land deals. Burn McGuire was
also one of the delegates lobbying for Oklahoma statehood in
the early nineteen hundreds, and op ed from the time,
(09:15):
written by a progressive senator blasted McGuire for taking part
in quote schemes to promote the game of getting the
Indians patrimony into the hands of those who would use
it to quote develop the country. In other words, this
senator was saying statehood for McGuire was about getting native land.
(09:36):
Anna was right alongside Bird McGuire during the push for statehood.
She went with the delegation to Washington, d c. Where
Theodore Roosevelt held a special reception for them in the
East Room of the White House, and upon Oklahoma statehood,
she was presented with the Oklahoma flag. This moment with
the flag is almost cinematic the way the paper writes it.
(09:58):
They're at the Capitol building, the Speaker of the House
presents her with the old flag for Oklahoma Territory. The
paper calls it a valuable relic. Then the speaker hands
Anna another flag, the first date flag for Oklahoma with
a big star and the number forty six on the front.
I imagine a ritualistic kind of a scene, almost kind
(10:19):
of a maternal sort of a symbol, right giving her
those flags like a mother of the state of Oklahoma.
Perhaps a few years after Oklahoma became a state and
the reservations were allotted out, Anna divorced Bird McGuire and
married a Chippawaman named George Lamont. George was a baseball
and football star who later worked at the Office of
(10:40):
Indian Affairs O s Age Agency before becoming a rancher.
When Anna and George Lamont married, they also became business
partners and started leasing and buying O Sage land, a
lot of it. There was a lot of pressure for
O Sages to lease their land to others and then,
in a lot of cases, eventually to sell it two
(11:01):
outside parties. It's important to understand that a lot of
the disconnected parcels of land that Allotman created weren't of
any use to many O Sage families. They weren't big
enough to graze cattle, they were too spread out to
cultivate a real farm. And the whole county was swarming
with outsiders eager to get it. They'd offered to buy
(11:21):
or lease allotments in exchange for cash, cars, anything that
meant they could have control of the land. So allotment
it was a tool Anna and George Lamott were able
to use to start their land business, a business that
would quickly give them control of a massive chunk of
o s Age land by one newspaper's count a third
(11:42):
of the entire county. Remember, this was supposed to be
hard to do. There were those restrictions in place that
meant o stage allottees couldn't sell or lease or mortgage
their land without approval from the government. You heard Katie
Eates Free the real estate Specialist, talk about this a
few episodes back. The restriction is that the federal government,
(12:05):
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they have to basically bless
what you're doing with your property. They're like, okay, is
this in your your best interest what you're doing because
people back in nineteen o six and nineteen eighteen and everything,
we're being taken advantage of. So that's where they came in.
I think that was the whole point, was to have
(12:25):
those restrictions, so that wasn't They weren't leasing to the
neighbor next door for a dollar a year when they
could be getting a hundred dollars a year or something
like that. But Anna and George Lamot skirted those protections.
They got leases and deeds without ever going in front
of a federal official who would make sure the oath
age latte was getting a fair price. Sometimes the leases
(12:47):
were signed by white men who served as guardians for
oath age children. I mean, what it comes down to
is they were making shady deals that had to do
with leasing oth age lands or involving o sage properties.
I guess using sharp practices. They were just dishonest and
how they were working with those sages and that allowed
(13:09):
them to fill their pockets and increase their land base.
So they were kind of in the business of tricking
people into signing over stuff. Yeah, and they were doing
things where they were always supposed to inform the government.
The Department of the Interior was in charge of all this,
so they were kind of doing deals behind the back
of the governments. They were they were ripping off sages
(13:31):
and they were defrauding the government. So the government of
course retaliated when they found out about this, but they
kind of did it a handful of times. They did
it repeatedly. The government first went after Analemma. She was
indicted for signing someone's name on a lease. Her indictment
didn't go over very well in the local press. The
(13:54):
Pahaska Paper characterized it as an attack by federal investigators
who were quote stir r things up around here. The
next year, there was another lawsuit against the Lamtts. This
one brought on behalf of an o Sage woman named
Rose Neil Hill. In that lawsuit, Rose said Anna told
her she was signing a power of attorney, when in
(14:17):
fact Rose was signing over a d to her land.
Rose was trying to undo that transfer and eight others.
In the lawsuit, she said Anna had stolen four thousand
acres of Osage land. That same year, some of the
indictments against the Lamottes were dismissed. A newspaper in nearby
Ponca City wrote, we were mightily pleased to find this
(14:39):
piece of news, but in the Lamottes were on trial again.
This is when the newspapers said the Lamottes claimed to
control roughly a third of the entire county. During one hearing,
George LaMotte told the court we thought we owned the
world and that the O Sage Country was a little kingdom.
(15:00):
Just a few days after his testimony, Anna and George
were found not guilty. According to a newspaper article, the
jury deliberations lasted an hour and a half. As Anna
LaMotte walked into the courtroom, the newspaper said, she quote
smiled confidently at the jurors. They beamingly returned the smile. Eventually,
(15:45):
the US brought a case to prevent the Lamats from
leasing out any more O Sage land. The government one,
but the Lamats appealed. The U. S. Supreme Court ruled
the Lamas had to turn over all leases they had
on restrict did oz Age land. In the decision, the
court wrote that those restrictions were necessary. These allotments, after all,
(16:07):
were in quote scattered tracks without restrictions. The court wrote, quote,
it is certain that improvident and ill advised leases would
be given and multiplied. From what I can tell, Even
after that case, Anna LaMotte kept leasing out land because
according to Jack's biography, he didn't start leasing land from
(16:28):
her until I don't know much about those leases. Jack
tells Terry a lot of his deals with Anna were informal.
They didn't put much in writing. But two years after
the Supreme Court's ruling, the Lamots dissolved their business partnership.
They made notice of it in the paper, the Pasca
Daily Journal. It says, no further business is authorized to
(16:52):
be done in the firm name. All of those transactions
happened pretty quickly, within fifteen years or so of allotment,
and even though a lot of those leases were later canceled,
the Lamottes were able to reshape O s Age County
in that time, giving ranchers access to huge swass of
land that they could use to graze cattle and expand
(17:14):
their operations. There's something else I want to tell you
about the Lamotts, because the Drummonds didn't just buy land
from them. This whole time the Lamottes and the Drummonds
and other big ranchers were buying up land. The oil
(17:36):
underneath all that land was making head right holders some
of the wealthiest people in the world. The same law
that allotted the O Sage Reservation, the nineteen six Act,
it also created the head right system and kept the
mineral estate and trust. But the wording in the nineteen
o six Act only guaranteed it would stay that way
(17:57):
for twenty five years. The policy at the time in
nineteen o six was that we're going to make this law.
This is going to the o s Ages after a
few decades, are going to go away as a sovereign.
Let's get them assimilated. Let's get them out of where
we have any trust obligations to them at all. This
is Wilson pipes them. I am an o Sage head
(18:18):
right holder and a citizen of the Oto, Missouri tribe.
He's an attorney who has represented the oath Age Nation
in the os Age Minerals Council. A lot of Wilson's
work for them goes back to that trust relationship with
the United States, the federal government's obligations to the oath
Age Nation and henright holders. It's not just I trust you,
(18:38):
you trust me. That's this is not that so to me.
The highest piece of this trust relationship is the sovereign
authority of the oas Age Nation. The os Age Allotment
Act is unusual compared to other acts because it has
so much control over so much federal control and superintendence
(19:03):
over O Sage resources. I mean remarkable compared to any
other tribe the United States. So again we embrace that
in some ways because it's created protection, but in other
ways it's caused, you know, significant hardship as well. In
the late nineteen teens, that trust relationship was in jeopardy
because of the wording in the nineteen o six Act.
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The oth Age Nation was nearing the end of this
promise that the oil and gas rates beneath the land
would be held in trust by the US on their behalf.
After twenty five years, the subsurface will belong to the
whoever the surface landowner is, and then there won't be
an o Sage tribe as a sovereign that exists anymore.
(19:48):
A lot of the people who came to oath Age
County to buy land thought that they would become the
owners of the mineral rights underneath that land, got all
the oil and gas revenue would no longer go to
head right holders. But os Age leaders pushed to extend
the trust relationship over the mineral estate. They got lawmakers
(20:08):
to introduce a bill that would make sure it wouldn't
go away, that all the proceeds from oil and gas
drilling in Osage County would continue to go into that
big pot and be paid out to head right holders.
But that incensed big landowners who wanted to own the
mineral rights. So some of those landowners formed a group
called the Osage County Homeowners Association. Michael Snyder's written about
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them too. So you're not talking about like the homeowners
Association that tells you your grass is too long, right,
I mean there that that might be kind of sinister too,
But this is a group of homeowners and their landowners, bankers, guardians,
other kinds of businessmen. But they were openly doing this.
(20:54):
This was different from the Association's divers alluded to the
men in hominy who are accessing o money through guardianships
and probates. The os Age County Homeowners Association was something bigger,
more formal. Their purpose was to lobby against the bill
that would keep the os Age Mineral State held in
trust for the nation. This is kind of the original
(21:16):
roster of the group. George LaMotte was the president and
um the vice president was Frederick Gentner Drummond. Later Jack
Drummond would also become involved with the home Owners Association.
The Drummond brothers, the Lamotts, and other landowners. They were
all working together to try and end the head right
(21:38):
system so that all the oil and gas rights beneath
the land they owned would go to them, not O
s Age citizens. This was a group made up of
prominent landowners in os Age County at the time. According
to one newspaper article from the most active members were
also guardians. These guardians their job was to protect the
(22:00):
financial interests of their O Sage wards. They were actively
lobbying to end the head right system and the trust
relationship over the mineral estate and their wards means source
of income. They would actually go out and talk to
the landowners and canvas and you know, just try to
persuade them, bring them around to their way of thinking
(22:20):
about this. So yeah, they were. They were aggressive, and
they were they were going out canvassing, and they were
putting um political pressure on on mayors and senators and
so forth. So yeah, they were. They were very vocal,
and until the Sages retaliated, they were just kind of
doing this very openly. The os Age Tribal Council fought
(22:42):
hard against the os Age County Homeowners Association. They launched
their own lobbying campaign, telling lawmakers that the landowners had
gotten the land for cheap, that they knew when they
bought it the mineral rights belonged to the tribe and
the tribal Council was successful. O s Age leaders got
the U. S. Congress to us a law extending the
head right system and the trust relationship. Several years later
(23:07):
it was extended again, and in it was extended one
last time, this time in perpetuity. There really isn't a
lot out there about the Osage County Homeowners Association. It
often gets lost in a lot of the history that's
told about the os Age Nation in the nineteens and
nineteen twenties. A lot happened then, but the Homeowners Association
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was a big deal, a very public battle between major
landowners and the os Age Nation over the mineral rights
that had made os Age citizens so wealthy, A battle
fought by a lot of the same men were supposed
to be looking out for O s Age financial interests.
On one of my phone calls with Gettner Drummond, the
lawyer running for Oklahoma Attorney General, I asked him about
(23:52):
the os Age County Homeowners Association whether he knew anything
about it. I was not aware of that. But had
I've been alive, I would have certainly said the law
that was past the nineteen o six should be enforced. Yes,
I would have done that because landowners so think about
it from the buyer. So the buyer is aware because
it's a law right, So you have to impute knowledge
(24:14):
of the law because it's published that if I buy
this land in nineteen twenty, for example, that in five
years I will own the minerals below it. Then you've
detrimentally relied on federal law and probably paid additional consideration
knowing that you would be a mineral estate owner, and
then the law changes in your not so it's really
(24:35):
been a taking, which would be akin to eminent domain.
So yeah, if I were alive back then, I would
have lobbied to not to not change the law. I
would have said keep the law as it is. So,
Getner said he would have made the same legal argument
as earlier Drummonds, that the head rate system and the
trust relationship should have expired, that the nineteen o six
(24:58):
Act should have been the final stay on the map.
That word he used at taking, it's a legal term
from the government takes control of private property. It's worth
mentioning that the o Stage mineral estate is still managed
by the federal government under current law. All the land
that getting our owns, that its siblings and cousins own,
will never come with the oil and gas rights beneath it.
(25:21):
But the land they do have is immensely valuable all
on its own. That's after the break I've told you
about the ways the Drummond brothers were able to acquire
land throughout the nineteen teens and nine twenties, How the
store and probates provided a flow of money, how guardianships
could be used to access pools of os age cash
(25:43):
money the brothers borrowed to buy land, and how the
Lamottes were a source of leases and deeds for more
pastors that could graze cattle. That was a lot of land,
but it doesn't fully explain the miles and miles of
land the Drummond family would ultimately acquire. By the late
nineteen thirties, the German brothers and other ranchers were given
(26:03):
a way to use the land they had to get
more land a new tool from the US government. It
was called the Federal Land Bank and It offered a
cheap and easy way for farmers and ranchers to borrow
money so they could buy land. But you know, without
the Federal Landbank, I would never have been able to
have what I have today because down here the Federal Landbank.
(26:31):
Whenever I needed my block in this ranch, I could
go to the Federal Landbank and put up a piece
of clear land and take the land that I had
buying a pay hard. Jack talks a lot in those
tapes with Terry about finance. He called it the secret
to success in the cattle business because all of the
(26:52):
cattle he and his brothers grazed in the land they got,
they were all assets that could secure loans. Every cow
and every acre could be used as collateral to buy
more cows and more acres. Those loans could be tricky
to get back. Then, the long term mortgage that we
know today wasn't really a thing. Banks weren't comfortable lending
(27:15):
money for that long, especially to farmers and ranchers. Sometimes
their crops wouldn't grow, or their cattle wouldn't gain weight,
and that would affect their ability to pay off the loan.
But without access to capital, farmers and ranchers couldn't buy
their own land, and that flew in the face of
what America was supposed to be about. So the US
(27:35):
government came up with a solution. The elevator pitch is
that at the beginning of the twenty century, a lot
of poor Americans, mainly farmers, didn't have a lot of
access to mortgage credit, and so the government got involved
by creating these new institutions such as the Federal Land
Banks and later Fannie May, to give them more mortgages.
(27:55):
This is Judge Glock. He's not the legal kind of judge.
That's just his first name. It's an old family name. Apparently,
my great great grandfather was a judge, and they keep
passing it down with the futile hope that one of
us will come to judge again someday. Apparently Judge works
for a think tank in Austin, Texas. He wrote a
book about the federal landbanks. It's called The Dead Pledge.
(28:17):
He also spent years as a government contractor doing research
on land rights and tribal nations in Oklahoma. There was
a lot of people that they got their first kind
of steps up in life from these federal land banks
getting tied into these federal land banks gave local individuals
a source of financing that would have been impossible otherwise.
(28:39):
But if you could tie into this big pot of
federal money, then you could really expand your operations kind
of exponentially. The Federal Land Bank was created in the
nineteen teens with twelve regional branches. For the first twenty
years or so, farmers and ranchers in os Age County
couldn't access them. The Federal Land Bank wouldn't give mortgages
(29:00):
on land that didn't come with the mineral rights. But
in the late nineteen thirties, the Federal Land Bank changed
its mind and started lending to landowners in os Age
County even without the mineral rights. This meant the Drummond
brothers no longer had to rely exclusively on private mortgage
companies or the funds they borrow out of Osige accounts.
(29:20):
Now the federal government was there to help them turn
what they'd already bought into even more land. In a way,
these loans were subsidized, They were basically guaranteed by the government,
and unlike commercial banks were local businessmen who loaned out money,
the federal land banks didn't pay taxes on the interest
they collected. This meant they could offer super low interest rates,
(29:42):
sometimes as low as two percent, when a lot of
private sector mortgages came with interest rates that were at
least twice as high. I kept seeing the Federal Land
Bank show up in the ledgers next to the names
of the Drummond brothers and other white ranchers. But I
started to notice these loans were far less common on
and owned Biosh families. Judge told me there were a
(30:03):
couple of reasons for this. The first was that getting
alone was a lot less formal than it is today.
A lot of times someone was approved based on who
they knew, and so you're not going to give loans
to people you don't know, and you know it's this
maybe not surprising. Also had racial implications too. Uh. There
was a lot of complaints from black farmers that they
(30:25):
were getting left out of this, and the same was
true of Indians. A lot of Indians and Native Americans
didn't have these same connections that the big local white
ranchers and uh, white power brokers had, and so that
was instead of creating a different sort of banking structure,
the federal land banks kind of tied into that existing
banking structure, and in that way kind of exacerbated those
(30:49):
problems with local relationships and local power structures. But there
was another reason it was hard for O s H
landowners to access the types of subsidized loans the Drummond
brothers could get the land itself. Allotment land, it came
with those restrictions, so it was difficult that The general
issue was that, like someone else, you needed permission and
(31:13):
from the government to get a Federal land bank mortgage
on allotment, and you needed the government's sign off, which
was often difficult to get. So there was a double
edged sword with these restrictions on allotment land. While they
provided some protection from people like the Lamots, they also
made the land less valuable from a financial perspective because
it was harder for os Age landowners to use it
(31:35):
to borrow money and expand their own landholdings. The Federal
Land Bank was just yet another example of how US
policies tilted the playing field. Toured wide landowners and worked
to strip the os Age Nation and other tribal nations
of their land and wealth, selling on credit, administering estates,
(32:07):
overseeing the finances of people deemed incompetent getting access to
cheap debt from the government, all programs that worked to
enrich a handful of white men, all of them further
in what allotments started. By the time the federal landbanks
came around, the Drummond brothers were able to turn an
already sizeable ranching business into something extraordinary. They were given
(32:32):
a huge advantage over o s age landowners, the ability
to access cheap debt to expand their ranches. Over the
last hundred years, the extended Drummond family has leveraged their
land position over and over again to grow the family businesses.
I asked Evan Pendleton, another reporter at Bloomberg who covers well,
(32:54):
to calculate what that land would be worth today. She
called around to appraiser is familiar with those age Annie
looked at recent transactions. When she added it all up,
she found that the land owned by present day Drummonds
has an estimated value of at least two hundred seventy
five million dollars. And I want to be clear, that's
not the nutworth of the Drummond family, and it doesn't
(33:16):
include any mortgages on the land. But that number, it
shows how valuable this land can be how valuable real
estate can be having an asset that appreciates over time
that you can borrow off of land covered in blue
stem grass, some of the best in the world for
grazing cattle. Seeing our first truck in like seven last spring,
(33:52):
I drove out to a ranch owned by Jack Drummond's grandson.
His name's Joe Bush. He's a rancher. Once to turn
off the county road, it's gravel. Blue stem grass stretches
as far as the eye can see. This grass is
what makes ranch land profitable here, even if you don't
own the mineral rights. When I got to Joe's house,
(34:17):
I parked near a huge tree. Hundreds of birds were
sitting in the branches tripping. It was a clear day.
The blue sky made the grass look even more golden
than usual. Joe took me to a picnic table on
his back porch. I stepped over a campaign sign on
my way in. This was a few months before the primary,
(34:38):
before Getner became the Republican nominee. Is the attorney general sign?
Is that for Getner? Yeah? Do you think you go
on this time? I don't know. Oklahoma's are very corrupt.
I spent a couple of hours with Joe at his ranch.
(34:59):
He named it Tower Hills after a phone tower on
the property. It's more than seven thousand acres and all
a lot of land for most people, but on the
smaller side as drumm and ranches go. He had the
cattle brand stitched on the front of his boots, a
lower case tea within each coming out at the bottom. Well.
When I moved up here, I had thirty thousand dollars
(35:20):
and a two wheel drive pickup and my family inherited
seven thousand acres, but there was a mortgage on it
and almost got starved at that first year. Um and
the cell tower guy came along and offered me a
(35:42):
hundred five dollars months, which was the difference between food
and no food. So took the food. So I had
to come up with a brand from my cattle, and
I took my father's brand, which was the thh which
for him stood for Timber Hill. And because I had
(36:06):
a tower right named it Tower Hills plural because there's
more than one hill. So that's the short story. Joe
smoked cigarettes on his porch while he told me what
he knew about his grandfather and his great uncle's like
getting her. He grew up driving around with his older
(36:27):
family members looking out at the pastures, learning the history
of who this land came from, how the family business worked.
Some of Joe's land Jack bought from Anna Lamott. When
I first talked to Joe a few weeks before he met,
I asked if he had heard of Anna LaMotte. Joe
told me he had. Mrs LaMotte was the she ran
(36:49):
the laundry in Pahushka, And Mrs LaMotte is the person
that he got all his pasture from for that first
deer deal that he did. In fact, that pasture where
the tower is, he got that pasture from her. Do
you know how she got it? No idea. I'm sure
(37:13):
it's in my abstracts, but no, I don't know. I
just know that, you know, grandfather said that was Mrs
LaMotte's pastor. You know she got in a fair amount
of trouble at one point. No, I don't know anything
about her except she ran the London match. Yeah, I
(37:34):
can send you, I can send you the case. Um. Basically,
she was accused and indicted for like convincing people to
sign deeds, saying that they were powers of attorney, but
then she would take control of the land, saying they
were power of attorney but they were deeds. No, I'm
(37:57):
not familiar with that. And in the in the tapes
your grandfather he said something about he said she would
just get it for nothing. She would he said the
words steel. I had not heard when when he did
(38:17):
talk about Mrs Lamott, she was somebody that he looked
up to. And I don't recall him saying anything about
her being shady with the Indians. I mean, you know
more about her than I do. Yeah, I can, I
can share it with you. I guess I didn't know
(38:38):
um when grandfather first described her, said she was the
washer woman. And he did say she was wearing an
apron because he said she'd dried her hands on her
apron and shook his hand. So I did get that detail.
But he told you that when you were driving one day,
(39:02):
he was talking about how he started in the ranching
business and how lucky he was and he, you know,
took a risk and it worked out. I brought some
other documents I had that involved Jack Drummond, including some
of the transcripts from the tapes where he talks about
Lamott and the store and the shirts. Some other public
(39:23):
documents on guardianships, like the notes from that conversation between
Jack and Fred Gettner that mentioned borrowing money from myrown
being's account to buy the bill Hale land. We looked
over them together. Did did he have any suspicions? I mean,
did you according to this, he did have suspicions about
getting er um. Did he ever talk to you about
(39:45):
those suspicions? Are those concerns? No? No, he very rarely
talked about getting her at all. And just like I've
heard from other family members, Joe said he never knew
his grandfather to be anything but an honorable man. He
didn't know about a lot of what I was telling
him about the guardianships or the probates. He didn't know
(40:08):
there was an undertaking business either. He said he had
heard about the silk shirts, but said his grandfather was
proud to have found a market for something unique that
associage customers really wanted. Because, like I mean, just asking
around about the Drummonds, like you do, hear a fair
amount of people who have always been told in their
families that the Drummonds got their land by, you know,
(40:33):
taking land as collateral at the from the store or
using guardianships or stuff like that. I'm just curious, like,
has anyone ever confronted you about that or have you
ever heard that? I have not. That doesn't mean something
didn't happen, that somebody has hurt Falane over So what
(40:55):
does it mean to you to be a Drummond today?
Like it's such, it's a name that care is a
lot of wait here in os Age County, right, it does?
It does the Drummonds. It's a mixed blessing. You know,
some of the Drummonds have done someone scrupulous things and
(41:16):
so he got to suffer through a little ill will. Um.
But I don't know, you know, there's people that feel
like they were swindled or you know, things didn't work
out or um. I don't know. There there's resentment among
(41:42):
people that are trying to build ranches because Drummonds somehow
always got there first, you know, but they didn't get
there first, right, the tribe got here first. So I'm
just like, I'm curious, like how this all mechanically worked. Well,
(42:03):
you read the book. They actually were successful at ranching.
They made money, and then they spent the money buy
in Land. I mean that's that's the magic of the
Oh sage is that stairs game weight real good in
one summer. So I know we've taken a lot of
(42:24):
your time. I'm kind of curious, like what you're thinking
about all this? Do you do want to know more
about kind of what I'm fascinated by what you're doing here,
and I still don't. I don't know that you're gonna
hit hey Eureka moment in your research. Maybe you will
(42:47):
when you said you don't think I'm going to have
a Eureka moment, Like what do you mean by that?
I don't think you'll find a cut and dried um
him and stole land from Indians because I don't think
they did. I think they actually did pay for it. Now,
there may have been some shenanigans with the guardianship and
(43:12):
then it would be between that particular guardian and that
particular Indian, but I think they were just as far
as my grandfather went, he felt like he was just
extraordinarily lucky that he he had the resources, he was
able to put him together, and when he shipped his cattle,
(43:35):
he made money. Joe Bush was right. There hasn't been
a single Eureka moment covering this, not at the National
Archives in Fort Worth, for the County Courthouse in downtown Pahuska,
no one conversation that revealed the true scope of just
how this one family got so much boost each land,
(43:55):
because there was no single strategy that built the drum
And Ranching Empire, not one document or one transaction that
landed the families so much land. Instead, there was allotment, guardianships,
the store years of access to power and influence in
Osage County, with other ranchers, guardians, and government officials all
(44:17):
playing a role. A lot of this at a time
when the policies in place incentivized O Sage families to sell,
either to access money they couldn't otherwise or pay off
a debt. In many cases, the land was already out
of O Sage hands when the Drummond brothers got it.
In a way, the story of the Drummond Brothers rise
(44:38):
is the story of allotment, the story of a system
that gave white settlers away in that allowed Oklahoma to
become a state, that expanded the United States as a whole,
and built the country we know today. But that's far
from all of the story because despite centuries of hostile
US policies in boarding schools that tried to stamp out
(45:01):
Native cultures, O s age leaders and citizens never stopped
fighting for the tribe's culture. It's financial independence and its
sovereignty working against and within those systems to find a
way forward over the last few decades. Those efforts set
up the stage nation to do something it couldn't for
a long time by the land back. That's next time
(45:26):
on In Trust. For maps, newspaper archives, photos, and other
documents related to this episode, go to Bloomberg dot com.
Slash in Trust. In Trust is a production of Bloomberg
and I Heart Media. It's reported and hosted by me
(45:47):
Rachel Adams Heard. Additional reporting by Allison Edita, Devin Pendleton,
in Linley Lynn Davis. Land is our senior producer. Samantha
Story is our executive producer. Jeff Grocott is our senior editor.
Additional editing by Francesco Levi and Daniel Ferrara. Additional production
(46:07):
by Victor Evayaz, Production support from Geoldo to Carly, Sound
engineering by Blake Naples, fact checking by Molly Nugent. Theme
music by Laura Worman Photography by Shane Brown. The book
we mentioned by Michael Snyder is called Our O. S. H. Hills.
You can email us at podcast at Bloomberg dot net.
(46:31):
Find in Trust anywhere you get your podcasts.
When I've talked to present day members that the extended
Drummond family, they've told me their ancestors got a lot
of their land from non Osage landowners who had already
gotten it from the original Osage lat And from what
I can tell from mill land records in the courthouse,
that's true. The three Drummond brothers purchased a bunch of
their land from white people. There was the bill Hale ranch,
(00:24):
another one called the Tiger that Jack Drummond talks about,
a lot. They even bought land from Ovi Pope's family.
And in some cases there was a middleman, actually a
middle woman, Alan large let Anna. Jack Drummond tells Terry,
(00:46):
his biographer, about a woman who made selling O sage
land twit ranchers her whole business. And then she would
charge of it at a high rate. And then she
had later from the Indians of the much less. She
was a the middle man then right yeahs Anna Mark
themat would acquire individual O s age allotments on sixty
(01:10):
acres here and there and packaged them together as one
big chunk that she would then lease or sell two
ranchers who wanted large contiguous pieces of land that meant
Anna could charge more, and the difference between what she
paid O s Ages for the land and what she
got from the ranchers was her profit. Yeah, she knew
the Indians and she knew the counman about the command
(01:34):
one was a grass and what the Indians one was
money whenever they wanted to see. Anna started out with leases.
She'd leased out a bunch of oce Age allotments, then
stub leased the combined land to ranchers. After a while,
she moved beyond leasing. She started buying oth age land
outright and selling the pastors she'd put together for a profit.
(01:55):
Both Jack and Cecil Drummond bought land from her. She
was the richest person in the os. That's fascinating about
her now. She was sure, And do you know Terry
that later I used that land from that time on
(02:16):
and then I said, Mrs Lamont, I want to buy
your land. She's all right, I'll sell it to you.
And we agreed on the prize at thirty dollars an acre.
It's clear Jack respected Anna. Terry brings her up a
lot in the tapes, and every time he does, Jack
speaks highly of her. Jack saw her tactics flipping oce
(02:37):
age Land at a markup as good business, kind of
like the shirts he was charging a markup on at
the store. Well, she was also she was the smartest
woman I I've known lots of women that she was.
She was, she was a businessman. But at one point
in those tapes, as he's again praising Anna LaMotte and
crediting her with a lot of his ranching success, Jack
(03:00):
says something a little more candid about what Anna was doing.
The fifty sounds and the difference between what the command
paid her unless she paid the end of the party,
and a lot of this land she just steal, just
get for nothing, diffused for nothing. She just steal, just
(03:24):
get for nothing, just used for nothing. When I started
looking into Anna LaMotte, I learned she was accused of
doing just that. Anna faced lawsuits and at one point
criminal charges over how she was getting O s Age Land.
When I talk about the system the Drummond Brothers learned
(03:46):
to operate to store the probates, the guardianships, I want
to make clear the brothers weren't the only ones getting
rich off the OCGE nation. There was the Association, sure,
the group of men who funneled O s Age my
me through the store and bank, but there was also
simply everyone else. The Drummond family didn't build their ranching
(04:08):
empire alone. They had help, not just from the store, guardianships,
other white people in hominy. At the core of it
all was allotment and help in the form of policy
and money from the federal government. Today, I'm going to
tell that story, the story of An Lamott. It's a
(04:29):
story wrapped up in the project of allotment in Oklahoma statehood,
the story about how the US expanded west and built
the country we know today. This is in trust. I'm
Rachel Adams. Heard to understand how Jack was able to
(05:02):
get land from Anna LaMotte, you need to understand how
Anna LaMotte got it in the first place. And she
couldn't have done it without Oklahoma statehood, without allotment. I
told you before the under allotment, the government divided up
land the O s Age Nation held Title two as
a whole and parceled it out to individual O s
Age citizens instead. In the decade leading up to those
(05:25):
allotment negotiations, the US had dismantled the os Age Nations
government and started cutting os Age families off from their culture.
They forced children to go to Native American boarding schools
and withhold their parents money they refused. This all worked
to severely weaken the os Age nation's power. Even still,
(05:46):
oth Age leaders traveled to Washington to argue against allotment.
An O s Age chief named Black Dog pointed to
the promises the United States had made in past treaties.
Another chief, James big Heart, told US government and officials
to look at the effects of allotment on other tribal nations.
He argued that all the disparate parcels of land were
(06:06):
too small to farm. Successfully incited examples of white men
who had tried and failed to farm their own plots
of land nearby. This comes up and Terry P. Wilson's
book The Underground Reservation. According to Wilson, the Secretary of
Interior brushed aside the concerns of Black Dog and Big
Heart and other prominent O s Age leaders from the
(06:27):
time and ended the meeting. He warned them allotment was coming.
Black Dog had raised another problem with allotment. The US
government was going to base who got those individual pieces
of land on a roll of Osage citizens at the time,
but that process was fraught outsiders tried to claim they
were O s Age, knowing they could get a chunk
(06:48):
of the reservation and a share of the mineral rights
that they succeeded. Apparently that included the Drummond family. According
to a newspaper article from nine two, so one tried
to enroll a member of the Drummond family in the
Osage Nation. The article in the Osage Journal list a
bunch of last names of children whose families applied to
(07:10):
have them added to the role of O s Age citizens.
Some sixty names were approved by Osage leaders, but two
were rejected. Names of people the O s Age Nation
said weren't O Sage, but it tried to get on
the role, and one of those names was Drummond. But
back to the people who were on the O Sage
(07:30):
roll two thousand, two hundred nine people, they were called
a lattas and every O Sage a latt was assigned
a head right and pieces of land in three rounds.
One of those parcels was known as a homestead allotment,
the others were called surplus land. Those chunks of land
could be far away from each other, making it difficult
(07:51):
for O Sage families to have any sort of profitable
ranching or farming operation. Just like Chief Big Heart warned,
So the entire economic city Asian changed and white ranchers
were able to sort of take advantage of this situation.
This is Michael Snyder and I teach at the University
of Oklahoma. Michael has written a couple of books about
(08:11):
a famous O Sage writer named John Joseph Matthews. Matthews
wrote a newspaper column and several books, and while Michael
was researching his work and reading hundreds of old newspapers,
he kept seeing Anna LaMotte's name. She was all over
the papers in the early nineteen hundreds, so they described
her as attractive and charming. Anna LaMotte was associated with
(08:32):
political power and Oklahoma State, who had declared a romantic
figure by the press, even amidst their scandals. It turns out,
before Anna LaMotte made it her business to acquire O
Sage land and flip it for a profit, she was
heavily involved with Oklahoma becoming a state, the reason the
Osage Nation and other tribal nations were forced into allotment.
(08:53):
To begin with, She had been married to an Oklahoma
Republican congressman named Bird S. McGuire, who was a lawyer
and a rancher who owned a large acreage, so she
knew about ranching and large land deals. Burn McGuire was
also one of the delegates lobbying for Oklahoma statehood in
the early nineteen hundreds, and op ed from the time,
(09:15):
written by a progressive senator blasted McGuire for taking part
in quote schemes to promote the game of getting the
Indians patrimony into the hands of those who would use
it to quote develop the country. In other words, this
senator was saying statehood for McGuire was about getting native land.
(09:36):
Anna was right alongside Bird McGuire during the push for statehood.
She went with the delegation to Washington, d c. Where
Theodore Roosevelt held a special reception for them in the
East Room of the White House, and upon Oklahoma statehood,
she was presented with the Oklahoma flag. This moment with
the flag is almost cinematic the way the paper writes it.
(09:58):
They're at the Capitol building, the Speaker of the House
presents her with the old flag for Oklahoma Territory. The
paper calls it a valuable relic. Then the speaker hands
Anna another flag, the first date flag for Oklahoma with
a big star and the number forty six on the front.
I imagine a ritualistic kind of a scene, almost kind
(10:19):
of a maternal sort of a symbol, right giving her
those flags like a mother of the state of Oklahoma.
Perhaps a few years after Oklahoma became a state and
the reservations were allotted out, Anna divorced Bird McGuire and
married a Chippawaman named George Lamont. George was a baseball
and football star who later worked at the Office of
(10:40):
Indian Affairs O s Age Agency before becoming a rancher.
When Anna and George Lamont married, they also became business
partners and started leasing and buying O Sage land, a
lot of it. There was a lot of pressure for
O Sages to lease their land to others and then,
in a lot of cases, eventually to sell it two
(11:01):
outside parties. It's important to understand that a lot of
the disconnected parcels of land that Allotman created weren't of
any use to many O Sage families. They weren't big
enough to graze cattle, they were too spread out to
cultivate a real farm. And the whole county was swarming
with outsiders eager to get it. They'd offered to buy
(11:21):
or lease allotments in exchange for cash, cars, anything that
meant they could have control of the land. So allotment
it was a tool Anna and George Lamott were able
to use to start their land business, a business that
would quickly give them control of a massive chunk of
o s Age land by one newspaper's count a third
(11:42):
of the entire county. Remember, this was supposed to be
hard to do. There were those restrictions in place that
meant o stage allottees couldn't sell or lease or mortgage
their land without approval from the government. You heard Katie
Eates Free the real estate Specialist, talk about this a
few episodes back. The restriction is that the federal government,
(12:05):
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they have to basically bless
what you're doing with your property. They're like, okay, is
this in your your best interest what you're doing because
people back in nineteen o six and nineteen eighteen and everything,
we're being taken advantage of. So that's where they came in.
I think that was the whole point, was to have
(12:25):
those restrictions, so that wasn't They weren't leasing to the
neighbor next door for a dollar a year when they
could be getting a hundred dollars a year or something
like that. But Anna and George Lamot skirted those protections.
They got leases and deeds without ever going in front
of a federal official who would make sure the oath
age latte was getting a fair price. Sometimes the leases
(12:47):
were signed by white men who served as guardians for
oath age children. I mean, what it comes down to
is they were making shady deals that had to do
with leasing oth age lands or involving o sage properties.
I guess using sharp practices. They were just dishonest and
how they were working with those sages and that allowed
(13:09):
them to fill their pockets and increase their land base.
So they were kind of in the business of tricking
people into signing over stuff. Yeah, and they were doing
things where they were always supposed to inform the government.
The Department of the Interior was in charge of all this,
so they were kind of doing deals behind the back
of the governments. They were they were ripping off sages
(13:31):
and they were defrauding the government. So the government of
course retaliated when they found out about this, but they
kind of did it a handful of times. They did
it repeatedly. The government first went after Analemma. She was
indicted for signing someone's name on a lease. Her indictment
didn't go over very well in the local press. The
(13:54):
Pahaska Paper characterized it as an attack by federal investigators
who were quote stir r things up around here. The
next year, there was another lawsuit against the Lamtts. This
one brought on behalf of an o Sage woman named
Rose Neil Hill. In that lawsuit, Rose said Anna told
her she was signing a power of attorney, when in
(14:17):
fact Rose was signing over a d to her land.
Rose was trying to undo that transfer and eight others.
In the lawsuit, she said Anna had stolen four thousand
acres of Osage land. That same year, some of the
indictments against the Lamottes were dismissed. A newspaper in nearby
Ponca City wrote, we were mightily pleased to find this
(14:39):
piece of news, but in the Lamottes were on trial again.
This is when the newspapers said the Lamottes claimed to
control roughly a third of the entire county. During one hearing,
George LaMotte told the court we thought we owned the
world and that the O Sage Country was a little kingdom.
(15:00):
Just a few days after his testimony, Anna and George
were found not guilty. According to a newspaper article, the
jury deliberations lasted an hour and a half. As Anna
LaMotte walked into the courtroom, the newspaper said, she quote
smiled confidently at the jurors. They beamingly returned the smile. Eventually,
(15:45):
the US brought a case to prevent the Lamats from
leasing out any more O Sage land. The government one,
but the Lamats appealed. The U. S. Supreme Court ruled
the Lamas had to turn over all leases they had
on restrict did oz Age land. In the decision, the
court wrote that those restrictions were necessary. These allotments, after all,
(16:07):
were in quote scattered tracks without restrictions. The court wrote, quote,
it is certain that improvident and ill advised leases would
be given and multiplied. From what I can tell, Even
after that case, Anna LaMotte kept leasing out land because
according to Jack's biography, he didn't start leasing land from
(16:28):
her until I don't know much about those leases. Jack
tells Terry a lot of his deals with Anna were informal.
They didn't put much in writing. But two years after
the Supreme Court's ruling, the Lamots dissolved their business partnership.
They made notice of it in the paper, the Pasca
Daily Journal. It says, no further business is authorized to
(16:52):
be done in the firm name. All of those transactions
happened pretty quickly, within fifteen years or so of allotment,
and even though a lot of those leases were later canceled,
the Lamottes were able to reshape O s Age County
in that time, giving ranchers access to huge swass of
land that they could use to graze cattle and expand
(17:14):
their operations. There's something else I want to tell you
about the Lamotts, because the Drummonds didn't just buy land
from them. This whole time the Lamottes and the Drummonds
and other big ranchers were buying up land. The oil
(17:36):
underneath all that land was making head right holders some
of the wealthiest people in the world. The same law
that allotted the O Sage Reservation, the nineteen six Act,
it also created the head right system and kept the
mineral estate and trust. But the wording in the nineteen
o six Act only guaranteed it would stay that way
(17:57):
for twenty five years. The policy at the time in
nineteen o six was that we're going to make this law.
This is going to the o s Ages after a
few decades, are going to go away as a sovereign.
Let's get them assimilated. Let's get them out of where
we have any trust obligations to them at all. This
is Wilson pipes them. I am an o Sage head
(18:18):
right holder and a citizen of the Oto, Missouri tribe.
He's an attorney who has represented the oath Age Nation
in the os Age Minerals Council. A lot of Wilson's
work for them goes back to that trust relationship with
the United States, the federal government's obligations to the oath
Age Nation and henright holders. It's not just I trust you,
(18:38):
you trust me. That's this is not that so to me.
The highest piece of this trust relationship is the sovereign
authority of the oas Age Nation. The os Age Allotment
Act is unusual compared to other acts because it has
so much control over so much federal control and superintendence
(19:03):
over O Sage resources. I mean remarkable compared to any
other tribe the United States. So again we embrace that
in some ways because it's created protection, but in other
ways it's caused, you know, significant hardship as well. In
the late nineteen teens, that trust relationship was in jeopardy
because of the wording in the nineteen o six Act.
(19:25):
The oth Age Nation was nearing the end of this
promise that the oil and gas rates beneath the land
would be held in trust by the US on their behalf.
After twenty five years, the subsurface will belong to the
whoever the surface landowner is, and then there won't be
an o Sage tribe as a sovereign that exists anymore.
(19:48):
A lot of the people who came to oath Age
County to buy land thought that they would become the
owners of the mineral rights underneath that land, got all
the oil and gas revenue would no longer go to
head right holders. But os Age leaders pushed to extend
the trust relationship over the mineral estate. They got lawmakers
(20:08):
to introduce a bill that would make sure it wouldn't
go away, that all the proceeds from oil and gas
drilling in Osage County would continue to go into that
big pot and be paid out to head right holders.
But that incensed big landowners who wanted to own the
mineral rights. So some of those landowners formed a group
called the Osage County Homeowners Association. Michael Snyder's written about
(20:31):
them too. So you're not talking about like the homeowners
Association that tells you your grass is too long, right,
I mean there that that might be kind of sinister too,
But this is a group of homeowners and their landowners, bankers, guardians,
other kinds of businessmen. But they were openly doing this.
(20:54):
This was different from the Association's divers alluded to the
men in hominy who are accessing o money through guardianships
and probates. The os Age County Homeowners Association was something bigger,
more formal. Their purpose was to lobby against the bill
that would keep the os Age Mineral State held in
trust for the nation. This is kind of the original
(21:16):
roster of the group. George LaMotte was the president and
um the vice president was Frederick Gentner Drummond. Later Jack
Drummond would also become involved with the home Owners Association.
The Drummond brothers, the Lamotts, and other landowners. They were
all working together to try and end the head right
(21:38):
system so that all the oil and gas rights beneath
the land they owned would go to them, not O
s Age citizens. This was a group made up of
prominent landowners in os Age County at the time. According
to one newspaper article from the most active members were
also guardians. These guardians their job was to protect the
(22:00):
financial interests of their O Sage wards. They were actively
lobbying to end the head right system and the trust
relationship over the mineral estate and their wards means source
of income. They would actually go out and talk to
the landowners and canvas and you know, just try to
persuade them, bring them around to their way of thinking
(22:20):
about this. So yeah, they were. They were aggressive, and
they were they were going out canvassing, and they were
putting um political pressure on on mayors and senators and
so forth. So yeah, they were. They were very vocal,
and until the Sages retaliated, they were just kind of
doing this very openly. The os Age Tribal Council fought
(22:42):
hard against the os Age County Homeowners Association. They launched
their own lobbying campaign, telling lawmakers that the landowners had
gotten the land for cheap, that they knew when they
bought it the mineral rights belonged to the tribe and
the tribal Council was successful. O s Age leaders got
the U. S. Congress to us a law extending the
head right system and the trust relationship. Several years later
(23:07):
it was extended again, and in it was extended one
last time, this time in perpetuity. There really isn't a
lot out there about the Osage County Homeowners Association. It
often gets lost in a lot of the history that's
told about the os Age Nation in the nineteens and
nineteen twenties. A lot happened then, but the Homeowners Association
(23:30):
was a big deal, a very public battle between major
landowners and the os Age Nation over the mineral rights
that had made os Age citizens so wealthy, A battle
fought by a lot of the same men were supposed
to be looking out for O s Age financial interests.
On one of my phone calls with Gettner Drummond, the
lawyer running for Oklahoma Attorney General, I asked him about
(23:52):
the os Age County Homeowners Association whether he knew anything
about it. I was not aware of that. But had
I've been alive, I would have certainly said the law
that was past the nineteen o six should be enforced. Yes,
I would have done that because landowners so think about
it from the buyer. So the buyer is aware because
it's a law right, So you have to impute knowledge
(24:14):
of the law because it's published that if I buy
this land in nineteen twenty, for example, that in five
years I will own the minerals below it. Then you've
detrimentally relied on federal law and probably paid additional consideration
knowing that you would be a mineral estate owner, and
then the law changes in your not so it's really
(24:35):
been a taking, which would be akin to eminent domain.
So yeah, if I were alive back then, I would
have lobbied to not to not change the law. I
would have said keep the law as it is. So,
Getner said he would have made the same legal argument
as earlier Drummonds, that the head rate system and the
trust relationship should have expired, that the nineteen o six
(24:58):
Act should have been the final stay on the map.
That word he used at taking, it's a legal term
from the government takes control of private property. It's worth
mentioning that the o Stage mineral estate is still managed
by the federal government under current law. All the land
that getting our owns, that its siblings and cousins own,
will never come with the oil and gas rights beneath it.
(25:21):
But the land they do have is immensely valuable all
on its own. That's after the break I've told you
about the ways the Drummond brothers were able to acquire
land throughout the nineteen teens and nine twenties, How the
store and probates provided a flow of money, how guardianships
could be used to access pools of os age cash
(25:43):
money the brothers borrowed to buy land, and how the
Lamottes were a source of leases and deeds for more
pastors that could graze cattle. That was a lot of land,
but it doesn't fully explain the miles and miles of
land the Drummond family would ultimately acquire. By the late
nineteen thirties, the German brothers and other ranchers were given
(26:03):
a way to use the land they had to get
more land a new tool from the US government. It
was called the Federal Land Bank and It offered a
cheap and easy way for farmers and ranchers to borrow
money so they could buy land. But you know, without
the Federal Landbank, I would never have been able to
have what I have today because down here the Federal Landbank.
(26:31):
Whenever I needed my block in this ranch, I could
go to the Federal Landbank and put up a piece
of clear land and take the land that I had
buying a pay hard. Jack talks a lot in those
tapes with Terry about finance. He called it the secret
to success in the cattle business because all of the
(26:52):
cattle he and his brothers grazed in the land they got,
they were all assets that could secure loans. Every cow
and every acre could be used as collateral to buy
more cows and more acres. Those loans could be tricky
to get back. Then, the long term mortgage that we
know today wasn't really a thing. Banks weren't comfortable lending
(27:15):
money for that long, especially to farmers and ranchers. Sometimes
their crops wouldn't grow, or their cattle wouldn't gain weight,
and that would affect their ability to pay off the loan.
But without access to capital, farmers and ranchers couldn't buy
their own land, and that flew in the face of
what America was supposed to be about. So the US
(27:35):
government came up with a solution. The elevator pitch is
that at the beginning of the twenty century, a lot
of poor Americans, mainly farmers, didn't have a lot of
access to mortgage credit, and so the government got involved
by creating these new institutions such as the Federal Land
Banks and later Fannie May, to give them more mortgages.
(27:55):
This is Judge Glock. He's not the legal kind of judge.
That's just his first name. It's an old family name. Apparently,
my great great grandfather was a judge, and they keep
passing it down with the futile hope that one of
us will come to judge again someday. Apparently Judge works
for a think tank in Austin, Texas. He wrote a
book about the federal landbanks. It's called The Dead Pledge.
(28:17):
He also spent years as a government contractor doing research
on land rights and tribal nations in Oklahoma. There was
a lot of people that they got their first kind
of steps up in life from these federal land banks
getting tied into these federal land banks gave local individuals
a source of financing that would have been impossible otherwise.
(28:39):
But if you could tie into this big pot of
federal money, then you could really expand your operations kind
of exponentially. The Federal Land Bank was created in the
nineteen teens with twelve regional branches. For the first twenty
years or so, farmers and ranchers in os Age County
couldn't access them. The Federal Land Bank wouldn't give mortgages
(29:00):
on land that didn't come with the mineral rights. But
in the late nineteen thirties, the Federal Land Bank changed
its mind and started lending to landowners in os Age
County even without the mineral rights. This meant the Drummond
brothers no longer had to rely exclusively on private mortgage
companies or the funds they borrow out of Osige accounts.
(29:20):
Now the federal government was there to help them turn
what they'd already bought into even more land. In a way,
these loans were subsidized, They were basically guaranteed by the government,
and unlike commercial banks were local businessmen who loaned out money,
the federal land banks didn't pay taxes on the interest
they collected. This meant they could offer super low interest rates,
(29:42):
sometimes as low as two percent, when a lot of
private sector mortgages came with interest rates that were at
least twice as high. I kept seeing the Federal Land
Bank show up in the ledgers next to the names
of the Drummond brothers and other white ranchers. But I
started to notice these loans were far less common on
and owned Biosh families. Judge told me there were a
(30:03):
couple of reasons for this. The first was that getting
alone was a lot less formal than it is today.
A lot of times someone was approved based on who
they knew, and so you're not going to give loans
to people you don't know, and you know it's this
maybe not surprising. Also had racial implications too. Uh. There
was a lot of complaints from black farmers that they
(30:25):
were getting left out of this, and the same was
true of Indians. A lot of Indians and Native Americans
didn't have these same connections that the big local white
ranchers and uh, white power brokers had, and so that
was instead of creating a different sort of banking structure,
the federal land banks kind of tied into that existing
banking structure, and in that way kind of exacerbated those
(30:49):
problems with local relationships and local power structures. But there
was another reason it was hard for O s H
landowners to access the types of subsidized loans the Drummond
brothers could get the land itself. Allotment land, it came
with those restrictions, so it was difficult that The general
issue was that, like someone else, you needed permission and
(31:13):
from the government to get a Federal land bank mortgage
on allotment, and you needed the government's sign off, which
was often difficult to get. So there was a double
edged sword with these restrictions on allotment land. While they
provided some protection from people like the Lamots, they also
made the land less valuable from a financial perspective because
it was harder for os Age landowners to use it
(31:35):
to borrow money and expand their own landholdings. The Federal
Land Bank was just yet another example of how US
policies tilted the playing field. Toured wide landowners and worked
to strip the os Age Nation and other tribal nations
of their land and wealth, selling on credit, administering estates,
(32:07):
overseeing the finances of people deemed incompetent getting access to
cheap debt from the government, all programs that worked to
enrich a handful of white men, all of them further
in what allotments started. By the time the federal landbanks
came around, the Drummond brothers were able to turn an
already sizeable ranching business into something extraordinary. They were given
(32:32):
a huge advantage over o s age landowners, the ability
to access cheap debt to expand their ranches. Over the
last hundred years, the extended Drummond family has leveraged their
land position over and over again to grow the family businesses.
I asked Evan Pendleton, another reporter at Bloomberg who covers well,
(32:54):
to calculate what that land would be worth today. She
called around to appraiser is familiar with those age Annie
looked at recent transactions. When she added it all up,
she found that the land owned by present day Drummonds
has an estimated value of at least two hundred seventy
five million dollars. And I want to be clear, that's
not the nutworth of the Drummond family, and it doesn't
(33:16):
include any mortgages on the land. But that number, it
shows how valuable this land can be how valuable real
estate can be having an asset that appreciates over time
that you can borrow off of land covered in blue
stem grass, some of the best in the world for
grazing cattle. Seeing our first truck in like seven last spring,
(33:52):
I drove out to a ranch owned by Jack Drummond's grandson.
His name's Joe Bush. He's a rancher. Once to turn
off the county road, it's gravel. Blue stem grass stretches
as far as the eye can see. This grass is
what makes ranch land profitable here, even if you don't
own the mineral rights. When I got to Joe's house,
(34:17):
I parked near a huge tree. Hundreds of birds were
sitting in the branches tripping. It was a clear day.
The blue sky made the grass look even more golden
than usual. Joe took me to a picnic table on
his back porch. I stepped over a campaign sign on
my way in. This was a few months before the primary,
(34:38):
before Getner became the Republican nominee. Is the attorney general sign?
Is that for Getner? Yeah? Do you think you go
on this time? I don't know. Oklahoma's are very corrupt.
I spent a couple of hours with Joe at his ranch.
(34:59):
He named it Tower Hills after a phone tower on
the property. It's more than seven thousand acres and all
a lot of land for most people, but on the
smaller side as drumm and ranches go. He had the
cattle brand stitched on the front of his boots, a
lower case tea within each coming out at the bottom. Well.
When I moved up here, I had thirty thousand dollars
(35:20):
and a two wheel drive pickup and my family inherited
seven thousand acres, but there was a mortgage on it
and almost got starved at that first year. Um and
the cell tower guy came along and offered me a
(35:42):
hundred five dollars months, which was the difference between food
and no food. So took the food. So I had
to come up with a brand from my cattle, and
I took my father's brand, which was the thh which
for him stood for Timber Hill. And because I had
(36:06):
a tower right named it Tower Hills plural because there's
more than one hill. So that's the short story. Joe
smoked cigarettes on his porch while he told me what
he knew about his grandfather and his great uncle's like
getting her. He grew up driving around with his older
(36:27):
family members looking out at the pastures, learning the history
of who this land came from, how the family business worked.
Some of Joe's land Jack bought from Anna Lamott. When
I first talked to Joe a few weeks before he met,
I asked if he had heard of Anna LaMotte. Joe
told me he had. Mrs LaMotte was the she ran
(36:49):
the laundry in Pahushka, And Mrs LaMotte is the person
that he got all his pasture from for that first
deer deal that he did. In fact, that pasture where
the tower is, he got that pasture from her. Do
you know how she got it? No idea. I'm sure
(37:13):
it's in my abstracts, but no, I don't know. I
just know that, you know, grandfather said that was Mrs
LaMotte's pastor. You know she got in a fair amount
of trouble at one point. No, I don't know anything
about her except she ran the London match. Yeah, I
(37:34):
can send you, I can send you the case. Um. Basically,
she was accused and indicted for like convincing people to
sign deeds, saying that they were powers of attorney, but
then she would take control of the land, saying they
were power of attorney but they were deeds. No, I'm
(37:57):
not familiar with that. And in the in the tapes
your grandfather he said something about he said she would
just get it for nothing. She would he said the
words steel. I had not heard when when he did
(38:17):
talk about Mrs Lamott, she was somebody that he looked
up to. And I don't recall him saying anything about
her being shady with the Indians. I mean, you know
more about her than I do. Yeah, I can, I
can share it with you. I guess I didn't know
(38:38):
um when grandfather first described her, said she was the
washer woman. And he did say she was wearing an
apron because he said she'd dried her hands on her
apron and shook his hand. So I did get that detail.
But he told you that when you were driving one day,
(39:02):
he was talking about how he started in the ranching
business and how lucky he was and he, you know,
took a risk and it worked out. I brought some
other documents I had that involved Jack Drummond, including some
of the transcripts from the tapes where he talks about
Lamott and the store and the shirts. Some other public
(39:23):
documents on guardianships, like the notes from that conversation between
Jack and Fred Gettner that mentioned borrowing money from myrown
being's account to buy the bill Hale land. We looked
over them together. Did did he have any suspicions? I mean,
did you according to this, he did have suspicions about
getting er um. Did he ever talk to you about
(39:45):
those suspicions? Are those concerns? No? No, he very rarely
talked about getting her at all. And just like I've
heard from other family members, Joe said he never knew
his grandfather to be anything but an honorable man. He
didn't know about a lot of what I was telling
him about the guardianships or the probates. He didn't know
(40:08):
there was an undertaking business either. He said he had
heard about the silk shirts, but said his grandfather was
proud to have found a market for something unique that
associage customers really wanted. Because, like I mean, just asking
around about the Drummonds, like you do, hear a fair
amount of people who have always been told in their
families that the Drummonds got their land by, you know,
(40:33):
taking land as collateral at the from the store or
using guardianships or stuff like that. I'm just curious, like,
has anyone ever confronted you about that or have you
ever heard that? I have not. That doesn't mean something
didn't happen, that somebody has hurt Falane over So what
(40:55):
does it mean to you to be a Drummond today?
Like it's such, it's a name that care is a
lot of wait here in os Age County, right, it does?
It does the Drummonds. It's a mixed blessing. You know,
some of the Drummonds have done someone scrupulous things and
(41:16):
so he got to suffer through a little ill will. Um.
But I don't know, you know, there's people that feel
like they were swindled or you know, things didn't work
out or um. I don't know. There there's resentment among
(41:42):
people that are trying to build ranches because Drummonds somehow
always got there first, you know, but they didn't get
there first, right, the tribe got here first. So I'm
just like, I'm curious, like how this all mechanically worked. Well,
(42:03):
you read the book. They actually were successful at ranching.
They made money, and then they spent the money buy
in Land. I mean that's that's the magic of the
Oh sage is that stairs game weight real good in
one summer. So I know we've taken a lot of
(42:24):
your time. I'm kind of curious, like what you're thinking
about all this? Do you do want to know more
about kind of what I'm fascinated by what you're doing here,
and I still don't. I don't know that you're gonna
hit hey Eureka moment in your research. Maybe you will
(42:47):
when you said you don't think I'm going to have
a Eureka moment, Like what do you mean by that?
I don't think you'll find a cut and dried um
him and stole land from Indians because I don't think
they did. I think they actually did pay for it. Now,
there may have been some shenanigans with the guardianship and
(43:12):
then it would be between that particular guardian and that
particular Indian, but I think they were just as far
as my grandfather went, he felt like he was just
extraordinarily lucky that he he had the resources, he was
able to put him together, and when he shipped his cattle,
(43:35):
he made money. Joe Bush was right. There hasn't been
a single Eureka moment covering this, not at the National
Archives in Fort Worth, for the County Courthouse in downtown Pahuska,
no one conversation that revealed the true scope of just
how this one family got so much boost each land,
(43:55):
because there was no single strategy that built the drum
And Ranching Empire, not one document or one transaction that
landed the families so much land. Instead, there was allotment, guardianships,
the store years of access to power and influence in
Osage County, with other ranchers, guardians, and government officials all
(44:17):
playing a role. A lot of this at a time
when the policies in place incentivized O Sage families to sell,
either to access money they couldn't otherwise or pay off
a debt. In many cases, the land was already out
of O Sage hands when the Drummond brothers got it.
In a way, the story of the Drummond Brothers rise
(44:38):
is the story of allotment, the story of a system
that gave white settlers away in that allowed Oklahoma to
become a state, that expanded the United States as a whole,
and built the country we know today. But that's far
from all of the story because despite centuries of hostile
US policies in boarding schools that tried to stamp out
(45:01):
Native cultures, O s age leaders and citizens never stopped
fighting for the tribe's culture. It's financial independence and its
sovereignty working against and within those systems to find a
way forward over the last few decades. Those efforts set
up the stage nation to do something it couldn't for
a long time by the land back. That's next time
(45:26):
on In Trust. For maps, newspaper archives, photos, and other
documents related to this episode, go to Bloomberg dot com.
Slash in Trust. In Trust is a production of Bloomberg
and I Heart Media. It's reported and hosted by me
(45:47):
Rachel Adams Heard. Additional reporting by Allison Edita, Devin Pendleton,
in Linley Lynn Davis. Land is our senior producer. Samantha
Story is our executive producer. Jeff Grocott is our senior editor.
Additional editing by Francesco Levi and Daniel Ferrara. Additional production
(46:07):
by Victor Evayaz, Production support from Geoldo to Carly, Sound
engineering by Blake Naples, fact checking by Molly Nugent. Theme
music by Laura Worman Photography by Shane Brown. The book
we mentioned by Michael Snyder is called Our O. S. H. Hills.
You can email us at podcast at Bloomberg dot net.
(46:31):
Find in Trust anywhere you get your podcasts.
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