The Osage Price

The Drummonds’ story, and a lot of the family’s early wealth and influence in Osage County, grew from one of their first businesses here, a store that the family patriarch took over in the early 1900s. It sold everything from flour to caskets. Much of it on credit. But the store had another function: It provided its owners financial leverage over Osage customers, in life and in death. Learn more and see bonus material from the episode: https://bloom.bg/3Lp8xZB. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Come trade with me. Those are the words that brought
the Drummond family to Oklahoma and os Age County. Frederick
Drummond came to the fot. What you're hearing is the
introduction to an oral history series called Voices of Oklahoma.
All sorts of famous people from the state are interviewed.
An Olympic gymnast, a neurosurgeon, a survivor of the Holsa

(00:24):
Race massacre, and one of the Drummonds. The Drummand name
runs thick in the vast ranch lands of Osage County.
The branches of the family trade cousins, brothers, uncles, are
extensive in story. This is an interview with Frederick Ford Drummond.
He inherited part of that one fourth the head right
and left it to his son for Drummond you heard

(00:45):
from him in the last episode. In this interview, Ford's
dad is talking about his grandfather, Frederick Drummond, a Scottish
immigrant who brought the family to the o s Age
Reservation in eighty six. He got a job as a
trader in Sky had a license from the government to
sell goods to os Ages. Later, he moved the family

(01:05):
to Harmony, where he ran another store called the Harmony
Trading Company, and that was the super walmart of os
Age County at that time. They had everything from groceries,
two ladies and gents, furnishings, shoe department, hardware department, furniture department, groceries.

(01:25):
They had everything that you needed to be a farmer
or a rancher. At that time it was a pretty
big deal. And even if you needed to be buried,
they also had coffins that you could get. I thought
that was always kind of funny all the old trading
companies that if they had a furniture store, they were
usually in the morticians as well. This is a story.

(01:50):
The family tells a lot that Frederick Drummond and his boys, Cecil,
bred Guttner and Jack built up their ranching empire while
running a trading post. Cecil was the rancher, Red Genner
was the businessman. Jack was both, but more of a speculator.
They were ranchers and cattlemen, but they were also bankers
and traders, community members how to stay in local politics.

(02:17):
When we went to Harmony, it was adust to Indian
trading posts on the banks of Harmony Creek. I imagine
it was about something like fifty people. Jack Drummond tells
the origin story too in those tapes with his biographer,

(02:38):
talks about how his father bought the Harmony Trading Company
and moved the family there right before alhatment. Jack gives
a bit more detail about how it actually all worked,
how the families saw themselves. How he kept his story
going was the Indian payments. So he knew that he
could speak in He could speak the Oss tongue, and
my brother Gevernor learned to speak the Os tongue all

(03:00):
who because he was going to be in the store
and you were in the store when the oil boom.
He had out there right and they were getting those fabulous,
fabulous checks in the year. The year I was in
I had the men's furnishing in the shoe department. Jack
started working in the store around nineteen oil production in

(03:22):
O s Age County had taken off, had right, payments
were huge. Jack ran the men's department. Their dad had
died by then, so his boss was his older brother,
Fred Gettinger Drummond. I understand that the O s Age
back in those days was an area of big parties
and there was a fabulous social life going. Only not

(03:43):
not not with the white people. For the Indians. I've
always heard about golf clubs and no fabulous party, that's all, Bess.
I don't believe it. I don't believe no, no, no, no, no,
no no no. Don't ever get that in your book
because it's not so okay. That's what I want to
get cleared up. No, no, Terry, the white people never never,

(04:07):
never had anything like that. It will only these Indians.
But they had this Indian payment money. It was so
much so lavish. Jack'saw an opportunity in all that wealth,
you can share it. In this story, he tells about
a dispute with his brother Fred Getner around December. Jack

(04:29):
and Fred Getner would fight a lot over the years,
but this story it was because of the store, about
a bonus check fred Getner wouldn't give to Jack. He
was so mad about it. Almost sixty years later, bona
state came and he would call run Cluck at a
time up to his office on the deck there in
the Homony Trading Company, and they even Tom came up.

(04:53):
He hadn't called on me. So I went up to
his office and I said, Gutner, I've been waiting for
you to Paul all day, you give me my brother
set where I said, Jack said, we don't think you
earned one. Well, the year before that men's department in
the shoe department had lost something like thirty thousand dollars.

(05:16):
And the year it was under my control, my management,
I may earn something like fifty thousand dollars. So Jack
saying he really turned things around for the men's department
an additional eighty thousand dollars in revenue. He goes on
to explain how, for example, on silk shirts, I found

(05:37):
a manufacturing outfits would make silk shirts th big unions
up to just two fifty four, even fifty six sizes.
But those shows would cost us and maybe six or
eight dollars a shirt, and now I'll get fifty or
sixty dollars a shirt. They didn't care what the what
the costs of the shirt was because they were getting

(05:59):
big old stage payments in those times. So when I
found out about these indians won't and then I got
the merchandize sold them to a little tremendous profit. Well, anyway,
he didn't give me those shirts. He says it would
cost about six to eight dollars for him to get one,

(06:19):
but he jacked up the prices. He charged stage customers
more than would have cost him to source the shirts
for reference. Paying sixty dollars for a shure is like
paying almost a thousand dollars today. They couldn't get him
anywhere else and the Old States except there at that store,
Right boy, I really charged him part. I will getting
them service, but I'll make them pay for it. The

(06:46):
main thing was it was just too much money. It
was just an incredible, fantastic amount of money here in
Oil no Stage count eat back then, all the swindlers
and con artists in the world or flock o Sage County.
This is John Maker. He's a citizen of the os
Age Nation. I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, raised in Harmony, Oklahoma,

(07:11):
where my family allotments are. I wanted to talk to
John because as I've been reporting this story, his family's
come up a lot in records related to the Drummonds,
both on his mom's side and his dad's side. John's
family has been in Hominy for more than a century.
Back then, they would have shopped at the Harmony Trading Company.

(07:34):
By the time John was born in the nineteen fifties,
the name had been changed to the Pioneer Store. I mean,
everybody just knew, and there was an O Saze prize
when you go to the store. When I asked John
about the store, he told me about a time growing
up when what he had always heard about the Hominy
Trading Company became reality right in front of him. That's

(07:55):
because of a little experiment his family tried. This was
in the sixties when he is in high school. His
mother's aunt was in town for a visit, and my
mom told her and said, well, you know, we need
to go to the town and get some material, sub
ribbon stuff to make our Indian dance shirts for me.
My brother, John says his mom's aunt was white and

(08:16):
sometimes she'd come to stay in Hominy for the summer.
One day, on one of those trips, the family loads
up in the car and heads to the store, and
John's mom asked her aunt for a fever. My mom said,
I want you to go in here and get this stuff.
Here's the list, she said, but if I go, they're
gonna charge me more. And my aunt she's got and
she didn't believe it. Oh, now, Dad, that they can't

(08:39):
do that here she said yes. He said, come on,
I'll pray it to you. So Mom went in there
and got this same stuff, same list. And then my aunt,
the Scottish woman, white woman, she went in the same stuff.
It was like half price, and my aunt was just
like flabber gas, like she couldn't believe it. It was

(09:01):
really true. And this was at the Hominy Trading Store.
When I was growing up, it was called the Pioneer Store.
That was just a common practice. M hmm. Everybody knows
it opsae price. I don't know how big the markup

(09:22):
was for os age customers. That's not clear from some
of the old ledgers I've seen the overcharging. It wasn't
exclusive to the Drummond store. Historians and researchers have documented
how merchants were able to profit off Native American wealth
across Indian country. I have talked to descendants of the
Drummond brothers about the store getting her Drummond the lawyer

(09:44):
told me that at one point he had looked through
the ledgers and didn't see anything that looked like exploitation.
Another Drummond, Jack's grandson told me he had heard about
the silk shirts from his grandfather, but he was always
proud of them. He found something his O s Age
customers wanted, he was able to source it for them,
like a luxury good. But the os Age price, I've

(10:05):
heard about it over and over again. Did you ever
hear anything about the Drummonds growing up? Did your family
ever talk about something? No, we just knew they had
a lot of land around, and of course every like
secretly like, well, you know how they got their land?
You know, they cheated and did get these out sides
to run up these big, outrageous bills. If they were
true or not, I don't know, but it seems to

(10:28):
be pretty unscrupulous. But in those days it was accepted
as good business pacts. Well, he's a good businessman now,
That's that's why they become so wealthy. If you look
at the Stage County Platt book, there's about five pages
of Drummonds, all druming, well, how must land they owned

(10:48):
in O Sage County. The thing about the Drummond family
story that Frederick and his boys were shop owners and
that's how they got their start. That's true in a way,
But what it leaves out, and what I've learned from
talking to families and digging up hundreds of historical records.
Is that the how Many Trading Company and other trading

(11:09):
post in os Age County the foundation for a lot more.
They put merchants in a position of financial power over
Osge customers, power that could be built on over the
years to gain money, influence, and land. This is in trust.
I'm Rachel Adams heard in that oral history recording with

(11:39):
Frederick Ford Drummond, the one I played for you at
the beginning, he kind of laughs about the story selling
coffins and serving as morticians, but that part of the
business was pretty big. It's another instance where you see
the how Many Trading Company charging a lot of money.
I know this because the how Many Trading Company keeps
coming up in my research. But not as a general store,

(12:02):
as an undertaker they advertised in the paper one ad
promised in Bamber's quote constantly in attendance, even overnight. I
also saw the Homny Trading Company was undertaking and the
records I pulled on no meat say he the o
Sage woman who is married to Ovi Pope. It was

(12:22):
her head right shares. Ovi Pope sold to Jack Drummond.
I saw something on her death certificate below where someone
wrote unknown where her parents names were supposed to be.
It was the line for the undertaker how many trading
company is written and cursive. Jack Drummond not only acquired
nor Meat say he's head rights, but his family's store

(12:44):
handled her funeral arrangements when she died while the Pope
brothers were keeping her daughter in Colorado, and normats say
He's probate file the pages and pages that went into
settling her estate. I could see how much that funeral
cost three thousand, two hundred dollars, as well as more
than nine hundred dollars for a note outstanding debt at

(13:06):
the store account for inflation. That's the equivalent of seventy
dollars that the Homony Trading Company charged. And no meat
say he's a state. Since I saw the Homony Trading
Company was an undertaker, I've been looking out for it
in other probate files and dust certificates. I've seen it
on several others too. Yea, I sai here that famous picture.

(13:31):
Charles meat Chetzi is John Maker's great grandfather. The Drummond
store handled his funeral services. John had pictures of a
lot of his family. We talked about this photo. It's
black and white, a three quarter profile. Meat Chetzi is
wearing a traditional stage hairstyle and clothing. John told me
the picture shows up in some prominent books about the

(13:53):
stage nation. This is a famous photograph everybody loves and
I like, say, dr Baby Baby. He used this his
likeness on the cover his book. And then when I
was over in France, this this professor. I stay with
them for a week in Paris and she asked me
she could use this on her book. It's all in France.

(14:14):
Writings said. I saw Charles meat Chutsi's name when I
was looking through the records at the Drummond Collection, the
archive outside of Oklahoma City, with those tapes of Jack
and all his financial records. There was a claim from
the store for his funeral, dated September. By this point,
the Homedy Trading Company had expanded the mortuary business to

(14:38):
a whole separate building called the Hominy Funeral Home. The
local paper wrote it up, calling it a modern city feature.
Apparently it was pretty unusual to see a funeral home
in a small town like Comedy. When Charles meat Chutsy died,
the claim for his funeral came from the Drummond store
and the new funeral home. The bill is itemized cost

(15:00):
looking down for the funeral dinner, cooking utensils, dishes, as
well as undertaking services this funeral dinner, it's like, well,
I see like the casket, harmony, comfugia, home, casketball, embalming,
grave digging services complete people with fifty dollars, which seems

(15:24):
like not much in today's today's would say funeral with
the big dinner, the feast for two hundred people, a
nice casket, probably around eight thousand dollars. Together, the claims
came out to two thousand seven dollars thirteen cents, tens
of thousands of dollars in today's money. It's an incredible

(15:47):
amount of money even in those times, because those days
were simple days, and how could something really be that
expensive back then? So it wasn't just shirts that were

(16:10):
marked up. Caskets and embalming and all the other stuff
that went into a funeral were way more expensive than
they were supposed to be. At one point, a US
lawmaker heard about the thousands of dollars that o sages
were charged for funerals. He said the practice was quote
even worse than the Teapot Dome case, which at that

(16:31):
time was considered the biggest political scandal in US history.
And the debts and a lot of the probate files
I've looked through weren't just from funerals. They were for
everyday shopping before the person died too o s Age
customers could o trading companies hundreds of dollars, sometimes even thousands.

(16:55):
But it wasn't just the funeral debt that stuck out
to me when reading about Charles me Chetsi, because the
Drummonds had another role when it came to his affairs
and meet Chetzy's probate. The man signing off on the
store's claims and saying the debt was legitimate was Jack Drummond.
That's because Jack was the administrator of meet Chetzi's estate.

(17:17):
This is a role that exists today. It's called an
administrator if you die without a will, an executor if
you die with one. Either way, that person is in
charge of vetting and paying all your debts and distributing
everything you have left to your heirs. Meet Chetsy's estate
wasn't the only time one of the Drummond brothers approved

(17:37):
a claim from their own store. In fact, this happened
three times in John Maker's own family. In addition to
Charles meet Chetzi, John's other great grandfather and his great
grandmother both had claims from the Hominy Trading Company. After
they died. Jack's brother, Fred Gettner, was the administrator of
their estates. In all, Fred Gittner alone hand at least

(18:00):
twenty eight oh Sage estates. So the Drummond brothers were
running the store that was claiming all these debts when O.
S Ages died, and then they put on a different
hat and approved payment to the store. Once the estate
was settled, the government would pay the Hominy Trading Company
from O. Sage accounts at the Office of Indian Affairs,

(18:22):
and when it was all said and done, whoever handled
the estate would get an administrator's fee. Depending on how
big the estate was, that fee could be up to
a couple of thousand dollars. Any oh stage, at least
you know, in my family, in my community, any o
stage that anyone thought might have the propensity or the

(18:44):
ability to become a lawyer, um, they encouraged them to
go to law school. And it was because of all
of the shenanigans that went on with the probate process.
This is Elizabeth Loha Homer. She's a citizen of the
Aage Nation. She's from Cominy. Elizabeth, as a lawyer, worked
for the os Age Nation for a while, then went

(19:07):
to the Department of Justice, then the Department of Interior.
Now she runs a law firm in d C. She's
also on the os Age Nations Supreme Court. I asked
Elizabeth if what I was seeing in the records was normal,
if the people administering estates could be on both sides
of it approving their own claims, because it seemed like
a pretty obvious conflict of interest. Oh, I would think

(19:29):
that that would definitely be a conflict of interest, an
unwavable conflict of interest. In other words, there are conflicts
of interest that can be waived. You know, I can say, oh, client,
I have a conflict of interest with this. You know,
would you waive that conflict of interests? And there are
some conflicts of interests that a client can wave, and

(19:51):
then there are conflicts of interests that a client can't wave.
And in this case, this is a conflict of interest
within a state right and so it should not be waived.
You know, if you've got a claim on the estate,
then you know, there are plenty of other people that
can administer that estate. It doesn't have to be you.
And the issue is that you're not able to give

(20:13):
it the proper examination to vet its legitimacy. No, it's
your classic conflict of interest. You have a pecuniary interest
in the subject matter. Pecuniary interest. In other words, you're
financially motivated. It is kind of consistent with a bad
behavior that we've seen through the twentieth century. I was

(20:34):
starting to see how the store gave the Drummonds power.
It was a store, yes, but it was also a
major lender, a pseudo financial institution, and the Drummonds and
other local merchants, they weren't just shopkeepers, they were debt collectors.
You just go and you would be issued you know,
an account, a credit account, and then you would just

(20:55):
you know, just like you do now. You didn't necessarily
have to have a credit card. You just went there
and you'd sign your book and that was That was
not at all at all unusual, even during my childhood.
I want to take a moment here to make clear
that the o Stage nation is far from the only
tribal nation whose citizens became indebted to traders and merchants.

(21:17):
In May of the Department of Interior released the initial
results of a massive investigation into federal policies affecting Native Americans.
The focus was on Indian boarding schools, but the report
covers so much more. That investigation highlights a private letter
from Thomas Jefferson, a letter that shows how this whole

(21:40):
credit system at trading companies dates back to the early
eighteen hundreds and how Native American debts were part of
an explicit strategy to make it easier for the government
to get Native land. Jefferson wrote the letter in eighteen
o three to William Henry Harrison, who at the time
was in charge with negotiating with tribal nations over land boundaries.

(22:03):
Jefferson writes that the US will quote push our trading
houses and be glad to see the good and influential
individuals among them run in debt. He goes on, because
we observe that when these debts get beyond what the
individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off
by a session of lands. This letter was written a

(22:26):
hundred years before Frederick Drummond took over the Hominy Trading
Company before the Osage Reservation was allotted. But what this
report said was that Jefferson strategy would go on to
inform the future of federal Indian law and policy. O
Sage families vowed about one million dollars to bankers and

(22:46):
merchants across the county. The Drummonds, included US lawmakers, caught
wind they held hearings about it. What I didn't understand
at first, and what I hoped Elizabeth could explain, was
why there was all this for the Drummonds to collect
on in the first place. Both ages, at least those
who had head rights, they were supposed to be the

(23:06):
richest people in the world. The store was charging a lot,
but was it so much that oth Age customers couldn't
pay their bill? Elizabeth said this was all made worse
by how Congress decided head right money should be distributed.
I mean there's all kinds of of references in the
hearing record of members of the Congress will they don't work,

(23:29):
you know, and they've got all this money and they're
like children, you know, which is like not true. I mean,
we were the first ones to you know, kind of
adopt these policies of you know, of understanding very sophisticated
legal principles of retaining the subsurface to state. When we
allotted the surface the state of our reservation, I mean

(23:51):
that was pretty slick, right, That is pretty smart. And
yet the talk amongst the powers that be or the
people the local community is like their children, and they
don't know how to manage their money and they're squandering it.
And so, you know, there was legislation the early nine

(24:12):
twenties that actually limited the amount of money that osages
could draw down courtly. They limited to like a thousand dollars.
I mean, you might have a state worth tens of
thousands of dollars, but you could get a thousand dollars
per quarter. And so like the whole merchant community kind
of adapted to that. These hearings over oh Sage fund

(24:34):
restrictions continued into the mid nineteen twenties. Some O s
Age leaders said they were in favor of the restrictions.
They saw them as a way to protect their people
from losing land and money, but others fought against them.
They wrote to Congress sent telegrams. One former chief named
Bacon Ryan told Congress that families wanted to be able

(24:55):
to build houses or remodel their homes. Others were sick
or getting old and needed to be able to access
their money. In those hearings, US politicians were primarily focused
on O Sage spending, even though, as Bacon Rhyn pointed out,
their spending was just like that of other wealthy people.

(25:15):
Who was that hearing from with the inspector named HS Trailer.
He's the one who called O s Age spending sinful.
And I'm bringing him up again because in the middle
of his racist rant, Trailer lists off dozens of families
with hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of debt to
trading companies, including the Hominy Trading Company, and some of

(25:38):
these names I recognized because I had seen them before.
When I started trying to figure out how the Drummonds
got land, I made copies of the original plat maps

(25:59):
from when the O. S H and Sation was allotted.
They're blue, divided into thousands of little pieces. Each one
has a name inside of an O s Age citizen
who received that allotment. After the nineteen o six Act,
I started coloring all the parcels that the Drummonds owned
today with a pink highlighter. That way I knew when
an o s Age name came up whether the Drummonds

(26:20):
ended up with their land. And what I saw was
that some of the names of os Age families who
were in debt to the store had also at some
point had their allotment dated to the Drummonds. The Osage

(26:43):
County Courthouse. This is tape from one out of a
dozen days I spent inside the Osage County Courthouse in
the land office trying to figure out how a lot
of these pink allotments ended up in the hands of
the Drummonds. You can smell the paint out here. This
particular day, the courthouse was repainting the land office. The

(27:04):
walls used to be wood paneling, now they're whitewashed. This
day all the phone and internet cords were strung across
the office floor, secured with scotch tape. That's strong. Hi,
looks so good in here minus the smell, minus the cords. Yes, sorry,

(27:24):
I almost really messed that up. Land in o Sage
County is divided into big square chunks like a grid.
The columns are called townships and the rows are called ranges.
Each township and range has a ledger organized by smaller
areas called sections, which lists each piece of land and

(27:45):
everyone who owned it over time. To figure out what
happened with each of those transactions, you have to grab
another book. These books are stacked around the Land Office
from Florida ceiling. They're stored on rollers covered in hard
more in plastic, full of warranty deeds, sheriff's deeds, quit
claim deeds, all the various ways property can be transferred

(28:07):
from one person to another. I'm telling you this because
I want you to understand how difficult it is to
know what exactly happened to any given piece of allotment land.
Each O Sage citizen received just over sixty acres of land,
but that land was spread out over multiple plots that
could be dozens of miles away from each other. A

(28:28):
lot of them weren't anywhere near a road, making them
practically inaccessible. It's just one way allotment was rigged against
the O Stage Nation from the start. Tracking the chain
of ownership after allotment is dizzy ng It takes a
long time. At the end of it, you only have
a few sparse details about what happened, but there's another

(28:49):
reason tracking all this down is difficult. The three Drummond brothers,
they were also putting land in each other's and even
other people's names. Terry asked Jack about this in the tapes.
He brings up that time Jack got scammed out of
a bunch of money on a trip to Chicago. Yeah,
around the time of the robbery. It seems like you
transferred an awful lot of land into other people's names,

(29:12):
boring into my life. Well, you put four thousand acres
in George Smith's name. Oh yeah, but that was the
protected coward built knew all about that, right, You put Uh,
I'm not sure how many acres into the wife's name,
either seven thousand or nine. Those are the only two.
And then you put land in cecils. No, those three

(29:34):
those that run, But that took care of. Almost all
of your land was in somebody else's name by the
end of nineteen two or by the beginning and night. Yeah,
by the end of that right. So not only were
they trying to track land transfers from a hundred years ago,
but I was trying to track land transfers from a
hundred years ago that were constantly changing hands and purposely

(29:56):
being put in other people's names, but act to the
names and the Congressional hearing the O Sage families who
owed the Homony Trading Company money. As I looked through
the ledgers, I realized that some of them hadn't just
run up a tab buying groceries and other goods. In
the years after allotment, some O Sage families mortgage their land.

(30:17):
They used their allotments to secure loans, except mortgages from
the bank weren't really a thing at the time, so
the loans came from local businessmen, including the Homony Trading Company,
and some of those same families that owed the store
money for everything for mortgages, to groceries to funerals. They
later needed their land to the Drummond Brothers. I looked

(30:39):
through a ton of these deeds. It's really hard to
tell if the land was being sold because of the
debt or if I was just seeing two different ways
O Sage families were trying to access their money at
a time when the government was restricting a lot of
it loans from the store and cash from selling land.
But I found at least one case where the connection
looked pretty clear. There was an O s Age family

(31:01):
who owed the Hominy Trading Company a lot of money
by early and months later they needed one hundred sixty
acres to one of the Drummond brothers. The price was
significantly less than what other nearby land was going for.
Maybe they were getting ripped off, or maybe the land
was being used to settle a debt. My name is

(31:24):
Katie Yates Free and I'm currently a realty specialist for
the Osige Nation, but I'm here on my own accord.
I have to say that Katie doesn't work for the
os Age Nation anymore. But when she did, her job
involved looking at land deals all day Lisa's sales. There's
still a pretty complicated set of rules the US government
has for a lot of O s Age land. Katie

(31:46):
helped people navigate that system. You're a steward of the
property for those owners on behalf of the federal government,
to basically safeguard their properties for them. I showed some
of the documents I found to Katie, the Congression old
testimony mentioning that one family's debt and then the d
to their land that came a few months later. It's
the grand total of the amount spent by this family

(32:08):
in four months for sustenance. So this is your rations
and stuff, sustenance and clothing amounts. It totaled four thousand,
five hundred thirty seven dollars and seventy cents. So what
history has taught us My grandma would say is that
the white man prizes at the O stage price that
d dollars is equal to more than eighty five thousand
dollars in today's money. Half of it was oot to

(32:31):
the Hominy Trading Company, half to other stores. The bill
was wracked up over just four months. I showed Katie
the ded too, the one that transferred one hundred sixty
acres of this family's land to Cecil Drummond a few
months later. The d doesn't say the exact price, but
the tax is paid on the sale indicate that it
sold for less than five hundred dollars total. So hundred

(32:54):
sixty acres for at most five hundred dollars is that low? Yeah?
I would have hope a hundred and sixty acres would
be worth more than five because if you think about
that bill, was how many sixty acre parcels had to
be sold to rectify that? What do you make of

(33:15):
that they were businessmen. I mean, it's no different than
business today. People just I don't think realized that it
happened here and it's happened for so long and people,
I mean they were ahead of their time and these
kind of um practices. I should say, it's we still

(33:40):
deal with stuff like this today. Yeah, you're not going
to find a lot of people around here that are
going to talk about the Drummonds. Why is that it's
a big name. But I'm not I'm not reading this wrong,
am I hate didn't want to answer that question on tape,

(34:02):
Maybe because we don't have a lot of information about
why these things happen, only that they did. Things don't
add up if you start looking back into history and
you can't make it out up. In my opinion, I've tried,
and you can try to put all the pieces of

(34:23):
the puzzle together, but they don't match. So it's an
incomplete history. It's probably incomplete on purpose, but yeah, that's incomplete.

(34:50):
Selling a lotment land like this was supposed to be hard.
In the nineteen o six Act went into effect, it
placed the land into something called restricted status. These were
protections meant to keep oath age families from being targeted
in schemes to get their land. The restriction is that
the federal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, would they

(35:11):
have to basically bless what you're doing with your property.
They're like, okay, is this in your best financial or
your best 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 leasing for fifty cents or
whatever it is, you know. So that's where they came in.

(35:32):
I think that was the whole point was to have
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 there was a way around those restrictions,
something called a certificate of competency. The government by default
considered oath Ages and other Native Americans to be, in

(35:54):
the government's words, incompetent and wouldn't let them handle their
own affairs. But a certificate of competency meant they could
have those restrictions removed, and in the years after, a
lot meant a lot of oath Age adults applied for
those certificates. So people will get their certificate to compsy
and it worked for some people. They would get it.

(36:15):
It's a very simple. They can do whatever they want
with their land. They may put a mortgage on it,
get a business, go and pay that mortgage off and
be completely successful. A huge ranch operation, you never know,
but I don't know very many that have done that.
For oth age adults with certificates of competency, the majority
of their land was no longer restricted. It could be mortgaged,

(36:36):
like the loans I saw in the courthouse were sold
when families needed cash. In Jack's biography, Terry writes that
Jack one time financed an o s Age wedding, provided
a wedding ring, a new pontiac, a bunch of hogs,
forty horses, and furnished the couple's home so he could
get three acres of land and another two thousand acre lease.

(36:59):
Say we still have the first land of my father
Lord he had, I might maybe twelve hundred day and
I just got around in. You'd come in want something
or some merged by buggy maybe or a team or
something of that far. He'd trade a month peace land.
I've traded up an automobile many times for peace land.

(37:22):
They want a new automobile. I wonder land flouted by obviously, Well,
I'll give you a new automobile by the automobile to
take a deep lit land. Many many times have I
done that. So it wasn't just the homny treating company
the source of a lot of the Drummond brothers money
and influence. It was this whole environment that they operated in,

(37:45):
an environment that kept oc age money tied up, that
made a lot of families dependent on the white businessmen
around them. Because this whole time the US government was
restricting how much of their own money just could access.
Those families were left with just a couple of options,
both working in the Drummond's favor. They could go into

(38:05):
debt at the store, money they'd have to pay back
somehow if they died before it was paid back. That
debt might come out of their estates, which a lot
of times were administered by one of the Drummond brothers.
Or they could sell or trade land that the Drummond
brothers could use to expand their ranching business. Those fund
restrictions led to something else too, a whole new way

(38:29):
for Whiteman and os Age County to make money off
That's after the break. Britney Spears has been freed from
a conservatorship that has controlled her personal life and money
for nearly fourteen years. Pop star Britney Spears was released
from a conservatorship she was placed under more than a

(38:50):
decade earlier. A psychiatric emergency had led a court to
declare her unable to handle her own affairs. Jamie Spears,
her father, was given legal control over his daughter's personal, professional,
and financial affairs in two thousand and eight. Eventually, after
a long legal fight and mounting public pressure, Britney Spears
was able to remove her father from control of the

(39:12):
conservatorship and later have it removed altogether. The conservatorship of
Britney Spears. From the outside and from Britney's own testimony,
it looked more like the conservatorship wasn't about protecting her
interests or her money. Fans saw a system that allowed
the people in control of her to profit off her success,

(39:32):
a system that meant the people put in place to
protect her could end up using her for their own gain.
All this with Britney Spears was happening as I started
reporting this story. But while the world was learning about
Britney Spears's conservatorship, I was learning about something similar that
O sages had been subjected to for decades. They were

(39:53):
called guardianships. Hundreds of OC age adults had someone put
in charge of their financial affairs, usually a white man,
and these guardianships were exclusive to the stage nation. They
happened across Indian country. OH Stage guardianships existed in the
years after a lotment, but it wasn't until head right
money started pouring in that they really took off. There's

(40:17):
congressional testimony about white men propositioning wealthy O stages to
become their guardian, telling them they'd helped them get around
all the limits that Congress had put on their money.
That's when a new kind of guardian surfaced, the professional guardian.
These were men who had several wards, men who had
taken advantage of this federal policy to insert themselves over

(40:39):
OH stage estates. Depending on how big the estate was,
their fee could be pretty big, over a thousand dollars
a year, a lot of money back then, and that
was on top of all the self dealing a lot
of them were accused of doing. This was an entire
policy racist and paternalistic put in place by the US
government and over seen by the local courts. That created

(41:02):
a lot of conflicts of interest. Here supposed to having this,
this wise white person, he's supposed to look at for
your interests. How did that work out? That wise white
person who was the biggest crook of them all. This
is Garrick Bailey. I'm a professor emeritus at the University Told.
For fifty years I tried to anthropology here. Garrick built

(41:24):
his career chronicling os Age culture. He's written and edited
three books on the os Age nation. I went to
see Garrick because over his decades of research, he's come
to know a lot about oth age guardianships. We had
talked on the phone a few times, and Garrick told
me he had a book I should look up. He
called it the Great Book. It's gray, that's why they

(41:50):
call it a gray book. And there are stories in
the Gray Book about your guardians, specific stories. This was
a field report written by the b A in the
fifties and sent to Congress. It's a start change in
tone from similar reports written thirty years earlier. Here the
government acknowledges stages were exploited, and a lot of that

(42:12):
is our fault. The report has all these examples of
guardianships gone wrong. It mentions one guardian who overcharged his
ward by a thousand dollars for a car. Another guardian
claimed that his o stage ward, a thirty eight year
old widow, owed him twelve thousand dollars. Two thousand of
that was from alan she apparently got when she was

(42:33):
so ill she didn't know what she was signing. The
Gray Book goes on to say that the government by
then had brought and settled at least twenty lawsuits against guardians.
But even though the b i A seems to acknowledge
all this that the guardianship system led to widespread exploitation
and profiteering, the authors keep the names of the guardians anonymous.

(42:56):
Do you think that there were any good guardians. I'm
sure there or there are always some good people around,
But I think there was so much racism involved in it,
and that this overall attitude that these people don't deserve anything.
They didn't they didn't earn, it didn't work hard, and
basically you've got you've got a county full of wealthy

(43:21):
Indians and poor whites. I think there's a lot of
pilfering going on by the local white community. You have
to remember there was such resentment. There is not just
a coincidence that the murders start and that toul us
A race massacre take place in There's a lot of

(43:44):
resentment about what's happening in any territory, and I think
that's that's a lot of it. I think it's easier
to cheat somebody out of something than to murder somebody
to take it. But I think particularly for the ones
who just treated them out of land and other things,

(44:05):
I think they had a messias your time, you asially
he ain't caught. Oh Sage leaders knew this was going on.
One member of the Stage Tribal Council, a man named
George Alberty, launched his own investigation into guardianships decades before
the Gray book. It comes up in a book called
The Underground Reservation by Terry P. Wilson. What Albready found

(44:28):
was a quote guardianship organization of merchants, bankers, etcetera. He
said they all worked together to get their words to
shop at certain stores or use certain banks. Alberty said
it was general knowledge but quote, when it comes to
proving in court, you can't. Other than the Gray Book.
Information on most guardianships it's hard to come by. There

(44:51):
are official guardianship files held in the os Age County Courthouse.
The thing is they're sealed. You can't look at them
without an order from a judge. Even descendants of the
people involved Wards and guardians have to get a court order.
But even though those documents are sealed, I have been
able to find some guardianship records in the National Archives

(45:14):
and other public collections. I've learned that a lot of
times these guardians lent out their Wards money loans to
businessmen in town that were considered investments for the oh
Sage Wards. Some of those loans went to the Drummond brothers.
From what I've seen, they paid them back at interest
rates that were normal for the time. But what this
meant was that the Drummond brothers had access to oh

(45:36):
Sage money that they could put to work for themselves.
Sometimes those loans were secured with O Sage land the
brothers had gotten earlier. This all played out in the
case of one O Sage family, the same family that
had deeded their land to Cecil Drummond after their debt
at the store had surpassed two thousand dollars. Within the
next few years, the Drummond brothers had gotten twenty five

(45:58):
thousand dollars in loan from the Osage family's accounts, all
given out by their guardians. That's the equivalent of more
than four hundred thousand dollars today. Those guardians were men.
The Drummond brothers knew. One of them worked at their store,
a man named Fred L. Shed, and sworn testimony. Shed's
board said Shed would only let her get credit at

(46:20):
the Homony Trading Company. So the one thing that really
struck me as I was looking at how much they
had on their bill for groceries and then just kind
of mentally trying to convert that for today's dollars. What
that I mean, It's a ridiculo. It's ridiculous. There's no
way this is Libby Gray. Libby is married to Jim Gray,

(46:42):
the former Chief. She runs a group called Noise, which
helps the families of missing and murdered Indigenous people. She's
descended from the family that had the big debt at
the Homony Trading Company and later needed their land to
Cecil Drummond. The store also handled the family's funeral services.
It was a whole systemic thing. It wasn't just the guardians.

(47:03):
I mean, in this time when there were all of
these deaths, we were paying what three to ten times
more for a funeral. Like the undertakers were profiting from
our wealth and from our murders. The people that sold clothing,
that sold material, that sold lumber, that sold cars, that

(47:25):
sold houses, that like built houses, whatever, everybody was profiting
from this because you have to get permission to spend
your money. So if you haven't in with a guardian
and you're going to build their house, they're going to
approve that one because you're their buddy, and you're going
to charge three to five times more for it. I mean,

(47:46):
it was just a whole system. I've sat down with
Libby several times while reporting this story. Both sides of
her family have come up in records relating to the Drummonds.
Whether that's guardians, chips, the store, we're robates. The Drummonds
had the store, they were overcharging the sages that put
a big nest dig back where they could buy more land,

(48:09):
and then the next generation had that step up where
they could do more, and then their kids had that
step up where they could do more, and it just
kept going. That was the beginning of them having this
generational wealth, right, and they're still wealthy and their children are,
I mean, their descendants are still building wealth off of

(48:29):
that initial investment that was stolen or I guess conned,
or however you want to say it. That was the
beginning of it for the Drummonds, and that was the
end of it for so many oh sages. It's it's

(48:56):
hard to think that our people were used like that. Yeah,
there's no resolution, there was no resolution to it, there
was no justice, right. But also, our land is more
important to us than that as indigenous people. And when
you look at how checker boarded our reservation is, and
how all of these jurisdictional issues affect our ability to

(49:19):
protect our people and our ability to fully exercise our sovereignty,
it's so much more than just the financial part of it.
I've mentioned before that I've talked to some of the
descendants of the three Drummond brothers for this story, and
you'll hear from some of them later in this series.
Their general take is that, well, they weren't aware of

(49:39):
any particular transactions. They knew their predecessors to be honest
and trusted men who built up the hominy community. The
Drummond Brothers were able to build wealth off ocigeous states
through all these different means, the store, the probates, the
men they knew who were guardians. But that wasn't all,

(50:00):
because as I dug through the archives, I found out
the Drummond brothers were guardians too. In fact, they were
guardians of a lot of osages, at least ten, and
all children and adults alike. And in those records I
found the story of an osage man who launched a
decade long fight against them, his story next time on

(50:23):
in Trust. In Trust is a production of Bloomberg and
I Heart Media. It's reported and hosted by me Rachel
Adam's Heard. Additional reporting by Alison Edita Davis. Land is

(50:47):
our senior producer. Samantha Story is our executive producer. Jeff
Grocott is our senior editor. Additional editing by Francesco Leavy
and Daniel Ferrara. Additional production by Victor EVAs, Production support
from Hilda de Carle, Sound engineering by Blake Maples. Fact

(51:07):
checking by Molly Nugent. Theme music by Laura Orman, photography
by Shane Brown. You can email us at podcasts at
bloomberg dot net. Find more about this episode at bloomberg
dot com. Slash in trust find in trust anywhere you
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