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(Bloomberg) — This is the transcript for the second episode of Bloomberg and iHeart investigative podcast “In Trust.” Learn more and subscribe to In Trust on iHeart, Apple or Spotify.
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Episode Two: The Headright
Rachel Adams-Heard Just a heads up before we get started, this episode contains descriptions of abuse. It may be hard to listen to.
Last summer, I bought a book. I had to get it from a rare books distributor. I paid $113.86. I bought it because I thought it might help answer my question about the Drummonds’ headrights, those shares of the Osage Mineral Estate that’s held in trust by the federal government.
The book came in the mail a week or two later. It’s a couple hundred pages, bound in a hardback linen cover. It smelled like dust. The cover was blue and tattered, with three different photos of one guy. In one, he’s young, 20s maybe, dressed in a military uniform. Another, he’s a kid, riding a horse in a cowboy hat. The biggest photo is a portrait of him, older. He’s staring into the camera, holding a lit cigarette, a big ring on his finger. He’s pale, round and dressed in a three-piece suit.
The title: “Ranching From the Front Seat of a Buick: The Life of Oklahoma’s A. A. ‘Jack’ Drummond.”
It’s this telling of the booms and busts of early ranch days in Osage County. A biography, of one of the three Drummond brothers who grew up here in the early 1900s.
Almost everyone I talked to about headrights brought up the Drummonds. A local newspaper had published a list of non-Osage names who had them, but not how many they had. I thought maybe the book might give me a clue.
I was also curious what a White man like Jack would have remembered about the Reign of Terror. A house blowing up, the FBI in town, murder all around him. But the details of this conspiracy are hardly mentioned at all: just one sentence on page 64.
The line: “Bill Hale, a local rancher, had to sell his land because he was going to prison for conspiring to murder most of an Osage Indian family so their headrights would devolve to his nephew.”
That was it. That’s all the book had to say about it. A casual mention of another rancher in town, who, by the way, also happened to mastermind the most notorious murders from the time.
There are pages dedicated to Jack Drummond going off to war, fighting a bunch of lawsuits over land. Meeting his first wife. Being scammed out of more than $90,000 on a trip to Chicago. Paying for some local kids to go to college. Loaning money to young ranchers who were about to go under. Driving around Oklahoma in his Buick, checking on cattle.
But something at the very beginning of the book jumped out to me. In the author’s note–the author, his name was Terry Hammons – he mentions he donated dozens of cassette tapes worth of interviews with Jack, along with a bunch of financial records, to the state historical society in Oklahoma City.
It sounded like a gold mine. Maybe these tapes, these records would tell me something about the Drummonds’ headrights and how they got them. So I reached out to the historical society. An archivist I spoke to ran a search. Nothing came up. No luck.
But a few days later, I got an email. That archivist said after her search came back blank she decided to keep looking. She spent hours, in her words, scrambling to find these tapes. She scoured the historical society’s inventory, called around to other sites. And, to my surprise:
Terry Hammons OK.Jack Drummond It work?Terry Hammons Yeah, I got it working again.Jack Drummond Alright.
Rachel Adams-Heard She found the tapes, and Jack’s financial records. Somewhere I would’ve never thought to look, up the road in a suburb called Edmond, at the University of Central Oklahoma.
Jack Drummond I’ll tell you Terry, where money is involved honor seems to fly out the window.Terry Hammons It sure does, it sure does.Jack Drummond And in families and with everyone else.
Rachel Adams-Heard These recordings, they’re all the raw material that went into making that biography. Hours and hours of two guys sitting in a room, talking about cattle mortgages, land financing, and the Drummond family.
Jack Drummond The secret of the success in the cattle business is finance. You have to know how to, to always pay those cattle loans. Like when I financed all this land, I kept my land in the clear.
Rachel Adams-Heard Terry and Jack started recording these in 1978. They talked every few months for the next couple years. You’ll hear dogs bark in the background. A clock ticking. And occasionally, the tape skips or stops—sometimes when things are just getting interesting.
Terry Hammons What you did was the government told you what they would pay you for it and you just took it?Jack Drummond That’s it.Terry Hammons You didn’t bother with court or anything like that?Jack Drummond No.Terry Hammons Johns took his money and then disappeared, right?Jack Drummond Yeah.Terry Hammons You didn’t see him after that?Jack Drummond Uh… cut that off and I’ll tell you.
Rachel Adams-Heard And honestly, at first, I was worried there was nothing here. But then I found this moment when Jack starts talking about a legal fight he got into, with a man named George Smith, and a bank he just calls “the National.”
Jack Drummond So, I had all this litigation with George Smith in the Osage, I had fought the National and sued them for this million dollars up there, so the National just hated me like hell.
Rachel Adams-Heard Basically, this was a fight between this rancher George Smith, and Jack Drummond over land in Osage County. The banks got involved because both men had taken out such big loans that whoever lost the lawsuit would go bankrupt. Think of it as a high-stakes, highly leveraged turf war.
Jack Drummond They called Bill Damron on the telephone and told him that I was a crooked son-of-a-bitch and that I would steal his cattle. They told him everything bad about me.
Rachel Adams-Heard I’m telling you all this because, as he starts getting into the details of this dispute, he mentions:
Jack Drummond I know Sam Borshing was a lawyer in Tulsa, and he knew how expensive litigation was, and he said to me, “How long can you keep up this litigation?” I said to him, “indefinitely.” He said, “How can you do that indefinitely?” I said, “I live with my mother, so I have free board and room and laundry, and I’ve got an Osage – half an Osage headright, and that pays me enough money so that I can always get new cars and make my car installments. As a last resort I….” (Tape Ends)
Rachel Adams-Heard The tape ends right there. Right after he mentions he has half an Osage headright.
Half a headright he’s using to make car payments. Half a headright that could float him during all these court battles. I later found out Jack had transferred most of his property into other people’s names during this lawsuit. But this half a headright, he held onto. Elsewhere in the tapes, he kind of brags to Terry Hammons about it.
Jack Drummond I’ve got a half of the Osage headright. Did you know I had half Osage..?Terry Hammons Yeah.Jack Drummond And that pays me…see I gave that to Jim. That trust pays insurance.
Rachel Adams-Heard Jim Drummond is Jack’s son. He’s in his 70s, still a practicing criminal defense attorney in Texas. I’ve spoken to him. Before I get to that conversation, though, I want to point out another moment in those tapes with Jack when he says, flat out, how he got that headright share.
And the number actually ends up being a little more than a half.
Jack Drummond I bought a half a headright. I bought a fourth of a right, I got the purchase of it from O.V. Pope.
Rachel Adams-Heard So there it was. And I’ve been able to confirm this: Jack Drummond bought one-half and one-fourth of a headright from someone named O.V. Pope, and that half share Jack later gave to his son.
If anything, these tapes gave me more questions than answers. Who was O.V. Pope? How did he get headrights? And who has them today?
This is “In Trust.” I’m Rachel Adams-Heard.
Terry Hammons I would like you to tell me about those three weeks when you and O.V. Pope drove around Oklahoma signing up the 500 cattlemen for the Oklahoma Livestock Marketing Association.Jack Drummond Alright.
Rachel Adams-Heard I heard Jack mention O.V. Pope’s name again in the middle of a story he tells about trying to round up farmers and ranchers for a financial co-op.
This is 1931, the Great Depression, the beginning of the Dust Bowl. Farmers and ranchers are facing yet another year of crop prices so low they can’t stay afloat. They’re overloaded with debt. Oklahoma families are starting to pack up their trucks and head west to California.
This cooperative was supposed to help ranchers out, and Jack’s job was to get people on board.
Jack Drummond I would sleep at nights in the car and O.V. Pope would drive me. When I would get to these towns, I would get me one of the leading cowmen and have him go with me to his friends. I had to have the support for each community, and it was hard going. It took me three weeks. I never took my clothes off, for those three weeks.
Rachel Adams-Heard Those were a gruesome three weeks, the way Terry describes it in the book. It’s August, hot. For nearly a month, O.V. Pope and Jack Drummond are living out of a car. Bumping along ranch roads, making a last-ditch effort to save the Oklahoma cattle business.
The thing is, nowhere in these tapes does Jack say how O.V. Pope would have gotten a headright. Or, why he sold part of it to Jack. And when I started looking around for something, anything, about O.V. Pope, I kept running into dead ends.
Compared to the Drummonds, this was a relatively obscure guy. No line in the local paper when he went out of town on business. No university buildings named after him.
But even without any specifics on O.V. Pope, I could get transfer records from the National Archives, all the paperwork that got sent to what was then called the Office of Indian Affairs—everything they required before they would sign off on the sale of a headright to someone else.
If the sale happened before 1965, it’s in the public record, held in a warehouse in Fort Worth.
It was legal to transfer a headright to a non-Osage person or group up until 1978. So there’s a gap in the public records you can access on headrights—thirteen years that are essentially a black box.
But even though the records before 1965 are technically public, they aren’t easy to access. You have to know the names of the individuals involved in order to ask one of the archives specialists to email the documents. If you want to search through them yourself, you have to get an appointment and a special researcher card, and travel to Fort Worth.
The folders I got back were bigger than I expected. It turns out there was a fair amount of bureaucracy involved in selling a headright. Each one’s about a dozen pages. You had to write a formal application, get it notarized, have an oil and gas inspector weigh in on the purchase price. The whole thing had to be approved by the Assistant Secretary of Interior.
According to those transfer records, Jack Drummond bought the one-half headright from O.V. Pope in 1925, for $20,050. And three years later, in 1928, he buys another one-fourth of a headright for $11,250.
What’s also in that paperwork is something missing in the tapes with Jack: how O.V. Pope got his headrights. He inherited them from his wife, an Osage woman named Nah-me-tsa-he. She died in 1924.
I found something else on the Pope family too. This time it was in Oklahoma’s court records.
I found out that after Nah-me-tsa-he died, O.V. Pope’s brother married her daughter, a daughter she had from a previous marriage, to an Osage man. Her name was Rhoda Wheeler Ridge, and she was trying to get a divorce.
I brought all this—the transfer paperwork and the introduction to the divorce case—to Tara Damron at the White Hair Memorial, who told me about that list of non-Osage headright holders. We started with the transfer paperwork.
Tara Damron So this is dated May 19, 1928, to a Mr. A.B. Ludwick, County Clerk Pawhuska, Oklahoma. It says “Dear Sir, there’s enclosed for recording assignment from O.V. Pope to Alfred A. Drummond which was approved by the Assistant Secretary of the Interior on May 10, 1928, together with cashier’s check…” (continues in background)
Rachel Adams-Heard I wanted to hear Tara’s thoughts on this, because she spends all day immersed in these kinds of records. She would know better what we were looking at.
Tara Damron So O.V. Pope was a White man who was married to an Osage lady. Nah-me-tsa-he and she had three headrights at the time of her death in 1924, from tuberculosis.Rachel Adams-Heard And he got one and a half.Tara Damron OK.Rachel Adams-Heard Yeah it looks like she was in her 60s and her husband was in his 30s.Tara Damron Really? Rachel Adams-Heard And he inherited half of her estate.Tara Damron Uh huh. Rachel Adams-Heard So O.V. Pope has one-and-a-half headrights. Tara Damron OK. Rachel Adams-Heard Her daughter Rhoda Wheeler Ridge has one-and-a-half headrights. Tara Damron OK. Rachel Adams-Heard O.V. Pope’s brother marries the daughter Tara Damron Hmm…Rachel Adams-Heard And this is her divorce case. If you want to read, starting there’s where it explains it.Tara Damron So this is Pope v. Pope, Oklahoma 1926. The ground alleged in the petition was extreme cruelty. On September 18, 1924, plaintiff filed an amended petition in which she alleged…(continues in background)
Rachel Adams-Heard Over pages and pages of testimony, Rhoda talks about the months before Nah-me-tsa-he died, when O.V. Pope and his brother Troy packed up her things and moved her to Colorado. They kept her and her children in a house Troy Pope bought, even while her mother—who O.V. Pope was married to—was dying, back in Osage County.
In January 1924, Nah-me-tsa-he died. And a little over four months later later, as Rhoda was set to inherit half of her mother’s estate, the two Pope brothers took her to the courthouse. Rhoda was forced to marry Troy Pope.
I want you to hear some parts of Rhoda’s testimony. And just to be clear, this divorce case is over 700 pages long. So this isn’t all of it. But what it does show is textbook abusive behavior. Rhoda describes a relationship where she was isolated from her family, and her finances, where she was manipulated and coerced, and physically and emotionally abused.
It’s tough to listen to, but I think it’s important to hear. We’ve asked voice actors to read from the testimony.
There’s one moment when the lawyer asks Rhoda about her first husband, a man named King Ridge. They divorced just months before her mother died.
[Voice actor] Attorney Did O.V. Pope ever try to get you to get a divorce?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge Yes, he helped me lots of times, talked to me lots of times, and tried to get me to do it, and I had to go ahead and do it.Rachel Adams-Heard After that, the Pope brothers moved Rhoda to Colorado. [Voice actor] Attorney Did you want to go to Colorado?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge No.Rachel Adams-Heard He asks Rhoda if she wanted to marry Troy Pope.[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge No.[Voice actor] Attorney Why did you do that?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge Well, I was afraid, he might hurt me.[Voice actor] Attorney Did he threaten to hurt you?Rachel Adams-Heard Rhoda doesn’t respond.[Voice actor] Attorney What did he do?Rachel Adams-Heard Again, no response.[Voice actor] Attorney What made you afraid of him? [Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge Because, they had a gun.
Rachel Adams-Heard Later, the lawyer tries to show the marriage is a sham. He drills down on the moment Rhoda was forced to say “I do.”
[Voice actor] Attorney What did the preacher ask you?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge The preacher asked me to say “I do.” [Voice actor] Attorney The preacher asked you to say “I do.” And how many times did he ask you that? [Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge He asked me three times.[Voice actor] Attorney Did you want to say I do?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge No, sir. [Voice actor] Attorney Why did you say it? [Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge Because I was afraid of them two boys.
Rachel Adams-Heard Rhoda tells the lawyer Troy was cruel to her and her children, that he whipped them. [Voice actor] Attorney Did he ever slap you any?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge He done it four different times in Colorado.[Voice actor] Attorney What caused that Rhoda? Do you know?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge He gets mad because I don’t give him money.[Voice actor] Attorney Because you don’t do what?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge Because I don’t give him money.[Voice actor] Attorney Did he ever twist your arm?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge He twist my arm two three times like that.[Voice actor] Attorney Did it hurt you?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge Yes, sir.[Voice actor] Attorney What name did he call you?[Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge He just call me, call me names, everything.[Voice actor] Attorney What would he say? Do you remember?
Rachel Adams-Heard Rhoda’s silent.
At another point, Rhoda says Troy wouldn’t let her visit her mother when she was dying. She says she wanted to see her all the time. She never got to say goodbye. She had to find out Nah-met-tsa-he died from a telegram that arrived at 3 o’clock on a Sunday morning. Within months, O.V. Pope was remarried.
Rhoda says she was also sick during this time, and Troy refused to get her a doctor. Meanwhile, he’s signing the back of her checks, and cashing them for himself.
[Voice actor] Attorney Did he get some money from O.V. Pope, from your mother’s estate?Rachel Adams-Heard Rhoda doesn’t respond. [Voice actor] Attorney Did he get $300 a month from your mother’s money? [Voice actress] Rhoda Wheeler Ridge Yes.
Rachel Adams-Heard In his testimony, Troy Pope denied that he abused Rhoda, or that he and his brother were taking her money for themselves. O.V. Pope testified that Rhoda wanted to go to Colorado. The lawyers didn’t spend much time on his own marriage to Rhoda’s mom. Or the fact that, by 1928, less than five years after Nah-me-tsa-he died, O.V. Pope had sold the 1.5 headrights he inherited from her for over $65,000, the equivalent of more than $1 million today. In total, three-fourths went to Jack Drummond, one-half went to another White man and one-fourth went to an investment company.
This divorce case goes beyond detailing the alleged abuse by the Pope brothers. It also paints the picture of an Osage woman who went to great lengths to protect her children. Rhoda enlisted the help of her uncle Jimmy to stand guard over her house. She hired lawyers to get restraining orders against Troy Pope.
And in the end, she was successful, and got away from the Pope brothers. She lived for another 40 years. She’s buried in Hominy, next to her first husband, King Ridge.
I’ve been in touch with Rhoda’s descendants. They didn’t know about this case, about the Pope brothers, or where these headright shares went.
But over email, they gave me a sense of who Rhoda was outside of this case. Because it didn’t define her. They said she grew old on her allotment with King Ridge. She remarried him after her divorce from Troy Pope. Her five children grew to live long, full lives. They gave her grandchildren, whom she adored. She loved playing cards and board games and hosting everyone over the holidays.
Rhoda was a humble, private person, they said, but most importantly, she was strong.
The Pope brothers never got any scrutiny outside of this divorce case. Because, despite all the evidence, the suspicious timing of it – in the middle of the Reign of Terror – what the Pope brothers did wasn’t treated as anything criminal. As far as I can tell, the FBI didn’t investigate, I never found anything published in the local paper about Nah-me-tsa-he’s death or Rhoda’s arranged marriage. No books, no movie. Another lost story of the Reign of Terror.
Tara Damron Golly. So this is exactly the type of schemes, crime, thefts—there’s so much of this stuff that was just not looked into. Obviously, Rhoda’s mother was in her 60s and O.V. Pope was half her age. And this is just awful, and it’s just disgusting. You hear stories, right? And you hear rumors. And it’s like, well, pretty sure so-and-so’s got it, but then, you see it in black and white just like that list, and then it’s, then it’s real, then it’s, “OK I was right. We were right.”
Rachel Adams-Heard I had also pulled the death certificate for Rhoda’s mom, Nah-me-tsa-he. It said she died of chronic tuberculosis and heart failure. O.V. Pope was the one who provided all the family information for the death certificate. He apparently didn’t know very much about the woman he married. Next to the space for her mother and father’s names, it just says unknown.
Rachel Adams-Heard So yeah, she was married to him. Tara Damron Mhm. Rachel Adams-Heard And then she died in 1924 with a listed cause of death as tuberculosis. Tara Damron Yeah. Mm. Rachel Adams-Heard Why’d you make that sound? Tara Damron Well, so many Osages have a suspicious cause of death, especially during that time period. Especially the ‘20s, the teens. So we don’t really know if that’s true or not. So we can’t really trust the death certificate, just because of the murders. We know that there were coverups, and that causes of death weren’t investigated: either poisoned whiskey, or strychnine, or doping. I mean, just none of that was investigated, you know. She may have died of tuberculosis, I mean because that was a disease prevalent during that time, but I don’t know.
Rachel Adams-Heard There was something else I brought Tara that day. It was a list, a small one, of non-Osage headright holders.
Tara, of course, has seen a version of this list before, the one from that lawsuit that ended up in the newspaper. But the list I brought her, it had numbers: how many headrights, or headright fractions, some of these non-Osage groups owned.
When the Bureau of Indian Affairs rejected my records request for this information, Bloomberg hired a law firm to fight it. We argued that the BIA didn’t give a good reason for denying our request, that the exemptions they claimed didn’t apply. And we were successful – kind of. Eventually, after a bunch of back-and-forth, we got something. Some seventy names of non-Osage headright holders, and how many they owned. Not the full list. The BIA withheld the names of non-Osage people who had headrights. But the organizations, family trusts, churches, oil companies – some of that we got.
Rachel Adams-Heard So I told you we were filing that FOIA? Tara Damron Yeah.Rachel Adams-Heard I told you when we were filing the request, Tara Damron Yes, yeah.Rachel Adams-Heard and you politely told me I was probably not going to have much luck. And you were right. So the Bureau of Indian Affairs denied it, and then we appealed, and they actually said they were going to send a letter to every non-Osage headright holder and give them the chance to object. You look surprised?Tara Damron Wow. Oh my god. Really! Keep going. Rachel Adams-Heard So they gave us a list of all non-Osage entities that did not object to the release of this information. Tara Damron Really?Rachel Adams-Heard So it’s a start.Tara Damron Oh my gosh…(gasp)Rachel Adams-Heard On that list, is Jack Drummond’s trust. And right there: half a headright.Tara Damron (whispers) Point five.
Rachel Adams-Heard It’s worth noting, the list we got back from this FOIA is not even close to comprehensive. The BIA says about a fourth of all headrights are held by outsiders: something like 560 headrights. What we got back was just a small number of those, a fraction, of non-Osage groups who didn’t object when the BIA reached out because of our appeal.
Rachel Adams-Heard By my count it’s about 36 headrights represented in this list so yeah, there’s about 500 that we don’t know about.Tara Damron Oh my gosh. OK, so about roughly 36 headrights, right so I mean, just do the math and like the last 20 years, or this past year.Rachel Adams-Heard A lot of money Tara Damron It’s a lot of money. It’s a lot of money.
Rachel Adams-Heard Since that initial list, the BIA has added a couple more names, so the latest version represents about 38 headrights. If you add up all the money those 38 headrights have paid out, just since the law was changed to stop more headrights from leaving Osage hands, the total comes out to more than $30 million.
And Jack Drummond’s trust, it may not have held the dozens of headrights that I had heard the Drummonds might have. But that half a headright, the one he bought from O.V. Pope—a white man whose Osage wife was twice his age and died during the Reign of Terror, who was accused of forcing her daughter to marry his own brother, just as she was about to inherit the other half of her mother’s estate—that half a headright was also a lot of money. Since 1925, when Jack bought it from O.V. Pope for the equivalent of $340,000 dollars today, that half a headright has paid out $1.7 million when adjusted for inflation.
Tara Damron It’s just so hypocritical, I think. The Bureau knowingly approved the transaction or sale of Osage had rights to non-Osages and saw nothing wrong with that. And they kept it from us, from us all these years and they’ve just been so protective. They’re protecting people that it doesn’t belong to. I mean, and that’s not their job, because these people aren’t even Indian. They’re not even Indian, you know, but they have Osage money or they have Indian money. It’s not right. It’s not OK. And it doesn’t make sense.
Rachel Adams-Heard This comes up a lot in my conversations with Tara. She’s always emphatic that this money belongs to the Osage Nation and its citizens. That even if there were legal ways for those headrights to be transferred out of Osage hands, that should have never been the case. And that as long as the Osage Mineral Estate is around, it’s meant to be benefitting Osage citizens, not the White people and oil companies and universities that have ended up with so many headrights.
After the break, the Drummonds who have these shares today.
Rachel Adams-Heard OK, just a second I’m gonna plug you in. OK, can you hear me? Jim Drummond Mmhmm. Rachel Adams-Heard This is Jim Drummond. He’s a criminal defense attorney, outside of Austin, Texas. His dad is Jack Drummond, the one from the tapes. Jack said he gave his half a headright to Jim, in a trust. I called him after I learned the story behind Jack’s headright shares. He didn’t answer, but a few hours later, he called me back. I told him I was a reporter, that I was doing a podcast series. I asked if I could record our call.
Rachel Adams-Heard You said that Alfred Alexander Drummond was your father, right?Jim Drummond Yeah. So he was my adoptive father. I was adopted by my grandmother, my biological grandmother and he was her second husband. They adopted me.Rachel Adams-Heard OK. Were y’all close?Jim Drummond Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Adams-Heard I talked to Jim for a few minutes, he told me he’s read Jack’s book. It turns out, Jim was the one who asked Terry Hammons to write it. He didn’t know the interview tapes or his father’s financial records were in a public archive, he never looked into it.
Jim was guarded, said he didn’t understand why Bloomberg News would be interested in this. But there was something he said before we started recording that I wanted to talk about. The first thing out of his mouth when he called me back.
Rachel Adams-Heard And you mentioned you said you your first question was, is it about the Osage headrights? I’m just curious what what you’re thinking.Jim Drummond There was a controversy about that a number of years ago, you know, that the the Osage tribe was looking to try to get some of the people who acquired headrights from the tribal members, and that they were hoping that people would voluntarily return them to the tribal ownership in some fashion. I didn’t ever read the the full story about that or the documents, but I was contacted by a trust, which holds an Osage headright that my father acquired. I had no power to agree or disagree with that. The trust owns it, not me. Rachel Adams-Heard Oh OK, I see.Jim Drummond So that’s what I remember about this. What I remember about that.Rachel Adams-Heard And are you a beneficiary of the trust, you just can’t?Jim Drummond I am, I am the beneficiary, but I have no control over the what we call the res. I’m a lawyer, but we call the res or the body of the trust is, it does not belong to me. Rachel Adams-Heard You said that you had no ability as a beneficiary of the trust to give it back, even if you wanted to?Jim Drummond That is correct.Rachel Adams-Heard Was that something you wanted to do?Jim Drummond I decided not to formulate an opinion on that since I had no power to do anything. I can certainly see an argument that the Osage Nation made. I think they were exploited. There are probably a lot of my family members who would not agree with me on that. I tend to be more of a left wing Democrat and they tend to be of the other persuasion, the redder persuasion. But I’ve never made an issue of it. It’s pointless to take sides in a controversy over which I have no power to have any effect.Rachel Adams-Heard Interesting. Well, I would love to talk to you some more. And I would love to kind of show you some of the documents that I got from the Alfred Drummond collection at the University of Central Oklahoma. We’re in Houston, with my producer. Would would you be up for an in person meeting at some point, if we came up to Austin? I go up a lot.Jim Drummond Oh, boy. Here’s the deal. I don’t I just don’t want to stir any controversy with anybody. And I don’t really know, a lot of my father’s dealings. I was growing up and he was 52 when I was born. I’m very reluctant unless—I know, journalists don’t like to share questions in advance—but unless I knew what questions what you’re going to delve into about those documents, I’m very reluctant to get involved. I belong to the Drummond family. I am a peripheral member. But nonetheless, I don’t want to create any problems or controversies for anyone. But any, any allegations of wrongdoing, I know zero about.Rachel Adams-Heard I hear you. You mentioned that you think that the Osage Nation was exploited? I’m just curious if you’ve ever had the question.Jim Drummond That’s their, their point of view and I understand that. I understand why they might have that point of view. But in terms of actually knowing any of the real details of who bought what and under what circumstances they bought it, that’s a wholly different issue of which I’m not qualified or informed enough to comment on. And frankly, I don’t have the time to review a lot of those documents that you’re referring to at Central State.Rachel Adams-Heard Right, OK.Jim Drummond Even though I am 73 years old, I am a busy criminal defense attorney. I have a major felony caseload—that’s all I do. Criminal defense. I have not only no interest in stirring up the pot, but I also have no dog in that fight.
Rachel Adams-Heard I’ve talked to Jim several times since that first call. About the headright transfer paperwork, the Pope brothers. I wanted to know whether it changed his perspective, knowing the story of this half a headright and the family it had belonged to.
After that first conversation, Jim said he didn’t want to be recorded, but he still took my calls. He told me that as far as he could tell, his father, Jack Drummond, hadn’t done anything illegal or unethical to get this headright share. That if you average out what it paid over the last 97 years, it’s actually a pretty modest return on what Jack initially bought it for. And Jim said, he couldn’t do anything about it anyway. He said he didn’t have control of the trust, and he doesn’t like forming opinions on things he can’t change.
I asked a trust attorney about this, by the way. Jim’s right.
He and the other beneficiaries could certainly ask the trustee, the bank or financial firm managing the trust, to give the headright share back to the Osage Nation. But the trustee has the final say. And if there are future beneficiaries, kids or grandkids who aren’t even born yet, that makes it pretty difficult for the trustee to make any decisions like that.
There is an exception. If someone sues over this half of a headright, an Osage family who says it was stolen from them or taken fraudulently, a court could order the trustee to give the share back to the family. But it’s not only Jim who has those headright shares that Jack Drummond bought from O.V. Pope. There was that other quarter of a headright, and that share, over time, has ended up with a few other Drummonds. One of them is named Frederick Ford Drummond, but he goes by Ford.
(phone ring)Frederick Ford Drummond Hello. Rachel Adams-Heard Hi, is this Ford? Frederick Ford Drummond Yes.Rachel Adams Heard Hello, my name is Rachel Adams-Heard.
Rachel Adams-Heard Ford wasn’t super interested in talking to me the first time I called him.
Frederick Ford Drummond Yeah, I’d rather not, I’m gonna decline. Rachel Adams-Heard OK. Frederick Ford Drummond Sounds like an interesting story.Rachel Adams-Heard Is there someone else in your family?
Rachel Adams-Heard I was hoping Ford could give me another name, someone on his side of the family I could talk to about this. He couldn’t think of anyone. He said the Drummond family at this point is really big, and no one person can really speak for everyone.
He wished me good luck on the story.
That was the last Ford and I talked, for a while, at least. Until one day, when I was in Osage County, and I heard a rumor that made me call him back.
Rachel Adams-Heard Listen, I know you said you didn’t want to talk. But I have one quick question for you. Just because it’s come up and I want to make sure that we get your take. And as you know, I’m doing a podcast, so I’m recording all my calls. But I heard a rumor that you might be trying to give your headright share back to the tribe?Frederick Ford Drummond That’s correct. I, my father had a one-twelfth headright, along with his two sisters. So a fourth of the headright, I guess they inherited from their dad, who I guess they got from his dad. I’m not sure. You may know more about it than I do. But my dad passed away in 2020 and he left it to me and I, along with my cousins, who—both of my aunts passed away, as well—so everyone is interested in giving the headright back to the tribe.
Rachel Adams-Heard Ford Drummond’s dad had one-twelfth of a headright, part of the one-fourth that Ford’s grandfather, Fred Gentner, bought from Jack, who bought it from O.V. Pope.
Ford was set to inherit his headright share after his dad died in 2020. But, he wanted to give it back to the Osage Nation. As did his cousins, who inherited the other part of that headright share.
Rachel Adams-Heard And I’m curious, like, why you decided to try to do that?Frederick Ford Drummond Well, the tribe has asked for them back, for one thing. And it’s not, honestly a lot of money involved. And it just seems like the right thing to do at this point. I think there’s a lot more history coming up—about “The Killers of the Flower Moon” movie, and all those kinds of things. I have no idea how we got this headright. I’m not aware of anything nefarious, or any wrongdoing, or anything, but I just think it seems like the right time and the right thing to do to just try to give it back to the tribe.
Rachel Adams-Heard But here’s the thing, Ford said he and his cousins, they can’t actually give their headright shares back to the tribe. They tried. But for some reason, federal law makes it practically impossible.
Frederick Ford Drummond You’ve probably learned it’s difficult to do it just legally. So they’re trying to get some type of legislative relief to allow that to happen. So, we’re just waiting to see when we can do it. But yeah, that’s, that’s my plan. Rachel Adams-Heard So is it the is the Bureau of Indian Affairs, that doesn’t really have a mechanism?Frederick Ford Drummond I think if there’s something the way the law is set up, that you’re supposed to try to find the original heirs of that headright—the descendants of that headright—and/or portion of the headright. As you probably have learned, headrights have been split up into very minute fractions across four descendants. So it’s hard to do that. It’s hard to track people down. And there’s not really a good mechanism for just giving it back to the tribe itself.Rachel Adams-Heard So the idea is that you would actually find the Osage allottee, whose headright share that originally was and give it back to the family instead of the tribe?Frederick Ford Drummond I’m not sure. You’d probably be better off asking someone at the BIA. All I know about that is there’s been a couple of news articles on it in local newspapers and there’s a whole kind of list of how you what you have to do to get it done—which just made basically made it impossible to do it.
Rachel Adams-Heard Ford is the Drummond family member I mentioned in episode one. The one who’s a citizen of the Choctaw Nation. He said his great-grandfather on his mother’s side experienced the removal of the Choctaw Nation from Mississippi to their reservation in present-day Oklahoma. Ford said he’s a product of both sides of Oklahoma’s history: tribal removal and White settlement.
And now he’s set to inherit this fraction of a headright, that was traced back to an Osage woman who died during the Reign of Terror. Whose White husband was later accused of coercing her daughter to marry his brother, a man she said exhibited “extreme cruelty” against her. And Ford wants to give it back. But for some bureaucratic reason, he can’t.
Everett Waller [introduces himself in Osage] My name is Everett Waller. I’m an Osage Indian from Hominy, Oklahoma. I am now the seated chairman of the Osage Minerals Council.
Rachel Adams-Heard I went to meet Everett Waller because just a few weeks before, the Osage Minerals Council announced an effort to get the US Congress to pass a bill that would make it easier for non-Osage headright holders like Ford Drummond to give their shares back to the Osage Nation.
Everett Waller That should never have left my people’s hands. Our trustee should not allow a item, whether it’s monetary, whether it’s land, whether it’s our future, to be given out to someone else, because we administrate it, we pay for it.
Rachel Adams-Heard Everett and his fellow Minerals Council members are elected by Osage headright holders. They make decisions about how to develop all the oil and gas resources in Osage County. Everett’s job is to represent Osage headright holders’ interests, and a big part of that is getting back all the headrights held outside the Nation.
Everett Waller I looked at the 1906 Act as amended. In ‘84, it was said that you cannot give these headrights or sell them to non-Osages, it would stop the bleeding. But then the damage has already been done. When the first Osage, original allottee died, any of their possessions should have been held in trust for the Nation.
Rachel Adams-Heard I sat with Everett at a big table, in a huge conference room in the Minerals Council building, on the hill in Pawhuska where all the Osage government buildings are. On the wall is a mural of dozens of Osage citizens, including members of Everett’s family.
Everett’s pushing for this legislation to get headrights back, because even though the rules were changed in the ‘70s and ‘80s so that headrights could no longer be transferred to non-Osages, they didn’t require any of the headrights that had already left Osage ownership to be returned.
So right now, if a non Osage person has a headright, and they want to give it back to the Osage Nation can that happen?
Everett Waller I don’t want to say it can’t happen. I just said we have seen a couple of issues before I was chairman that actually showed that there’s not a proper methodology through the federal government to allow that. Now, I think that’s done, as you well know, by some people in Washington, that has has not completed the requirements of taking care of the treaty rights of the Osage.
Rachel Adams-Heard So both Ford and Everett are saying the current process is so complicated and cumbersome that non-Osage headright holders are practically prohibited from returning their shares. That’s what this new legislation would do – make that process easier.
And it seems likely that legislation like this isn’t going to be very controversial. We’re talking about adding a legal mechanism for someone to voluntarily give something back to a tribal nation. Even with all the gridlock and polarization in government, it’s hard to see anyone taking any major issues with that.
And once this is all solved, Ford Drummond and his two cousins will give back their portion of that one-fourth of a headright. And Jim Drummond’s trustee will hang onto his.
As far as I can tell, the Drummonds had three-fourths of a headright. They bought it from a man named O.V. Pope, who inherited his shares from his wife, Nah-me-tsa-he, who died while the Pope brothers isolated, abused, and coerced her daughter into marrying Troy Pope.
We only followed three-fourths of a headright, and we ran into the Reign of Terror. How many of the 500-plus other headrights held by non-Osages had a similar story?
I get why the idea of the Drummonds having dozens of headrights got around. The Drummonds are a big name around Osage County. Some of them are rich and powerful. You can’t walk through downtown Pawhuska without running into one of the Drummonds’ businesses. And across the different branches of the family, they own so much land, land their ancestors were able to buy pretty quickly. How was one family able to get so much, thousands and thousands of acres by the 1930s? Especially since this was all owned by the Osage Nation in 1906.
And sure, there’s still a chance that there’s a Drummond out there who holds more headrights under some other name.
But after reading pages and pages of headright transfers, and going through probate files and other legal documents from that time, this three-fourths of a headright is all that I could find.
That’s still a lot of money over the years – money that wasn’t meant for them. I doubt when Osage leaders negotiated collective ownership of the Mineral Estate they imagined parts of it would end up with a White family like the Drummonds. Certainly not like this.
But the money the Drummond family did get from headrights, it’s not enough to build a ranching empire. Not one like theirs, more than 130,000 acres across all the family members. The land the Drummonds own, thousands of acres of bluestem grass, it can graze cattle, serve as collateral for loans, build wealth over generations.
By the time Jack Drummond bought that fraction of a headright in 1925 he and his two brothers already owned a lot of Osage land.
And when I tried to find out how they did that, I saw something more subtle than the murders of the Reign of Terror. A system that the Drummond brothers and other White men in Osage County used to insert themselves into the finances of generations of Osage families. A system that helped build an empire.
What started it all – next time on “In Trust.”
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