(Bloomberg) — This is the transcript for the third 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 Three: The Osage Price
(audio from a documentary) “‘Come trade with me.’ Those are the words that brought the Drummond family to Oklahoma and Osage County. Frederick Drummond came to the…”
Rachel Adams-Heard 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 1921 Tulsa race massacre, and one of the Drummonds.
(audio from a documentary) “The Drummond name runs thick in the vast ranch lands of Osage County. The branches of the family tree — cousins, brothers, uncles — are extensive and storied.”
Rachel Adams-Heard This is an interview with Frederick Ford Drummond — he inherited part of that one-fourth of a headright, and left it to his son, Ford Drummond. You heard 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 Osage Reservation in 1886. He got a job as a trader in Pawhuska. Had a license from the government to sell goods to Osages. Later, he moved the family to Hominy, where he ran another store called the Hominy Trading Company.
(audio from a documentary: Frederick Ford Drummond) “That was the Super Walmart of Osage County at that time. They had everything from groceries, to ladies and gents furnishings, shoe department, hardware department, furniture department, groceries — they had everything that you needed to be a farmer or a rancher at that time. That 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, if they had a furniture store, they were usually morticians as well.”
Rachel Adams-Heard This is a story the family tells a lot — that Frederick Drummond and his boys, Cecil, Fred Gentner, and Jack, built up their ranching empire while running a trading post. Cecil was the rancher, Fred Gentner 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. Had a say in local politics.
Jack Drummond When we went to Hominy, it was just an Indian trading post on the banks of Hominy Creek. I imagine there was about something like 50 people.
Rachel Adams-Heard Jack Drummond tells the origin story too, in those tapes with his biographer. Talks about how his father bought the Hominy Trading Company, and moved the family there right before allotment. Jack gives a bit more detail about how it actually all worked, how the family saw themselves.
Jack Drummond How he kept his store going was the Indian payments. See, he could speak the Osage tongue and my brother Gentner learned to speak the Osage tongue also, because he was going to be in the store.Terry Hammons Now, you were in the store when the oil boom hit up there, right? And they were getting those fabulous, fabulous checks?Jack Drummond The year I was in, I had the men’s furnishing and the shoe department.
Rachel Adams-Heard Jack started working in the store around 1920. Oil production in Osage County had taken off. Headright payments were huge. Jack ran the men’s department. Their dad had died by then, so his boss was his older brother, Fred Gentner Drummond.
Terry Hammons I understand that the Osage back in those days was an area of big parties and there was a fabulous social life going on, is that so?Jack Drummond Not with the White people; for the Indians.Terry Hammons I’ve always heard about golf clubs and fabulous parties and…Jack Drummond No, that’s all BS. Don’t believe it.Terry Hammons Don’t believe it, huh?Jack Drummond No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don’t ever get that in your book because it’s not so.Terry Hammons OK. That’s what I wanted to get cleared up.Jack Drummond No, no, Terry. The White people never never never had anything like that. It was only these Indians — but they had this Indian payment money that was so much, so lavish.
Rachel Adams-Heard Jack saw an opportunity in all that wealth. You can hear it in this story he tells about a dispute with his brother, Fred Gentner, around December of 1921. Jack and Fred Gentner would fight a lot over the years. But this story — it was because of the store — about a bonus check Fred Gentner wouldn’t give to Jack. He was still mad about it almost 60 years later.
Jack Drummond And bonus day came and he would call one clerk at a time up to his office on the deck there in the Hominy Trading Company. And the evening time came up, he hadn’t called on me. So I went up to his office and I said, “Well Gentner, I’ve been waiting for you to call me all day to give me my bonus check.” Well he said, “Jack,” he said, “We don’t think you’ve earned one.” Well the year before that men’s department and shoe department had lost something like $30,000, and the year it was under my control, my management, I may have earned something like $50,000.
Rachel Adams-Heard So Jack’s saying he really turned things around for the men’s department. An additional $80,000 in revenue. He goes on to explain how.
Jack Drummond For example on a silk shirt, I found a manufacturing outfit that would make silk shirts for those big Indians up to 52, 54, even 56 sizes. But those shirts would cost us maybe $6 or $8 a shirt and I’d get $50 or $60 a shirt. They didn’t didn’t care what the cost of a shirt was because they were getting big Osage payments in those times. So when I found out what these Indians wanted, then I got the merchandise and sold it to them at a tremendous profit. Well anyway, he didn’t give me my $600…
Rachel Adams-Heard Those shirts, he says it would cost about $6 to $8 dollars for him to get one. But he jacked up the prices. He charged Osage customers more than 500% what it cost him to source the shirts. For reference, paying $60 for a shirt in 1921 is like paying almost $1,000 today.
Jack Drummond They couldn’t get them anywhere else in the Osage except there at that store. And boy I really charged them for it. I was getting them service but I was making them pay for it.
John Maker The main thing was it was just too much money. It was just an incredible, fantastic amount of money here in oil in Osage County back then. All the swindlers and con artists in the world were flocking to Osage County.
Rachel Adams-Heard This is John Maker. He’s a citizen of the Osage Nation.
John Maker I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, raised in Hominy, Oklahoma, where my family allotments are.
Rachel Adams-Heard 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’s been in Hominy for more than a century. Back then, they would have shopped at the Hominy Trading Company. By the time John was born in the 1950s, the name had been changed to the Pioneer Store.
John Maker I mean, everybody just knew, and there was an Osage price when you’d go to the store.
Rachel Adams-Heard 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 because of a little experiment his family tried. This was in the ‘60s, when he was in high school. His mother’s aunt was in town for a visit.
John Maker And my mom told her, said, “Well, you know, we need to go to town and get some material, some ribbon stuff to make our Indian dance shirts,” for me and my brother.
Rachel Adams-Heard John says his mom’s aunt was White, and sometimes, she’d come to stay in Hominy for the summer. And one day, on one of those trips, the family loads up in the car and heads to the store, and John’s mom asks her aunt for a favor.
John Maker My mom said, “Now, I want you to go in there and get this stuff, here’s the list.” She said, “But if I go they’re gonna charge me more.” And my aunt, she goes — she didn’t believe it — she goes, “Oh, now, they can’t do that here.” She said “Yes,” — she said, “Come on, I’ll prove it to you.” So mom went in there and got this same stuff, same list. And then my aunt — a Scottish woman, White woman — she went in. Same stuff, it was like, half price. And my aunt was just flabbergasted. She couldn’t believe it … it was really true.Rachel Adams-Heard And this was at the Hominy Trading Company?John Maker That’s the Drummond’s store. When I was growing up it was called the Pioneer Store. That was just a common practice. Mmm-hmm. Everybody knows it: Osage price.
Rachel Adams-Heard I don’t know how big the markup was for Osage customers. That’s not clear from some of the old ledgers I’ve seen. And the overcharging? It wasn’t exclusive to the Drummonds’ 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. Gentner Drummond, the lawyer, 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 Osage customers wanted, and he was able to source it for them, like a luxury good.
But the Osage price, I’ve heard about it over and over again.
Rachel Adams-Heard Did you ever hear anything about the Drummonds growing up? Did your family ever talk about them? John Maker No, we just knew they had a lot of land around and of course, everybody was like secretly, like, “We know how they got their land, you know? They cheated and they’d get these Osages to run up these big outrageous bills.” If they were true or not I don’t know, but it seemed to be pretty unscrupulous. But in those days, it was accepted as good business practice: “Well, he’s a good business man.” You know, that’s why they become so wealthy. If you look in the Osage County plat book there’s about five pages of Drummonds, all Drummonds — phew phew phew! — of how much land they own in Osage County.
Rachel Adams-Heard 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 Hominy Trading Company and other trading posts in Osage County were the foundation for a lot more.
They put merchants in a position of financial power over Osage 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 Frederick Ford Drummond — the one I played for you at the beginning — he kind of laughs about the store selling coffins and serving as morticians. But that part of the business was pretty big. It’s another instance where you see the Hominy Trading Company charging a lot of money.
I know this because the Hominy Trading Company keeps coming up in my research. But not as a general store; as an undertaker. They advertised in the paper. One ad promised embalmers, quote, “constantly in attendance.” Even overnight.
I also saw the Hominy Trading Company was undertaking in the records I pulled on Nah-me-tsa-he, the Osage woman who was married to O.V. Pope. It was her headright shares O.V. 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: Hominy Trading Company is written in cursive.
Jack Drummond not only acquired Nah-me-tsa-he’s headrights, but his family’s store handled her funeral arrangements when she died, while the Pope brothers were keeping her daughter in Colorado.
In Nah-me-tsa-he’s probate file, the pages and pages that went into settling her estate, I could see how much that funeral cost: $3,200. As well as more than $900 for a “note” — outstanding debt at the store.
Account for inflation — that’s the equivalent of $70,000 that the Hominy Trading Company charged to Nah-me-tsa-he’s estate.
Since I saw the Hominy Trading Company was an undertaker, I’ve been looking out for it in other probate files and death certificates. I’ve seen it on several others, too.
John Maker Yeah, Charlie Me-chet-se. That’s him right here, that famous picture.
Rachel Adams-Heard Charles Me-chet-se is John Maker’s great-grandfather. The Drummonds’ 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. Me-chet-se is wearing a traditional Osage hairstyle and clothing. John told me the picture shows up in some prominent books about the Osage Nation.
John Maker This is a famous photograph. Everyone loves this, and like I say, Dr. Bailey — Garrick Bailey — he used this, his likeness, on the cover of his book. And then when I was over in France, this professor — I stayed with them for a week in Paris — she asked me if she could use this on her book. It’s all in French writing. I said, “Yeah, go ahead.”
Rachel Adams-Heard I saw Charles Me-chet-se’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 1931.
By this point, the Hominy Trading Company had expanded the mortuary business to 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 Hominy.
When Charles Me-chet-se died, the claim for his funeral came from the Drummonds’ store and the new funeral home. The bill is itemized: costs broken down for the funeral dinner, cooking utensils, dishes, as well as undertaking services.
John Maker Boy, this funeral dinner is like, let’s see — the casket, Hominy Funeral Home casket, ball, embalming, grave digging services — complete funeral was $1,250. Which seems like not much in today’s …. today’s Osage funeral, with the big dinner, the feast for 200 people, a nice casket — it’s probably around $8,000.
Rachel Adams-Heard Together, the claims came out to $2,027.13. Tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money.
John Maker It’s an incredible amount of money. Even in those times, because those days were simple days. And how could something really be that expensive back then?
Rachel Adams-Heard So it wasn’t just shirts that were 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 Osages were charged for funerals. He said the practice was “even worse than the Teapot Dome case,” which at that time was considered the biggest political scandal in US history.
And the debts in 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. Osage customers could owe trading companies hundreds of dollars, sometimes even thousands.
But it wasn’t just the funeral debt that stuck out to me when reading about Charles Me-chet-se. Because the Drummonds had another role when it came to his affairs. In Me-chet-se’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 Me-chet-se’s estate. 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.
Me-chet-se’s estate wasn’t the only time one of the Drummond brothers approved a claim from their own store. In fact, this happened three times in John Maker’s own family. In addition to Charles Me-chet-se, John’s other great-grandfather and his great-grandmother both had claims from the Hominy Trading Company after they died. Jack’s brother Fred Gentner was the administrator of their estates. In all, Fred Gentner alone handled at least 28 Osage estates.
So, the Drummond brothers were running the store that was claiming all these debts when Osages died. And then, they’d put on a different hat and approve payment to the store.
Once the estate was settled, the government would pay the Hominy Trading Company from Osage accounts at the Office of Indian Affairs.
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 thousand dollars.
Elizabeth Lohah Homer Any Osage — at least, you know, in my family and my community — any Osage that anyone thought might have the propensity or the ability to become a lawyer, they encouraged them to go to law school. And it was because of all of the shenanigans that went on with the probate process.
Rachel Adams-Heard This is Elizabeth Lohah Homer. She’s a citizen of the Osage Nation. She’s from Hominy. Elizabeth is a lawyer, worked for the Osage Nation for a while, then went to the Department of Justice, then the Department of Interior. Now she runs a law firm in D.C. She’s also on the Osage Nation’s 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.
Elizabeth Lohah Homer Oh, I would think that that would definitely be a conflict of interest. An unwaivable 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 interest?” And there are some conflicts of interests that a client can waive, and then there are conflicts of interest that a client can’t waive. And in this case, this was a conflict of interest with an estate. Right? And so it should not be waived. You know, if you’ve got a claim on the estate, then there are plenty of other people who can administer that estate. It doesn’t have to be you.Rachel Adams-Heard And the issue is that you’re not able to give it the proper examination to vet its legitimacy? Elizabeth Lohah Homer No, it’s your classic conflict of interest. You have a pecuniary interest in the subject matter.
Rachel Adams-Heard Pecuniary interest. In other words, you’re financially motivated.
Elizabeth Lohah Homer It is kind of consistent with the bad behavior that we’ve seen through the 20th century.
Rachel Adams-Heard I was 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.
Elizabeth Lohah Homer You’d just go and you would be issued an account, a credit account. And then 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 not at all unusual, even during my childhood.
Rachel Adams-Heard I want to take a moment here to make clear that the Osage Nation is far from the only tribal nation whose citizens became indebted to traders and merchants. In May of 2022, 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 credit system at trading companies dates back to the early 1800s, 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 1803 to William Henry Harrison, who at the time was in charge with negotiating with tribal nations over land boundaries. Jefferson writes that the US will “push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good & 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 cession of lands.”
This letter was written 100 years before Frederick Drummond took over the Hominy Trading Company. Before the Osage Reservation was allotted. But what this report said was that Jefferson’s strategy would go on to inform the future of federal Indian law and policy.
By 1921, Osage families owed about $1 million to bankers and 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 debt for the Drummonds to collect on in the first place. Osages, at least those who had headrights, they were supposed to be the richest people in the world. The store was charging a lot, but was it so much that Osage customers couldn’t pay their bill?
Elizabeth said this was all made worse by how Congress decided headright money should be distributed.
Elizabeth Lohah Homer I mean there’s all kinds of references in the hearing record, of members of the Congress, “well they don’t work,” you know, “and they’ve got all this money and they’re like children,” you know, which is like, not true. I mean, we’re the first ones to kind of adopt these policies of understanding very sophisticated legal principles of retaining the subsurface estate, when we allotted the surface estate of our reservation. I mean that was pretty slick, right? That is pretty smart. And yet the talk amongst the powers that be, or the people in the local community, is like: “They’re children and they don’t know how to manage their money and they’re squandering it.” And so, you know, there was legislation in the early 1920s that actually limited the amount of money that Osages could draw down quarterly. They limited it to like $1,000. I mean, you might have an estate worth tens of thousands of dollars, but you could get $1,000 per quarter. And so the whole merchant community kind of adapted to that.
Rachel Adams-Heard These hearings over Osage fund restrictions continued into the mid-1920s. Some Osage 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 Rind told Congress that families wanted to be able 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 Osage spending. Even though, as Bacon Rind pointed out, their spending was just like that of other wealthy people. There was that hearing from 1920, with the inspector named H.S. Traylor. He’s the one who called Osage spending “sinful.”
And I’m bringing him up again because, in the middle of his racist rant, Traylor 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 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 from when the Osage Nation was allotted. They’re blue, divided into thousands of little pieces. Each one has a name inside, of an Osage citizen who received that allotment after the 1906 act.
I started coloring all the parcels that the Drummonds owned today with a pink highlighter. That way I knew when an Osage name came up whether the Drummonds ended up with their land.
And what I saw was that some of the names of Osage families who were in debt to the store had also at some point had their allotment deeded to the Drummonds.
(ambient noise outdoors)
The Osage County Courthouse.
Rachel Adams-Heard 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 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.
Rachel Adams-Heard Woo, that’s strong. Hi! Looks so good in here. Clerk Minus the smell in here. Clerk Minus the cords! Y’all be careful. Rachel Adams-Heard Minus the cords. Yeah, sorry, I almost really messed that up. Clerk They’ll get ya.
Rachel Adams-Heard Land in Osage 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 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 floor to ceiling. They’re stored on rollers, covered in hard maroon plastic. They’re full of warranty deeds, sheriff’s deeds, quit-claim deeds — all the various ways property can be transferred 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 Osage citizen received just over 640 acres of land, but that land was spread out over multiple plots that could be dozens of miles away from each other. A lot of them weren’t anywhere near a road, making them practically inaccessible. It’s just one way allotment was rigged against the Osage Nation from the start.
Tracking the chain of ownership after allotment is dizzying, and takes a long time. At the end of it, you only have a few sparse details about what happened. But there’s another 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 asks 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.
Terry Hammons Around the time of the robbery it seems like you transferred an awful lot of land into other people’s names.Jack Drummond Only to my wife.Terry Hammons Well, you put 4,000 acres in, uh, George Smith’s name?Jack Drummond Oh, yeah. But that was to protect the cows and Milton Freeland knew all about that.Terry Hammons Right, you put, I’m not sure how many acres into the wife’s name. Either 7,000 or 9,000?Jack Drummond Alright, those are the only two.Terry Hammons And then you put land in Cecil’s name.Jack Drummond Alright those three. That’s right.Terry Hammons But that took care of almost all of your land, was in somebody else’s name.Jack Drummond Yeah. Terry Hammons By the end of 1932. Or by the beginning, or by the end of 1932.Jack Drummond That’s right it did.
Rachel Adams-Heard So not only was I trying to track land transfers from 100 years ago, but I was trying to track land transfers from a hundred years ago that were constantly changing hands and purposely being put in other peoples’ names.
But back to the names in the Congressional hearing, the Osage families who owed the Hominy 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 Osage families mortgaged their land. 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 Hominy Trading Company.
And some of those same families that owed the store money, for everything from mortgages to groceries to funerals, they later deeded their land to the Drummond brothers. I looked 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 Osage 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 Osage family who owed the Hominy Trading Company a lot of money by early 1918, and months later, they deeded 160 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.
Katie Yates Free My name is Katie Yates Free and I’m currently a realty specialist for the Osage Nation. But I’m here on my own accord, I have to say that.
Rachel Adams-Heard Katie doesn’t work for the Osage Nation anymore, but when she did, her job involved looking at land deals all day: leases, sales. There’s still a pretty complicated set of rules the US government has for a lot of Osage land. Katie helped people navigate that system.
Katie Yates Free You’re a steward of the property for those owners, on behalf of the federal government, to basically safeguard their properties for them.
Rachel Adams-Heard I showed some of the documents I found to Katie: the Congressional testimony mentioning that one family’s debt, and then the deed to their land that came a few months later.
Katie Yates Free The grand total of the amount spent by this family in four months for sustenance — so, this is your rations and stuff. Sustenance and clothing amounts, it totaled $4,537.70. So what history has taught us — my grandma would say — is it the White man price or is that the Osage price?
Rachel Adams-Heard That $4,500 is equal to more than $85,000 in today’s money. Half of it was owed to the Hominy Trading Company, half to other stores. The bill was racked up over just four months. I showed Katie the deed too, the one that transferred 160 acres of this family’s land to Cecil Drummond a few months later.
The deed doesn’t say the exact price, but the taxes paid on the sale indicate that it sold for less than $500 total.
Rachel Adams-Heard So 160 acres for at most $500.Katie Yates Free Yeah.Rachel Adams-Heard Is that low? Katie Yates Free Yeah. I would hope 160 acres would be worth more than $500. Because, if you think about it, that bill was $4,500; how many 160 acre parcels had to be sold to rectify that? Rachel Adams-Heard What do you make of that? Katie Yates Free They were businessmen. I mean, it’s no different than business today. People just, I don’t think, realize that it happened here and it’s happened for so long, and people, I mean, they were ahead of their time in these kind of, practices, I should say. We still 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. Rachel Adams-Heard Why is that? Katie Yates Free It’s a big name.Rachel Adams-Heard But I’m not, I’m not reading this wrong. Am I?Katie Yates Free [Silent]
Rachel Adams-Heard Katie didn’t want to answer that question on tape. Maybe because we don’t have a lot of information about why these things happened, only that they did.
Katie Yates Free Things don’t add up if you start looking back in the history, and you can’t make it add up, in my opinion. I’ve tried. You can try to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, but they don’t match.Rachel Adams-Heard So it’s an incomplete history.Katie Yates Free It’s probably incomplete on purpose. But yeah, it’s incomplete.
Rachel Adams-Heard Selling allotment land like this was supposed to be hard. When the 1906 Act went into effect, it placed the land into something called restricted status. These were protections meant to keep Osage families from being targeted in schemes to get their land.
Katie Yates Free The restriction is that the federal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they have to basically bless what you’re doing with your property. They’re like, “OK, is this in your best financial or your best interest, what you’re doing?” Because people back in 1906 and 1918 and everything were being taken advantage of — leasing for 50 cents or whatever it is, you know? So that’s where they came in. I think that was the whole point was to have those restrictions. So they weren’t leasing to the neighbor next door for $1 a year, when they could be getting $100 a year or something like that.
Rachel Adams-Heard But there was a way around those restrictions, something called a certificate of competency. The government, by default, considered Osages and other Native Americans to be, in 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 allotment, a lot of Osage adults applied for those certificates.
Katie Yates Free So people would get their certificate of competency and it worked for some people. They would get it’s fee simple, they can do whatever they want with their land. They may put a mortgage on it, get a business going, 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.
Rachel Adams-Heard For Osage adults with certificates of competency, the majority of their land was no longer restricted. It could be mortgaged, like the loans I saw in the courthouse, or sold when families needed cash.
In Jack’s biography, Terry writes that Jack one time financed an Osage wedding — provided a wedding ring, a new Pontiac, a bunch of hogs, 40 horses — and furnished the couple’s home so he could get 320 acres of land and another 2,000-acre lease.
Jack Drummond See, we still have the first land that my father bought and he had, I imagine, maybe 1,200 acres. And it was just scattered around and Indians would come in and want something, or to buy a buggy maybe, or a team of something of that sort, he’d trade them a piece of land. I’ve traded an automobile many times for a piece of land. They want a new automobile, I wanted their land, so I’d buy, I’d say, “Well I’ll give you a new automobile.” I’d buy the automobile, take a deed to their land. Terry Hammons Fascinating.Jack Drummond Many, many times have I done that.
Rachel Adams-Heard So it wasn’t just the Hominy Trading Company, the source of a lot of the Drummond brothers’ money and influence. It was this whole environment that they operated in — an environment that kept Osage money tied up, that made a lot of Osage families dependent on the White businessmen around them. Because this whole time the US government was restricting how much of their own money Osages could access, those families were left with just a couple of options, both working in the Drummonds’ favor. They could go into 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 for White men in Osage County to make money off Osage wealth.
That’s after the break.
(Broadcast news clip: “Britney Spears has been freed from a conservatorship that has controlled her personal life and money for nearly 14 years.”)
Rachel Adams-Heard In 2021, pop star Britney Spears was released from a conservatorship she was placed under more than a decade earlier.
A psychiatric emergency had led a court to declare her unable to handle her own affairs.
(Broadcast news clip: “Jamie Spears, her father, was given legal control over his daughters personal, professional, and financial affairs in 2008.”)
Rachel Adams-Heard Eventually, after a long legal fight, and mounting public pressure, Britney Spears was able to remove her father from control of the conservatorship, and later have it removed altogether.
(Broadcast news clip: “It’s official, the conservatorship of Britney Spears has been terminated.”)
Rachel Adams-Heard 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. 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’ conservatorship, I was learning about something similar that Osages had been subjected to for decades.
They were called guardianships. Hundreds of Osage adults had someone put in charge of their financial affairs, usually a White man. These guardianships weren’t exclusive to the Osage Nation. They happened across Indian country.
Osage guardianships existed in the years after allotment, but it wasn’t until headright money started pouring in that they really took off. There’s Congressional testimony about White men propositioning wealthy Osages to become their guardian, telling them they’d help 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 Osage estates. Depending on how big the estate was, their fee could be pretty big — over $1,000 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 overseen by the local courts that created a lot of conflicts of interest.
Garrick Bailey You’re supposed to have this, this wise White person is supposed to look out for your interests.Rachel Adams-Heard How did that work out?Garrick Bailey That wise, White person was the biggest crook of them all.
Rachel Adams-Heard This is Garrick Bailey.
Garrick Bailey I’m a professor emeritus at the University of Tulsa. For 50 years I taught anthropology here.
Rachel Adams-Heard Garrick built his career chronicling Osage culture. He’s written and edited three books on the Osage Nation.
I went to see Garrick because, over his decades of research, he’s come to know a lot about Osage guardianships. We had talked on the phone a few times, and Garrick told me he had a book I should look at. He called it the “Gray Book.”
Garrick Bailey It’s gray (laughs). That’s why they call it the “Gray Book.” And there are stories in the “Gray Book” about guardians, specific stories.
Rachel Adams-Heard This was a field report written by the BIA in the ’50s and sent to Congress. It’s a stark change in tone from similar reports written 30 years earlier. Here, the government acknowledges: Osages were exploited, and a lot of that is our fault.
The report has all these examples of guardianships gone wrong. It mentions one guardian who overcharged his ward by a $1,000 for a car. Another guardian claimed that his Osage ward, a 38-year-old widow, owed him $12,000 — $2,000 of that was from a loan she apparently got when she was 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 20 lawsuits against guardians. But even though the BIA seems to acknowledge all this, that the guardianship system led to widespread exploitation and profiteering, the authors keep the names of the guardians anonymous.
Rachel Adams-Heard Do you think that there any there were any good guardians?Garrick Bailey I’m sure there were. There are always some good people around. But I think there was so much racism involved in it, and this overall attitude that, “These people don’t deserve anything. They didn’t, they didn’t earn it. They didn’t work hard.” And basically you’ve got a county full of wealthy 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. It’s not just a coincidence that the murders start and the Tulsa race massacre take place in 1921. There is a lot of resentment about what’s happening in Indian territory, and I think 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 that just cheated them out of land and other things, I think they had a much easier time. Less likely to get caught.
Rachel Adams-Heard Osage leaders knew this was going on. One member of the Osage 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 Alberty found was the “guardianship organization” of “merchants, bankers, etc.” He said they all worked together to get their wards to shop at certain stores or use certain banks. Alberty said it was general knowledge, but “when it comes to proving in court, you can’t.”
Other than the “Gray Book,” information on most guardianships is hard to come by. There are official guardianship files, held in the Osage 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 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 Osage 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 Osage money that they could put to work for themselves. Sometimes, those loans were secured with Osage land the brothers had gotten earlier.
This all played out in the case of one Osage family. The same family that had deeded their land to Cecil Drummond after their debt at the store had surpassed $2,000. Within the next few years, the Drummond brothers had gotten $25,000 in loans from the Osage family’s accounts, all given out by their guardians. That’s the equivalent of more than $400,000 today.
Those guardians were men the Drummond brothers knew. One of them worked at their store, a man named Fred L. Shedd. In sworn testimony, Shedd’s ward said Shedd would only let her get credit at the Hominy Trading Company.
Libbi Gray 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 ridiculous. There’s no way.
Rachel Adams-Heard This is Libbi Gray. Libbi’s married to Jim Gray, 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 Hominy Trading Company, and later deeded their land to Cecil Drummond. The store also handled the family’s funeral services.
Libbi Gray It was a whole systemic thing. It wasn’t just the guardians. I mean, in this time when there were all of these deaths, we were paying, what, three to 10 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 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 have an 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, it was just a whole system.
Rachel Adams-Heard I’ve sat down with Libbi several times while reporting this story. Both sides of her family have come up in records relating to the Drummonds, whether that’s guardianships, the store or probates.
Libbi Gray The Drummonds had the store. They were overcharging Osages. That put a big nest egg back where they could buy more land. 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 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 Osages.
It’s hard to think that our people were used like that. 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 checkerboarded our reservation is and how all of these jurisdictional issues affect our ability to protect our people and our ability to fully exercise our sovereignty it’s so much more than just the financial part of it.
Rachel Adams-Heard 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, while they weren’t aware of 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 Osage estates through all these different means: the store, the probates, the men they knew who were guardians.
But that wasn’t all. 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 10 in 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 “In Trust.”
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