In Trust

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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The extended Drummond family includes TV’s “Pioneer Woman,” Ree Drummond, and Oklahoma Attorney General candidate Gentner Drummond. If you add up the holdings of scores of family members, the Drummonds today are the biggest landowner in Osage County.  Many Osages have long wondered: How’d the family get so much land? An out-of-print book and hours of forgotten tapes reveal clues. They also point to an untold story of one Osage woman’s resilience. Learn more and see bonus material from the episode at https://bloom.bg/3DNjPp1.

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For years, Osage citizens had to sift through rumors and wrinkled pieces of paper for clues to one pressing question: Who ended up with shares of their reservation’s mineral rights? The answer was a secret, guarded by the federal government. Until one day in 2009, when a local newspaper published a list of those names – including some familiar ones. Learn more and see bonus material from the episode: https://bloom.bg/3xujL9x 

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A hundred and fifty years ago, the Osage Nation bought a stretch of prairie the size of Delaware, in what's now Oklahoma. The Osage owned the land and everything beneath it. Today, much of present-day Osage County has left Osage hands. In some cases, appropriation was swift and brutal: Dozens of Osages were murdered for their share of lucrative mineral rights to this oil-rich land, a period often referred to as the Reign of Terror. But other transfers of wealth played out more subtly—dollar by dollar and acre by acre, over decades—helped along by policies created by the US government.

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