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