Speaker 1: Come trade with me. Those are the words that brought
Speaker 1: the Drummond family to Oklahoma and os Age County. Frederick
Speaker 1: Drummond came to the fot. What you're hearing is the
Speaker 1: introduction to an oral history series called Voices of Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: All sorts of famous people from the state are interviewed.
Speaker 1: An Olympic gymnast, a neurosurgeon, a survivor of the Holsa
Speaker 1: Race massacre, and one of the Drummonds. The Drummand name
Speaker 1: runs thick in the vast ranch lands of Osage County.
Speaker 1: The branches of the family trade cousins, brothers, uncles, are
Speaker 1: extensive in story. This is an interview with Frederick Ford Drummond.
Speaker 1: He inherited part of that one fourth the head right
Speaker 1: and left it to his son for Drummond you heard
Speaker 1: from him in the last episode. In this interview, Ford's
Speaker 1: dad is talking about his grandfather, Frederick Drummond, a Scottish
Speaker 1: immigrant who brought the family to the o s Age
Speaker 1: Reservation in eighty six. He got a job as a
Speaker 1: trader in Sky had a license from the government to
Speaker 1: sell goods to os Ages. Later, he moved the family
Speaker 1: to Harmony, where he ran another store called the Harmony
Speaker 1: Trading Company, and that was the super walmart of os
Speaker 1: Age County at that time. They had everything from groceries,
Speaker 1: two ladies and gents, furnishings, shoe department, hardware department, furniture department, groceries.
Speaker 1: They had everything that you needed to be a farmer
Speaker 1: or a rancher. At that time it was a pretty
Speaker 1: big deal. And even if you needed to be buried,
Speaker 1: they also had coffins that you could get. I thought
Speaker 1: that was always kind of funny all the old trading
Speaker 1: companies that if they had a furniture store, they were
Speaker 1: usually in the morticians as well. This is a story.
Speaker 1: The family tells a lot that Frederick Drummond and his boys, Cecil,
Speaker 1: bred Guttner and Jack built up their ranching empire while
Speaker 1: running a trading post. Cecil was the rancher, Red Genner
Speaker 1: was the businessman. Jack was both, but more of a speculator.
Speaker 1: They were ranchers and cattlemen, but they were also bankers
Speaker 1: and traders, community members how to stay in local politics.
Speaker 1: When we went to Harmony, it was adust to Indian
Speaker 1: trading posts on the banks of Harmony Creek. I imagine
Speaker 1: it was about something like fifty people. Jack Drummond tells
Speaker 1: the origin story too in those tapes with his biographer,
Speaker 1: talks about how his father bought the Harmony Trading Company
Speaker 1: and moved the family there right before alhatment. Jack gives
Speaker 1: a bit more detail about how it actually all worked,
Speaker 1: how the families saw themselves. How he kept his story
Speaker 1: going was the Indian payments. So he knew that he
Speaker 1: could speak in He could speak the Oss tongue, and
Speaker 1: my brother Gevernor learned to speak the Os tongue all
Speaker 1: who because he was going to be in the store
Speaker 1: and you were in the store when the oil boom.
Speaker 1: He had out there right and they were getting those fabulous,
Speaker 1: fabulous checks in the year. The year I was in
Speaker 1: I had the men's furnishing in the shoe department. Jack
Speaker 1: started working in the store around nineteen oil production in
Speaker 1: O s Age County had taken off, had right, payments
Speaker 1: were huge. Jack ran the men's department. Their dad had
Speaker 1: died by then, so his boss was his older brother,
Speaker 1: Fred Gettinger Drummond. I understand that the O s Age
Speaker 1: back in those days was an area of big parties
Speaker 1: and there was a fabulous social life going. Only not
Speaker 1: not not with the white people. For the Indians. I've
Speaker 1: always heard about golf clubs and no fabulous party, that's all, Bess.
Speaker 1: I don't believe it. I don't believe no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no no. Don't ever get that in your book
Speaker 1: because it's not so okay. That's what I want to
Speaker 1: get cleared up. No, no, Terry, the white people never never,
Speaker 1: never had anything like that. It will only these Indians.
Speaker 1: But they had this Indian payment money. It was so
Speaker 1: much so lavish. Jack'saw an opportunity in all that wealth,
Speaker 1: you can share it. In this story, he tells about
Speaker 1: a dispute with his brother Fred Getner around December. Jack
Speaker 1: and Fred Getner would fight a lot over the years,
Speaker 1: but this story it was because of the store, about
Speaker 1: a bonus check fred Getner wouldn't give to Jack. He
Speaker 1: was so mad about it. Almost sixty years later, bona
Speaker 1: state came and he would call run Cluck at a
Speaker 1: time up to his office on the deck there in
Speaker 1: the Homony Trading Company, and they even Tom came up.
Speaker 1: He hadn't called on me. So I went up to
Speaker 1: his office and I said, Gutner, I've been waiting for
Speaker 1: you to Paul all day, you give me my brother
Speaker 1: set where I said, Jack said, we don't think you
Speaker 1: earned one. Well, the year before that men's department in
Speaker 1: the shoe department had lost something like thirty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: And the year it was under my control, my management,
Speaker 1: I may earn something like fifty thousand dollars. So Jack
Speaker 1: saying he really turned things around for the men's department
Speaker 1: an additional eighty thousand dollars in revenue. He goes on
Speaker 1: to explain how, for example, on silk shirts, I found
Speaker 1: a manufacturing outfits would make silk shirts th big unions
Speaker 1: up to just two fifty four, even fifty six sizes.
Speaker 1: But those shows would cost us and maybe six or
Speaker 1: eight dollars a shirt, and now I'll get fifty or
Speaker 1: sixty dollars a shirt. They didn't care what the what
Speaker 1: the costs of the shirt was because they were getting
Speaker 1: big old stage payments in those times. So when I
Speaker 1: found out about these indians won't and then I got
Speaker 1: the merchandize sold them to a little tremendous profit. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: he didn't give me those shirts. He says it would
Speaker 1: cost about six to eight dollars for him to get one,
Speaker 1: but he jacked up the prices. He charged stage customers
Speaker 1: more than would have cost him to source the shirts
Speaker 1: for reference. Paying sixty dollars for a shure is like
Speaker 1: paying almost a thousand dollars today. They couldn't get him
Speaker 1: anywhere else and the Old States except there at that store,
Speaker 1: Right boy, I really charged him part. I will getting
Speaker 1: them service, but I'll make them pay for it. The
Speaker 1: main thing was it was just too much money. It
Speaker 1: was just an incredible, fantastic amount of money here in
Speaker 1: Oil no Stage count eat back then, all the swindlers
Speaker 1: and con artists in the world or flock o Sage County.
Speaker 1: This is John Maker. He's a citizen of the os
Speaker 1: Age Nation. I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, raised in Harmony, Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: where my family allotments are. I wanted to talk to
Speaker 1: John because as I've been reporting this story, his family's
Speaker 1: come up a lot in records related to the Drummonds,
Speaker 1: both on his mom's side and his dad's side. John's
Speaker 1: family has been in Hominy for more than a century.
Speaker 1: Back then, they would have shopped at the Harmony Trading Company.
Speaker 1: By the time John was born in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: the name had been changed to the Pioneer Store. I mean,
Speaker 1: everybody just knew, and there was an O Saze prize
Speaker 1: when you go to the store. When I asked John
Speaker 1: about the store, he told me about a time growing
Speaker 1: up when what he had always heard about the Hominy
Speaker 1: Trading Company became reality right in front of him. That's
Speaker 1: because of a little experiment his family tried. This was
Speaker 1: in the sixties when he is in high school. His
Speaker 1: mother's aunt was in town for a visit, and my
Speaker 1: mom told her and said, well, you know, we need
Speaker 1: to go to the town and get some material, sub
Speaker 1: ribbon stuff to make our Indian dance shirts for me.
Speaker 1: My brother, John says his mom's aunt was white and
Speaker 1: sometimes she'd come to stay in Hominy for the summer.
Speaker 1: One day, on one of those trips, the family loads
Speaker 1: up in the car and heads to the store, and
Speaker 1: John's mom asked her aunt for a fever. My mom said,
Speaker 1: I want you to go in here and get this stuff.
Speaker 1: Here's the list, she said, but if I go, they're
Speaker 1: gonna charge me more. And my aunt she's got and
Speaker 1: she didn't believe it. Oh, now, Dad, that they can't
Speaker 1: do that here she said yes. He said, come on,
Speaker 1: I'll pray it to you. So Mom went in there
Speaker 1: and got this same stuff, same list. And then my aunt,
Speaker 1: the Scottish woman, white woman, she went in the same stuff.
Speaker 1: It was like half price, and my aunt was just
Speaker 1: like flabber gas, like she couldn't believe it. It was
Speaker 1: really true. And this was at the Hominy Trading Store.
Speaker 1: When I was growing up, it was called the Pioneer Store.
Speaker 1: That was just a common practice. M hmm. Everybody knows
Speaker 1: it opsae price. I don't know how big the markup
Speaker 1: was for os age customers. That's not clear from some
Speaker 1: of the old ledgers I've seen the overcharging. It wasn't
Speaker 1: exclusive to the Drummond store. Historians and researchers have documented
Speaker 1: how merchants were able to profit off Native American wealth
Speaker 1: across Indian country. I have talked to descendants of the
Speaker 1: Drummond brothers about the store getting her Drummond the lawyer
Speaker 1: told me that at one point he had looked through
Speaker 1: the ledgers and didn't see anything that looked like exploitation.
Speaker 1: Another Drummond, Jack's grandson told me he had heard about
Speaker 1: the silk shirts from his grandfather, but he was always
Speaker 1: proud of them. He found something his O s Age
Speaker 1: customers wanted, he was able to source it for them,
Speaker 1: like a luxury good. But the os Age price, I've
Speaker 1: heard about it over and over again. Did you ever
Speaker 1: hear anything about the Drummonds growing up? Did your family
Speaker 1: ever talk about something? No, we just knew they had
Speaker 1: a lot of land around, and of course every like
Speaker 1: secretly like, well, you know how they got their land?
Speaker 1: You know, they cheated and did get these out sides
Speaker 1: to run up these big, outrageous bills. If they were
Speaker 1: true or not, I don't know, but it seems to
Speaker 1: be pretty unscrupulous. But in those days it was accepted
Speaker 1: as good business pacts. Well, he's a good businessman now,
Speaker 1: That's that's why they become so wealthy. If you look
Speaker 1: at the Stage County Platt book, there's about five pages
Speaker 1: of Drummonds, all druming, well, how must land they owned
Speaker 1: in O Sage County. The thing about the Drummond family
Speaker 1: story that Frederick and his boys were shop owners and
Speaker 1: that's how they got their start. That's true in a way,
Speaker 1: But what it leaves out, and what I've learned from
Speaker 1: talking to families and digging up hundreds of historical records.
Speaker 1: Is that the how Many Trading Company and other trading
Speaker 1: post in os Age County the foundation for a lot more.
Speaker 1: They put merchants in a position of financial power over
Speaker 1: Osge customers, power that could be built on over the
Speaker 1: years to gain money, influence, and land. This is in trust.
Speaker 1: I'm Rachel Adams heard in that oral history recording with
Speaker 1: Frederick Ford Drummond, the one I played for you at
Speaker 1: the beginning, he kind of laughs about the story selling
Speaker 1: coffins and serving as morticians, but that part of the
Speaker 1: business was pretty big. It's another instance where you see
Speaker 1: the how Many Trading Company charging a lot of money.
Speaker 1: I know this because the how Many Trading Company keeps
Speaker 1: coming up in my research. But not as a general store,
Speaker 1: as an undertaker they advertised in the paper one ad
Speaker 1: promised in Bamber's quote constantly in attendance, even overnight. I
Speaker 1: also saw the Homny Trading Company was undertaking and the
Speaker 1: records I pulled on no meat say he the o
Speaker 1: Sage woman who is married to Ovi Pope. It was
Speaker 1: her head right shares. Ovi Pope sold to Jack Drummond.
Speaker 1: I saw something on her death certificate below where someone
Speaker 1: wrote unknown where her parents names were supposed to be.
Speaker 1: It was the line for the undertaker how many trading
Speaker 1: company is written and cursive. Jack Drummond not only acquired
Speaker 1: nor Meat say he's head rights, but his family's store
Speaker 1: handled her funeral arrangements when she died while the Pope
Speaker 1: brothers were keeping her daughter in Colorado, and normats say
Speaker 1: He's probate file the pages and pages that went into
Speaker 1: settling her estate. I could see how much that funeral
Speaker 1: cost three thousand, two hundred dollars, as well as more
Speaker 1: than nine hundred dollars for a note outstanding debt at
Speaker 1: the store account for inflation. That's the equivalent of seventy
Speaker 1: dollars that the Homony Trading Company charged. And no meat
Speaker 1: say he's a state. Since I saw the Homony Trading
Speaker 1: Company was an undertaker, I've been looking out for it
Speaker 1: in other probate files and dust certificates. I've seen it
Speaker 1: on several others too. Yea, I sai here that famous picture.
Speaker 1: Charles meat Chetzi is John Maker's great grandfather. The Drummond
Speaker 1: store handled his funeral services. John had pictures of a
Speaker 1: lot of his family. We talked about this photo. It's
Speaker 1: black and white, a three quarter profile. Meat Chetzi is
Speaker 1: wearing a traditional stage hairstyle and clothing. John told me
Speaker 1: the picture shows up in some prominent books about the
Speaker 1: stage nation. This is a famous photograph everybody loves and
Speaker 1: I like, say, dr Baby Baby. He used this his
Speaker 1: likeness on the cover his book. And then when I
Speaker 1: was over in France, this this professor. I stay with
Speaker 1: them for a week in Paris and she asked me
Speaker 1: she could use this on her book. It's all in France.
Speaker 1: Writings said. I saw Charles meat Chutsi's name when I
Speaker 1: was looking through the records at the Drummond Collection, the
Speaker 1: archive outside of Oklahoma City, with those tapes of Jack
Speaker 1: and all his financial records. There was a claim from
Speaker 1: the store for his funeral, dated September. By this point,
Speaker 1: the Homedy Trading Company had expanded the mortuary business to
Speaker 1: a whole separate building called the Hominy Funeral Home. The
Speaker 1: local paper wrote it up, calling it a modern city feature.
Speaker 1: Apparently it was pretty unusual to see a funeral home
Speaker 1: in a small town like Comedy. When Charles meat Chutsy died,
Speaker 1: the claim for his funeral came from the Drummond store
Speaker 1: and the new funeral home. The bill is itemized cost
Speaker 1: looking down for the funeral dinner, cooking utensils, dishes, as
Speaker 1: well as undertaking services this funeral dinner, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I see like the casket, harmony, comfugia, home, casketball, embalming,
Speaker 1: grave digging services complete people with fifty dollars, which seems
Speaker 1: like not much in today's today's would say funeral with
Speaker 1: the big dinner, the feast for two hundred people, a
Speaker 1: nice casket, probably around eight thousand dollars. Together, the claims
Speaker 1: came out to two thousand seven dollars thirteen cents, tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of dollars in today's money. It's an incredible
Speaker 1: amount of money even in those times, because those days
Speaker 1: were simple days, and how could something really be that
Speaker 1: expensive back then? So it wasn't just shirts that were
Speaker 1: marked up. Caskets and embalming and all the other stuff
Speaker 1: that went into a funeral were way more expensive than
Speaker 1: they were supposed to be. At one point, a US
Speaker 1: lawmaker heard about the thousands of dollars that o sages
Speaker 1: were charged for funerals. He said the practice was quote
Speaker 1: even worse than the Teapot Dome case, which at that
Speaker 1: time was considered the biggest political scandal in US history.
Speaker 1: And the debts and a lot of the probate files
Speaker 1: I've looked through weren't just from funerals. They were for
Speaker 1: everyday shopping before the person died too o s Age
Speaker 1: customers could o trading companies hundreds of dollars, sometimes even thousands.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't just the funeral debt that stuck out
Speaker 1: to me when reading about Charles me Chetsi, because the
Speaker 1: Drummonds had another role when it came to his affairs
Speaker 1: and meet Chetzy's probate. The man signing off on the
Speaker 1: store's claims and saying the debt was legitimate was Jack Drummond.
Speaker 1: That's because Jack was the administrator of meet Chetzi's estate.
Speaker 1: This is a role that exists today. It's called an
Speaker 1: administrator if you die without a will, an executor if
Speaker 1: you die with one. Either way, that person is in
Speaker 1: charge of vetting and paying all your debts and distributing
Speaker 1: everything you have left to your heirs. Meet Chetsy's estate
Speaker 1: wasn't the only time one of the Drummond brothers approved
Speaker 1: a claim from their own store. In fact, this happened
Speaker 1: three times in John Maker's own family. In addition to
Speaker 1: Charles meet Chetzi, John's other great grandfather and his great
Speaker 1: grandmother both had claims from the Hominy Trading Company. After
Speaker 1: they died. Jack's brother, Fred Gettner, was the administrator of
Speaker 1: their estates. In all, Fred Gittner alone hand at least
Speaker 1: twenty eight oh Sage estates. So the Drummond brothers were
Speaker 1: running the store that was claiming all these debts when O.
Speaker 1: S Ages died, and then they put on a different
Speaker 1: hat and approved payment to the store. Once the estate
Speaker 1: was settled, the government would pay the Hominy Trading Company
Speaker 1: from O. Sage accounts at the Office of Indian Affairs,
Speaker 1: and when it was all said and done, whoever handled
Speaker 1: the estate would get an administrator's fee. Depending on how
Speaker 1: big the estate was, that fee could be up to
Speaker 1: a couple of thousand dollars. Any oh stage, at least
Speaker 1: you know, in my family, in my community, any o
Speaker 1: stage that anyone thought might have the propensity or the
Speaker 1: ability to become a lawyer, um, they encouraged them to
Speaker 1: go to law school. And it was because of all
Speaker 1: of the shenanigans that went on with the probate process.
Speaker 1: This is Elizabeth Loha Homer. She's a citizen of the
Speaker 1: Aage Nation. She's from Cominy. Elizabeth, as a lawyer, worked
Speaker 1: for the os Age Nation for a while, then went
Speaker 1: to the Department of Justice, then the Department of Interior.
Speaker 1: Now she runs a law firm in d C. She's
Speaker 1: also on the os Age Nations Supreme Court. I asked
Speaker 1: Elizabeth if what I was seeing in the records was normal,
Speaker 1: if the people administering estates could be on both sides
Speaker 1: of it approving their own claims, because it seemed like
Speaker 1: a pretty obvious conflict of interest. Oh, I would think
Speaker 1: that that would definitely be a conflict of interest, an
Speaker 1: unwavable conflict of interest. In other words, there are conflicts
Speaker 1: of interest that can be waived. You know, I can say, oh, client,
Speaker 1: I have a conflict of interest with this. You know,
Speaker 1: would you waive that conflict of interests? And there are
Speaker 1: some conflicts of interests that a client can wave, and
Speaker 1: then there are conflicts of interests that a client can't wave.
Speaker 1: And in this case, this is a conflict of interest
Speaker 1: within a state right and so it should not be waived.
Speaker 1: You know, if you've got a claim on the estate,
Speaker 1: then you know, there are plenty of other people that
Speaker 1: can administer that estate. It doesn't have to be you.
Speaker 1: And the issue is that you're not able to give
Speaker 1: it the proper examination to vet its legitimacy. No, it's
Speaker 1: your classic conflict of interest. You have a pecuniary interest
Speaker 1: in the subject matter. Pecuniary interest. In other words, you're
Speaker 1: financially motivated. It is kind of consistent with a bad
Speaker 1: behavior that we've seen through the twentieth century. I was
Speaker 1: starting to see how the store gave the Drummonds power.
Speaker 1: It was a store, yes, but it was also a
Speaker 1: major lender, a pseudo financial institution, and the Drummonds and
Speaker 1: other local merchants, they weren't just shopkeepers, they were debt collectors.
Speaker 1: You just go and you would be issued you know,
Speaker 1: an account, a credit account, and then you would just
Speaker 1: you know, just like you do now. You didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: have to have a credit card. You just went there
Speaker 1: and you'd sign your book and that was That was
Speaker 1: not at all at all unusual, even during my childhood.
Speaker 1: I want to take a moment here to make clear
Speaker 1: that the o Stage nation is far from the only
Speaker 1: tribal nation whose citizens became indebted to traders and merchants.
Speaker 1: In May of the Department of Interior released the initial
Speaker 1: results of a massive investigation into federal policies affecting Native Americans.
Speaker 1: The focus was on Indian boarding schools, but the report
Speaker 1: covers so much more. That investigation highlights a private letter
Speaker 1: from Thomas Jefferson, a letter that shows how this whole
Speaker 1: credit system at trading companies dates back to the early
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds and how Native American debts were part of
Speaker 1: an explicit strategy to make it easier for the government
Speaker 1: to get Native land. Jefferson wrote the letter in eighteen
Speaker 1: o three to William Henry Harrison, who at the time
Speaker 1: was in charge with negotiating with tribal nations over land boundaries.
Speaker 1: Jefferson writes that the US will quote push our trading
Speaker 1: houses and be glad to see the good and influential
Speaker 1: individuals among them run in debt. He goes on, because
Speaker 1: we observe that when these debts get beyond what the
Speaker 1: individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off
Speaker 1: by a session of lands. This letter was written a
Speaker 1: hundred years before Frederick Drummond took over the Hominy Trading
Speaker 1: Company before the Osage Reservation was allotted. But what this
Speaker 1: report said was that Jefferson strategy would go on to
Speaker 1: inform the future of federal Indian law and policy. O
Speaker 1: Sage families vowed about one million dollars to bankers and
Speaker 1: merchants across the county. The Drummonds, included US lawmakers, caught
Speaker 1: wind they held hearings about it. What I didn't understand
Speaker 1: at first, and what I hoped Elizabeth could explain, was
Speaker 1: why there was all this for the Drummonds to collect
Speaker 1: on in the first place. Both ages, at least those
Speaker 1: who had head rights, they were supposed to be the
Speaker 1: richest people in the world. The store was charging a lot,
Speaker 1: but was it so much that oth Age customers couldn't
Speaker 1: pay their bill? Elizabeth said this was all made worse
Speaker 1: by how Congress decided head right money should be distributed.
Speaker 1: I mean there's all kinds of of references in the
Speaker 1: hearing record of members of the Congress will they don't work,
Speaker 1: you know, and they've got all this money and they're
Speaker 1: like children, you know, which is like not true. I mean,
Speaker 1: we were the first ones to you know, kind of
Speaker 1: adopt these policies of you know, of understanding very sophisticated
Speaker 1: legal principles of retaining the subsurface to state. When we
Speaker 1: allotted the surface the state of our reservation, I mean
Speaker 1: that was pretty slick, right, That is pretty smart. And
Speaker 1: yet the talk amongst the powers that be or the
Speaker 1: people the local community is like their children, and they
Speaker 1: don't know how to manage their money and they're squandering it.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, there was legislation the early nine
Speaker 1: twenties that actually limited the amount of money that osages
Speaker 1: could draw down courtly. They limited to like a thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: I mean, you might have a state worth tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of dollars, but you could get a thousand dollars
Speaker 1: per quarter. And so like the whole merchant community kind
Speaker 1: of adapted to that. These hearings over oh Sage fund
Speaker 1: restrictions continued into the mid nineteen twenties. Some O s
Speaker 1: Age leaders said they were in favor of the restrictions.
Speaker 1: They saw them as a way to protect their people
Speaker 1: from losing land and money, but others fought against them.
Speaker 1: They wrote to Congress sent telegrams. One former chief named
Speaker 1: Bacon Ryan told Congress that families wanted to be able
Speaker 1: to build houses or remodel their homes. Others were sick
Speaker 1: or getting old and needed to be able to access
Speaker 1: their money. In those hearings, US politicians were primarily focused
Speaker 1: on O Sage spending, even though, as Bacon Rhyn pointed out,
Speaker 1: their spending was just like that of other wealthy people.
Speaker 1: Who was that hearing from with the inspector named HS Trailer.
Speaker 1: He's the one who called O s Age spending sinful.
Speaker 1: And I'm bringing him up again because in the middle
Speaker 1: of his racist rant, Trailer lists off dozens of families
Speaker 1: with hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of debt to
Speaker 1: trading companies, including the Hominy Trading Company, and some of
Speaker 1: these names I recognized because I had seen them before.
Speaker 1: When I started trying to figure out how the Drummonds
Speaker 1: got land, I made copies of the original plat maps
Speaker 1: from when the O. S H and Sation was allotted.
Speaker 1: They're blue, divided into thousands of little pieces. Each one
Speaker 1: has a name inside of an O s Age citizen
Speaker 1: who received that allotment. After the nineteen o six Act,
Speaker 1: I started coloring all the parcels that the Drummonds owned
Speaker 1: today with a pink highlighter. That way I knew when
Speaker 1: an o s Age name came up whether the Drummonds
Speaker 1: ended up with their land. And what I saw was
Speaker 1: that some of the names of os Age families who
Speaker 1: were in debt to the store had also at some
Speaker 1: point had their allotment dated to the Drummonds. The Osage
Speaker 1: County Courthouse. This is tape from one out of a
Speaker 1: dozen days I spent inside the Osage County Courthouse in
Speaker 1: the land office trying to figure out how a lot
Speaker 1: of these pink allotments ended up in the hands of
Speaker 1: the Drummonds. You can smell the paint out here. This
Speaker 1: particular day, the courthouse was repainting the land office. The
Speaker 1: walls used to be wood paneling, now they're whitewashed. This
Speaker 1: day all the phone and internet cords were strung across
Speaker 1: the office floor, secured with scotch tape. That's strong. Hi,
Speaker 1: looks so good in here minus the smell, minus the cords. Yes, sorry,
Speaker 1: I almost really messed that up. Land in o Sage
Speaker 1: County is divided into big square chunks like a grid.
Speaker 1: The columns are called townships and the rows are called ranges.
Speaker 1: Each township and range has a ledger organized by smaller
Speaker 1: areas called sections, which lists each piece of land and
Speaker 1: everyone who owned it over time. To figure out what
Speaker 1: happened with each of those transactions, you have to grab
Speaker 1: another book. These books are stacked around the Land Office
Speaker 1: from Florida ceiling. They're stored on rollers covered in hard
Speaker 1: more in plastic, full of warranty deeds, sheriff's deeds, quit
Speaker 1: claim deeds, all the various ways property can be transferred
Speaker 1: from one person to another. I'm telling you this because
Speaker 1: I want you to understand how difficult it is to
Speaker 1: know what exactly happened to any given piece of allotment land.
Speaker 1: Each O Sage citizen received just over sixty acres of land,
Speaker 1: but that land was spread out over multiple plots that
Speaker 1: could be dozens of miles away from each other. A
Speaker 1: lot of them weren't anywhere near a road, making them
Speaker 1: practically inaccessible. It's just one way allotment was rigged against
Speaker 1: the O Stage Nation from the start. Tracking the chain
Speaker 1: of ownership after allotment is dizzy ng It takes a
Speaker 1: long time. At the end of it, you only have
Speaker 1: a few sparse details about what happened, but there's another
Speaker 1: reason tracking all this down is difficult. The three Drummond brothers,
Speaker 1: they were also putting land in each other's and even
Speaker 1: other people's names. Terry asked Jack about this in the tapes.
Speaker 1: He brings up that time Jack got scammed out of
Speaker 1: a bunch of money on a trip to Chicago. Yeah,
Speaker 1: around the time of the robbery. It seems like you
Speaker 1: transferred an awful lot of land into other people's names,
Speaker 1: boring into my life. Well, you put four thousand acres
Speaker 1: in George Smith's name. Oh yeah, but that was the
Speaker 1: protected coward built knew all about that, right, You put Uh,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how many acres into the wife's name,
Speaker 1: either seven thousand or nine. Those are the only two.
Speaker 1: And then you put land in cecils. No, those three
Speaker 1: those that run, But that took care of. Almost all
Speaker 1: of your land was in somebody else's name by the
Speaker 1: end of nineteen two or by the beginning and night. Yeah,
Speaker 1: by the end of that right. So not only were
Speaker 1: they trying to track land transfers from a hundred years ago,
Speaker 1: but I was trying to track land transfers from a
Speaker 1: hundred years ago that were constantly changing hands and purposely
Speaker 1: being put in other people's names, but act to the
Speaker 1: names and the Congressional hearing the O Sage families who
Speaker 1: owed the Homony Trading Company money. As I looked through
Speaker 1: the ledgers, I realized that some of them hadn't just
Speaker 1: run up a tab buying groceries and other goods. In
Speaker 1: the years after allotment, some O Sage families mortgage their land.
Speaker 1: They used their allotments to secure loans, except mortgages from
Speaker 1: the bank weren't really a thing at the time, so
Speaker 1: the loans came from local businessmen, including the Homony Trading Company,
Speaker 1: and some of those same families that owed the store
Speaker 1: money for everything for mortgages, to groceries to funerals. They
Speaker 1: later needed their land to the Drummond Brothers. I looked
Speaker 1: through a ton of these deeds. It's really hard to
Speaker 1: tell if the land was being sold because of the
Speaker 1: debt or if I was just seeing two different ways
Speaker 1: O Sage families were trying to access their money at
Speaker 1: a time when the government was restricting a lot of
Speaker 1: it loans from the store and cash from selling land.
Speaker 1: But I found at least one case where the connection
Speaker 1: looked pretty clear. There was an O s Age family
Speaker 1: who owed the Hominy Trading Company a lot of money
Speaker 1: by early and months later they needed one hundred sixty
Speaker 1: acres to one of the Drummond brothers. The price was
Speaker 1: significantly less than what other nearby land was going for.
Speaker 1: Maybe they were getting ripped off, or maybe the land
Speaker 1: was being used to settle a debt. My name is
Speaker 1: Katie Yates Free and I'm currently a realty specialist for
Speaker 1: the Osige Nation, but I'm here on my own accord.
Speaker 1: I have to say that Katie doesn't work for the
Speaker 1: os Age Nation anymore. But when she did, her job
Speaker 1: involved looking at land deals all day Lisa's sales. There's
Speaker 1: still a pretty complicated set of rules the US government
Speaker 1: has for a lot of O s Age land. Katie
Speaker 1: helped people navigate that system. You're a steward of the
Speaker 1: property for those owners on behalf of the federal government,
Speaker 1: to basically safeguard their properties for them. I showed some
Speaker 1: of the documents I found to Katie, the Congression old
Speaker 1: testimony mentioning that one family's debt and then the d
Speaker 1: to their land that came a few months later. It's
Speaker 1: the grand total of the amount spent by this family
Speaker 1: in four months for sustenance. So this is your rations
Speaker 1: and stuff, sustenance and clothing amounts. It totaled four thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred thirty seven dollars and seventy cents. So what
Speaker 1: history has taught us My grandma would say is that
Speaker 1: the white man prizes at the O stage price that
Speaker 1: d dollars is equal to more than eighty five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars in today's money. Half of it was oot to
Speaker 1: the Hominy Trading Company, half to other stores. The bill
Speaker 1: was wracked up over just four months. I showed Katie
Speaker 1: the ded too, the one that transferred one hundred sixty
Speaker 1: acres of this family's land to Cecil Drummond a few
Speaker 1: months later. The d doesn't say the exact price, but
Speaker 1: the tax is paid on the sale indicate that it
Speaker 1: sold for less than five hundred dollars total. So hundred
Speaker 1: sixty acres for at most five hundred dollars is that low? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I would have hope a hundred and sixty acres would
Speaker 1: be worth more than five because if you think about
Speaker 1: that bill, was how many sixty acre parcels had to
Speaker 1: be sold to rectify that? What do you make of
Speaker 1: that they were businessmen. I mean, it's no different than
Speaker 1: business today. People just I don't think realized that it
Speaker 1: happened here and it's happened for so long and people,
Speaker 1: I mean they were ahead of their time and these
Speaker 1: kind of um practices. I should say, it's we still
Speaker 1: deal with stuff like this today. Yeah, you're not going
Speaker 1: to find a lot of people around here that are
Speaker 1: going to talk about the Drummonds. Why is that it's
Speaker 1: a big name. But I'm not I'm not reading this wrong,
Speaker 1: am I hate didn't want to answer that question on tape,
Speaker 1: Maybe because we don't have a lot of information about
Speaker 1: why these things happen, only that they did. Things don't
Speaker 1: add up if you start looking back into history and
Speaker 1: you can't make it out up. In my opinion, I've tried,
Speaker 1: and you can try to put all the pieces of
Speaker 1: the puzzle together, but they don't match. So it's an
Speaker 1: incomplete history. It's probably incomplete on purpose, but yeah, that's incomplete.
Speaker 1: Selling a lotment land like this was supposed to be hard.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen o six Act went into effect, it
Speaker 1: placed the land into something called restricted status. These were
Speaker 1: protections meant to keep oath age families from being targeted
Speaker 1: in schemes to get their land. The restriction is that
Speaker 1: the federal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, would they
Speaker 1: have to basically bless what you're doing with your property.
Speaker 1: They're like, okay, is this in your best financial or
Speaker 1: your best 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 leasing for fifty cents or
Speaker 1: whatever it is, you know. 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 there was a way around those restrictions,
Speaker 1: something called a certificate of competency. The government by default
Speaker 1: considered oath Ages and other Native Americans to be, in
Speaker 1: the government's words, incompetent and wouldn't let them handle their
Speaker 1: own affairs. But a certificate of competency meant they could
Speaker 1: have those restrictions removed, and in the years after, a
Speaker 1: lot meant a lot of oath Age adults applied for
Speaker 1: those certificates. So people will get their certificate to compsy
Speaker 1: and it worked for some people. They would get it.
Speaker 1: It's a very simple. They can do whatever they want
Speaker 1: with their land. They may put a mortgage on it,
Speaker 1: get a business, go and pay that mortgage off and
Speaker 1: be completely successful. A huge ranch operation, you never know,
Speaker 1: but I don't know very many that have done that.
Speaker 1: For oth age adults with certificates of competency, the majority
Speaker 1: of their land was no longer restricted. It could be mortgaged,
Speaker 1: like the loans I saw in the courthouse were sold
Speaker 1: when families needed cash. In Jack's biography, Terry writes that
Speaker 1: Jack one time financed an o s Age wedding, provided
Speaker 1: a wedding ring, a new pontiac, a bunch of hogs,
Speaker 1: forty horses, and furnished the couple's home so he could
Speaker 1: get three acres of land and another two thousand acre lease.
Speaker 1: Say we still have the first land of my father
Speaker 1: Lord he had, I might maybe twelve hundred day and
Speaker 1: I just got around in. You'd come in want something
Speaker 1: or some merged by buggy maybe or a team or
Speaker 1: something of that far. He'd trade a month peace land.
Speaker 1: I've traded up an automobile many times for peace land.
Speaker 1: They want a new automobile. I wonder land flouted by obviously, Well,
Speaker 1: I'll give you a new automobile by the automobile to
Speaker 1: take a deep lit land. Many many times have I
Speaker 1: done that. So it wasn't just the homny treating company
Speaker 1: the source of a lot of the Drummond brothers money
Speaker 1: and influence. It was this whole environment that they operated in,
Speaker 1: an environment that kept oc age money tied up, that
Speaker 1: made a lot of families dependent on the white businessmen
Speaker 1: around them. Because this whole time the US government was
Speaker 1: restricting how much of their own money just could access.
Speaker 1: Those families were left with just a couple of options,
Speaker 1: both working in the Drummond's favor. They could go into
Speaker 1: debt at the store, money they'd have to pay back
Speaker 1: somehow if they died before it was paid back. That
Speaker 1: debt might come out of their estates, which a lot
Speaker 1: of times were administered by one of the Drummond brothers.
Speaker 1: Or they could sell or trade land that the Drummond
Speaker 1: brothers could use to expand their ranching business. Those fund
Speaker 1: restrictions led to something else too, a whole new way
Speaker 1: for Whiteman and os Age County to make money off
Speaker 1: That's after the break. Britney Spears has been freed from
Speaker 1: a conservatorship that has controlled her personal life and money
Speaker 1: for nearly fourteen years. Pop star Britney Spears was released
Speaker 1: from a conservatorship she was placed under more than a
Speaker 1: decade earlier. A psychiatric emergency had led a court to
Speaker 1: declare her unable to handle her own affairs. Jamie Spears,
Speaker 1: her father, was given legal control over his daughter's personal, professional,
Speaker 1: and financial affairs in two thousand and eight. Eventually, after
Speaker 1: a long legal fight and mounting public pressure, Britney Spears
Speaker 1: was able to remove her father from control of the
Speaker 1: conservatorship and later have it removed altogether. The conservatorship of
Speaker 1: Britney Spears. From the outside and from Britney's own testimony,
Speaker 1: it looked more like the conservatorship wasn't about protecting her
Speaker 1: interests or her money. Fans saw a system that allowed
Speaker 1: the people in control of her to profit off her success,
Speaker 1: a system that meant the people put in place to
Speaker 1: protect her could end up using her for their own gain.
Speaker 1: All this with Britney Spears was happening as I started
Speaker 1: reporting this story. But while the world was learning about
Speaker 1: Britney Spears's conservatorship, I was learning about something similar that
Speaker 1: O sages had been subjected to for decades. They were
Speaker 1: called guardianships. Hundreds of OC age adults had someone put
Speaker 1: in charge of their financial affairs, usually a white man,
Speaker 1: and these guardianships were exclusive to the stage nation. They
Speaker 1: happened across Indian country. OH Stage guardianships existed in the
Speaker 1: years after a lotment, but it wasn't until head right
Speaker 1: money started pouring in that they really took off. There's
Speaker 1: congressional testimony about white men propositioning wealthy O stages to
Speaker 1: become their guardian, telling them they'd helped them get around
Speaker 1: all the limits that Congress had put on their money.
Speaker 1: That's when a new kind of guardian surfaced, the professional guardian.
Speaker 1: These were men who had several wards, men who had
Speaker 1: taken advantage of this federal policy to insert themselves over
Speaker 1: OH stage estates. Depending on how big the estate was,
Speaker 1: their fee could be pretty big, over a thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a year, a lot of money back then, and that
Speaker 1: was on top of all the self dealing a lot
Speaker 1: of them were accused of doing. This was an entire
Speaker 1: policy racist and paternalistic put in place by the US
Speaker 1: government and over seen by the local courts. That created
Speaker 1: a lot of conflicts of interest. Here supposed to having this,
Speaker 1: this wise white person, he's supposed to look at for
Speaker 1: your interests. How did that work out? That wise white
Speaker 1: person who was the biggest crook of them all. This
Speaker 1: is Garrick Bailey. I'm a professor emeritus at the University Told.
Speaker 1: For fifty years I tried to anthropology here. Garrick built
Speaker 1: his career chronicling os Age culture. He's written and edited
Speaker 1: three books on the os Age nation. I went to
Speaker 1: see Garrick because over his decades of research, he's come
Speaker 1: to know a lot about oth age guardianships. We had
Speaker 1: talked on the phone a few times, and Garrick told
Speaker 1: me he had a book I should look up. He
Speaker 1: called it the Great Book. It's gray, that's why they
Speaker 1: call it a gray book. And there are stories in
Speaker 1: the Gray Book about your guardians, specific stories. This was
Speaker 1: a field report written by the b A in the
Speaker 1: fifties and sent to Congress. It's a start change in
Speaker 1: tone from similar reports written thirty years earlier. Here the
Speaker 1: government acknowledges stages were exploited, and a lot of that
Speaker 1: is our fault. The report has all these examples of
Speaker 1: guardianships gone wrong. It mentions one guardian who overcharged his
Speaker 1: ward by a thousand dollars for a car. Another guardian
Speaker 1: claimed that his o stage ward, a thirty eight year
Speaker 1: old widow, owed him twelve thousand dollars. Two thousand of
Speaker 1: that was from alan she apparently got when she was
Speaker 1: so ill she didn't know what she was signing. The
Speaker 1: Gray Book goes on to say that the government by
Speaker 1: then had brought and settled at least twenty lawsuits against guardians.
Speaker 1: But even though the b i A seems to acknowledge
Speaker 1: all this that the guardianship system led to widespread exploitation
Speaker 1: and profiteering, the authors keep the names of the guardians anonymous.
Speaker 1: Do you think that there were any good guardians. I'm
Speaker 1: sure there or there are always some good people around,
Speaker 1: But I think there was so much racism involved in it,
Speaker 1: and that this overall attitude that these people don't deserve anything.
Speaker 1: They didn't they didn't earn, it didn't work hard, and
Speaker 1: basically you've got you've got a county full of wealthy
Speaker 1: Indians and poor whites. I think there's a lot of
Speaker 1: pilfering going on by the local white community. You have
Speaker 1: to remember there was such resentment. There is not just
Speaker 1: a coincidence that the murders start and that toul us
Speaker 1: A race massacre take place in There's a lot of
Speaker 1: resentment about what's happening in any territory, and I think
Speaker 1: that's that's a lot of it. I think it's easier
Speaker 1: to cheat somebody out of something than to murder somebody
Speaker 1: to take it. But I think particularly for the ones
Speaker 1: who just treated them out of land and other things,
Speaker 1: I think they had a messias your time, you asially
Speaker 1: he ain't caught. Oh Sage leaders knew this was going on.
Speaker 1: One member of the Stage Tribal Council, a man named
Speaker 1: George Alberty, launched his own investigation into guardianships decades before
Speaker 1: the Gray book. It comes up in a book called
Speaker 1: The Underground Reservation by Terry P. Wilson. What Albready found
Speaker 1: was a quote guardianship organization of merchants, bankers, etcetera. He
Speaker 1: said they all worked together to get their words to
Speaker 1: shop at certain stores or use certain banks. Alberty said
Speaker 1: it was general knowledge but quote, when it comes to
Speaker 1: proving in court, you can't. Other than the Gray Book.
Speaker 1: Information on most guardianships it's hard to come by. There
Speaker 1: are official guardianship files held in the os Age County Courthouse.
Speaker 1: The thing is they're sealed. You can't look at them
Speaker 1: without an order from a judge. Even descendants of the
Speaker 1: people involved Wards and guardians have to get a court order.
Speaker 1: But even though those documents are sealed, I have been
Speaker 1: able to find some guardianship records in the National Archives
Speaker 1: and other public collections. I've learned that a lot of
Speaker 1: times these guardians lent out their Wards money loans to
Speaker 1: businessmen in town that were considered investments for the oh
Speaker 1: Sage Wards. Some of those loans went to the Drummond brothers.
Speaker 1: From what I've seen, they paid them back at interest
Speaker 1: rates that were normal for the time. But what this
Speaker 1: meant was that the Drummond brothers had access to oh
Speaker 1: Sage money that they could put to work for themselves.
Speaker 1: Sometimes those loans were secured with O Sage land the
Speaker 1: brothers had gotten earlier. This all played out in the
Speaker 1: case of one O Sage family, the same family that
Speaker 1: had deeded their land to Cecil Drummond after their debt
Speaker 1: at the store had surpassed two thousand dollars. Within the
Speaker 1: next few years, the Drummond brothers had gotten twenty five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in loan from the Osage family's accounts, all
Speaker 1: given out by their guardians. That's the equivalent of more
Speaker 1: than four hundred thousand dollars today. Those guardians were men.
Speaker 1: The Drummond brothers knew. One of them worked at their store,
Speaker 1: a man named Fred L. Shed, and sworn testimony. Shed's
Speaker 1: board said Shed would only let her get credit at
Speaker 1: the Homony Trading Company. So the one thing that really
Speaker 1: struck me as I was looking at how much they
Speaker 1: had on their bill for groceries and then just kind
Speaker 1: of mentally trying to convert that for today's dollars. What
Speaker 1: that I mean, It's a ridiculo. It's ridiculous. There's no
Speaker 1: way this is Libby Gray. Libby is married to Jim Gray,
Speaker 1: the former Chief. She runs a group called Noise, which
Speaker 1: helps the families of missing and murdered Indigenous people. She's
Speaker 1: descended from the family that had the big debt at
Speaker 1: the Homony Trading Company and later needed their land to
Speaker 1: Cecil Drummond. The store also handled the family's funeral services.
Speaker 1: It was a whole systemic thing. It wasn't just the guardians.
Speaker 1: I mean, in this time when there were all of
Speaker 1: these deaths, we were paying what three to ten times
Speaker 1: more for a funeral. Like the undertakers were profiting from
Speaker 1: our wealth and from our murders. The people that sold clothing,
Speaker 1: that sold material, that sold lumber, that sold cars, that
Speaker 1: sold houses, that like built houses, whatever, everybody was profiting
Speaker 1: from this because you have to get permission to spend
Speaker 1: your money. So if you haven't in with a guardian
Speaker 1: and you're going to build their house, they're going to
Speaker 1: approve that one because you're their buddy, and you're going
Speaker 1: to charge three to five times more for it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was just a whole system. I've sat down with
Speaker 1: Libby several times while reporting this story. Both sides of
Speaker 1: her family have come up in records relating to the Drummonds.
Speaker 1: Whether that's guardians, chips, the store, we're robates. The Drummonds
Speaker 1: had the store, they were overcharging the sages that put
Speaker 1: a big nest dig back where they could buy more land,
Speaker 1: and then the next generation had that step up where
Speaker 1: they could do more, and then their kids had that
Speaker 1: step up where they could do more, and it just
Speaker 1: kept going. That was the beginning of them having this
Speaker 1: generational wealth, right, and they're still wealthy and their children are,
Speaker 1: I mean, their descendants are still building wealth off of
Speaker 1: that initial investment that was stolen or I guess conned,
Speaker 1: or however you want to say it. That was the
Speaker 1: beginning of it for the Drummonds, and that was the
Speaker 1: end of it for so many oh sages. It's it's
Speaker 1: hard to think that our people were used like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no resolution, there was no resolution to it, there
Speaker 1: was no justice, right. But also, our land is more
Speaker 1: important to us than that as indigenous people. And when
Speaker 1: you look at how checker boarded our reservation is, and
Speaker 1: how all of these jurisdictional issues affect our ability to
Speaker 1: protect our people and our ability to fully exercise our sovereignty,
Speaker 1: it's so much more than just the financial part of it.
Speaker 1: I've mentioned before that I've talked to some of the
Speaker 1: descendants of the three Drummond brothers for this story, and
Speaker 1: you'll hear from some of them later in this series.
Speaker 1: Their general take is that, well, they weren't aware of
Speaker 1: any particular transactions. They knew their predecessors to be honest
Speaker 1: and trusted men who built up the hominy community. The
Speaker 1: Drummond Brothers were able to build wealth off ocigeous states
Speaker 1: through all these different means, the store, the probates, the
Speaker 1: men they knew who were guardians. But that wasn't all,
Speaker 1: because as I dug through the archives, I found out
Speaker 1: the Drummond brothers were guardians too. In fact, they were
Speaker 1: guardians of a lot of osages, at least ten, and
Speaker 1: all children and adults alike. And in those records I
Speaker 1: found the story of an osage man who launched a
Speaker 1: decade long fight against them, his story next time on
Speaker 1: in Trust. In Trust is a production of Bloomberg and
Speaker 1: I Heart Media. It's reported and hosted by me Rachel
Speaker 1: Adam's Heard. Additional reporting by Alison Edita Davis. Land is
Speaker 1: our senior producer. Samantha Story is our executive producer. Jeff
Speaker 1: Grocott is our senior editor. Additional editing by Francesco Leavy
Speaker 1: and Daniel Ferrara. Additional production by Victor EVAs, Production support
Speaker 1: from Hilda de Carle, Sound engineering by Blake Maples. Fact
Speaker 1: checking by Molly Nugent. Theme music by Laura Orman, photography
Speaker 1: by Shane Brown. You can email us at podcasts at
Speaker 1: bloomberg dot net. Find more about this episode at bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot com. Slash in trust find in trust anywhere you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts