Wide Angle
A viral tweet claims the land at the movie’s center is now all owned by the Pioneer Woman’s family. The real story is weirder.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images and NBC.
At the height of the “boys think about the Roman Empire daily” discourse of mid-September, when everyone on the internet seemed to be saying what their “Roman Empire” was, @thenoasletter issued a tweet that went viral and quickly got millions of views: “my mom just said her ‘roman empire’ is how the pioneer woman’s family owns all the land killers of the flower moon is about.” Is this really true? Did the family of Ree Drummond—the folksy ranch wife, blogger, and Food Network star, famous for her cans-based approach to cooking and for being married to a guy she calls “the Marlboro Man”—somehow end up holding the land in Osage County, Oklahoma, where greedy white settlers murdered members of the Osage Nation for their mineral rights during the 1920s, the “Reign of Terror” that became the subject of a bestselling David Grann book and a forthcoming Martin Scorsese movie?
The person to ask about this history is Rachel Adams-Heard, a Bloomberg reporter whose 2022 podcast, In Trust, looked at what happened to the Osage Nation’s land and mineral rights after the Reign of Terror. Adams-Heard shows how the transfer of wealth from Osage to white hands wasn’t just a matter of murder, but also happened within the boundaries of the law. Because many Osages were assigned white “guardians” by the state, and couldn’t make financial transactions without their approval, there was ample room for corruption.
The Drummond family that the Pioneer Woman married into, some members of which acted as guardians for Osage wards, ends up being a big part of this story. Adams-Heard interviews several present-day Drummonds, including Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, about what she finds out. I spoke with Adams-Heard this week. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Rebecca Onion: Let’s look first at the numbers. How much of the former Osage land is actually currently Drummond land, in that area?
Rachel Adams-Heard: Osage County is almost 1.5 million acres, which is massive. It’s bigger than the state of Delaware. When you add up all of the land that the extended members of the Drummond family own today—or as of last year, when we did our analysis—it is nearly 9 percent of the entire county. My colleagues Linly Lin and Devon Pendleton also valued the land. It’s valued at $275 million at least, because this land is really prime grazing land. It’s covered in bluestem grass, which is one of the best ways to fatten cattle.
One thing the Drummonds we interviewed would stress to us when we brought them these findings is that they respect each other’s fence lines. So it’s not that all of that 9 percent is owned by one immediate family. We’re talking about second, third cousins in some cases.
Some of the biggest single ranches in the Drummond family are the one run by Ree Drummond’s husband, Ladd, and his brother Tim, as well as the one run by current Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond.
If people have read David Grann’s book, they know that the dispute covered in it is not about land, per se—it was about what was called “headrights,” which was about Osage access to money from the oil that was making that land so valuable. Oil isn’t such a big factor in Osage County now, 100 years later. So what’s at stake has changed.
Yeah. It might be helpful to do a little history here. Osage County, we already established, biggest county in Oklahoma. You’ll hear “Osage County” and you’ll also hear “the Osage Reservation,” and they have the same boundaries. Former Osage Chief Jim Gray explained it like this to me, which I found helpful: Basically, when Oklahoma became a state, Osage County was established directly on top of the Osage Reservation. Through this policy called “allotment,” the surface land was divided up into these individual parcels and distributed to individual Osage citizens. But all the mineral rights beneath the surface were put into one big pot and divided into equal shares, between 2,229 Osage tribal members in all, and those are what later became called “headrights.”
So before allotment, all the land had been owned by the Osage Nation. It was for the nation to decide how it would be used. But now it was all divided into sections. Some were too small to profitably farm, so it was these headrights that ended up being far more lucrative in this time period, because oil production took off in the 1910s and ’20s. Because of the way that those headrights could, for the most part, be transferred only through inheritance, that was when you saw these horrible schemes like the ones depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon.
But yes, the bulk of Killers of the Flower Moon really focuses on the transfer of those headrights, not necessarily the land itself. But land was still a huge part of all this. William K. Hale [played by Robert De Niro in the movie], who was convicted for aiding and abetting the murder of the Osage man Henry Roan—he was a rancher. That was one of his biggest business enterprises. When he was arrested, he sold his land to a partnership between the Drummond family and another prominent Oklahoma ranching family, the Mullendore family.
So, if you’re talking about the surface land in Killers of the Flower Moon, you might be thinking about that land, the land that William K. Hale owned when he was arrested.
If you search for “Drummond” in the Kindle version of Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, there’s only one appearance—a citation to a biography of A.A. “Jack” Drummond, one of the generation alive at the time of the Reign of Terror. So it’s not like you’re going to go to the movie and see, Oh, look, it’s Pioneer Woman’s husband’s great-grandfather.
A lot of Killers of the Flower Moon looks at one particular community within the Osage Reservation, the Fairfax/Gray Horse District, and where the early Drummond family members in Osage County primarily had their businesses was around Hominy. We’re talking about the same county, but it’s a slightly different community. Hominy doesn’t really come up as much in the book.
One of the more interesting and probably more relevant-to-the-movie things that we found was about the William K. Hale land that was sold. It was a big contiguous position, which was hard to come by at the time because allotment had divided the land into such small parcels, and there were a lot of rules around how and when Osage families could sell that land. After I found out that the Drummond family was part of this partnership that bought it, I just kept an eye out for anything that indicated how they paid for it, what they ended up doing with that land.
As part of this collection at the University of Central Oklahoma that one of the Drummond brothers’ biographers donated, there’s this memo between two of the original three Drummond brothers who really started the big ranching enterprise. It seems to indicate that they borrowed $15,000 from their Osage ward to pay for the land that they bought from William K. Hale. There’s no other indication that I’ve seen of that borrowing, in any of the other records, so we’re not sure what actually happened.
This particular Osage man, Myron Bangs Jr., he was incredibly skeptical of his guardians. He on several occasions wrote U.S. officials and suggested that he thought that his guardians—one was Roy Cecil Drummond, and later it was Fred Gentner Drummond—were improperly using his land, that he didn’t trust the way that they were managing his money. But because U.S. policy basically determined that Osage citizens were incompetent, he really had no power to get out from under that guardianship. So to see that he might not have known that his money was used to purchase this land from a man who was convicted of aiding and abetting a murder of another Osage man—I mean, that was really striking to see.
It was very interesting to hear Gentner Drummond’s reactions to the documents you brought him, about the Bangs guardianship. His reaction was—I wouldn’t say defensive, but he said, since the federal judiciary found that there was no wrongdoing in the guardianship, that’s what he was going to focus on, not on Bangs’ allegations. These transactions, where the Drummonds ended up with land or the fraction of a headright they do have, were actually legal, so it’s hard to say where the wrongdoing lies.
It’s really hard to look at individual land transactions and know the reason why that land was sold by an Osage family, or the reason why it was purchased by the original three Drummond brothers. That was one of the biggest challenges of reporting this. But what we were able to see is really that this family was able to amass so much wealth relatively quickly, in a place that had all been entirely owned by the Osage Nation just a decade or two earlier.
It’s important to go back to their original business in Osage County, when the three brothers’ father, Frederick Drummond, first came to Oklahoma. This was before statehood, and he got into the trading business. He would sell goods to Osages. When their oil wealth took off, these trading posts run by white settlers were able to take advantage of that. They started charging more and more, and Osage families started shopping more and more, just like you’d expect any wealthy person to do. But these places weren’t really like a store, like we think of today. They sold farming supplies and food and clothes and even caskets. In fact, the undertaking business was probably one of the most lucrative parts.
So you just had a tremendous amount of money coming through the door. Because there were all these restrictions by the U.S. government on how Osages could spend their own money, a lot of them wound up in debt, because they would have to buy things on credit at the store. What we can see from congressional testimony is that some families would be thousands of dollars in debt, which at the time was a tremendous amount of money, to the Drummonds’ store in Hominy. In some cases, we saw while a family was in $2,000 to $3,000 of debt, their land would be deeded over to a member of the Drummond family for what we can tell was a very low price. But again, it’s impossible to know for sure whether that land was used to settle that debt.
And the other thing, too, is that it’s easy to look at the annual guardianship fees that were charged, $1,000 here or there, and think, like, Oh, well, that’s not enough to really change things, but it adds up over time. In the case of Myron Bangs Jr.’s guardianship alone, there was some $15,000 that ultimately went to his guardians as a fee, which is a quarter of a million dollars, at least, in today’s money.
Then the other element to all this is the access to financing from Osage accounts the guardians had, because they were in charge and they and their friends and business associates were overseeing these Osage bank accounts. And so what we also noticed is that Osage money was being used to finance land purchases and land improvements by the Drummonds and their business associates.
Another layer of wealth-building.
“So that piece of land that had gone from Osage families, to William K. Hale, to the Drummonds and Mullendores, to the Drummonds, to Ted Turner, is now back with the Osage Nation.”
With the Hale land, the Drummonds did end up selling most of that to the Mullendore family. And then a lot of that was later sold to other parties. But there was a portion that was passed on through later generations of Drummonds and eventually went to Charles Drummond, who was Ree Drummond’s father-in-law. In the early 2000s, he sold that piece, which was around 400 acres, along with many, many other acres, to Ted Turner, who ended up with a portion of what had been the William K. Hale land. But some 15 or so years later, Turner put it up for sale. It was the Osage Nation who ended up winning the bid.
So that piece of land that had gone from Osage families, to William K. Hale, to the Drummonds and Mullendores, to the Drummonds, to Ted Turner, is now back with the Osage Nation.
Have you heard anything from the Drummonds about your series since it went up?
Generally speaking, they still stand by the idea that they never heard anything about their ancestors that alarmed them, or that indicated that they were anything other than trustworthy men. They said that they either didn’t know that their ancestors were guardians, or if they did, they had always heard it was because they were trusted by their Osage neighbors.
We never heard from Ree Drummond. We obviously reached out several times.
Have you been to her businesses in Pawhuska? I’ve never been there. I think it’s interesting that she has a store there now. Very full-circle.
Yeah. Every time I was in Pawhuska, the store was really busy. It’s called the Mercantile, and everyone calls it “the Merc.” Then she has a kind of high-end hotel or boutique hotel called the Boarding House. She has several other restaurants.
A lot of Osage citizens have conflicted feelings when we bring up her name in Osage County, because a lot of people will say, “She’s done a lot for Pawhuska,” but it’s still a really difficult, challenging, traumatic history. It’s important to know that when I first stepped foot in Osage County, I was not the first to ask this question about the land, or to talk to people about it. This has been something that was circulating in Osage circles for a really long time.
The Osage Nation has been very active through all of this. Myron Bangs was active in fighting his guardianship. Osage leaders back in the early 20th century were active in making sure that the mineral estate and their retention of all the mineral rights as a nation wasn’t terminated. The Osage Nation government is very active today in trying to buy back as much land as possible, and really use that ranch that they bought to further the interests of the Osage Nation as a whole. They would say to us, “We were really fighting for our sovereignty, and our future.”
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