The Frontier Was Always Stolen
The one where you remember that it’s occasionally hard to be my friend, but you’ll also learn something new! Is this a hit piece? I hope not.
I woke up Friday and lamented that I had looked at job listings instead of finishing this, but the rain in New York kept me home; I still finished later than expected. I hope you were safe and dry in the city’s deluge, too.
Hi Bestie!!
I don’t want to circle the drain on all that vexes me, but if we were seated at the bar (or in a booth at Texas Roadhouse) I would yell about Ree Drummond (who I never liked anyway!), the Big Boss of Trad Wives.
Thanks to a woman who re-tweeted some vital information people are finally catching on to the Drummond Family. (What is your Roman Empire? Context, this time from Harper’s Bazaar.)
A lot to take in, if you aren’t familiar with Ree Drummond or Killers of the Flower Moon.
Drummond is famous as the blogger and Food Network personality behind The Pioneer Woman. First launched as a blog in 2006, Drummond expanded her brand as an “accidental country girl” (sure, Jan) to Food Network in 2011, the same year her memoir From Black Heels to Tractor Wheels was published, based on stories published on her blog. (Columbia Pictures bought the rights, and Reese Witherspoon planned to star, but as of yet, there is no film.)
Killers of the Flower Moon is a non-fiction book about the systematic murder of the Osage people during the early 20th century and has been adapted by Martin Scorsese for the screen. It will come out in theaters this month. My sister called the trailer “the best movie [she’s] seen all year.”
I am biased. I have disliked Drummond this whole time. I skimmed her blog in college with horror and bewilderment. (I was very into mommy bloggers.) I am under the impression that she’s a Republican–the kind who prayed for George W. Bush and his War on Terror–but she has never written about politics, a privilege one can afford when she benefits from the status quo.
More than imaginary politics though, I was deeply uncomfortable with the prank calls she placed (which she recorded and published on her blog) to her brother, who was developmentally disabled. And also her liberal use of the R-word, which she said was OK if she used it.
Critics complain that her recipes are lifted from church cookbooks. I dislike that Drummond is an almond mom with her daughters and not her sons.
(Recipe stealing, which is wrong, is my complaint about Half Baked Harvest. The appropriation is bad, too.)
In the second season of The Pioneer Woman, she made Asian wings as part of a “prank” on the menfolk; it was racist. The episode resurfaced in 2017 and little came of it.
Her popularity continued to surge: you can tour her studio on the ranch; you can pick up tickets and directions at “The Merc,” her multi-consumerism experience.
A year before Chip and Joanna Gaines dominated the suburbs with shiplap and open-concept kitchens in 2013, and three years before they opened the Silos, Drummond purchased a 100-year-old building in downtown Pawhuska and transformed it “into a multipurpose space complete with a cafe, deli, and retail store.” Pawhuska isn’t Waco, where the Magnolia Empire employs 750 people, but she's maintaining the town as a destination for colonizers.
“Cafe” seems modest. It reads like an upscale Cracker Barrel; it has its own Stanley Quencher-style water cup. (I asked my best friend, Matt, if we would eat the cornflake-crusted French toast, and he said, “Fuck yeah.”) Ree’s offices are upstairs, and the empire continues to expand: a bread and breakfast is behind the building, and a pizza shop and ice cream parlor are across the street. Ree is not the first or last lifestyle celebrity to expand her brand to housewares and hometowns; Molly Yeh has a line of housewares and a restaurant in East Grand Forks, Minnesota.
Ree Drummond was born rich in Oklahoma–The New Yorker calls Bartlesville “affluent”. It describes her childhood thusly: “Her life revolved around ballet classes, her parents’ country club, and summer trips to Hilton Head, South Carolina.”
She married rich when she married Ladd Drummond, who is more than the simple cattle farmer she portrays online and on television. She is generously compensated independently of the Drummond wealth: Her show pays anywhere between $8-$25 million. Her blog continues to generate income–in 2011, before she hired writers, the ad revenue was $1 million–as do her many books, businesses, and housewares lines with Walmart.
Back to the 433,000 acres of stolen land, where the government pays the Drummonds $2 million per year for allowing burros and “wild horses” (it’s feral horses) to graze. (They can resell the horses to slaughter for as much money as they want.)
A few million for some books, some ads, and some horses are nothing when it comes to land. Can you build an empire without the privilege, wealth, and largesse? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in 2017, per Land Report that the family is the twenty-third largest landowner in the U.S. The New Yorker reported the family was 79th in 2011, citing the same publication. (I have been unable to verify this myself.) The same report attributes the landmass to nine percent of Osage County. The Drummonds are the largest landowners in the county.
An aside: The largest landowner is widely regarded to be John C. Malone, who owns 2.2 million acres. Malone is on the board of directors at the Cato Institute, donated to Trump’s election, and spends most of his time in Colorado. A timber baron, Red Emmerson, is said to own 2.3 million acres and that should make him No. 1.
433,000 acres is a lot of land! The acquisition was nefarious, too.
The Drummond Family patriarch, Frederick, landed in Osage Territory in 1886 at 22. (Old, by Little House standards.) He was elected mayor of Hominy in 1908. Hominy is 21 miles south of Pawhuska.
In 1913, after Frederick’s death, two of his sons founded the Drummond Cattle Company. They claimed that year, after his death, that Frederick owned 1,200 acres. Their operation employed over 200,000 people. One of his sons, Frederick Gentner, took control of the Hominy Trading Company, which oversaw land deeds, because he spoke Osage. Jack, one of the other sons, started buying acreage in another county–people called him a “land hog.” He started buying head rights, though, from white ranchers who inherited rights from their dead wives, whom they married for their land. (George Washington did it, too.)
When the Osage were pushed into their parcel of land in the 19th century, the government didn’t know it had oil. The Bureau of Indian Affairs managed royalties on the land and paid individual allottees, while the tribe split mineral rights equally. The Osage became very rich quickly. In 1921 angry white people lobbied Congress to strip the Osage of their competency, arguing that they weren’t smart enough to manage their wealth. The courts assigned individual members of the tribe a white guardian, including children who had living parents. The guardians stole the land (and murdered the Osage people assigned to them), inheriting the Osage's wealth. During the Reign of Terror the Drummond sons were creditors against and administrators for Osage estates, making the path to acquiring headrights easier.
The same year Congress let the white lobbyists win, hundreds of Osage people were murdered. Some of the deaths appeared accidental. Some of them were suspicious. Eventually, many of the deaths looked like murder, and the feds in DC felt–surprisingly since they were under the duress of J. Edgar Hoover–this should be investigated.
Most of the murders remain unsolved today, but the contract killing of Mollie Burkhart’s family, which forms the plot of Killers of the Flower Moon, unraveled and landed cattle rancher and “political boss” William Hale in jail.
Hale owned a 5,000-acre ranch, a controlling interest in the Fairfax bank, and a partial interest in the town's general store and funeral home. The ranch was sold to the Drummond family in 1926. Allegedly it was broken up into smaller ranches over time–if the Drummonds own 443,000 acres, surely some of Hale’s broken-up ranch has been subsumed.
Hale had his nephew, Ernest Burkhart, marry Mollie so Hale’s associates could get close to her family and kill them, one by one. When they blew up a house with nine pounds of nitroglycerin three people died. It’s almost like he ran out of ideas or patience on that one.
Hale was sentenced to life in prison and served 18 years. He died in a nursing home in 1962 and is buried in Witchita, should you be driving through and looking for a place to urinate. After prison, he worked for notorious moonshiner Benny Binion, whose life of crime started in 1924, per the FBI’s file on him. (Seems like a parole violation.)
Binion murdered a Black man in 1931 (he received a suspended sentence) and twice organized the murder of competitors (sounds familiar). He was only indicted once. He was involved in organized crime and his Las Vegas casino is still in operation.
Back to the Drummonds, who owned the funeral home with Hale. In the general store, Jack charged the Osage people ten times what the white people paid. Per Wikipedia, if a shirt was $5 or $6, he charged $60 or $80 instead. What a prick. (But Katherine, weren’t your ancestors jerks, too? Probably! I don’t romanticize them in my memoir.) When the Osage needed to bury their dead, he overcharged them for the right to burial, forcing them to give up more land. He grabbed their headrights to settle debts at the general store, too.
In 1941 the Drummond brothers were sued for fraud, for having easily grabbed Osage land for twenty years. A judge threw out the case. An investigation last year by Bloomberg said the Drummond land acquisitions “bumped up against the line of what was considered legal." (For more about this investigation, listen to the podcast In Trust.)
Last year the Drummonds were back in court with the Osage Nation. The Drummonds (specifically Ladd and Tim) wanted to privatize 15 miles of county road near their 443,000-acre ranch. The Drummonds, and “11 other Pawhuska businesses and ranching people,” wanted to curb mischief near the ranch and its iron sign. The stretch of road is an access point to Osage land, however. The County Commissioners threw it out; they said the request was without merit. The road is also a flood route.
Today over 6,000 Osage people live within the tribal jurisdiction. The tribe has over 20,000 members.
In addition to Ree’s empire, the Drummonds have power outside the ranch and its tax breaks: Oklahoma’s attorney general is Gentner Drummond, Ladd’s cousin.
It's fair to say, you don’t need her coffee recipe. If you need a church casserole, I have plenty of cookbooks I can lend.
Dribs and Drabs
Obviously, you should read Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. My mom doesn’t read Too Loud Too Old, but she sent me a book review when it came out, so “shout out to my mom.”
I listened to Cursive’s Mama I’m Swollen while I worked on this–after you’ve listened to Everclear, Death Cab for Cutie, and the Postal Service all week, that’s all that’s left, you know–which was accidentally prescient.
If we were seated at the bar, which one is it?
When I read the plot of a film on Wikipedia (more often than I’d like to admit, but it’s a hobby) I look at the cast so I can picture the story in my own mind. I look at photographs in non-fiction; I guess that’s the same thing.
Ayo Edebiri threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox game! (The article is about her pants.) If I wrote a bestseller (LOL) would I get an Orioles jersey that said HILL on the back?? (Is there a hockey version of that?)
Speaking of baseball, not only did the Os take the division title (!!), they signed Adam Jones to a one-day contract two weeks ago so he could retire as an Oriole. Gives me a happy heart.
I have a lot of thoughts on New York’s cover story! Relevant, but less thoughts, on this piece from Lyz Lenz.
I don’t have a link for it, but I tried to find The Database (even A Database would do) for news stories about women who turned down men and were punished for it. The look on my therapist’s face when I whined, “I only found data from the U.K.,” cannot be replicated. Not that I would link it here! We can be free of that, for now.
Regarding church cookbooks, I ate cream cheese chicken (it’s chicken breast, wrapped around cream cheese and secured with bacon), Maryland corn, and Rice-A-Roni for dinner while I finished this. I asked my mom, who has submitted this to cookbooks, where she got it, and she said it was in the Washington Post or Star and was a “grilling food.” The bacon produces smoke, so she bakes it. It’s one of her staples. If you made a church cookbook of your staples, what would you print?
I’ll Go First (™): my many syrups, cold brew (LOL), crispy kale, cornflake chicken, caramel rolls, corn dip, cardamom buns, at least three peanut butter cookies, my chocolate chip cookie (adapted from Cochon Butcher’s recipe), and Nutella pie.
Because I looked at the Mercantile’s menu, I looked at Magnolia Table, too. The first thing I noticed was that it costs a lot less in Waco for eggs than it does in Pawhuska. I don’t want to give the Gaines empire any money, but I am not mad about a pimento grilled cheese.
Always your friend (please will you come and visit us on Sundays),
Katherine
SOURCES (MLA9)
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