"The Pioneer Woman" Ree Drummond may have benefited from the Osage massacre depicted in the upcoming Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio film "Killers of the Flower Moon."
The lifestyle blogger and TV personality is married into the Drummond family, which began growing wealth through dealings with the Osage people generations ago in Oklahoma and are now among the top 100 landowners in the country.
But a recent report shines light on her family's part in that dark history, reported The Oklahoman.
“They were put in charge of Osage families’ finances, borrowed from Osage estates, probated Osage wills, and collected on debts that they claimed as owners of a government-licensed store," Bloomberg reported. "They bought headright fractions, even as they lobbied for the headright [to collect royalties on underground minerals] system to be abolished. And they bought land. Lots of it.”
The upcoming film, which is based on the David Grann bestseller by the same name, focuses on a string of murders in the 1920s of dozens of Osage people, who had become some of the wealthiest people in the world when oil was discovered on land allotted to them by the U.S. government.
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The Drummond patriarchs, whose father emigrated to the U.S. from Scotland in the 1880s, used business practices that “bumped up against the line of what was considered legal" in their dealings with the Osage people, whom they charged a higher price at the store they operated and for whom they acted as undertakers when they died.
Headright claims could only be passed to the allotted Osage tribal member’s legal heir, which led to many of the murders to gain control of those benefits that had been established by the federal government to make sure the Osage got their fair share from the oil drilled on their land.
"In 1925, Jack Drummond bought half of a headright from OV Pope, a white man who had inherited 1.5 of his Osage wife’s three headrights, for $20,050, which is almost $340,000 today," The Oklahoman reported. "Three years later, he bought a quarter of a headright for $11,250."
Those headright shares have paid Drummond family members about $2.4 million when adjusted for inflation, and one of the Drummond heirs says he and his cousins would like to return theirs to the Osage Nation, which is nearly impossible under current law – but the tribe's mineral council would like to change that.
