How a Pioneer Store Started Drummond Family's Oklahoma Legacy (Episode Three) | In Trust

The Drummonds’ story, and a lot of the family’s early wealth and influence in Osage County, grew from one of their first businesses here, a store that the family patriarch took over in the early 1900s. It sold everything from flour to caskets. Much of it on credit. But the store had another function: It provided its owners financial leverage over Osage customers, in life and in death. Learn more at bloomberg.com/intrust.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the Osage Nation bought a stretch of prairie the size of Delaware, in what's now Oklahoma. The Osage owned the land and everything beneath it.

Today, much of present-day Osage County has left Osage hands. In some cases, appropriation was swift and brutal: Dozens of Osages were murdered for their share of lucrative mineral rights to this oil-rich land, a period often referred to as the Reign of Terror. But other transfers of wealth played out more subtly—dollar by dollar and acre by acre, over decades—helped along by policies created by the US government.

“In Trust” is the story of that system. A system that moved wealth from Native hands to White ones. One that three brothers learned to operate, laying the foundation for a modern American dynasty of land and influence that continues to this day.

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