Land, Cattle, and POWER

OKLAHOMA LEGACIES

Land, Cattle, and Power

The Drummond family’s rise in Osage country, the history Hollywood left outside the frame, and how Attorney General Gentner Drummond now stands at the intersection of ranching, politics, and America’s beef crisis

By Miami News-Digest 

July 2026

The hamburgers served at the Osage County Fairgrounds were made with Drummond beef.

It was Jan. 13, 2025, and Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond had returned to Pawhuska, near his family’s sprawling ranches, to announce that he was running for governor. Hundreds gathered beneath a campaign slogan promising service to ordinary Oklahomans rather than the political elite. Drummond presented himself as a combat pilot, prosecutor, businessman, cattle rancher, and independent-minded attorney general.

The setting could hardly have been more appropriate.

There was cattle, political ambition, a celebrated Oklahoma family name, and land in the heart of the Osage Nation. What the campaign scene did not show was the century and a half beneath it: Osage removal, oil wealth, racial guardianships, inflated store accounts, probate claims, land transfers, cattle empires, banking capital, #Hollywood celebrity, and the accumulation of political power.

By June 2026, Drummond had narrowly finished first in a crowded #Republican gubernatorial primary and advanced to an Aug. 25 runoff against former state Sen. Mike #Mazzei. The attorney general entered that contest carrying both the advantages and the unanswered historical questions attached to one of Oklahoma’s most powerful families.

This is not a story alleging that Gentner Drummond committed the wrongs of his ancestors.

It is not an allegation that Ree Drummond, her husband, Ladd, or other living descendants participated in crimes committed before they were born. Nor does the available record establish that the Drummond brothers joined William K. Hale’s conspiracy to murder Osage people during the Reign of Terror. They were not charged in those killings, and the family does not appear in the central murder narrative told by David #Grann or Martin #Scorsese.

It is instead the story of how land becomes capital, how capital becomes influence, and how advantages created under one generation’s laws can shape the lives of generations that follow.

It is also a story about the difference between what was legal and what was just.

The Osage purchased their Oklahoma home

The Osage Nation was not simply assigned the land that became Osage County.

After being pushed from a vast ancestral territory and surrendering its Kansas reservation, the Nation used its own money to purchase approximately 1.47 million acres from the Cherokee Nation. The price, paid from Osage tribal funds, was $1,099,137.41. The deed was conveyed to the United States in trust for the Osage in 1883. 

That fact matters because descriptions of the land as something the federal government generously “gave” to the Osage reverse the historical relationship.

The Osage bought it.

As pressure for Oklahoma statehood increased, however, Congress divided the reservation through the Osage Allotment Act of 1906. Individual Osage citizens received surface parcels, while the Nation retained collective ownership of the oil, gas, and other minerals beneath the reservation. Most of the surface land was eventually sold into non-Osage ownership.

The Drummond family accumulated enormous surface holdings, but "it" did not acquire the Osage Mineral Estate. The Osage Nation remains the beneficial owner of the minerals beneath the reservation. The United States holds the estate in trust, and no private individual owns a particular portion of it.

A #headright is something different. It is the right to receive a share of revenue generated by the collective mineral estate. Headrights could historically pass by inheritance to non-Osages, creating a financial pathway that would become one of the motives behind the Osage murders. Approximately one-quarter of existing headright interests are now held by non-Osages, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs figures cited by the Osage Minerals Council.

The wealth that attracted an army of predators

Oil transformed Osage County.

Royalty payments made Osage headright holders members of one of the world’s wealthiest populations per capita. That wealth attracted oilmen, bankers, attorneys, merchants, undertakers, husbands, guardians, land buyers, insurance agents, and professional criminals. Newspapers often described Osage wealth with envy and ridicule, reinforcing the racist belief that Native people had somehow received money they did not deserve.

The violence later called the Reign of Terror was not random.

William K. Hale, the “King of the Osage Hills,” arranged killings intended to move headrights and other wealth through the family of his nephew, Ernest Burkhart, who had married Mollie Kyle. The FBI’s historical account says Hale bribed, intimidated, lied, and stole his way to power before ordering murders to obtain Osage oil income, insurance proceeds, and control over property.

Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon concentrates upon the most visible part of that system: poison, gunfire, explosions, conspiracy, and murder.

But killing was only one way to strip wealth from Osage families.

Others relied upon store credit, guardianships, probate proceedings, inflated bills, mortgages, powers of attorney, estate administration, and deeds that could appear legal even when the circumstances surrounding them were deeply unequal.

That is where the Drummond history enters the frame.

The Scottish immigrant and the trading counter

Frederick Drummond arrived in the United States from #Scotland during the 1880s. His first attempt at Texas ranching failed. In 1886, he moved to Pawhuska and became a government-licensed trader at the Osage #Mercantile Company. He married Addie Gentner, acquired an interest in the business, and later moved to Hominy, where he organized the Hominy #Trading Company.

The #enterprise prospered.

The store sold clothing, furniture, supplies, food, hardware, and Pendleton blankets favored by Osage customers. At one point, the Hominy Trading Company was reportedly the largest Pendleton blanket dealer in the country. From that commercial base, Frederick expanded into ranching, banking, and real estate.

After Frederick died in 1913, his sons, Roy Cecil, Frederick Gentner, and Alfred Alexander “Jack” Drummond, formed the Drummond Cattle Company. By the 1980s, the brothers and their descendants managed more than 200,000 acres in Oklahoma and southern Kansas.

That is the respectable version of the family story: an immigrant merchant, three educated sons, business discipline, cattle knowledge, and generations of hard work.

Those things are part of the history.

They are not the whole history.

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The “Osage price”

Decades later, Jack Drummond described how the store profited during the oil boom.

In an oral history examined by Bloomberg reporter Rachel Adams-Heard for the podcast In Trust, Jack recalled obtaining silk shirts for approximately $6 to $8 and selling them to Osage customers for $50 or $60. He said the customers were receiving large Osage payments, so he found the goods they wanted and sold them at a “tremendous profit.”

Descendants of Osage families remembered something they called the “Osage price”: a separate, substantially higher price charged to Native customer. A similar practice is not altogether unheard of in many bartering markets throughout the world, from antiquity to modern day...

In the same investigation, one Osage family recalled sending a white relative into the store to purchase the same goods an Osage woman had just priced. The white customer reportedly received them for approximately half as much. Drummond descendants interviewed for the podcast offered a different interpretation, describing the products as luxury merchandise that the store had located for willing customers. One family member said he had examined ledgers and did not believe they demonstrated exploitation.

The opposing accounts should both be reported.

The recorded statements, however, leave little doubt that at least one Drummond brother openly celebrated extraordinary markups made possible by Osage oil income.

The store was also more than a place to buy a shirt or blanket. It extended credit, financed purchases, loaned money, handled funeral services, filed claims against estates, and occupied a central position in the financial life of Hominy.

That combination created power.

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A business that could profit from life, debt, and death?

When an Osage customer died owing money, the Hominy Trading Company could submit a claim against the estate.

Bloomberg’s investigation found cases in which a Drummond brother was also the #estate administrator responsible for determining whether the family store’s claim was valid. In the estate of Charles Me-Chetzi, Jack Drummond reportedly approved a claim from the business he helped operate. Frederick Gentner Drummond handled at least 28 Osage estates, according to the records reviewed by In Trust.

An estate administrator was expected to examine debts, protect heirs, distribute remaining assets, and prevent illegitimate claims. When the administrator also had a financial interest in the company seeking payment, the arrangement created what an Osage attorney interviewed by Bloomberg described as a classic conflict of interest.

The Hominy Trading Company also operated an undertaking business.

#Probate records examined for In Trust contained funeral charges, store debts, and other claims that reached amounts equivalent to tens of thousands of dollars today. The store could therefore sell goods to an Osage customer, extend credit, handle the funeral, submit the resulting bills, and participate in administering the estate from which those bills were paid.

The arrangement may have operated through court-approved paperwork, but paperwork did not remove the underlying imbalance.

Osage people could be enormously wealthy on paper while federal law restricted their access to their own money. A family that could not freely withdraw oil income might borrow from a merchant, accumulate a store account, mortgage land, or sell property for immediate cash.

The people controlling the credit, the merchandise, the probate claims, and access to the courts were positioned to profit from every step.

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When store debt became land

The connection between debt and land is not perfectly documented in every transaction. Many records are incomplete, some guardianship files remain sealed, and the reason behind a century-old deed cannot always be reconstructed.

At least one case uncovered by In #Trust was unusually direct.

An Osage family accumulated more than $4,500 in expenses over approximately four months, with about half owed to the Hominy Trading Company. Months later, the family deeded 160 acres to Cecil Drummond. The deed did not list a precise purchase price, but the transfer taxes indicated that the land sold for less than $500, substantially below nearby land values identified by the investigation.

The record does not definitively state whether the transfer settled the store account, whether the family needed immediate cash, or whether another agreement existed.

It does show the economic sequence: restricted Osage money, an enormous merchant bill, and a transfer of Osage land to the merchant’s family for an exceptionally low apparent price.

Other records showed Osage families mortgaging land through local businessmen, borrowing from accounts controlled by guardians, and transferring or trading acreage that later became part of Drummond cattle operations.

This is why calling the history merely “successful ranching” is inadequate.

The cattle empire was not built only by raising better calves. It also grew from a commercial and legal environment in which Osage citizens had restricted control over their own money while insider merchants, lenders, guardians, and estate administrators enjoyed easy access to it.

The guardianship system was defended as a way to protect Osage citizens from 'exploitation'.

Instead, it frequently institutionalized exploitation.

Educated, capable Osage adults could be classified as financially “incompetent” under a racial system that placed control of their money in the hands of white guardians. The guardian could collect fees, approve expenditures, direct investments, and decide which merchants or banks a ward could use.

The three Drummond brothers served as guardians for at least 10 Osage adults and children, according to the Bloomberg investigation summarized by Vanity Fair.

Some loans made from Osage accounts to the Drummond brothers were apparently repaid with interest at rates normal for the time. That fact matters. Not every use of ward funds was necessarily fraudulent.

It also meant that members of the family had access to Osage capital that could be placed into their own businesses and secured by land already acquired from Osage owners.

Formal repayment does not erase the advantage. The wards whose money supplied the capital did not necessarily possess comparable freedom to invest their own funds.

One of the most troubling episodes involved Myron Bangs Jr., an Osage man whose finances were managed under #guardianship.

#Bloomberg reported that $15,000 from Bangs’s account was borrowed and used by the Drummond brothers to help purchase ranch property from William Hale as Hale faced imprisonment for his role in the Osage murder conspiracy. The reporting indicated that Bangs may not have known his money was being used for that purpose.

Bangs later commissioned an independent audit that identified numerous discrepancies and concerns. In 1941, the federal government sued the Drummond brothers, alleging that they had conspired to defraud him.

Filed in 1941 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, alleging that the brothers conspired to defraud Myron Bangs Jr. (represented by Paul #Comstock) during their tenure as his financial guardians. 

The case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Franklin Elmore #Kennamer for lack of evidence.

The court process did not reach a full trial on the merits; instead, it was thrown out by the judge during the preliminary stages of the litigation.

That dismissal must be stated clearly. The federal allegations did not result in a judgment that the brothers committed fraud. It would be inaccurate to report the allegations as though they were proven criminal findings.

Rather than proceeding to a jury trial where witnesses would be cross-examined, the defense attorneys for the Drummond brothers filed a motion to dismiss the case.

Because the 1941 case was thrown out in its earliest procedural stages, the specific defense attorneys who represented the Drummond brothers are rarely detailed in historical overviews of the litigation.

However, during this era, prominent local attorneys in Osage County and #Tulsa—such as Charles R. Gray and Frank T. McCoy—frequently handled the high-stakes legal defenses and guardianship corporate interests for the Drummond family.

The precise attorney names are recorded on the original, physical paper filings from 1941. To find them, a researcher would have to physically pull the original case docket from the National Archives at Fort Worth.

The documented circumstances remain extraordinary: money belonging to an Osage ward was used to acquire property from the cattleman convicted in a conspiracy to murder Osage people for wealth.

The Drummonds purchased the #Hale property with another ranching family, the #Mullendores.

Portions changed hands in later years. A parcel ultimately owned by Charles Drummond, father of Ladd Drummond, was sold to media magnate Ted Turner. In 2016, the Osage Nation purchased Turner’s 43,000-acre Bluestem Ranch for $74 million.

In 2024, the ranch was placed into federal trust for the Osage Nation.

The land includes original Osage allotments and a parcel once owned by Hale and later by the Drummond family. It can no longer be privately sold or burdened in the same manner. More than a century after allotment, that portion of the landscape returned to protected Osage ownership. 

Was the land 'stolen'?

The word stolen is morally understandable, but it must be used with precision. Let the reader discern or decide...

The overall loss of Osage land occurred through a federal policy specifically designed to break apart Native communal ownership. Osage access to money was restricted. White guardians were imposed. Merchants extended debt. Probate administrators approved claims. Speculators and intermediaries acquired land. Some transfers were challenged as fraudulent, some occurred under obvious conflicts of interest, and others appeared lawful on their face.

Not every parcel now associated with the Drummond family can responsibly be labeled stolen without examining its individual chain of title.

The broader process was unquestionably dispossession.

A deed can be legally recorded while arising from coercive circumstances. A person may technically consent to a sale while being denied access to money that would have made the sale unnecessary. A court may approve a transaction within a system structured against one party from the beginning.

Formal legality is not the same thing as fairness.

A 2022 Bloomberg analysis estimated that the extended Drummond family owned approximately 9 percent of Osage County, with the land valued at roughly $275 million. That is an investigative estimate, not a judicial finding concerning the validity of every title. Members of the family have maintained that their ancestors were honorable businessmen who purchased land fairly and maintained positive relationships with Osage neighbors.

The available record supports neither the claim that every acre was criminally stolen nor the comforting idea that the empire arose solely from neutral, arms-length transactions.

The truth is grittier: generations of business achievement were built within, and benefited from, a racial system that transferred land and economic control away from Osage people.

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From ranching family to household American brand

The Drummond name eventually extended far beyond cattle.

Different branches of the family developed ranches, banks, law practices, investments, communications interests, and political relationships. Ladd Drummond’s marriage to Ree Drummond added a national entertainment and tourism empire to the family story.

Ree married into the family in 1996. Her Pioneer Woman persona grew from a blog into television programs, cookbooks, products, restaurants, lodging, and retail businesses that turned Pawhuska into a destination for visitors. She did not participate in the historical transactions, and ancestry by marriage does not create personal liability for them. Her celebrity, however, has made the family’s romantic ranching image far more visible than the history beneath the ranches.

That contrast is part of the modern story.

Millions of Americans know the family through polished kitchens, cattle drives, family dinners, and prairie sunsets. Far fewer know that the family’s economic foundation developed in the same county where federal restrictions, racial guardianships, inflated debts, and the Osage Reign of Terror operated simultaneously.

The television image is not necessarily false. It is incomplete.

Gentner Drummond belongs to another branch of the extended family.

He should be assessed for his own decisions, not treated as a substitute defendant for his ancestors. His biography is substantial: an Oklahoma State University graduate, Georgetown-trained attorney, former assistant district attorney, private practitioner, banker, businessman, and longtime rancher. He served as an Air Force fighter pilot during the Persian Gulf War, received the Distinguished Flying Cross, and was sworn in as Oklahoma attorney general in January 2023. He and his wife, Wendy, have a blended family of six children and seven grandchildren.

His ranch near #Pawhuska has been described as approximately 25,000 acres. #Drummond has spoken publicly about growing up on the land, improving pastures, constructing ponds, reducing labor through machinery, and trying to make the operation sustainable for future generations.

He is therefore not merely a politician who poses beside children and cattle.

He is a major upstream producer with a personal financial and cultural stake in ranching, land use, cattle prices, water, property rights, feed costs, financing, and access to markets.

His family history also provides something most ranchers do not possess: a multigenerational base of land, capital, business connections, and name recognition assembled over more than a century.

Acknowledging that advantage does not deny his military service, education, labor, or professional achievements.

It places them in context.

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The beef crisis reaches Oklahoma

The United States entered 2026 with 86.2 million cattle and calves, including 27.6 million beef cows. The beef-cow inventory was down another 1 percent, the calf crop was down 2 percent, and cattle on feed were down 3 percent. USDA described the industry as remaining in the contractionary phase of a #cattle cycle that had already reduced the herd for years.

#Drought, high feed prices, financing costs, pasture losses, producer retirements, and the liquidation of breeding cows reduced the number of animals available. Even when ranchers decide to rebuild, biology imposes a delay. A retained heifer must mature, become pregnant, deliver a calf, and raise that animal before it enters the beef supply.

The shortage has moved through the entire chain.

In May 2026, USDA reported that farm-level cattle prices were 16.9 percent higher than a year earlier and wholesale beef prices were 15.9 percent higher. Retail beef and veal prices were 12.9 percent above May 2025. The average national price for a pound of standard ground beef reached approximately $6.75 in May.

High cattle prices can benefit producers who have animals ready to sell. They do not automatically mean that ranching is easy or uniformly profitable. The same producer may be paying more for replacement animals, land, fencing, equipment, hay, fuel, labor, veterinary services, and interest.

At the processing level, too few cattle can leave enormous slaughter plants operating below capacity. That raises per-animal costs and can cause shift reductions, layoffs, or closures even while consumers are paying record prices.

The narrow middle controlled by four companies

Between the ranch and the grocery store stands the most concentrated part of the supply chain.

USDA’s Economic Research Service reports that the four largest meatpackers handle approximately 85 percent of steer and heifer purchases. The dominant firms are generally identified as Tyson Foods, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef.

Concentration does not prove that every price movement results from illegal conduct. USDA notes that research has produced limited evidence that concentration alone explains lower livestock prices, and large plants can produce genuine efficiencies.

It does create vulnerability.

When a few companies control most large-scale slaughter capacity, ranchers have fewer potential buyers, communities become dependent upon individual plants, and disruptions can rapidly affect both cattle bids and retail availability.

#Oklahoma has cattle, pasture, feed operations, auction markets, and smaller processors. It does not have enough large-scale, locally controlled slaughter capacity to bypass the national bottleneck. That is the structural problem identified in Miami News-Digest’s recent #beef investigation: Oklahoma may raise the animal, but much of the decisive processing power lies elsewhere.

No evidence reviewed for this report shows that Gentner Drummond owns or controls Tyson, JBS, Cargill, or National Beef.

He is not one of the Big Four meatpackers.

His position is upstream. He raises cattle within the system those companies dominate. That can place his economic interests alongside smaller ranchers when they seek more competitive markets, accurate country-of-origin labeling, protection from cattle theft, or expanded processing capacity.

In August 2025, his office joined an appellate brief supporting South Dakota ranchers who challenged the use of “Product of USA” labeling on foreign-sourced beef that underwent some processing or packaging in the United States. Drummond argued that the practice was deceptive and harmful to domestic producers. The filing supported the ranchers’ lawsuit; it was not itself a final judicial ruling on their claims.

The Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association originally endorsed him for governor in January 2025, presenting him as a rancher who understood the industry.

One year later, that alliance fractured.

On Jan. 21, 2026, the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association formally rescinded its endorsement of Drummond.

The organization cited what it called watershed-based regulatory and litigation strategies pursued by the attorney general’s office. It said those actions threatened the “economic interests, operational viability, and private property rights” of Oklahoma beef producers. The association subsequently adopted a policy against endorsing candidates for political office.

The conflict emerged in the shadow of Oklahoma’s long-running water-pollution litigation involving poultry companies and the Illinois River watershed. Cattle producers feared that legal precedents, nutrient restrictions, or watershed regulations could eventually affect ranches and other agricultural operations.

Drummond’s campaign answered that some agricultural leaders had been misled by out-of-state lobbyists more interested in protecting corporate interests than Oklahoma water. His campaign said he would continue seeking settlements that protected waterways while working with the industry.

The episode revealed the tension at the center of his public identity.

As a rancher, Drummond speaks the language of property rights and agricultural survival. As attorney general, he is responsible for enforcing laws and representing the state’s interests in water and pollution disputes. As a gubernatorial candidate, he must persuade both rural landowners and voters concerned about corporate influence and environmental damage.

The interests do not always align.

The Osage build a different cattle future

The Osage Nation’s recent land and food initiatives offer a striking counterpoint.

The 43,000-acre Osage Nation Ranch is once again held for the Nation, with trust status protecting it from private sale and strengthening tribal jurisdiction. The land includes tallgrass prairie suitable for grazing and parcels that passed through the hands of Hale, the Drummonds, and Turner before returning to the Osage.

The Nation also operates Butcher House Meats in Hominy, a 19,000-square-foot processing facility created partly in response to food-system failures exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. It processes cattle, bison, hogs, and seasonal deer, operates a public retail counter, and sells Osage beef and bison produced in partnership with the Nation’s ranch.

This does not replicate the throughput of a Tyson or JBS plant.

It does something different: it keeps more control over land, animals, processing, food access, and economic value within the Osage community.

The Nation that once saw its land divided and its people placed under white financial supervision is rebuilding a vertically connected food system under its own authority.

That may be the most consequential Oklahoma legacy in the entire story.

The full ledger

The Drummond story is not that one family caused every crime committed against the Osage.

It is not that present descendants should be held criminally responsible for the actions of men who died generations ago. It is not that business skill, military service, ranch work, or public service are illusions.

The story is that the family’s fortune developed inside a system that placed extraordinary power in white hands and imposed extraordinary restrictions upon Osage hands.

The store generated money and debt. Debt helped create leverage. Probate proceedings collected accounts. Guardianships provided access to capital. Land became pasture. Pasture supported cattle. Cattle and land became collateral. Collateral financed more expansion. Expansion produced banking relationships, business authority, celebrity, and political influence.

Gentner Drummond now stands where those histories meet.

He is not a Big Four meatpacker. He is not accused of the murders depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon. He is a modern cattleman, attorney general, and candidate for governor whose personal opportunities were shaped, in part, by a multigenerational inheritance rooted in Osage country.

That is not guilt by ancestry.

It is a reason to demand historical honesty from people who possess inherited power.

The Osage survived removal, purchased a permanent home, protected their mineral estate, endured guardianship abuses and murder, and began bringing land and food production back under their own control.

The old Oklahoma story was about converting Osage wealth into private empires.

The unfinished story is about the Osage reclaiming the authority to build their own.

Selected Sources

Adams-Heard, Rachel. “The Osage Price.” In Trust. Bloomberg and iHeartMedia, September 2022.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Osage Murders Case.” FBI History.

Hoffman, Jordan. “The Strange but True Story of the Pioneer Woman’s Link to Killers of the Flower Moon.” Vanity Fair, October 19, 2023.

Oklahoma Historical Society. “Drummond Ranch.” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.

Oklahoma Historical Society. “Fred and Addie Drummond Home.”

Osage Minerals Council. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Osage Nation.

Osage Nation. “The Osage Nation Reservation.”

Osage News. “Osage Nation Makes History with Second Largest Trust Land Acquisition in U.S. History.” November 19, 2024.

Pope, Anna. “Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association Pulls Gubernatorial Endorsement of Drummond.” KOSU, January 23, 2026.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. “Concentration in U.S. Meatpacking Industry and How It Affects Competition and Cattle Prices.” January 2024.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service. “United States Cattle Inventory Down Slightly.” January 30, 2026.

U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Average Retail Food and Energy Prices.” 2026.