Word trickled back to tribal headquarters in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, that Congress was again working to rewrite the statutes that defined the rights of Osage tribe members. Once one of the main powers in the Great Plains, the Osage people had been reduced by smallpox epidemics and encroaching settlement on their hunting grounds. While other tribes had been relocated to lands chosen by the federal government, in 1881, the Osage purchased ~1.5 million acres of Indian Territory for a reservation that would maintain special privileges, including the tribe retaining surplus land after allotment and mineral rights being held communally by the tribe.
The issue of mineral rights came to the forefront in 1894 when oil was discovered in their hilly land. Kansas oilman Edwin Foster began speculating after agreeing to pay the Osage 10% of all sales of oil produced on the reservation, which entailed the whole of Osage County. While initially the oil was not much of an impact on the region, the expiration of Foster’s lease in 1916 along with surging demand due to World War I caused a rush. Under the “Million Dollar Elm,” a sprawling elm tree outside of the county courthouse, public auctions were held where oil companies paid enormous sums for leases, setting the world record of $1.99 million for one 160-acre lease.
The leases proved good investments, and exploding oil production prompted boomtowns full of roughnecks to spring up across the county. Crime was rampant, and officials were frequently corrupt. The corruption flowed upward to the federal government, where lobbyists worked to alter definitions of “competency” and require guardianship by court-appointees for Osage tribal members. This often led to white men collecting oil royalties for legally disempowered Osage and pocketing whatever they could.
With another round of laws looking to be passed in 1921 by the new Republican-dominated government, tribal leaders decided to lobby themselves by playing the “white man’s game.” In postwar Washington, that game was bribery. Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, whose department contained the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was notorious for his legal shenanigans long before becoming a senator from New Mexico. Fall defended cattle rustlers and killers in the latter days of the Wild West, including Jesse Wayne Brazel, who gunned down Pat Garrett when the former sheriff had pursued suspects in the murder of Fall’s neighbor.
When palms were successfully greased, new laws pertaining to the Osage tribe granted recognition of the tribal council, which had been dissolved in 1889, reinstated in 1906, and dissolved again. The council received rights to maintain tribal rolls and issue their own certificates of competency with Secretary Fall endorsing the agreement as a saver of department resources better allocated to managing federal lands, such as the Naval Reserve at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. When Fall’s efforts to maneuver leasing the reserves to oil companies were discovered, along with numerous other scandals in the Harding administration, blame shifted around Washington in every direction. The Osage, meanwhile, stepped back into their degree of self-government out of Pawhuska.
Through the 1920s, even more money surged into the region. In 1926 alone, a single tribal citizen could expect more than $16,000 in royalty money ($240,000 in 2020 dollars). By 1939, more than $100 million had been dispersed to the Osage. There were numerous attempts to steal headrights by marriage and inheritance after murder, but the local courts had been cleansed of corruption by tribal votes and were swift to deal with such matters. Instead, the Osage spent their income on travel, education, and luxuries with Pawhuska hosting the first Rolls Royce dealership west of the Mississippi.
After seeing the decadence and collapse of the 1920s into the Great Depression, tribal members decided to put their wealth to more long-lasting investments. Much of the country dragged on economically, but Osage County became a center of construction and local industry. The five-mile Osage Canal project expanded the Arkansas River to make it navigable to shipping up to Hominy in the southern part of the county, which became the focus of agricultural and petroleum exchange for the entire region, ultimately outpacing Tulsa to the southeast.
Riding the wave of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Osage investment in film caused it to become a center for television and indie film production that grew substantially with the end of the Studio System in the 1960s. The need for knowhow in electronics prompted the founding of Osage Institute of Technology (Osage Tech), the MIT of the Midwest, which later became one of the centers of the Internet with Osage Hills rivaling many of Silicon Valley’s startups.
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In reality, Congress passed an act enforcing guardianship and maintaining direct authority through the Secretary of the Interior’s office. In addition to guardianship schemes, dozens if not hundreds of murders were carried out in the Reign of Terror in 1921-1926. Laws were then changed to prevent headrights from going to anyone without more than half native ancestry.
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