The Middlewoman

She was hailed by the local press as a hero of Oklahoma’s drive for statehood, which divided communal Native lands into individual parcels that could be leased or sold. A few years later, she was assembling tracts of Osage lands that she flipped to ranchers including Jack Drummond. But Anna Marx LaMotte’s tactics were anything but heroic. This is the story of how one White woman worked to reshape Osage County in the years after allotment, and how US policies furthered what she started. See archival photos and documents from the episode at https://bloom.bg/3eaycsW. 

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Om Podcasten

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. Learn more and follow our listener guides at bloomberg.com/intrust.