Rebuilding the Nation

While the US government stood by, the Osage Nation in Oklahoma lost vast amounts of land. Sometimes it was through theft; other times it was just business. The Osage are clawing the land back tract by tract

- Rachel Adams-Heard

Raymond Red Corn remembers every bit of the drive up to Kansas to buy back his people’s land. Red Corn, who was the assistant principal chief of the Osage Nation, had gotten up early one morning in January 2016 and, with a colleague, loaded up in a Ford SUV they jokingly called “the chief mobile.” It wasn’t a long drive from Osage County, in northern Oklahoma, to Hutchinson, where a ranch broker stood ready to collect bids for the sprawling patch of prairie, but Red Corn wasn’t taking any chances. There was a backup plan: If he crashed or the truck broke down, Osage Nation police would leave him on the side of the road. Their only job was to make sure the sealed envelope they were carrying got to Kansas.

Red Corn stops here in his story. He doesn’t want this part to sound goofy. “It was all done with a smirk and a wink,” Red Corn says. “And we also knew that if we got in a wreck of some kind, that somebody was going to get this on up there.”

Red Corn and RJ Walker, then a member of the Osage Nation Congress, ended up getting to Hutchinson with time to kill. They hung out in the broker’s office, waiting to submit their bid closer to the 4:30 p.m. deadline—just to make sure there wasn’t any funny business. They parted with their envelope with 20 minutes to spare.

That bid, in the amount of $74 million, was the best and highest that media mogul Ted Turner got for his Bluestem Ranch. In 2016 the Osage Nation became the owner of 43,000 rolling acres of golden grass. Again.