The Osage kept their minerals. Under the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, everything beneath the reservation that became Osage County stayed tribal property, held in trust by the federal government, and each allottee received one equal share of the royalties, a headright. A headright passed to its holder's heirs, and an heir did not have to be Osage. When oil production soared after 1920, so did the payments. In 1923 alone the tribe took in more than $30 million.
The guardians
Beginning in 1906, Congress passed a series of laws that put Osage "minors and incompetents" under guardians, with the findings left to Oklahoma's county probate courts. In 1921 it went further, requiring guardians for every Osage of half or more Osage ancestry to manage their royalties and affairs until they demonstrated "competency." The courts routinely found people incompetent without considering mental capacity. One Osage woman was given a guardian because her savings showed she was not spending, which was taken as proof that she did not understand money. The guardians were local white lawyers and businessmen. Pawhuska, a town of about 8,000, was said to have as many lawyers as Oklahoma City, which had 140,000.
What it paid
The system made a death into a transfer. A guardian controlled a ward's land, headright and royalties, and an heir, or an heir's husband, could gather several headrights into one estate. William K. Hale, the rancher who called himself the King of the Osage Hills, had his nephew Ernest Burkhart marry Mollie Kyle. Her sister Anna Brown was shot in May 1921. Her mother, Lizzie Q. Kyle, died that July with poison suspected, holding her own headright and three she had inherited. A bomb destroyed the Fairfax home of another sister, Rita Smith, in March 1923, killing Rita, her husband Bill and their housekeeper, Nettie Brookshire. Mollie was being poisoned. A court had recently made Hale the guardian of George Bigheart, son of the last hereditary chief, when Bigheart drank poisoned whiskey that June. The Osage Tribal Council asked Washington for help in March 1923, and Bureau of Investigation agents arrested Hale, Burkhart and John Ramsey in January 1926.
The guardians settled
Hale and Ramsey were sentenced to life at Leavenworth and Burkhart to McAlester; all three were later paroled, and Burkhart was pardoned by Governor Henry Bellmon. The guardians fared better. In 1924 the Interior Department charged two dozen of them with corruption in handling their wards' affairs, and every case was settled out of court. In 1929 the guardian system still held $27 million for 883 Osage families. The journalist Dennis McAuliffe later found that his grandmother, Sybil Beekman Bolton, who died in 1925 at twenty-one, had been the ward of her white stepfather, a lawyer who was also the federally appointed tribal counsel and whose four other Osage wards were all dead by 1923. After 1925 federal law barred non-Osages from inheriting headrights from Osages of half or more Osage ancestry.