Like others on the Osage tribal roll, Mollie and her family
members each received a headright—essentially, a share in the
tribe’s mineral trust. When, the following year, Oklahoma entered
the Union as the forty-sixth state, members of the tribe were able
to sell their surface land in what was now Osage County. But to
keep the mineral trust under tribal control, no one could buy or
sell headrights. These could only be inherited. Mollie and her
family had become part of the first underground reservation.
The tribe soon began leasing areas to more and more white
prospectors for exploration. Mollie saw workers—tool dressers,
rope chokers, mule peelers, gang pushers—toiling furiously. After
lowering a torpedo filled with nitroglycerin into the belly of the
earth, the muddied workers would detonate it, occasionally
turning up a fragment of an ancient American Indian spear or an
arrowhead. They’d stare at it in bewilderment. These men built
wooden structures that ascended into the sky, like temples, and
they chanted their own private language: “Bounce, you cats,
bounce. Load up on them hooks, you snappers. That’s high. Ring
her off, collar-pecker. Up on the mops. Out, growler-board.” Many
wildcatters dug dry wells, or “dusters,” and scurried away in
despair. An Osage remarked that such white men “ack like
tomorrow they ain’t gonna be no more worl’.”
In the early twentieth century, George Getty, an attorney from
Minneapolis, began his family’s quest for oil in the eastern part of
Osage territory, on a parcel of land, Lot 50, that he’d leased for
$500. When his son, Jean Paul Getty, was a boy, he visited the
area with him. “It was pioneer days,” Jean Paul, who founded the
Getty Oil Company, later recalled. “No motorcars, very few
telephones, not many electric lights. Even though it was the
beginning of the twentieth century, you still very much felt the