Osage Nation Buys Ted Turner’s Oklahoma Ranch As Part Of Effort To Reclaim County

• Logan Layden
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  Logan Layden is a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma. He is a native of McAlester, Oklahoma and graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Logan spent three years as a state capitol reporter and local host of All Things Considered for NPR member station KGOU in Norman and six years as a reporter with StateImpact from 2011 to 2017. Most recently, he was news director for McAlester Radio before returning to public radio in 2020.

Joe Wertz / StateImpact Oklahoma

Bison on the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve near Pawhuska, Okla. The nearby ranch the Osage Nation is purchasing also has bison.

Osage Nation Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear is on a mission. He wants the tribe to buy back as much land as possible in Osage County, where it owns less than 10 percent of the nearly 1.5 million acres it did in the early 1900s.

The latest move in that effort is a big one. As the Tulsa World’s Michael Overall reports, the Osage Nation reached a deal to purchase Ted Turner’s 43,000-acre ranch near Pawhuska:

The tribe paid $74 million for the property, where the media mogul experimented with environmentally friendly ranching methods and raised more than 3,000 head of bison as well as cattle.

…In a letter to Standing Bear, Turner said he was hoping all along that the tribe would become the new owner when he put the property up for sale.

“It is my sincere hope that our transaction is the last time this land is ever sold,” Turner wrote, “and that the Osage Nation owns this land for all future generations.”

Standing Bear hopes so, too. And he wants to keep adding to the Osage Nation’s real estate empire, with the tribe planning to launch a new effort next week to buy up small parcels of land from tribal members who can no longer live on or take care of their properties.

“We’re going to buy as much land as we can,” Standing Bear said, “and get back what has been lost.”