Uncle Peyton

Peyton Glass had a license to steal.

Actually, two licenses.

From the Payne County News, May 9, 1930

The first was Mary Roan, a young Osage woman in Fairfax, Oklahoma. The second was Louis Red Eagle, a teenager.

Like all Osage, Mary and Louis received a quarterly payment from Uncle Sam – their share of the millions of dollars in royalties for the oil being pumped from underneath Osage County in northern Oklahoma.

In some years, the payment to each tribal member exceeded $10,000 ($160,000 today), making the Osage the wealthiest group of people on Earth at the time.

The oil wealth attracted many whites to Osage County. Peyton Glass joined the rush in 1915, buying an interest in the largest dry goods business in Fairfax from E. B. Glover and rechristening it the G. & G. Store.

His standing as a respected merchant would come in handy a few years later when the guardian system was created.

Fearing the Osage would be easy prey to crooks trying to take their riches – or simply uncomfortable with Indians enjoying so much wealth -- the U.S. Congress decided they needed white guardians to look after their finances. To regain control of their money, tribal members had to prove they could handle it themselves.

It was a system ripe for corruption. Not only did the guardians decide how to invest the money, but they also decided what their charges could buy and where. A merchant such as Glass could require Mary and Louis to shop exclusively at the G. & G. Store at prices he alone set.

In addition, he could pay himself a hefty fee for managing their money.

In 1921, Glass posted a legal notice in the Fairfax weekly, The Osage Chief, warning the town’s businesses against extending credit to Mary Roan unless Glass first approved.

The previous month, she had filed for divorce from her Osage husband, Henry Roan. One of the wealthier families in Fairfax, the Roans had three children, two of them adopted.

Henry Roan

In February 1923, before the divorce was final, Henry Roan was found murdered on a desolate patch of land outside Fairfax. Someone had shot him in the back of the head as he sat in his car.

Suspicion fell on a white taxi driver, Roy Bunch, who was often seen with Mary, but he was never charged. They married two months after the killing.

Ultimately, cattleman William Hale would be convicted of Henry Roan’s murder. Hale was linked to more than a dozen other mysterious deaths that became known as the Osage Reign of Terror. The plot to rob the Indians of their oil allotments is meticulously documented in David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

Sentenced to life in prison. Hale was freed after 18 years.

Glass’s other charge, Louis Red Eagle, liked speed.

As a seventeen-year-old in 1918, he was involved in a crash that killed a friend. He bought a new Buick but wrecked it in 1921, killing another friend.

Red Eagle’s luck ran out in 1926. He died in a crash blamed on excessive speed near Fairfax. He was twenty-five and left a wife and a five-year-old son.

A newspaper said he also left a fortune of $95,000 ($1.7 million today). You can bet Peyton Glass tried to take a cut of that.

By this time, Glass had opened a second G. & G. Store in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He hired his brother-in-law, William Webb, to run it.

Webb died unexpectedly in 1930 and told Madeline on his deathbed that her Uncle Peyton would take care of her. As we document in Madeline Gets Life, that promise went unfulfilled.