"The Pioneer Woman" is Apparently More Than Just a Name

A famous cooking influencer has a surprising connection to 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

Feast on a brand new Report, #Content piggies! This one contains some random thoughts, news bits, relevant plugs, and your favorite, yours truly overthinking a semi-obscure news story tangentially related to movies and pop-culture. If you enjoy this, and really how could you not, please subscribe and share. Papa needs some fresh validation! I hope you’re all doing well. I love you.

Random Asides Before The Main

- I got to take my toddler trick or treating last night. I forget what a great holiday Halloween is sometimes. My son is two and his favorite words to me lately are “No, dada!” which he likes to yell while pushing me away when I try to hug him too much, or when I ask if I can read to him before bed instead of mom (he NEVER lets me do that, even though I am a god damned fantastic book reader). But last night he held onto my index finger for a bit while we walked from house to house and it made me so happy I thought my heart would burst. My stepson was there too, dressed as his idol, Steph Curry, walking far ahead and being self-sufficient, as older kids do.

My son was dressed as Baby Yoda, after one of his favorite shows, Yoda, which is what he calls The Mandalorian. When people would see his costume they’d ask, “…and who are you?”

He’d get a slightly indignant, why-are-you-asking-me-such-a-dumb-question look on his face and say, “Sammy!” because that is his name. Obviously I’m Sammy, what are you, thick?

“But who are you dressed as?” we’d ask, and he’d touch his fuzzy baby Yoda cap with the ears and say “Cat!” Because “Cat” is what he calls Baby Yoda. (The Mandalorian is Yoda to him). I love his little personality, which is nuanced and complex even at a rudimentary level of language. It made me happy every time.

Like I said, Halloween is great.

- I wrote about The Gilded Age for GQ, and how it’s a great show for dudes who just want to watch the fancy ladies bicker. I think it’s Cynthia Nixon’s best role and I would take a bullet for Carrie Coon. I’m not ashamed to say that I was trying to blatantly rip off one of my favorite SNL digital shorts, “what if Downtown Abbey was on Spike TV.”

- Headline of the Week: “Cabinet of F*ckpigs and a Team with No Plan.” FilmDrunk used to get caught by “explicit” filtering software all the time, and yet apparently Politico can just put “F*ckpigs” in a headline uncensored and get it picked up by Google News (which is where I came across it). Can AI be anything other than a total disaster? It has already basically ruined Google Search results. Anyway, “Cabinet of F*ckpigs” sounds like an obscure Herzog title.

-There’s a new feature in Rolling Stone about how HBO execs used “a secret army” to fire back at TV critics who had dissed their shows on Twitter. This whole thing is so wonderfully petty that I want to drink it straight from the tap.

Days before [Perry Mason] aired on the platform (VanArendonk seemingly had a screener for review), [Vulture critic Kathryn VanArendonk] subtweeted the series. “Dear prestige TV,” she wrote, “Please find some way to communicate male trauma besides showing me a flashback to the hero’s memories of trench warfare.”

[HBO’s then-head of original programming Casey] Bloys was annoyed, according to text messages reviewed by Rolling Stone, and sent VanArendonk’s tweet to Kathleen McCaffrey, HBO’s senior vice president of drama programming. “Maybe a Twitter user should tweet that that’s a pretty blithe response to what soldiers legitimately go through on [the] battlefield,” he texted. “Do you have a secret handle? Couldn’t we say especially given that it’s D-Day to dismiss a soldier’s experience like that seems pretty disrespectful … this must be answered!”

God what a dumb baby. Being a critic is easily the most low-paying way to make powerful enemies.

AI image created from “A pioneer woman cooking” prompt.

The Pioneer Woman

If you’ve been paying attention around here, we’ve been talking a lot about Killers of the Flower Moon — both the book, for which I interviewed author David Grann back in 2017, and the new Scorsese film adaptation, which I wrote about last week.

Great book, great movie. The subjects of which are, basically, the Osage Reign of Terror. To briefly recap, back in the early 20th century, oil was discovered underneath Osage Indian land in Oklahoma. Through the sale of their mineral rights, or “headrights,” the Osage briefly became the world’s richest people, per capita. And then a lot of outsiders came in and started murdering them.

Though the book and movie focus heavily on rancher William Hale (played by Robert De Niro), who orchestrated a complex, wide-ranging plot to kill the relatives of his nephew’s Osage wife, in order so that she, and then his nephew, and then presumably Hale, would inherit all of the family’s headrights, similar plots — to kill, disinherit, or swindle the Osage — were shockingly widespread at the time. It seemed as though nearly everyone in Osage country was in on it, one of those proverbial conspiracies that “goes all the way to the top.” Mollie Burkhart, whose husband Leonardo DiCaprio plays in the film, had to go all the way to Washington and pay $20,000 to get someone to investigate the killings because the locals were too corrupt.

The film is an especially effective depiction of evil, especially for how banal De Niro’s character is. Even when Hale seems to have completely lost the plot, killing with unsubtle methods like bombs and execution-style gunshots and the townspeople start to turn on him, it’s less because he’s a thieving murderer than because he’s doing it so loudly. They’re sort of like, Tone it down, man, we had a good grift going here.

Perhaps you also know The Pioneer Woman. That’s the stage name of Ree Drummond, a folksy redhead with a massively popular lifestyle brand (with an estimated net worth of $50 million) that began as a blog about her life in rural Oklahoma and later expanded to include recipes, cookbooks, a show on the Food Network (now in its 35th season), and more. My wife (*obligatory Borat*) have both made her recipes before. I think they were decent? I don’t really remember.

Well, would you believe that Ree Drummond seems to have married into the family of some of those Osage swindlers? Eve Batey did some fantastic work for Vanity Fair recently, connecting a cryptic tweet about it to an impressively rich body of scholarship on the subject.

Some of the highlights:

Rachel Adams-Heard’s 2022 Bloomberg podcast series In Trust determined that Oklahoma’s influential Drummond extended family—which includes Ree’s husband, Ladd, and Oklahoma attorney general Gentner Drummond—owns an estimated 9% of Osage County land that was once in the hands of the Osage tribe. The land’s estimated worth is $275 million.

At one point, the family’s portfolio also included land owned by William K. Hale.

As always, if you meet some guys named “Ladd” and “Gentner” it’s a pretty safe bet that their families own some land. Batey is being a bit vague about how exactly Ree’s husband and the OK attorney general are related here, but that’s because it’s a big family — they even have their own Wikipedia page. Family trees always hurt my head a little bit, but basically, Genter is Ladd’s great uncle. And their family owns a ton of former Osage land, and some once owned specifically by the psychopathic murderer played by Robert De Niro in the movie. Probably nothing weird about that!

How did it all come to be? The family patriarch emigrated to Osage country from Scotland in the 1880s and set up a store. (“Don’t hunt for gold, sell the pick axes,” and so forth).

Frederick [the patriarch] died in 1913. That same year, his sons Roy Cecil, Frederick Gentner, and Alfred Alexander (who went by Jack) entered the ranch trade, buying massive swaths of land across the region—frequently from Osage tribe members willing to sell their allotments. Meanwhile, Frederick Gentner had also taken over operations at the store.

By now, the Drummonds’ business was more than a place to shop. It also offered document preparation (think estate paperwork, will execution, and deed transfer), as well as undertaker and funeral services.

If you’ve seen the movie and remember the funeral scene, you’ll know why “offered undertaker and funeral services” in the teens and twenties might set off alarm bells in some people’s minds.

“People like the Drummonds had their fingers in a lot of pies,” Snyder [a history professor at Oklahoma State] says. “They were selling everything under the sun and were involved with mortuaries and burials, charging outrageous sums to perform those services. So they were kind of pulling money from the Osage in a lot of different ways.” We see some of this in Killers of the Flower Moon, when DiCaprio’s character complains that an undertaker is charging him “the Osage price.”

Ah, so sometimes undertakers in Osage country overcharged the Osage. Surely that doesn’t mean everyone—

…audio tapes of a late-1970s interview with Jack Drummond offer an explanation of the nearly 700% markup he’d apply to some items popular with Osage shoppers. It’s a practice he describes with pride: “They didn’t care what the cost of a shirt was because they were getting big Osage payments in those times. So when I found out what these Indians wanted, then I got the merchandise and sold it to them at a tremendous profit.”

True, the line between “being enterprising” and “being a piece of shit” is pretty blurry here. Maybe it sort of always is, and maybe that’s why these stories are so fascinating/. Because the mask is off more than it usually is. Was frontier capitalism “rougher,” more predatorial, more racist than it is now? Or were they just less sophisticated about optics back then?

[Emphasis here mine]:

White Oklahomans could also make extra cash by getting a court to appoint them as guardians over their Osage neighbors. “You had intelligent, educated Osages that were formally declared incompetent,” Snyder says. “So then they were assigned a guardian. And the guardians would be in charge of their finances and handling their money.” According to Snyder’s research, all three Drummonds “definitely made a lot of money” acting as guardians for Osage tribe members; according to In Trust, “the three Drummond brothers were guardians to at least 10 Osages—children and adult.”

The way Grann depicts it in the book (touched upon but not really explicated in the film) being a “guardian” to an adult Osage was rarely an altruistic pursuit. As one can imagine.

The Drummond family also still owns three-quarters of an Osage headright, purchased by a white man who inherited it from his deceased Osage wife during the Reign of Terror.

As they say, “big yikes!"

Of course, that’s being very glib; acknowledging the unsettling qualities without explaining the reasoning. One of my writing professors’ favorite correction was “why are you telling me this?”

And so I feel somewhat compelled to try to interrogate what I find so funny about this story. About the idea that The Pioneer Woman from the Food Network married into fabulously rich and powerful family, the root of whose money very likely came from grifting Native Americans (acknowledging both that the line between grift and enterprise is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, and that a lot of people’s inherited land and money probably originally came from American Indians if you dig back far enough).

My first instinct was to delight in this story and my second instinct was to feel sort of bad about delighting in it (hence the previous parenthetical). What did The Pioneer Woman, whose fame is 90% of the reason it’s even a story, ever do to deserve having to be mentioned in this story other than be famous? Her part in it was mostly just marrying some rich guy and starting one of the world’s most successful blogs. (Wikipedia tells me that, pre-Pioneer days, she graduated from USC where she pledged a sorority).

I guess part of it is the weird feeling I’ve always gotten from Food Network personalities whose whole shtick is “I have a filthy rich husband somewhere who I mention all the time but you never see and we never talk about what he actually does.”

Ina Garten fits in here as well. Even if you’ve barely seen her show you probably still know that her husband is named “Jeffrey.” That’s always felt odd or maybe just funny to me, in the vein of “I have a girlfriend, she goes to a different school!” or “my friends are just out of frame, having the time of their lives.”

But it’s also the retro-fied branding. When I hear “The Barefoot Contessa” or “The Pioneer Woman” my instinctual reaction is to mutter “oh fuck off.” Ina Garten ain’t an Italian countess (should we be more impressed with her if she was?) and Ree Drummond ain’t churning butter. (I’ll leave Ina Garten out of the rest of this, I know she’s a fun weird aunt who drinks wine, I didn’t mean for her to be catching strays on account of the name).

“The Pioneer Woman” conjures this image of frugality, of spartan living — tight buns (of hair) and covered wagons. Yet if you watch any of her videos or shows, it seems clear that this lifestyle wasn’t driven by a desire for simplicity, she’s just a rich lady living on a tract of land huge enough for her lifestyle to be considered rural (which in fairness, she’s never especially tried to hide, so far as I can tell).

So I guess part of the schadenfreude I got from this story was sort of like when you’re reading one of those features about some millennial couple bragging about how you should just scrimp and save like they do, and stop eating avocado toast, and that way you could own a house-flipping empire just like them! Feeling ashamed of your pathetic savings and spendthrift ways, you read on just to find the paragraph where they admit they started with a $200,000 loan from their dad or whatever (it’s very weird how many of these articles there are).

I was also doing my best not to include an internetty neologism like “tradwife” in this piece, but it’s hard to avoid. The Pioneer Woman seems like an earlier, softer sell for some of the paeans to “traditional living” that would come from later lifestyle brands and influencers. The people who sell this kind of stuff (“paleo” diets and the like fit in there as well) always want to harken back to these supposedly simpler times without acknowledging: 1) the wealth that underpins their ability to pursue them and 2) the actual historical baggage that comes with whatever period to which they’re harkening. Oh, you’re doing “paleo” now? When’s the last time you cowered in a cave?

And… this story has both! The familial wealth that helps underwrite the shtick and glimpses into the shady methods that helped them accrue it! Inheriting a nebulously acquired ranching empire from an Indian tribe is sort of the ultimate loan from your dad, isn’t it? The idea of a self-styled “pioneer” having to acknowledge all this awful baggage just seems too perfect. That’s not to say it makes her a bad person or even different from a lot of people with family money, it’s just that there’s just an irresistible poetic symmetry to it.

So there it is I guess, a reasoned defense of my schadenfreude and haterade. It’s also possible that I just grew up in a rural area around too many people who liked to go around town in cowboy hats and pick-up trucks and always thought they were a little full of shit. Stop cosplaying as working class, Chad, your dad owns a dealership.

Come to think of it, I too drove a pick-up truck. My dad bought it cheap from an older cousin. Maybe we’re all a little more Pioneer Woman than we like to admit.

I never wore a cowboy hat though. That would be fucking lame.