Correction
This story originally had incorrect information about the amount of land held by the tribe in 2014. It has been corrected.
Becoming one of the largest land owners in the state’s largest county, the Osage Nation completed a deal this week to buy Ted Turner’s Bluestem Ranch, covering 43,000 acres of prairie west of Pawhuska, officials confirmed Thursday.
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.
The deal had been in the works since 2015, when the tribe placed a winning bid for the property. But the sale didn’t become final until Wednesday, and the tribe won’t take possession until November.
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Even then, not much will change in the ranch’s day-to-day activities, as the tribe will continue operating it as a for-profit business, officials said. But the Bluestem likely will get a new name in the Osage language, although the tribe hasn’t yet decided what to call it.
The purchase was the latest and biggest step in Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear’s determined effort to buy as much land as possible in Osage County, where the tribe once owned nearly 1.5 million acres before it was divided up and allotted to individual tribal members in the early 1900s.
By the time Standing Bear took office in 2014, tribal holdings had dwindled to less than 7 percent of the original Osage Reservation. But with this and other purchases in recent years, the tribe now controls more than 9 percent of its original landholdings, Standing Bear said.
“Land,” he said, “is central to the culture, traditions and history of the Osage people.”
The ranch sits near the Osage Wind development, an 8,400-acre wind farm that the tribe filed two federal lawsuits against in a failed effort to prevent construction in 2015. But Turner, who’s most famous for founding the Cable News Network, didn’t allow wind turbines on the property, Standing Bear said. And the tribe “certainly never will,” he said.
“The whole point is to preserve the land,” he said, “for our children and the future.”
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.”
