Big Hill Trading Company

Big Hill Trading Company was a major Fairfax business whose owner, Scott Mathis, also managed the finances of Anna Brown and Lizzie as their guardian. That overlap connected the company to a system that constrained Osage access to their own wealth and to the investigation of the murders surrounding Anna’s family. Years later, its large, once-busy store stood abandoned in a shrinking town, making the company both a participant in the oil-boom community and a remnant of its decline.

Business and Local Standing

The company was owned by Scott Mathis, whom the account identifies as one of the prominent white citizens of Osage County. The oil wealth flowing into the region helped build local businesses and made possible settlers’ ambitions to turn the prairie into a center of commerce. Big Hill Trading Company belonged to that prosperous business landscape; it was not a marginal concern, but a substantial presence in Fairfax.

The company’s position also placed Mathis within the overlapping worlds of commerce and Osage estate administration. The federal government required the Office of Indian Affairs to decide which Osage people it deemed capable of managing their trust funds. Those classified as incompetent could be assigned white guardians who oversaw and authorized their spending, even for small purchases. Mathis served as guardian for Anna Brown and Lizzie and had long managed their financial affairs. This was an individual role he held as the company’s owner, not evidence that the company itself administered the federal system.

Estate Administration and Investigation

After Anna’s death, her estate was administered by Mathis. At the direction of Mollie Burkhart and her family, the estate hired private detectives; Mathis assembled a team, as did the estate of Charles Whitehorn. The investigations therefore unfolded in a community where a prominent business owner also held authority over the finances of people whose deaths were under scrutiny.

The guardianship system made that authority consequential. Osage people under guardianship could not freely control their trust income, and in 1921 federal restrictions further limited how much restricted members could withdraw each year. These rules applied to the broader system, not specifically to Big Hill Trading Company. But Mathis’s guardianship over Anna and Lizzie placed him directly within the financial structures through which Osage wealth was managed by local white officials and businessmen.

Reports of Corruption and Political Ties

As Tom White’s investigation widened, agents described Mathis as a crook who was evidently under William K. Hale’s influence. Their report also named an associate of Mathis as a spy for Hale and Big Hill Trading Company, alleging that the associate helped arrange crooked dealings that exploited Osage people. The report linked the company’s local network to Hale’s, while stopping short of establishing that every business transaction by the company was criminal.

The agents’ account situated these allegations within a wider pattern of influence. It described local police chiefs, a banker and guardian, Fairfax’s mayor, a county prosecutor, and even a federal official as compromised, beholden to Hale, or unwilling to act against him. In this setting, Big Hill Trading Company appears not merely as a commercial establishment but as part of a local landscape where business, guardianship, and political power could overlap. The distinction matters: the evidence specifically implicates Mathis and an associate, while depicting Hale’s reach as extending across institutions and officials.

The Store and the Town’s Decline

When the narrative returns to Fairfax years later, the former Big Hill Trading Company building is a darkened, abandoned storefront on the main street. Margie Burkhart recalled that, when she was growing up, it was still operating and seemed enormous, with wooden banisters and old wood floors. Her memory gives the building a material scale that its later condition has lost: a once-active place of business reduced to a closed shell in a town whose population had fallen below fourteen hundred.

The contrast reflects the wider retreat of the boom. Gray Horse and other boomtowns declined as oil income fell, fields depleted, and Osage fortunes were further diminished by guardians and thieves. Fairfax’s abandoned storefront preserves that change in visible form. Big Hill Trading Company had prospered in the commercial world built by oil wealth; its empty building later stood among the remains of that world, while the history attached to its owner connected local prosperity to the unequal administration and exploitation of Osage money.

Significance

Big Hill Trading Company matters in the account because its owner’s roles joined commerce, guardianship, and the local power network surrounding the Osage murders. The company was a prominent business supported by the oil-boom economy; Mathis was also guardian to Anna Brown and Lizzie, and investigators associated one of his company’s associates with Hale’s operations. Those connections do not make every aspect of the company’s business criminal, but they show how the institutions managing Osage wealth could be entangled with the same local relationships that obstructed accountability.

Its later abandonment supplies a final contrast. The company’s large Fairfax store had once embodied the promise of a booming town; in the later account, it is an empty reminder of a prosperity that proved uneven and temporary. The building’s decline does not erase the power its owner once exercised, but it makes the boom’s afterlife visible.