Million Dollar Elm

The Million Dollar Elm was the great tree on a Pawhuska hilltop where Osage oil leases were auctioned, roughly four times a year. It gave a physical address—and a memorable name—to a public contest over underground wealth. Beneath its shade, Osage families, local businessmen, and oil magnates gathered as bidding turned leases into fortunes or losses. The tree’s importance was not simply that it stood beside an auction: it became the emblem of a system in which extraordinary resource wealth drew both crowds and powerful outsiders, while the Osage did not control all the institutions governing its distribution.

The Name and the Oil Boom

The auctions had begun in 1912 under the oversight of the Department of the Interior. Only part of the Osage County underground reservation had been opened to drilling, but competition for an individual lease—typically covering 160 acres—had risen sharply. In 1923, the Daily Oklahoman joked that a person trying to spend a million dollars would have found the task easy in Oklahoma: one nod could suffice. The tree’s name captured that scale of money in a phrase, joining a familiar landmark to the value assigned to the oil beneath the land.

The wealth behind the bidding was visible in the oil fields as well as in the auction crowd. In 1917, a well on Lot 185 erupted in a column of black oil after the derrick trembled and the ground burst open. Spectators followed gushers shooting as much as a hundred feet into the air; some celebrated, while oil spray coated fields, flowers, workers, and onlookers. In 1920, E. W. Marland found the Burbank field, where a new well produced 680 barrels in its first twenty-four hours. These dramatic discoveries help explain why a lease auction could become a public spectacle: each tract carried the possibility of a sudden fortune, though no bid guaranteed success.

A Public Auction, a Concentrated Contest

In good weather, spectators came from miles away to watch beneath the tree. Ernest Burkhart sometimes attended, as did Mollie Burkhart and other Osage members. Newspaper coverage described Osage spectators through familiar stereotypes, but their presence also made plain that the auction concerned the land and mineral resources from which their community’s wealth derived. Local settlers and business owners, including William K. Hale and Scott Mathis, also took an interest. Oil income helped local businesses grow and fueled ambitions to remake the prairie as a commercial center.

The auction itself had a carefully staged character. Colonel Ellsworth E. Walters, a tall auctioneer in a striped shirt, celluloid collar, and long tie, presided beneath the tree. His pocket watch hung from a metal chain, and his booming voice urged the bidders on with folksy patter. The showmanship made the proceedings vivid, but the underlying contest was serious: a successful lease could make a penniless wildcatter rich, while a mistaken bid could ruin a bidder. Oilmen studied geological maps and gathered information from employees they called rock hounds and spies. The best leases were generally offered later, so the magnates waited while less valuable tracts went first and the crowd’s attention shifted toward them.

The gathering was not an equal meeting of all those affected by oil. The auction determined who could drill and profit from particular tracts, while the broader handling of Osage income depended on systems that could also be exploited. Tom White’s investigation found guardians and administrators who inflated prices, steered their wards’ business to favored firms, claimed Osage property for themselves, or stole directly from restricted accounts. One government study estimated that guardians had taken at least eight million dollars from Osage accounts before 1925. The auctions made the enormous value of the resource visible; the surrounding guardianship system showed how wealth could be diverted even when it was ostensibly managed for its owners.

From the Hilltop to the Theater

The Million Dollar Elm was the setting in good weather, not the only place where the auctions occurred. On January 18, 1923, five months after Barney McBride’s murder, oilmen gathered for a winter sale inside the Constantine Theater in Pawhuska. The building’s Greek columns, murals, and lights around the stage supplied a more formal setting, but the same auctioneer and the same escalating bids carried the contest indoors. Colonel Walters opened with less valuable leases, reminding the bidders that no tract would sell for less than five hundred dollars. A bid of five hundred became six hundred, and he closed the sale at that price.

The change of venue clarifies what the Elm represented. The tree was a landmark and an image, while the auctions were an institution that continued when winter made the hilltop unsuitable. Newspaper notices heralded the oilmen’s arrivals in luxurious railcars as the Millionaires’ Special. Their prominence at the sales reflected the growing political reach of the oil industry as well as its local economic power. Sinclair, Marland, and other oilmen helped finance Warren Harding’s successful presidential campaign; later, Sinclair paid money through a bogus company to Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall in connection with access to strategic naval oil reserves. The auctions and the national oil-leasing scandal were distinct events, but together they show how control of oil could connect local bidding to influence far beyond Pawhuska.

A Wealth Symbol with an Afterlife

The name’s promise of abundance did not last unchanged. The Great Depression struck Osage fortunes already reduced by guardians and thieves. Oil that had reached more than three dollars a barrel fell to 65 cents in 1931, and an annual headright payment fell below $800. Oil fields were gradually depleted, and boomtowns, including Gray Horse, declined. In later years, more than ten thousand wells remained across the reservation, but they generally produced less than fifteen barrels a day each. At a 2012 auction in Tulsa, three leases sold for less than $15,000 altogether.

In that longer history, the Million Dollar Elm holds together two contrasting views of oil wealth: the spectacular promise represented by leases and gushers, and the limited, precarious income that remained for many Osage families after exploitation, economic decline, and depletion. It is a particular tree in a particular town, but also a shorthand for a public ritual in which enormous fortunes were imagined, pursued, and transferred. The name preserves the brightness of the boom without allowing that brightness to stand alone.