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More than half a dozen visits later, Moses' grandson Leon Bruno has accumulated enough photocopies of documents to fill 19 loose-leaf notebooks. Papers show that Moses' entire 80-acre allotment first came under an oil lease in 1923. Six years later, according to BIA documents, 20 of those acres were sold to two local white men for $1,311, or $65.55 an acre. The family has found contradicting government estimates of the land's royalty value at the time, ranging from $50 to $400 an acre. And documents are unclear about whether Moses Bruno understood before the transaction was completed that the land was being sold. A well was drilled on these 20 acres in 1933 and still pumps to this day.
In 1931 Bruno got permission from the BIA to withdraw 20 separate acres of his allotment from the trust, and he began selling percentages of his oil and gas royalty interest. Four wells were eventually drilled on the remaining BIA-controlled 40 acres and pumped from March 1939 to the end of 1941. It was the practice then for oil companies to send royalty-payment checks for Indian-owned property directly to the superintendent of the local BIA office. Each day the Shawnee office made a deposit via certified mail to the Federal Reserve Bank in Oklahoma City, Okla. The deposit sheet listed the source of each check, its amount and the day's total deposits. Daily entries were also made in the office's cash-receipts journal, registering the payment to each individual Indian account on a ledger card.
Sorting through those old documents, with the lingering resentments the families have toward the BIA, can be confusing. When Dana Dickson began comparing the amounts posted to her great grandfather's ledger card with the sums on the deposit sheets for the same days, she discovered that 10% was routinely funneled from the oil check to a special-deposit account. Dickson and her relatives suspected that corrupt agents were taking the money for themselves. But Ross Swimmer, a Department of the Interior ombudsman working on behalf of Indian-trust beneficiaries, told TIME that the deduction, which was not exclusive to Moses Bruno's account, was simply a fee that the BIA charged for managing the oil and gas properties held by the trust funds.
Nearly two years after the elder Brunos died in 1960, a Shawnee bureau agent suggested that the family sell its remaining 40 acres, along with the property's mineral rights. "[The minerals have only a] nominal value," the agent wrote in a letter to the regional BIA office in Anadarko. The family signed off on the sale, netting $3,022.50. In 1982 a new oil well was drilled on that land and is still pumping.
The Bruno family acknowledges the pressure the BIA was under during the oil-boom years. In the 1935 annual report of the Shawnee agency, the superintendent called his office "woefully undermanned," handling 1,500 Indian money accounts with only one clerk, who had no modern accounting machines. "Maybe there were some mistakes made," says Leon Bruno. "[But] a lot of what went on was deliberate." The family estimates that Moses Bruno earned a total of $35,000 from his oil and gas leases. The production figures the descendants unearthed, on just one well on the land that was sold in 1933, amount to almost $70 million.
It is not clear whether the family will ever receive compensation for any miscalculations that may have been made on their land sales and oil leases. Elouise Cobell's class action has stalled in the face of the Department of the Interior's estimate that it would take five years and $335 million just to account for the money from land and mineral leases covering a period of more than 100 years. And Congress is balking at the expense — even though its committees have issued more than one report over the years about gross mismanagement of Native American trust funds. In December the Bruno descendants decided to withdraw from the Cobell suit and hired a lawyer to pursue their own.