Categories | Social Sciences |
Author | David Grann |
Publisher | Vintage; Reprint edition (April 3, 2018) |
Language | English |
Paperback | 416 pages |
Item Weight | 12.8 ounces |
Dimensions |
5.21 x 0.73 x 7.99 inches |
I. Book introduction
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is the third non-fiction book by the American journalist David Grann. The book was released on April 18, 2017 by Doubleday. Time magazine listed Killers of the Flower Moon as one of its top ten non-fiction books of 2017. A film adaptation directed by Martin Scorsese and set to star Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, and Lily Gladstone is currently in production for a 2023 release.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of The Lost City of Z. • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
“A masterful work of literary journalism crafted with the urgency of a mystery.” —The Boston Globe
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.
As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
Synopsis
The book investigates a series of murders of wealthy Osage people that took place in Osage County, Oklahoma in the early 1920s—after big oil deposits were discovered beneath their land. After the Osage are awarded rights in court to the profits made from oil deposits found on their land, the Osage people prepare to receive the wealth to which they are legally entitled from sales of their oil deposits.
The Osage are viewed as the “middle man” and a complex plot is hatched to eliminate the Osage inheritors on a one-by-one basis by any means possible. Officially, the count of the full-blooded, wealthy Osage victims reaches at least twenty, but Grann suspects that hundreds more may have been killed because of their ties to oil. The book details the newly formed FBI’s investigation of the murders, as well as the eventual trial and conviction of cattleman William Hale as the mastermind behind the plot.
Film adaptation
The book is being adapted into a film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Brendan Fraser, and Jesse Plemons on a budget of over $200 million. It will be released theatrically by Paramount Pictures and stream on Apple TV+ in 2023.
Though the role of Tom White, the lead FBI agent, was initially written for DiCaprio, DiCaprio pushed to have his role changed to the nephew of the film’s primary antagonist, who will be played by De Niro. As a result, it was reported that Jesse Plemons was cast as Tom White to replace DiCaprio, while DiCaprio was cast as Ernest Burkhart.
Editorial Reviews
- “Disturbing and riveting. . . . Grann has proved himself a master of spinning delicious, many-layered mysteries that also happen to be true. . . . It will sear your soul.”
—Dave Eggers, New York Times BookReview - “A marvel of detective-like research and narrative verve.”
—Financial Times - “A shocking whodunit. . . . What more could fans of true-crime thrillers ask?”
—USA Today - “A master of the detective form. . . . Killers is something rather deep and not easily forgotten.”
—Wall St. Journal - “The best book of the year so far.”
—Entertainment Weekly - “David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon is unsurprisingly extraordinary.”
—Time - “A masterful work of literary journalism crafted with the urgency of a mystery. . . . Contained within Grann’s mesmerizing storytelling lies something more than a brisk, satisfying read. Killers of the Flower Moon offers up the Osage killings as emblematic of America’s relationship with its indigenous peoples and the ‘culture of killing’ that has forever marred that tie.”
—The Boston Globe - “[C]lose to impeccable. It’s confident, fluid in its dynamics, light on its feet. . . . The crime story it tells is appalling, and stocked with authentic heroes and villains. It will make you cringe at man’s inhumanity to man.”
—The New York Times
About David Grann
David Elliot Grann (born March 10, 1967) is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a best-selling author.
His first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was published by Doubleday in February 2009. After its first week of publication, it debuted on The New York Times bestseller list at #4 and later reached #1. Grann’s articles have been collected in several anthologies, including What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001, The Best American Crime Writing of 2004 and 2005, and The Best American Sports Writing of 2003 and 2006. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard.
According to a profile in Slate, Grann has a reputation as a “workhorse reporter”, which has made him a popular journalist who “inspires a devotion in readers that can border on the obsessive.”
David Grann was born on March 10, 1967, to Phyllis and Victor Grann. His mother is the former CEO of Putnam Penguin and the first woman CEO of a major publishing firm. His father is an oncologist and Director of the Bennett Cancer Center in Stamford, Connecticut. Grann has two siblings, Edward and Alison
II. Reviewer Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
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1. TERI, LA WOMAN reviews for Killers of the Flower Moon
Chilling and Excellent
This is a terrific read. Very compelling and thoroughly, exhaustively researched. David Grann does a truly masterful and heartfelt job of relaying this heartbreaking tale of murder, betrayal, and deceit. Grann has a unique and captivating way of telling this wrenching story of the Reign Of Terror on the Osage Indians to murder them and steal their ‘headrights’ on the massive mineral deposits (oil and gas) on their federal lands given them by the US government, finally in 1877. This came only after all the white immigrants and settlers had killed thousands of them, starved them, by disease, pushed them off, outright stole the bulk of all their other beautiful, lush, and rich lands, originally in what is now Kansas, Nebraska, and Arkansas, where their ancestors had lived for hundreds and hundreds of years. The US government broke one treaty after another until they were eventually moved to a portion of what is now Oklahoma.
“Osage: (Ni-u-kon-ska), “People of the Middle Waters”, is a Midwestern Native American tribe of the Great Plains. The tribe developed in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys around 700 BC along with other groups of its language family. They migrated west after the 17th century, settling near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as a result of Iroquois invading the Ohio Valley in a search for new hunting grounds.” – Wiki
There were many more than the 24 innocent Osage murdered during the “Reign Of Terror” after oil was discovered on their Osage Reservation in 1906. Grann in his scrupulous research and interviews eventually discovers over 650 suspicious deaths, predominantly Osage tribal members, but also anyone white who attempted to help them or knew too much about the murderous gang of conspirators. Even after rich cattleman and Osage ‘guardian’, William K. Hale, his two nephews, Ernest, and Byron (aka Bryan) Burkhart, and their heinous fellow henchmen were finally proven guilty and locked up in Leavenworth from June 1926- June 1929, the murders and mysterious deaths went on, ignored, and uninvestigated by all local Oklahoma authorities. From sheriffs to mayors, judges, Representatives, Senators, governors, police, state and county officials, doctors, coroners, from the very rich and influential to the penniless down and outers, ruthless whites led and together participated in the entire travesty. The murders were carried out by various insidious means, be it shooting, blowing them up as they slept, beatings, countless chilling heartless methods, often by poison or morphine injections, and all by greedy whites time and time again. Their recurring method of marrying into the tribe was always only for one reason: to inherit their money. Unfortunately, it seems they never married for love. The betrayals are endless.
I won’t spoil it for you, but the disappointment over the lack of followthrough of the Oklahoma justice system left me disgusted. Let me know how you feel about Bryan Burkhart’s marriage after you finish the book. It’s a real shake your head, life can’t get any stranger tale… or can it?
It is my hope that one of my all-time favorite film directors, Martin Scorcese, and co-producer and exceptional actor, Leonardo DeCaprio, do justice to Mr. Grann’s marvelous book in their upcoming film, but most of all I hope that they honor the Osage Nation, all their ancestors, and descendants that have suffered so deeply for generations of ominous, immeasurable, and callous cruelty.
I find it both odious and telling that this story, the film based on Grann’s book, the telling of mass murder and racial oppression, should come into the light on exactly the 100th anniversary of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood Massacre. The final injustice would be if these shameful and outrageous events in our American history continued to be removed from our history books. That would be a national sacrilege.
One of my favorite lines from Killers Of Flower Moon is a quote of the Osage descendant and retired teacher, Mary Webb. At the end of her interview with the author, she said, “This land is saturated in blood.” Then, she repeated a quote when God cried out to Abel after he killed Cain “The blood cries out from the ground.”
Good book, highly recommend.
2. SIRIAM reviews for Killers of the Flower Moon
A well written story of a forgotten USA crime that ends up demonstrating a historical conspiracy againt Native Americans
Firstly I would state that this is a very well written book – it isn’t till you read such examples you realize what a difference it makes to your overall enjoyment! I did not find it too journalistic like some other reviewers (though David Grann is a staff writer) and the author as the footnotes and Appendices show, has great command of voluminous historic paper data.
Secondly, the tale it tells works so well because while it is at heart a 1920s crime story it uses the backdrop of the history of Native Americans and their treatment at the hands of the US government and white settlers to provide a much wider panorama to the events and the crimes. In this case the sudden growth of the domestic US oil industry at the turn of the century, created the situation that one of the largest oil reserves was found on the reservation of the Osage Indian nation in recently established Oklahoma. Ironically the tribe had only ended up there because of being forced off its original tribal lands by the government but had wisely in negotiating its purchase preserved its mineral rights. This quickly led to untold wealth and inevitably attracting interest from numerous white persons keen to acquire a share of the new wealth, given the historic approach in the USA to Native Americans.
While the attempts by politicians in Washington, early oil magnates and local business and financiers in such a corruptible frontier environment to acquire personal gain provides the backdrop, the central story is the increasing use of cross marriage and murder to try and inherit family interests and ownership of such wealth which takes up the first two thirds of the book. Add into that mix the foundling National Bureau of Investigation (later to morph into the FBI) under its first appointed head Edgar J. Hoover and a scandal that in 1920s USA could not be tackled by openly corrupt local and state law enforcement was a heaven sent opportunity to prove the new national policing approach.
The real hero of the tale is Tom White, originally a Texas Ranger who had recently joined the Bureau and was in retrospect the wise choice by Hoover that by his team’s success helped make the reputation of his Bureau in leading the investigation. Sadly as with all such examples Hoover’s autocratic approach reflected little subsequent gratitude but what moves the story beyond its crime plot is the final third where without giving the details away the proving of a wider conspiracy many years later after events had been forgotten is the real revelation.
3. ELYSE WALTERS reviews for Killers of the Flower Moon
Reading about injustice -historical tragedies–such greed – such ugliness—does something to us. It’s hard to explain the depths of what transforms.
We feel the anger… the incredible unfairness. We feel different- changed in ways – after reading a book like this. It’s the type of book that makes me want to ‘do something’.
White people cheated Indians out of their land! That we ‘knew’…. but there is much in this small book many people are not aware of. Author David Grann kept peeling off the layers of the onion….by uncovering the magnitude of the numbers of murders that took place within the Osage Tribe. — His research gives us a true story of history that just makes you sick!
And why? For those who have not read this yet…. JUST READ IT…. it becomes very clear. It will infuriate you — but like the Holocaust– some stories need to be told – so we don’t forget.
Having recently read Sherman Alexie’s memoir- “You Don’t Have To Say I Love You”……. plus this Native American Historical story…..
……If the combination of these two books alone don’t completely transform you about your stand about American Indian Rights ….SO MUCH SO ….
that you’re ready to rally for them – vote for them – protest ‘with’ them – fight ‘with’ them ….
Then I sure don’t know what will.
Warning: This book can make you FURIOUS!!!!
THE PHOTOS included of the Osage Tribe were beautiful!!!!
4. MISWIS reviews for Killers of the Flower Moon
Extremely Interesting
If you are interested in US history or the thoughtless ill treatment of Native American peoples, this is the book to read.
We have all read of the countless broken treaties the US government has had with native Americans, but these stories will disturb you more. These people were preyed upon and murdered in the last 100 years with no real solution for the families.
Law enforcement work was of little relief for these peoples, their families were too intimidated by everyone around them. Even love was hollow for them. I felt sorry for the victims and families but the process was sadly enlightening.
While the story is complicated, I enjoyed reading it immensely. Trust me, the movie cannot tell the whole story, read it.
5. TRISH reviews for Killers of the Flower Moon
That we as a nation, less than one hundred years after the Osage Indian killings, have no collective memory of these events seems an intentional erasure. The truth of the killings would traumatize our school children and make every one of us search our souls, of that there is no doubt. David Grann shows us that the systematic killings of dozens of oil-wealthy Osage Indians were not simply the rogue deeds of a psychopath or two in a small town in Oklahoma.
The tentacles of guilt and the politics of fear extended to townspeople who earned their reputation as “successful” because they allowed these murders and thefts of property to go on, as well as implicated law enforcement. Grann outlines how the case was solved and brought to court by the persistence of FBI officer Tom White and his band, but Grann is not full-throated in his praise of Hoover’s FBI. He leaves us feeling ambiguous, not about White, but about Hoover.
The Osage Indians once laid claim to much of the central part of what is now called the United States, “a territory that stretched from what is now Missouri and Kansas to Oklahoma and still farther west, all the way to the Rockies.” The tribe was physically imposing, described by Thomas Jefferson as “the finest men we have ever seen,” whose warriors typically stood over six feet tall. They were given land by Jefferson as part of their settlement to stop fighting the Indian Wars in the early 1700s.
Jefferson reneged on the agreement within four years, and ended up giving the once-mighty Osage a 50-by-125 mile area in southeastern Kansas to call their own. Gradually, however, white settlers found they liked that particular Kansas farmland and moved onto it anyway, killing anyone who challenged them, oftentimes the legal “owners”. The government then forced the Osage to sell the Kansas land and buy rocky, hilly land in Oklahoma, land no white man would want, where the Osage would be “safe” from encroachment. This was the late 1800s.
In the early 1900s oil was discovered on that ‘worthless’ Oklahoma land and because a representative of the Osage tribe was in Washington to defend Osage interests, he managed to include in the legal agreement of the allotment of Indian Territory “that the oil, gas, coal, or other minerals covered by the lands…are hereby reserved to the Osage Tribe.” Living Osage family members each were given a headright, or a share in the tribe’s mineral trust. The headrights could not be sold, they could only be inherited.
The Osage became immensely wealthy. The federal government expressed some concern (!) that the Osage were unable to manage their own wealth, and so ordered that local town professionals, white men, be appointed as guardians. One Indian WWI veteran complained he was not permitted to sign his own checks without oversight, and expenditures down to toothpaste were monitored. But this is not even the most terrible of the legacies. The Osage began to be murdered, one by one.
When Grann discovered rumblings of this century-old criminal case in Oklahoma, he wanted to see the extent of what was called the Reign of Terror, thought to have begun in 1921 and lasted until 1926, when some of the cases were finally successfully prosecuted. The “reign,” he discovered, was much longer and wider than originally imagined, and therefore did not just implicate the men who were eventually jailed for the crimes. “White people in Oklahoma thought no more of killing an Indian than they did in 1724.” said John Ramsey, one of the men eventually jailed for crimes against the Osage. A reporter noted, “The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward a full-blood Indian…is fairly well recognized.”
What we learn in the course of this account is that a great number of people had information that could have led to answers much sooner than it did, but because there was so much corruption, even the undercover agents and sheriffs were in on the open secret of the murders. Those townspeople who might be willing to divulge what they knew were unable to discover to whom they should share information lest they be murdered as well. Grann was able to answer some questions never resolved at the time, with his access to a greater number of now-available documents.
Why this history is not better known is a mystery still. Memory of it was fading already in the late 1950s when a film, The FBI Story starring Jimmy Stewart, made mention of it. The 1920s are not so long ago, and some of the people who were children then have only recently passed away, or may even be still living. Among the Osage there is institutional memory, and still some resentment, naturally, and a long-lasting mistrust of white people. Need I say this is a must-read?
The audio of this book is narrated by three individuals: Ann Marie Lee, Will Patton, and Danny Campbell. Interestingly, the voices of the narrators seem to age over the course of the history, and it is a tale well-told. But the paper copy of this has photographs which add a huge amount of depth and interest to the story. This is another good candidate for a Whispersync option, but if you are going to choose one, the paper was my favorite.
6. JULIE reviews for Killers of the Flower Moon
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann is a 2017 Doubleday publication.
A Conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic, and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in a criminal act- Don Delillo
This is a stunning historical true crime ‘novel’ centered around corrupt and shameful politics, racism, and greed that fueled the ‘Osage reign of terror’, back in the 1920’s and was responsible for the birth of the first ‘Bureau of Investigation”-
When Mollie Burkhart’s sister disappeared, and was later found shot to death, an investigation into her death, as well a bombing and a string of poisonings all aimed at wealthy Osage Indians who benefited from the oil found on their land, began that would eventually expose an incredible conspiracy. This conspiracy involved anyone and everyone, it seems, as the Osage were being systematically killed off. This included law men and lawmakers, all the way to Washington, as white men schemed to take control of the vast wealth the Osage were entitled to.
Finally, with increasing pleas for help the FBI got involved in the case, but rife with corruption, they floundered horribly. Eventually, Tom White was assigned the case by J. Edgar Hoover. His investigation would expose men at their darkest and most unconscionable. It’s hard to imagine Hoover in this light, but he was trying to build his reputation at this time, so solving this case would be a big feather in his cap.
I am ashamed to admit I didn’t know anything about this dark piece of history. This is a true crime accounting, but it reads like a modern -day murder mystery, one you simply can not put down, with enough plot twists to keep the reader right on the edge of their seats. While many true crime books are hard to read due to the creepiness and graphic details of the crimes, this book doesn’t really have that same, ‘don’t read it alone at night’ quality to it, but I was so shocked by what I was reading, I experienced plenty of shock waves, all the same.
Usually, I find myself feeling a great many emotions for crime victims and their families, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt more sympathy than I did for Mollie Burkhart. My God!! That poor woman suffered such an incredible amount of loss, in unimaginable ways.
But, I am also ashamed of the way the Osage was reated by our country. Men of power who schemed to limit access to their money, assigning them guardians, who could easily steal from them… or worse. They were treated like children!! Can you imagine having someone monitoring every penny you spent- down to a tube of toothpaste?? SERIOUSLY??
‘The US government, contending that many Osage were unable to handle their money, had required the Office of Indian Affairs to determine which members of the tribe were capable of managing their trust funds. Over the tribe’s vehement objections, many Osage were deemed incompetent, and were forced to have a local white guardian overseeing and authorizing all their spending, down to the tube of toothpaste they purchased at the corner store. One Osage who had served in World War 1 complained, “I fought in France for this country, and yet I am not allowed even to sign my own checks.’
The history that unfolds in this book riveting. So many innocent lives lost, so many lies, scandals and cover-ups, it’s hard to keep count of it all. But, at the end of the day, this book resonated with me because I learned some eye -opening truths about the Osage, which I knew virtually nothing, and came away with a much better understanding and deep respect for them. It also solidified, unfortunately, my cynicism about our government and what truly lies at the bottom depths of a person’s heart. Greed, racism, and the desire for complete control, at any cost, still governs our lives today. While I did feel a long overdue feeling of triumph, and relief that this story is finally out there, that some justice was served in the end, there are still many who didn’t get that kind of retribution or closure.
This is a MUST READ!! I promise it is one of those books that will give you pause, make you stop to reconsider, and will change your outlook about the past, help one recognize that we are still battling many of those same issues in the present, which could, just maybe, keep history from repeating itself.
‘History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the onset.”
While this story chilled me right to the bone, it also broke my heart and tapped into a well of emotions, while teaching me a lot about a time in history I am so glad I discovered. It’s a book we can all take something away from, and hopefully learn from it.
7. WILLIAMCANI reviews for Killers of the Flower Moon
Really eye-opening explanation of a recent history.
The Osage Indians lived in Kansas until the 1870s when the government decided that their land was too valuable for them to own, and the Osage Indians were being forced off their land. The Osage Indians were moved to Northeastern Oklahoma on a patch of ground that was deemed worthless – until oil was discovered beneath the reservation land in the 1920s, those dirt scratching Indians became extremely wealthy. The federal government, due to the Osages’ inherent racial weakness, deemed them incapable of managing their own affairs and appointed guardians to manage their affairs, white guardians. Guardians who controlled their money for their own benefit – buying a car for $250, and selling it to their appointed dependee at $1,250 for a healthy profit. However, the tale of greed escalates to one of murder and a devilish plot to murder its womenfolk one by one, in a coldly calculated order, as would gradually bequeath their riches to white speculators in the end by the only viable means: inheritance. And here lies the macabre intimacy that marks this out from other stories of mass killing of American Indians: inheritance, of course, entailed marrying Native women, raising children with them while knowing the plan’s murderous outcome. Every effort is co-ordinated by the wealthy and the institutions of white settlersto hamper investigations until the fledgling FBI steps in.
This is a well written – factual but in a flowing narrative, which takes you on a journey of first hand experience of how the First Nation people have been shamefully treated by the American’s and their institutions and legal systems.
David Grann has done a wonderful job of investigating these murders. Though some people were incarcerated for the crimes back in the 1920s, the more Grann dug, the more threads he found that led to other guardians who should have been investigated more thoroughly as well.
8. LIZ reviews for Killers of the Flower Moon
A good nonfiction book will read as fast as a good piece of fiction, all the while imparting new knowledge to the reader. Destiny of the Republic, by Candice Millard, is a prime example. Now comes Killers of the Flower Moon. Enthralling, it tells not only of the killing spree against the Osage, but the rise of the oil industry, the development of private detectives and the Bureau of Investigation ( the precursor to the FBI) and the political corruption of the day.
It’s a sad look back on the prejudices of the day, along with the numerous scandals. But for someone who came of age in the 70s, when Hoover was more villain than hero, it’s interesting to see how much he did to bring the bureau out of its prior history of corruption and scandal.
It was also interesting to see how White and his team finally put together a case after struggling to find hard evidence or live witnesses to bring the murderer to trial.
I highly recommend this book to those who enjoy an entertaining, enlightening nonfiction book.
9. LINDA reviews for Killers of the Flower Moon
“We Indians cannot get our rights in these courts and I have no chance at all of saving this land for my children.” (Widow of Joe Bates, Osage Nation, 1921)
No horror novella could possibly mirror the horrendous crimes that were visited upon the Osage Indian Nation in the 1920’s. The catastrophic bungling of crime evidence, the leaks and sabotage, and the willful insidious behavior by unscrupulous individuals is mind-boggling. The devil and his cohorts wore well-pressed suits and walked among the honest and the God-fearing.
In the 1870’s, the Osage Indian Nation were driven from their lands in Kansas and forced upon rocky, worthless land in Oklahoma. The Osage embraced this land as a means of being left alone. That wish never came true. Beneath this forsaken land were some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. The Osage shared the rich dividends amongst themselves. But their new-found wealth came at a great price. The law forced appointed “guardians” to manage their growing bank accounts.
David Grann tells this incredible story through the wide periphery of Mollie Burkhart and her family members. Mollie was an Osage woman married to a white man, Ernest Burkhart. It is through Mollie that we come to know the brutal crimes committed against her and her family and others living in this town. The photographs of Mollie, her mother, and her sisters will breathe life into this story. It will enrage you at the thought that these defenseless individuals died from poisoning, suspicious fires, and fatal gunshot wounds. No one dared to speak names behind closed doors out of fear of retribution. And insatiable greed turned hearts to blackened stone.
Grann’s story reads like a well-tuned work of pure fiction. But as you turn the pages, you are aghast by the hardcore truth that awaits you. Justice didn’t exist on this Osage territory. It took years and years before a case could be brought before the court system. That is unless you could find a jury that was not lined with bribes. Years of ineptness took their toll on Mollie until a remarkable former Texas Ranger, Tom White, took charge. We will experience the birth of the FBI with the initiation of J. Edgar Hoover. The journey towards that justice was a long and arduous one.
I came upon David Grann on C-SPAN one evening. I had to know the story of Mollie Burkhart for myself. I believe you will, too. “The blood cries out from the ground.” The silence no longer exists and the truth, finally, prevails.
10. JV POORE reviews for Killers of the Flower Moon
If ever a story needed to be told, it is this one.
Although I was aware of the general horrific treatment of the indigenous people by the white man, I am shocked and shattered to learn of the special hell the Osage people were subjected to.
Because this history was so well-hidden, thorough and proper research was required. Mr. Grann was quite clearly the perfect person, as he uncovered and articulated multiple conspiracies. Although his affection and admiration of the Osage is evident, he miraculously manages to convey their circumstances in an objective, rather than angry voice.
I’m keeping my copy, but I’ll be buying another for my favorite classroom library. I cannot wait to introduce this book to ‘my’ students.
III. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI Quotes
The best book quotes from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
“For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression. Instead, citizens responded to a hue and cry by chasing after suspects.”
“Only in the mid-nineteenth century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots—after dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state—did police departments emerge in the United States.”
“In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.” In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.”
“History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.”
“There was one question that the judge and the prosecutors and the defense never asked the jurors but that was central to the proceedings: Would a jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian? One skeptical reporter noted, “The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward the full-blood Indian…is fairly well recognized.” A prominent member of the Osage tribe put the matter more bluntly: “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.”
“An Indian Affairs agent said, ‘The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”
“As Sherlock Holmes famously said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“There never has been a country on this earth that has fallen except when that point was reached…where the citizens would say, ‘We cannot get justice in our courts.’ ”
“What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”
“Yet an ugliness often lurked beneath the reformist zeal of Progressivism. Many Progressives—who tended to be middle-class white Protestants—held deep prejudices against immigrants and blacks and were so convinced of their own virtuous authority that they disdained democratic procedures.”
“The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered.”
“Stores gone, post office gone, train gone, school gone, oil gone, boys and girls gone—only thing not gone is graveyard and it git bigger.”
“Your money draws them and you’re absolutely helpless. They have all the law and all the machinery on their side. Tell everybody, when you write your story, that they’re scalping our souls out here”
“Many Osage, unlike other wealthy Americans, could not spend their money as they pleased because of the federally imposed system of financial guardians.”
“Some day this oil will go and there will be no more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father,” a chief of the Osage said in 1928. “There’ll be no fine motorcars and new clothes. Then I know my people will be happier.”
“Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar: Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy: Hide it in smiles and affability.”
“As she spoke, I realized that the Reign of Terror had ravaged – still ravaged – generations. A great-grandson of Henry Roan’s once spoke of the legacy of the murders: “I think somewhere it is in the back of our minds. We may not realize it, but it is there, especially if it was a family member that was killed. You just have it in the back of your head that you don’t trust anybody.”
“A growing number of white Americans expressed alarm over the Osage’s wealth—outrage that was stoked by the press.”
“The Osage elders sang the traditional songs for the dead, only now the songs seemed for the living, for those who had to endure this world of killing.”
“The historian Burns once wrote, “To believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”
“In 1850 Allan Pinkerton founded the first American private detective agency; in advertisements, the company motto, “We Never Sleep” was inscribed under a large, unblinking Masonic-like eye, which gave rise to the term “private eye”…. William J. Burns was an avid user of a Dictograph- a primitive listening device that could be concealed in anything from a clock to a chandelier…. Just as Allan Pinkerton, in the nineteenth century was known as the eye, Burns, In the twentieth century had become “the ear”.”
“At forty-four, Mollie could finally spend her money as she pleased, and was recognized as a full-fledged American citizen.”
“Yet an ugliness often lurked beneath the reformist zeal of Progressivism. Many Progressives—who tended to be middle-class white Protestants—held deep prejudices against immigrants and blacks and were so convinced of their own virtuous authority that they disdained democratic procedures. This part of Progressivism mirrored Hoover’s darkest impulses.”
“To believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow.”
“But in 1921, just as the government had once adopted a ration system to pay the Osage for seized land – just as it always seemed to turn its gospel of enlightenment into a hammer of coercion – Congress implemented even more draconian legislation controlling how the Osage could spend their money.”
“The Osage also managed to slip into the agreement what seemed, at the time, like a curious provision: “That the oil, gas, coal, or other minerals covered by the lands…are hereby reserved to the Osage Tribe.”
“In the old days, an Osage clan, which included a group known as the Travelers in the Mist, would take the lead whenever the tribe was undergoing sudden changes or venturing into unfamiliar realms.”
Excerpted from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
Chapter 1 – The Vanishing
In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.” In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.
On May 24, 1921, Mollie Burkhart, a resident of the Osage settlement town of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, began to fear that something had happened to one of her three sisters, Anna Brown. Thirty-four, and less than a year older than Mollie, Anna had disappeared three days earlier. She had often gone on “sprees,” as her family disparagingly called them: dancing and drinking with friends until dawn. But this time one night had passed, and then another, and Anna had not shown up on Mollie’s front stoop as she usually did, with her long black hair slightly frayed and her dark eyes shining like glass. When Anna came inside, she liked to slip off her shoes, and Mollie missed the comforting sound of her moving, unhurried, through the house. Instead, there was a silence as still as the plains.
Mollie had already lost her sister Minnie nearly three years earlier. Her death had come with shocking speed, and though doctors had attributed it to a “peculiar wasting illness,” Mollie harbored doubts: Minnie had been only twenty-seven and had always been in perfect health.
Like their parents, Mollie and her sisters had their names inscribed on the Osage Roll, which meant that they were among the registered members of the tribe. It also meant that they possessed a fortune. In the early 1870s, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties. In the early twentieth century, each person on the tribal roll began receiving a quarterly check. The amount was initially for only a few dollars, but over time, as more oil was tapped, the dividends grew into the hundreds, then the thousands. And virtually every year the payments increased, like the prairie creeks that joined to form the wide, muddy Cimarron, until the tribe members had collectively accumulated millions and millions of dollars. (In 1923 alone, the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.) The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world. “Lo and behold!” the New York weekly Outlook exclaimed. “The Indian, instead of starving to death . . . enjoys a steady income that turns bankers green with envy.”
The public had become transfixed by the tribe’s prosperity, which belied the images of American Indians that could be traced back to the brutal first contact with whites—the original sin from which the country was born. Reporters tantalized their readers with stories about the “plutocratic Osage” and the “red millionaires,” with their brick-and-terra-cotta mansions and chandeliers, with their diamond rings and fur coats and chauffeured cars. One writer marveled at Osage girls who attended the best boarding schools and wore sumptuous French clothing, as if “une très jolie demoiselle of the Paris boulevards had inadvertently strayed into this little reservation town.”
At the same time, reporters seized upon any signs of the traditional Osage way of life, which seemed to stir in the public’s mind visions of “wild” Indians. One article noted a “circle of expensive automobiles surrounding an open campfire, where the bronzed and brightly blanketed owners are cooking meat in the primitive style.” Another documented a party of Osage arriving at a ceremony for their dances in a private airplane—a scene that “outrivals the ability of the fictionist to portray.” Summing up the public’s attitude toward the Osage, the Washington Star said, “That lament, ‘Lo the poor Indian,’ might appropriately be revised to, ‘Ho, the rich redskin.’ ”
Gray Horse was one of the reservation’s older settlements. These outposts—including Fairfax, a larger, neighboring town of nearly fifteen hundred people, and Pawhuska, the Osage capital, with a population of more than six thousand—seemed like fevered visions. The streets clamored with cowboys, fortune seekers, bootleggers, soothsayers, medicine men, outlaws, U.S. marshals, New York financiers, and oil magnates. Automobiles sped along paved horse trails, the smell of fuel overwhelming the scent of the prairies. Juries of crows peered down from telephone wires. There were restaurants, advertised as cafés, and opera houses and polo grounds.
Although Mollie didn’t spend as lavishly as some of her neighbors did, she had built a beautiful, rambling wooden house in Gray Horse near her family’s old lodge of lashed poles, woven mats, and bark. She owned several cars and had a staff of servants—the Indians’ pot-lickers, as many settlers derided these migrant workers. The servants were often black or Mexican, and in the early 1920s a visitor to the reservation expressed contempt at the sight of “even whites” performing “all the menial tasks about the house to which no Osage will stoop.”
Mollie was one of the last people to see Anna before she vanished. That day, May 21, Mollie had risen close to dawn, a habit ingrained from when her father used to pray every morning to the sun. She was accustomed to the chorus of meadowlarks and sandpipers and prairie chickens, now overlaid with the pock-pocking of drills pounding the earth. Unlike many of her friends, who shunned Osage clothing, Mollie wrapped an Indian blanket around her shoulders. She also didn’t style her hair in a flapper bob, and instead let her long, black hair flow over her back, revealing her striking face, with its high cheekbones and big brown eyes.
Her husband, Ernest Burkhart, rose with her. A twenty-eight-year-old white man, he had the stock handsomeness of an extra in a Western picture show: short brown hair, slate-blue eyes, square chin. Only his nose disturbed the portrait; it looked as if it had taken a barroom punch or two. Growing up in Texas, the son of a poor cotton farmer, he’d been enchanted by tales of the Osage Hills—that vestige of the American frontier where cowboys and Indians were said to still roam. In 1912, at nineteen, he’d packed a bag, like Huck Finn lighting out for the Territory, and gone to live with his uncle, a domineering cattleman named William K. Hale, in Fairfax. “He was not the kind of a man to ask you to do something—he told you,” Ernest once said of Hale, who became his surrogate father. Though Ernest mostly ran errands for Hale, he sometimes worked as a livery driver, which is how he met Mollie, chauffeuring her around town.
Ernest had a tendency to drink moonshine and play Indian stud poker with men of ill repute, but beneath his roughness there seemed to be a tenderness and a trace of insecurity, and Mollie fell in love with him. Born a speaker of Osage, Mollie had learned some English in school; nevertheless, Ernest studied her native language until he could talk with her in it. She suffered from diabetes, and he cared for her when her joints ached and her stomach burned with hunger. After he heard that another man had affections for her, he muttered that he couldn’t live without her.
It wasn’t easy for them to marry. Ernest’s roughneck friends ridiculed him for being a “squaw man.” And though Mollie’s three sisters had wed white men, she felt a responsibility to have an arranged Osage marriage, the way her parents had. Still, Mollie, whose family practiced a mixture of Osage and Catholic beliefs, couldn’t understand why God would let her find love, only to then take it away from her. So, in 1917, she and Ernest exchanged rings, vowing to love each other till eternity.
By 1921, they had a daughter, Elizabeth, who was two years old, and a son, James, who was eight months old and nicknamed Cowboy. Mollie also tended to her aging mother, Lizzie, who had moved in to the house after Mollie’s father passed away. Because of Mollie’s diabetes, Lizzie once feared that she would die young, and beseeched her other children to take care of her. In truth, Mollie was the one who looked after all of them.
May 21 was supposed to be a delightful day for Mollie. She liked to entertain guests and was hosting a small luncheon. After getting dressed, she fed the children. Cowboy often had terrible earaches, and she’d blow in his ears until he stopped crying. Mollie kept her home in meticulous order, and she issued instructions to her servants as the house stirred, everyone bustling about—except Lizzie, who’d fallen ill and stayed in bed. Mollie asked Ernest to ring Anna and see if, for a change, she’d come over to help tend to Lizzie. Anna, as the oldest child in the family, held a special status in their mother’s eyes, and even though Mollie took care of Lizzie, Anna, in spite of her tempestuousness, was the one her mother spoiled.
When Ernest told Anna that her mama needed her, she promised to take a taxi straight there, and she arrived shortly afterward, dressed in bright red shoes, a skirt, and a matching Indian blanket; in her hand was an alligator purse. Before entering, she’d hastily combed her windblown hair and powdered her face. Mollie noticed, however, that her gait was unsteady, her words slurred. Anna was drunk.
Mollie couldn’t hide her displeasure. Some of the guests had already arrived. Among them were two of Ernest’s brothers, Bryan and Horace Burkhart, who, lured by black gold, had moved to Osage County, often assisting Hale on his ranch. One of Ernest’s aunts, who spewed racist notions about Indians, was also visiting, and the last thing Mollie needed was for Anna to stir up the old goat.
Anna slipped off her shoes and began to make a scene. She took a flask from her bag and opened it, releasing the pungent smell of bootleg whiskey. Insisting that she needed to drain the flask before the authorities caught her—it was a year into nationwide Prohibition—she offered the guests a swig of what she called the best white mule.
Mollie knew that Anna had been very troubled of late. She’d recently divorced her husband, a settler named Oda Brown, who owned a livery business. Since then, she’d spent more and more time in the reservation’s tumultuous boomtowns, which had sprung up to house and entertain oil workers—towns like Whizbang, where, it was said, people whizzed all day and banged all night. “All the forces of dissipation and evil are here found,” a U.S. government official reported. “Gambling, drinking, adultery, lying, thieving, murdering.” Anna had become entranced by the places at the dark ends of the streets: the establishments that seemed proper on the exterior but contained hidden rooms filled with glittering bottles of moonshine. One of Anna’s servants later told the authorities that Anna was someone who drank a lot of whiskey and had “very loose morals with white men.”
At Mollie’s house, Anna began to flirt with Ernest’s younger brother, Bryan, whom she’d sometimes dated. He was more brooding than Ernest and had inscrutable yellow-flecked eyes and thinning hair that he wore slicked back. A lawman who knew him described him as a little roustabout. When Bryan asked one of the servants at the luncheon if she’d go to a dance with him that night, Anna said that if he fooled around with another woman, she’d kill him.
Meanwhile, Ernest’s aunt was muttering, loud enough for all to hear, about how mortified she was that her nephew had married a redskin. It was easy for Mollie to subtly strike back because as one of the servants attending to the aunt was white—a blunt reminder of the town’s social order.
Anna continued raising Cain. She fought with the guests, fought with her mother, fought with Mollie. “She was drinking and quarreling,” a servant later told authorities. “I couldn’t understand her language, but they were quarreling.” The servant added, “They had an awful time with Anna, and I was afraid.”
That evening, Mollie planned to look after her mother, while Ernest took the guests into Fairfax, five miles to the northwest, to meet Hale and see Bringing Up Father, a touring musical about a poor Irish immigrant who wins a million-dollar sweepstakes and struggles to assimilate into high society. Bryan, who’d put on a cowboy hat, his catlike eyes peering out from under the brim, offered to drop Anna off at her house.
Before they left, Mollie washed Anna’s clothes, gave her some food to eat, and made sure that she’d sobered up enough that Mollie could glimpse her sister as her usual self, bright and charming. They lingered together, sharing a moment of calm and reconciliation. Then Anna said good-bye, a gold filling flashing through her smile.
With each passing night, Mollie grew more anxious. Bryan insisted that he’d taken Anna straight home and dropped her off before heading to the show. After the third night, Mollie, in her quiet but forceful way, pressed everyone into action. She dispatched Ernest to check on Anna’s house. Ernest jiggled the knob to her front door—it was locked. From the window, the rooms inside appeared dark and deserted.
Ernest stood there alone in the heat. A few days earlier, a cool rain shower had dusted the earth, but afterward the sun’s rays beat down mercilessly through the blackjack trees. This time of year, heat blurred the prairies and made the tall grass creak underfoot. In the distance, through the shimmering light, one could see the skeletal frames of derricks.
Anna’s head servant, who lived next door, came out, and Ernest asked her, “Do you know where Anna is?”
Before the shower, the servant said, she’d stopped by Anna’s house to close any open windows. “I thought the rain would blow in,” she explained. But the door was locked, and there was no sign of Anna. She was gone.
News of her absence coursed through the boomtowns, traveling from porch to porch, from store to store. Fueling the unease were reports that another Osage, Charles Whitehorn, had vanished a week before Anna had. Genial and witty, the thirty-year-old Whitehorn was married to a woman who was part white, part Cheyenne. A local newspaper noted that he was “popular among both the whites and the members of his own tribe.” On May 14, he’d left his home, in the southwestern part of the reservation, for Pawhuska. He never returned
….
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