KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON: THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI – David Grann

With a title like Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, all that's left to tell, when you think about it, are the details. But, oh mercy, those details.

It's a tragically true story peppered with fiction: the lies one race of people consistently told another race. And we already know which was the lying race, considering we're looking once again at our history of "forked tongue" in the conquering and settling of the American West by a land-hungry nation of Bible-toting fortune seekers. We already know plenty of blood was spilled by both races in this struggle between appetite and survival. This book rips away the fig leaf of public innocence that concealed just how catastrophically evil the hungry ones became when they deemed Oklahoma's Osage Indians nothing more than speed bumps in the stampede to the feeding trough.

During a sixteen-year period (1907-23) Osage County Indians were dying at nearly twice the national rate, many of them suspiciously and some obviously murdered. When state, local and private investigators failed to solve any of the obvious murders, the infant FBI—then known only as the Bureau of Investigation and directed by a shady former private detective—took a look, and got nowhere. Then J. Edgar Hoover became director. Hoover assigned Special Agent Tom White, a former Texas Ranger with an exemplary reputation, to revisit the failed investigations. The result led to the conviction of an important white resident of the county and several henchmen.

Special Agent Tom White and Boss

More recently, in 1992, Dennis McAuliffe Jr., a Washington Post editor and grandson of another Osage Indian whose death had been suspicious, looked deeper and concluded that many more Indians than initially thought most likely were murdered. McAuliffe’s work was followed by David Grann, the New Yorker staff writer who researched and authored this book, Killers of the Flower Moon. Grann dug even deeper, and found how incomprehensibly horrible the “Reign of Terror” in Osage County actually had been.

Dennis McAuliffe

Grann quotes Garrick Bailey, a leading anthropologist on Osage culture, as saying he believed “a high percentage of the county’s leading citizens” were behind the killings. “Indeed,” Grann concludes, “virtually every element of society was complicit.” One of the victims was Barney McBride, a wealthy white oilman who was shot to death in Washington where he’d gone carrying an appeal by the Indians for a federal investigation. McBride, Grann says, “threatened to bring down...a vast criminal operation that was reaping millions and millions of dollars.” 

Ah, finally, a clue to the motive besides “the only good injun is a dead injun.”

Oil!

An underground sea of the “black gold” lay under land the Osage ended up owning after more than a century of U.S. treachery (including that of Pres. Thomas Jefferson). The government might have gotten hold of the oil as well as the nearly hundred million acres of Osage ancestral land had it not been for tough Indian bargaining led by Chief James Big Heart, who spoke seven languages, including Sioux, French, English, and Latin, and John Palmer, a lawyer whose mom was Osage. Buying their reservation allotment the Osage managed to include in the transaction that “the oil, gas, coal, or other minerals covered by the lands… are hereby reserved to the Osage Tribe.” The Indians knew somehow, Grann writes, their reservation rested upon oil deposits.

Chief Big Heart

According to the allotment provisions, the Osage would own the mineral rights even after selling their land. Each tribe member received what was called a “headright,” which could not be sold, and was passed down through the generations.

Well, lo and behold, prospectors “discovered” the oil, and Indians owning these headrights now were entitled to quarterly royalties from its commercial sale. Suddenly the Osage were rich, and suddenly Osage maidens were more attractive than ever to white men who wanted to marry them. And marry them they did, and everyone might have lived happily ever after, but…

There was a catch. Naturally. Whoever first suggested that women always get the last word evidently overlooked the U.S. Congress. Responding to popular concern about the potential for irresponsible spending by the Osage of their new-found wealth, the lawmakers decreed that “guardians” be appointed to oversee this spending. The guardians, of course, were white.

One white with good intentions, W. W. Vaughan, an attorney and former prosecutor who vowed to eliminate the criminal element that was a “parasite upon those who make their living by honest means,” was murdered and thrown from the train he was taking home from Oklahoma City after visiting the dying Chief Big Heart, who’d been poisoned.

“The justice of the peace was asked by a prosecutor if he thought that Vaughan had known too much.” Grann says. “The justice replied, ‘Yes, sir, and had valuable papers on his person.’”

W.W. Vaughan and family

Are we catching the drift here? Do we pick up a whiff of stink learning that Indians with headrights or in line to inherit them begin dying mysteriously, perhaps from poison, or from solidified lead propelled by gunpowder? Or, as in one case, when their home explodes to smithereens in the middle of the night while they’re in bed asleep? Read Killers of the Flower Moon and the stench will gag you.

You might wonder, knowing this overpowering circumstantial evidence, why the local justice system in Osage County couldn’t come up with any solid evidence. Understandably, forensic science was barely existent then—even after the fledgling FBI got involved—and witnesses might be reluctant to testify, not knowing who if anyone in their community they could trust.

“The murders had created a climate of terror that ate at the community,” according to Grann. “People suspected neighbors, suspected friends.

“A visitor...later recalled that people were overcome by ‘paralyzing fear,’ and a reporter observed that a ‘dark cloak of mystery and dread…covered the oil-bespattered valleys of the Osage hills.’”

Grann writes, “All efforts to solve the mystery had faltered. Because of anonymous threats, the justice of the peace was forced to stop convening inquests into the latest murders. He was so terrified that merely to discuss the cases, he would retreat into a back room and bolt the door. The new county sheriff dropped even a pretense of investigating the crimes. ‘I didn’t want to get mixed up in it,’ he later admitted, adding cryptically, ‘There is an undercurrent like a spring at the head of the hollow. Now there is no spring, it is gone dry, but it is broke way down to the bottom.’

“Of solving the cases, he said, ‘It is a big doings and the sheriff and a few men couldn’t do it. It takes the government to do it.’”

“The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered,” Grann sums up. “The press later described the killings as being as ‘dark and sordid as any murder story of the century’ and the ‘bloodiest chapter in American crime history.’”

[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]