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Hour after hour, mile after mile, lurching back and forth in the wagon, Mollie crossed the wild, empty landscape, not yet carved into a country. Eventually, the light began to fail, and the driver and Mollie had to stop and set up camp. When the sun sank below the prairie floor, the sky would turn blood red and then black, the density of the darkness diluted only by the moon and the stars, from where the Osage believed that many of their clans descended. Mollie had become a traveler in the mi...more
Heartbreaking history in the USA and beautifully told story of our Osage Native American’s historical background. Set in Oklahoma at a time the Osage were rich in resources. This also features the birth of the FBI.
3.5 stars. Pretty crazy and gruesome story with a lot of details about (relatively) primitive investigation techniques.
Another shameful episode from America's not-too-distant past. In the 1920's, the Osage, resettled in Oklahoma, held the headrights to what turned out to be oil-rich land and became rich themselves. A nice bit of cosmic justice for the Osage, who had been forced from their traditional lands. However, there was a lot of resentment about their wealth, to the point of there being a Reign of Terror where numerous Osage people were murdered. How deep the conspiracy to commit these murders went is appa
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Every American ought to read this. I had never heard of the Reign of Terror—the systematic murders of Osage for their money in the early decades of the 1900s. The breadth and depth of the conspiracy that took dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent lives is sickening. Throughout the book, just when you read something horrible that’s happened, a few pages later something even worse is discovered; the evil is unimaginable. The failure of justice in a small town in America during this era left so many
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This book is an edge of your seat mystery and also heartbreaking to see what happened to a native community. It classifies Oklahoma and Osage county as the last vestige of the wild west where robbery gangs and murder are still an every day occurrence and how corruption penetrated every level of local government. It is so heartbreaking to see how few people cared about these murders because of the fact that they were Native Americans. It was breathtaking to see how deep this went because of the f
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Reads like a novel
Very well written account of yet another instance in the long list of ways whites have mistreated native Americans. Little known account of killings for control of financial resources. Kind of just tapers off at the end.
Very well written account of yet another instance in the long list of ways whites have mistreated native Americans. Little known account of killings for control of financial resources. Kind of just tapers off at the end.
Mar 02, 2017
Phoebe
marked it as to-read
Apr 26, 2017
Jim
marked it as books-to-get
Apr 26, 2018
Jennifer Eklund
marked it as to-read
Jul 26, 2021
Scott
marked it as to-read
Nov 28, 2021
Kristen Iworsky
marked it as to-read
