Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

by David Grann

It was easy for Mollie to subtly strike back because one of the servants attending to the aunt was white—a blunt reminder of the town’s social order.

For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.

“It was getting so that you could not bury an Osage Indian at a cost of under $6,000”—a sum that, adjusted for inflation, is the equivalent of nearly $80,000 today.

Insane.

But within four years Jefferson had compelled the Osage to relinquish their territory between the Arkansas River and the Missouri River.

Over the next two decades, the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land, ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas.

Horrible.

“This is Indian country, isn’t it?” Laura said. “What did we come to their country for, if you don’t like them?”

Amazing question from the eyes of a child.

Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage, mutilating their bodies and scalping them.

I am honestly quite angry after reading this book.

An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”

Easy answer (read the book and acknowledge the amount of murdered Osage)

By 1877, there were virtually no more American buffalo to hunt—a development hastened by the authorities who encouraged settlers to eradicate the beasts, knowing that, in the words of an army officer, “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

Horrible.

And even then the government insisted on making the payments in the form of clothing and food rations.

Payments should be in money.

An Indian Affairs commissioner had said, “The Indian must conform to the white man’s ways, peacefully if they will, forcibly if they must.” Mollie’s parents were warned that if they didn’t comply, the government would withhold its annuity payments, leaving the family starving.

Horrible.

One Osage who had served in World War I complained, “I fought in France for this country, and yet I am not allowed even to sign my own checks.”

Horrible.

At a subsequent hearing, even a judge who served as a guardian acknowledged that rich Indians spent their wealth no differently than white people with money

Guardians - also murderers. Weird that they have both titles.

“Ed Nichols is to swing into eternity,” he said.

The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.”

Hurt my heart

They did not quite fit the profile of college-educated recruits that became part of Hoover’s mythology.

“Over the sixteen-year period from 1907 to 1923, 605 Osages died, averaging about 38 per year, an annual death rate of about 19 per 1,000. The national death rate now is about 8.5 per 1,000; in the 1920s, when counting methods were not so precise and the statistics were segregated into white and black racial categories, it averaged almost 12 per 1,000 for whites. By all rights, their higher standard of living should have brought the Osages a lower death rate than America’s whites. Yet Osages were dying at more than one-and-a-half times the national rate—and those numbers do not include Osages born after 1907 and not listed on the roll.”

This is actually insane.