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.

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.

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.

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.”

U.S. policy toward the tribes shifted from containment to forced assimilation, and officials increasingly tried to turn the Osage into churchgoing, English-speaking, fully clothed tillers of the soil. The government owed the tribe annuity payments for the sale of its Kansas land but refused to distribute them until able-bodied men like Ne-kah-e-se-y took up farming. And even then the government insisted on making the payments in the form of clothing and food rations. An Osage chief complained, “We are not dogs that we should be fed like dogs.”

One day, he said, a trader began to refer to Ne-kah-e-se-y as Jimmy. Soon other traders began to call Mollie’s father Jimmy, and before long it had supplanted his Osage name. “Likewise his daughters who often visited the store, received their names there of,” the trader’s son wrote. And that’s how Wah-kon-tah-he-um-pah became Mollie.

In 1894, when Mollie was seven, her parents were informed that they had to enroll her in the St. Louis School, a Catholic boarding institution for girls that had been opened in Pawhuska, which was two days’ journey by wagon to the northeast. 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.

Her family’s distress increased in the late 1890s as the U.S. government intensified its push for the culmination of its assimilation campaign: allotment. Under the policy, the Osage reservation would be divvied up into 160-acre parcels, into real estate, with each tribal member receiving one allotment, while the rest of the territory would be opened to settlers. The allotment system, which had already been imposed on many tribes, was designed to end the old communal way of life and turn American Indians into private-property owners—a situation that would, not incidentally, make it easier to procure their land.

For months, Bigheart and Palmer and other members of the tribe negotiated with government officials over the terms of allotment. The Osage prevailed upon the government to divide the land solely among members of the tribe, thereby increasing each individual’s allotment from 160 acres to 657 acres. This strategy would avoid a mad dash on their territory, though whites could then attempt to buy allotments from tribe members. 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.”

Over the tribe’s vehement objections, many Osage, including Lizzie and Anna, were deemed “incompetent,” and were forced to have a local white guardian overseeing and authorizing all of their spending, down to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store.

Many of the prisoners, though, had been driven to a desperate act—often, something violent and despicable—and afterward they were penitent, seeking redemption. In some ways, these convicts were the most frightening to contemplate, for they demonstrated that badness could take hold of anyone.

Then the preacher offered his own holy words. “Ed Nichols is to swing into eternity,” he said. “Sheriff Death is on his black steed, is but a short distance away, coming to arrest the soul of this man to meet the trial at the higher bar where God himself is supreme ruler, Jesus, his son the attorney, and the Holy Ghost the prosecutor.”

The Indian Rights Association detailed the case of a widow whose guardian had absconded with most of her possessions. Then the guardian falsely informed the woman, who had moved from Osage County, that she had no more money to draw on, leaving her to raise her two young children in poverty. “For her and her two small children, there was not a bed nor a chair nor food in the house,” the investigator said. When the widow’s baby got sick, the guardian still refused to turn over any of her money, though she pleaded for it. “Without proper food and medical care, the baby died,” the investigator said.

White observed the way Ramsey kept saying “the Indian,” rather than Roan’s name. As if to justify his crime, Ramsey said that even now “white people in Oklahoma thought no more of killing an Indian than they did in 1724.”

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?

“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.”

“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.’

Though Hoover privately commended White and his men for capturing Hale and his gang and gave the agents a slight pay increase—“a small way at least to recognize their efficiency and application to duty”—he never mentioned them by name as he promoted the case.

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.”

Louis F. Burns, the eminent historian of the Osage, observed, “I don’t know of a single Osage family which didn’t lose at least one family member because of the head rights.”

“A murdered Indian’s survivors don’t have the right to the satisfaction of justice for past crimes, or of even knowing who killed their children, their mothers or fathers, brothers or sisters, their grandparents. They can only guess—like I was forced to.”