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

by David Grann

When an Osage chief was asked why he didn’t adopt the white man’s ways, he replied, “I am perfectly content with my condition. The forests and rivers supply all the calls of nature in plenty.”

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.”

“The Indian must conform to the white man’s ways, peacefully if they will, forcibly if they must.”