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

by David Grann

The Osage had been assured by the U.S. government that their Kansas territory would remain their home forever, but before long they were under siege from settlers. Among them was the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who later wrote Little House on the Prairie based on her experiences. “Why don’t you like Indians, Ma?” Laura asks her mother in one scene. “I just don’t like them; and don’t lick your fingers, Laura.”

One evening, Laura’s father explains to her that the government will soon make the Osage move away: “That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick.”

In 1870, the Osage—expelled from their lodges, their graves plundered—agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage, mutilating their bodies and scalping them. An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”

The series of forced migrations, along with such “white man’s diseases” as smallpox, had taken a tremendous toll on the tribe. By one estimate, its population dwindled to about three thousand—a third of what it had been seventy years earlier. The Indian Affairs agent reported, “This little remnant is all that remains of a heroic race that once held undisputed ownership over all this region.”

Some of them had begun to use their clout to bend the course of history. In 1920, Sinclair, Marland, and other oilmen helped finance the successful presidential bid of Warren Harding. One oilman from Oklahoma told a friend that Harding’s nomination had cost him and his interests $1 million. But with Harding in the White House, a historian noted, “the oil men licked their chops.” Sinclair funneled, through the cover of a bogus company, more than $200,000 to the new secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall; another oilman had his son deliver to the secretary $100,000 in a black bag. In exchange, the secretary allowed the barons to tap the navy’s invaluable strategic oil reserves. Sinclair received an exclusive lease to a reserve in Wyoming, which, because of the shape of a sandstone rock near it, was known as Teapot Dome. The head of Standard Oil warned a former Harding campaign aide, “I understand the Interior Department is just about to close a contract to lease Teapot Dome, and all through the industry it smells….I do feel that you should tell the President that it smells.” The illicit payoffs were as yet unknown to the public, and as the barons moved toward the front of the Million Dollar Elm, they were treated as princes of capitalism, the crowd parting before them.

Each new auction seemed to surpass the previous one for the record of the highest single bid and the total of millions collected. One lease sold for nearly $2 million, while the highest total collected at an auction climbed to nearly $14 million. A reporter from Harper’s Monthly Magazine wrote, “Where will it end? Every time a new well is drilled the Indians are that much richer.” The reporter added, “The Osage Indians are becoming so rich that something will have to be done about it.”

It wasn’t only the federal government that was meddling in the tribe’s financial affairs. The Osage found themselves surrounded by predators—“a flock of buzzards,” as one member of the tribe complained at a council meeting. Venal local officials sought to devour the Osage’s fortunes. Stickup men were out to rob their bank accounts. Merchants demanded that the Osage pay “special”—that is, inflated—prices. Unscrupulous accountants and lawyers tried to exploit full-blooded Osage’s ill-defined legal status. There was even a thirty-year-old white woman in Oregon who sent a letter to the tribe, seeking a wealthy Osage to marry: “Will you please tell the richest Indian you know of, and he will find me as good and true as any human being can be.”