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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Grann
Read between
July 30 - July 31, 2025
The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.”
This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.
Anna Brown.
Mollie had already lost her sister Minnie nearly three years earlier.
(In 1923 alone, the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.) The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world.
The servants were often black or Mexican, and in the early 1920s a visitor
A twenty-eight-year-old white man, he had the stock handsomeness of an extra in a Western picture show: short brown hair, slate-blue eyes, square chin.
Still, Mollie, whose family practiced a mixture of Osage and Catholic beliefs, couldn’t understand why God would let her find love, only to then take it away from her.
years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they
would become forces of repression. Instead, citizens responded to a hue and cry by chasing after suspects.
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.
John Joseph Mathews
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.”
led by one of its greatest chiefs, James Bigheart—who spoke seven languages, among them Sioux, French, English, and Latin, and who had taken to wearing a suit—was able to forestall the process.
In 1850, Allan Pinkerton founded the first American private detective agency; in advertisements, the company’s motto, “We Never Sleep,” was inscribed under a large, unblinking, Masonic-like eye, which gave rise to the term “private eye.”
The private detectives investigating the Osage deaths had often worked for the William J. Burns International Detective Agency before venturing out on their own. Burns, a former Secret Service agent, had succeeded Pinkerton as the world’s most celebrated private eye.
Incredibly, no one from the sheriff’s office had searched the place yet.
Anna’s alligator purse, which she had taken to Mollie’s luncheon, was now lying on the floor, the servant said, with “everything torn out of it.”
This was what Sherlock Holmes stories left out—the tedium of real detective work, the false leads and the dead ends.
The twenty-nine-year-old Smith had been a horse thief before attaching himself to an Osage fortune: first by marrying Mollie’s sister Minnie, and then—only months after Minnie’s death from the mysterious “wasting illness” in 1918—by wedding Mollie’s sister Rita.
At the time, statutes governing electronic surveillance were nebulous, and Burns was an avid user of a Dictograph—a primitive listening device that could be concealed in anything from a clock to a chandelier.
The detectives began to follow Hattie Whitehorn around the clock, relishing being able to see without being seen: “Operative
Authorities, upon examining the body, believed that someone he met during his excursion had slipped him a dose of poison, possibly strychnine—a bitter white alkaloid that, according to a nineteenth-century medical treatise, was “endowed with more destructive energy” than virtually any other poison.
Barney McBride,
wealthy fifty-five-year-old white oilman,
In exchange, the secretary allowed the barons to tap the navy’s invaluable strategic oil reserves.
On January 18, 1923, five months after the murder of McBride, many of the big oilmen gathered for another auction. Because it was winter, they met in the Constantine Theater, in Pawhuska. Billed as “the finest building of its kind in Oklahoma,” the theater had Greek columns and murals and a necklace of lights around the stage. As usual, Colonel started with the less valued leases. “What am I bid?” he called out. “Remember, no tracts sold for less than five hundred dollars.”
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.”
John Joseph Mathews bitterly recalled reporters “enjoying the bizarre impact of wealth on the Neolithic men, with the usual smugness and wisdom of the unlearned.”
Many Osage, unlike other wealthy Americans, could not spend their money as they pleased because of the federally imposed system of financial guardians.
“We want to raise them and educate them. We want them to be comfortable, and we do not want our money held up from us by somebody who cares nothing for us.”
He went on, “We want our money now. We have it. It is ours, and we don’t want some autocratic man to hold it up so we can’t use it….It is an injustice to us all. We do not want to be treated like a lot of little children. We are men and able to take care of ourselves.”
The news jolted Mollie. In 1902, more than a decade before meeting Ernest, she and Roan had been briefly married.
Still, they remained bound by a memory of a fleeting intimacy that had apparently ended with no bitterness and perhaps even some hidden warmth.
Grammer was a rodeo star who had performed at Madison Square Garden and been crowned the steer-roping champion of the world.
He was also an alleged train robber, a kingpin bootlegger with connections to the Kansas City Mob, and a blazing gunman.
They included Asa Kirby, a stickup man who had glimmering gold front teeth, and John Ramsey, a cow rustler who seemed the least bad of Grammer’s bad men.
In June 1923, Davis pleaded guilty to bribery and received a two-year sentence, but a few months later he was pardoned by the governor.
Then Vaughan telephoned the new Osage County sheriff to say that he had all the information he needed and that he
was rushing back on the first train. The sheriff pressed him if he knew who had killed Bigheart.
The justice of the peace was asked by a prosecutor if he thought that Vaughan had known too much. The justice replied, “Yes, sir, and had valuable papers on his person.”
The official death toll of the Osage Reign of Terror had climbed to at least twenty-four members of the tribe.
The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered.
While the tribe waited for the federal government to respond, Mollie lived in dread, knowing that she was the likely next target in the apparent plot to eliminate her family.
No record of how she felt when agents from the Bureau of Investigation—an obscure branch of the Justice Department that in 1935, would be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation—finally arrived in town.
To the surprise of many of the department’s critics, Stone selected J. Edgar Hoover, the twenty-nine-year-old deputy director of the bureau, to serve as acting director while he searched for a permanent replacement. Though Hoover had avoided the stain of Teapot Dome, he had
overseen the bureau’s rogue intelligence division, which had spied on individuals merely because of their political beliefs. Hoover had also never been a detective. Never been in a shoot-out or made an arrest. His grandfather and his father, who were deceased, had worked for the federal government, and Hoover, who still lived with his mother, was a creature of the bureaucracy—its gossip, its lingo, its unspoken deals, its bloodless but vicious territorial wars.
John Palmer, the tribe’s well-known advocate, sent an angry letter to Charles Curtis, the Kansas senator, insinuating that the bureau’s investigation had been tainted by corruption: “I join in the general belief that the murderers have been shrewd enough and politically and financially able enough to have honest and capable officers removed or sent to other parts, and also to quiet dishonest officials whose duty it was and is to hunt
the perpetrators of these awful crimes.”
