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

by David Grann

Some of the previous agents on the case, including Burger, had betrayed the kind of casual prejudice toward the Osage that was then commonplace. In a joint report, Burger and another agent had stated, “The Indians, in general, are lazy, pathetic, cowardly, dissipated,” and Burger’s colleague insisted that the only way to make “any of these dissolute, stubborn Osage Indians talk and tell what they know is to cut off their allowance…and if necessary, throw them in jail.”

head. The bullet would’ve been impossible to miss during the autopsy. Someone on the scene—a conspirator or even the killer—must have swiped it.

But Bertillonage was already being displaced by a more efficient method of identification that was revolutionizing the world of scientific detection: fingerprinting.

They have all the law and all the machinery on their side. Tell everybody, when you write your story, that they’re scalping our souls out here.”

As the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, J. Edgar Hoover found in Progressivism an approach that reflected his own obsession with organization and social control. What’s more, here was a way for Hoover, a deskbound functionary, to cast himself as a dashing figure—a crusader for the modern scientific age.

Yet an ugliness often lurked beneath the reformist zeal of Progressivism. Many Progressives—who tended to be middle-class white Protestants—held deep prejudices against immigrants and blacks and were so convinced of their own virtuous authority that they disdained democratic procedures. This part of Progressivism mirrored Hoover’s darkest impulses.

Under Hoover, agents were now seen as interchangeable cogs, like employees in a large corporation.

This was a major departure from traditional policing, where lawmen were typically products of their own communities. The change helped insulate agents from local corruption and created a truly national force, yet it also ignored regional difference and had the dehumanizing effect of constantly uprooting employees.

White wrote to Hoover that he believed an agent who was familiar with a region and its ...

yegg—a safecracker—gave

The yegg said that Kirby was the “soup man”—the expert in explosives—who had designed the bomb.

“white people in Oklahoma thought no more of killing an Indian than they did in 1724.”

It was someone whom the agents knew, knew all too well: Kelsie Morrison, their undercover informant who had supposedly been working with the agents to identify the third man.

Hale had had an affair with Anna and was the father of her baby.

“There were these doctors. They were brothers. My mother said that everyone knew that’s where people would get the dope to poison the Osage.”

Indeed, virtually every element of society was complicit in the murderous system.