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

by David Grann

This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

“Lo and behold!” the New York weekly Outlook exclaimed. “The Indian, instead of starving to death…enjoys a steady income that turns bankers green with envy.”

Inquests were a remnant of a time when ordinary citizens largely assumed the burden of investigating crimes and maintaining order.

and order in the area, was a fifty-eight-year-old, three-hundred-pound frontiersman named Harve M. Freas.

that Wah’Kon-Tah had withdrawn his blessings and that the world was slipping into even greater chaos.

ensuing frenzy. But, as the elders

All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

“The Indians, in general, are lazy, pathetic, cowardly, dissipated,”

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.”

interests of indigenous communities, conducted

Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy: Hide it in smiles and affability.

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.

“You either improve or deteriorate.”

The archive reflects the human need to document every deed and directive, to place a veil of administrative tidiness over the disorder of famines and plagues and natural disasters and crimes and wars.