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

by David Grann

In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

In the early 1870s, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States.

One article noted a “circle of expensive automobiles surrounding an open campfire, where the bronzed and brightly blanketed owners are cooking meat in the primitive style.” Another documented a party of Osage arriving at a ceremony for their dances in a private airplane—a scene that “outrivals the ability of the fictionist to portray.” Summing up the public’s attitude toward the Osage, the Washington Star said, “That lament, ‘Lo the poor Indian,’ might appropriately be revised to, ‘Ho, the rich redskin.’ ”

Unfathomably racist

She owned several cars and had a staff of servants—the Indians’ pot-lickers, as many settlers derided these migrant workers. The servants were often black or Mexican, and in the early 1920s a visitor to the reservation expressed contempt at the sight of “even whites” performing “all the menial tasks about the house to which no Osage will stoop.”

Ernest Burkhart,

A twenty-eight-year-old white man,

For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.

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.

deceased between five and seven days.

“She’s been shot!”

rarely attended training academies or steeped themselves in the emerging scientific methods of detection, such as the analysis of fingerprints and blood patterns.

The leader of the Dalton Gang, an infamous nineteenth-century band of outlaws, once served as the main lawman on the Osage reservation.

Osage County sheriff,

Harve M. Freas.

“terror to evil doers.”

cozy with criminal elements—that he gave free rein to gambler...

m...

moons...

town marshal, the equivalent of a police chief,

The bullet, he announced, was nowhere to be found.

no sign of the bullet,

moonshine.

didn’t make a cast impression of the tire marks, or dust the bottle for fingerprints, or check Anna’s body for gunpowder residue. They didn’t even photograph the crime scene, which, in any case, had already been contaminated by the many observers.

Wah’Kon-Tah,

It was getting so that you could not bury an Osage Indian at a cost of under $6,000”—a sum that, adjusted for inflation, is the equivalent of nearly $80,000 today.

More troubling, her face couldn’t be painted to signal her tribe and clan—a tradition at Osage funerals.

Happy Hunting Ground.

The killings of Anna Brown and Charles Whitehorn caused a sensation.

.32-caliber pistol

both victims had been wealthy Osage Indians, in their thirties?

During Lizzie’s lifetime, the Osage had become dramatically unmoored from their traditions. Louis F. Burns, an Osage historian, wrote that after oil was discovered, the tribe had been “set adrift in a strange world,” adding, “There was nothing familiar to clutch and stay afloat in the world of white man’s wealth.”

oil was a cursed blessing. “Some day this oil will go and there will be no more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father,” a chief of the Osage said in 1928. “There’ll be no fine motorcars and new clothes. Then I know my people will be happier.”

Mollie pressed the authorities to investigate Anna’s murder, but most officials seemed to have little concern for what they deemed a “dead Injun.”

It was just a story to them, not a real issue with real people who were really hurt and needed justice.

Mollie turned to Ernest’s uncle, William Hale. His business interests now dominated the county, and he had become a powerful local advocate for law and order

energetic

bankrupt—

He worked with the fever of someone who feared not only hunger but an Old Testament God who, at any moment, might punish him like Job.

expert at branding, dehorning, castrating, and selling stock.

schoolteacher

daughter

recited p...

“high-class gentleman.”

reserve deputy sheriff in Fairfax,

politicians courted his support,

He outworked and outwitted his rivals, making plenty of enemies who wanted him dead.

Mollie Burkhart and many others considered him Osage County’s greatest benefactor.

He aided the Osage before they were flush with oil money, donating to charities and schools and a hospital.

“...

Hale wrote a letter to an assistant chief of the tribe, saying, “I never had better friends in my life than the Osages….I will always be the Osages true Friend.” In this last remnant of the American frontier, Hale was revered as the “King of the Osage Hills.”

Hale frequently came by Mollie’s house to collect Ernest,