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by
David Grann
Read between
April 15 - May 14, 2018
diamond-studded pin from the Masonic lodge),
The authorities had provided a translator for Mollie, but she waved him off and spoke in succinct English, the way the nuns had taught her as a child.
Anna had left around sundown.
car.”
“Bryan Burkhart.”
“Towards Fairfax.”
“About five or six days.”
Perhaps they discounted her because of prejudice—because she was an Osage and a woman.
Hale had once caught him stealing his cattle
“Come to town.”
“About 5 or 4:30.”
“No, sir.”
“Yes, sir.”
A prevailing theory was that her killer came from outside the reservation.
“the greatest criminal bonanza in American history.” And few places in the country were as chaotic as Osage County, where the unwritten codes of the West, the traditions that bound communities, had unraveled.
A U.S. Justice Department official warned that there were more fugitives hiding out in the Osage Hills than “perhaps any other county in the state or any state in the Union.”
suspicions about Anna’s ex-husband, Oda Brown,
Since the burial, Brown had hired a lawyer and had tried unsuccessfully to contest the will.
Under interrogation, the forger, a fidgety twenty-eight-year-old man, claimed that Brown had paid him $8,000 to murder Anna.
“There’s a lot of talk,” the sheriff was quoted as saying. “But you have to have proof, not talk.”
Eventually, the county prosecutor decided to look again for the bullet that had eluded investigators during Anna’s autopsy. A court order was obtained to unbury Anna.
The bullet appeared to have vanished.
Lizzie—who’d once possessed the same energy and stubborn determination as Mollie—had grown sicker.
One day that July, less than two months after Anna’s murder, Lizzie stopped breathing.
Mollie’s brother-in-law, Bill Smith, was one of the first to wonder if there was something curious about Lizzie’s death, coming so soon after the murders of Anna and Whitehorn.
begun looking into the matter himself.
Indeed, no one had uncovered any natural cause for her death.
she’d been poisoned. And Bill was sure that all three deaths were connected—somehow—to the Osage’s subterranean reservoir of black gold.
Mollie had been ten years old when the oil was first discovered, had witnessed, firsthand, the ensuing frenzy.
meeting, Jefferson addressed the chiefs as “my children”
Ew
The Osage chief stated that his people “had no choice, they must either sign the treaty or be declared enemies of the United States.” Over the next two decades, the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land, ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas.
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.” “This is Indian country, isn’t it?” Laura said. “What did we come to their country for, if you don’t like them?” One evening, Laura’s father explains to her that the government will
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An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”
most whites regarded the land as “broken, rocky, sterile, and utterly unfit for cultivation,” as one Indian Affairs agent put it.
Wah-Ti-An-Kah, an Osage chief, stood at a council meeting and said, “My people will be happy in this land. White man cannot put iron thing in ground here.
a third of what it had been seventy years earlier.
“This little remnant is all that remains of a heroic race that once held undisputed ownership over all this region.”
By 1877, there were virtually no more American buffalo to hunt—a development hastened by the authorities who encouraged settlers to eradicate the beasts, knowing that, in the words of an army officer, “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” U.S. policy toward the tribes shifted from containment to forced assimilation, and officials increasingly tried to turn the Osage into churchgoing, English-speaking, fully clothed tillers of the soil. The government owed the tribe annuity payments for the sale of its Kansas land but refused to distribute them until able-bodied men like Ne-kah-e-se-y took up
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Unaccustomed to the white man’s agricultural methods and deprived of buffalo, the Osage began to go hungry; their bones soon looked as if they might break through their skin.
An Osage delegation, including the chief Wah-Ti-An-Kah, was urgently dispatched to Washington, D.C., to petition the commissioner of India...
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As the commissioner tried to leave, Wah-Ti-An-Kah blocked his path to the door and let go of his blanket. To the shock of even his fellow Osage, he was naked, except for his breechcloth and his moccasins, and his face was painted as if he were leading a war party.
The commissioner said, “Surely this man who doesn’t know how to act—who comes to my office almost naked, with war paint on his face, is not civilized enough to know how to use money.” Wah-Ti-An-Kah said that he was not ashamed of his body, and after he and the delegation pressed their case, the commissioner agreed to end the ration policy. Wah-Ti-An-Kah picked up his blanket and said, “Tell this man it is all right now—he can go.”
Wah-kon-tah-he-um-pah became Mollie.
An Indian Affairs commissioner had said, “The Indian must conform to the white man’s ways, peacefully if they will, forcibly if they must.”
Mollie’s parents were warned that if they didn’t comply, the government would withhold its annuity payments, leaving the family starving.
Mollie had to remove the Indian blanket from her shoulders and put on a plain dress. She wasn’t allowed to speak Osage—she had to catch the white man’s tongue—and was given a Bible
“domestic arts”: sewing, baking, laundering, and housekeeping. “It is impossible to overestimate the importance of careful training for Indian girls,” a U.S. government official had stated, adding, “Of what avail is it that the man be hard-working and industrious, providing by his labor food and clothing for his household, if the wife, unskilled in cookery, unused to the needle, with no habits of order or neatness, makes what might be a cheerful, happy home only a wretched abode of filth and squalor?…It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate
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Many Osage students at Mollie’s school tried to flee, but lawmen chased after them on horseback and bound them with ropes, hauling them back.
more and more girls had stopped wearing their blankets and moccasins
Many students began to feel embarrassed by their parents, who didn’t understand English and still lived by the old ways.
