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

by David Grann

1890s as the U.S. government intensified its push for the culmination of its assimilation campaign: allotment.

end the old communal way of life

a situation that would, not incidentally, make it easier to procure their land.

The Osage had seen what had happened to the C...

“Men knocked each other down as they rushed onward.

Theodore Roosevelt had already warned what would befall an Indian who refused his allotment: “Let him, like these whites, who will not work, perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers.”

“great storm”

a new state called Oklahoma.

“red people.”

the Osage were the last tribe in Indian Territory to be allotted

The Osage prevailed upon the government to divide the land solely among members of the tribe, thereby increasing each individual’s allotment from 160 acres to 657 acres.

With the tribe’s approval, Florer and a wealthy banking partner obtained a lease to begin drilling on the reservation.

But to keep the mineral trust under tribal control, no one could buy or sell headrights. These could only be inherited.

“Are they dangerous? Will we have to fight them off?” His father laughed. “No,” he said. “They’re rather quiet and peaceful.”

arcing above the rigging, it rose before them like an angel of death. The spray coated the fields and the flowers and smeared the faces of the workers and the spectators. Still, people hugged and tossed their hats in celebration.

Lizzie died in July 1921,

August they had still not looked into the case.

Oklahoma attorney general soon charged Sheriff Freas with willfully “failing to enforce the law” by permitting bootlegging and gambling.

During much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private detective agencies had filled the vacuum left by decentralized, underfunded, incompetent, and corrupt sheriff and police departments.

rough justice.

“the devil’s disciples.”)

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.”

Pike.

The U.S. government, contending that many Osage were unable to handle their money, had required the Office of Indian Affairs to determine which members of the tribe it considered capable of managing their trust funds. Over the tribe’s vehement objections, many Osage, including Lizzie and Anna, were deemed “incompetent,” and were forced to have a local white guardian overseeing and authorizing all of their spending, down to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store.

he had an impressive track record, including catching those responsible for the 1910 bombing of the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, which killed twenty people. The New York Times called Burns “perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius, whom this country has produced,” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave him the moniker he longed for: “America’s Sherlock Holmes.”

Unlike Sherlock Holmes, though, Burns had rigged juries, and allegedly kidnapped a suspect, and he routinely used the sordid techniques of imperial spies.

Incredibly, no one from the sheriff’s office had searched the place yet.

about 8:30, on the night Anna disappeared, someone had rung her house from a phone belonging to a business in Ralston, a town six miles southwest of Gray Horse.

two hard-boiled characters from the oil camps had purportedly been seen with Anna shortly before her death, and had afterward skipped town.

she was going to have “a little baby.”

Yet no one knew who the father was.

A. W. Comstock,

Pike, the detective Hale had enlisted, had moved on. Sheriff Freas was also no longer leading the investigation; that February, he was expelled from office after a jury had found him guilty of failing to enforce the law.

Then, on a frigid night that month, William Stepson, a twenty-nine-year-old Osage champion steer roper, received a call that prompted him to leave his house in Fairfax. He returned home to his wife and two children several hours later, visibly ill. Stepson had always been in remarkable shape, but within hours he was dead.

By the time of Stepson’s death, scientists had devised numerous tools to detect poison in a corpse. A sample of tissue could be extracted from the body and tested for the presence of an array of toxic substances—from strychnine to arsenic. Yet in much of the country these forensic methods were applied even less consistently than fingerprint and ballistic techniques.

coroner in most counties of the United States was an “untrained and unskilled individual” and had “a small staff of mediocre ability, and with inadequate equipment.”

poisoning was a perfect way to commit murder.

On March 26, 1922, less than a month after Stepson’s death, an Osage woman died of a suspected poisoning.

Then, on July 28, Joe Bates, an Osage man in his thirties, obtained from a stranger some whiskey, and after taking a sip, he began frothing at the mouth, before collapsing.

Barney McBride,

oilman, to go to Washington, D.C., and ask federal authorities to investigate. McBride had been married to a Creek Indian, now deceased, and was raising his stepdaughter.

he found a telegram from an associate waiting for him. “Be careful,”

When he headed outside, someone seized him and tied a burlap sack tightly over his head. The next morning, McBride’s body was found in a culvert in Maryland. He had been stabbed more than twenty times, his skull had been beaten in, and he had been stripped naked, except for his socks and shoes, in one of which had been left a card with his name. The forensic evidence suggested that there had been more than one assailant, and authorities suspected that his killers had shadowed him from Oklahoma.

CONSPIRACY BELIEVED TO KILL RICH INDIANS.

the auctions were held outdoors, on a hilltop in Pawhuska, in the shade of a large tree known as the Million Dollar Elm.

Hale and Mathis, the Big Hill Trading Company owner

In 1920, Sinclair, Marland, and other oilmen helped finance the successful presidential bid of Warren Harding.

Sinclair funneled, through the cover of a bogus company, more than $200,000 to the new secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall; another oilman had his son deliver to the secretary $100,000 in a black bag.

Teapot Dome.

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.”