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

by David Grann

A growing number of white Americans expressed alarm over the Osage’s wealth—

The accounts rarely, if ever, mentioned that numerous Osage had skillfully invested their money or that some of the spending by the Osage might have reflected ancestral customs that linked grand displays of generosity with tribal stature.

Many Osage, unlike other wealthy Americans, could not spend their money as they pleased because of the federally imposed system of financial guardians. (One guardian claimed that an Osage adult was “like a child six or eight years old, and when he sees a new toy he wants to buy it.”)

In practice, the decision to appoint a guardian—to render an American Indian, in effect, a half citizen—was nearly always based on the quantum of Indian blood in the property holder, or what a state supreme court justice referred to as “racial weakness.” A full-blooded American Indian was invariably appointed a guardian, whereas a mixed-blood person rarely was.

He implored Congress to take greater action. “Every white man in Osage County will tell you that the Indians are now running wild,” he said,

You want them to "modernize" and when they do and do a good job at it despite everything up against them you say they are childish and running wild?!?!

could withdraw no more than a few thousand dollars annually from his or her trust fund. It didn’t matter if these Osage needed their money to pay for education or a sick child’s hospital bills.

As a full-blooded Osage, Mollie was among those whose funds were restricted, though at least her husband, Ernest, was her guardian.

Merchants demanded that the Osage pay “special”—that is, inflated—prices.

The man had been fatally shot in the back of the head.

Since the brutal slaying of the oilman McBride, nearly six months had passed without the discovery of another suspicious death. Yet as the two lawmen stared at the man in the car, they realized that the killing hadn’t stopped after all.

Henry Roan, a forty-year-old Osage Indian who was married with two children.

“Roan considered W. K. Hale his best friend.” Roan was one of the full-bloods whose financial allowance had been officially curtailed, and he had often asked Hale to advance him cash.

wife was having an affair with a man named Roy Bunch.

Mollie. In 1902, more than a decade before meeting Ernest, she and Roan had been briefly married.

fifteen

And so she decided not to say a word, not to her husband or the authorities.

early March, the dogs in the neighborhood began to die,

Henry Grammer’s

Roan had said that he was going to get whiskey at Grammer’s ranch—the same place, coincidentally or not, where Mollie’s sister Anna often got her whiskey, too.

alleged train robber, a kingpin bootlegger with connections to the Kansas City Mob, and a blazing gunman.

three in the morning,

explosion.

Rita was lying beside him in her nightgown.

Bill Smith

survivor,

On March 14, four days after the bombing, Bill Smith died—

Osage Reign of Terror.

In April 1923, Governor Jack C. Walton of Oklahoma dispatched his top state investigator, Herman Fox Davis, to Osage County. A lawyer and a former private detective

crook.

pardoned by the governor.

murder

Davis received a life...

November, Governor Walton wa...

Vaughan,

Bigheart—

Vaughan remained at Bigheart’s side for several hours, until he was pronounced dead.

all the information he needed

He hung up and went to the station where he was seen boarding an overnight train. When the train pulled in to the station the next day, though, there was no sign of him. OWNER VANISHES LEAVING CLOTHES IN PULLMAN CAR,

The Boy Scouts,

Vaughan’s body was spotted lying by the railroad tracks, thirty miles north of Oklahoma City. He’d been thrown from the train;

naked,

documents Bigheart had given him were gone, and when Vaughan’s widow went to the designated hiding s...

at least twenty-four members of the tribe. Among the victims were two more men who had tried to assist the investigation: one, a prominent Osage rancher, plunged down a flight of stairs after being drugged; the other was gunned down in Oklahoma City on his way to brief state officials about the case.

The press later described the killings as being as “dark and sordid as any murder story of the century” and the “bloodiest chapter in American crime history.”

anonymous threats, the justice of the peace was forced to stop convening inquests into the latest murders.

In 1923, after the Smith bombing, the Osage tribe began to urge the federal government to send investigators who, unlike the sheriff or Davis, had no ties to the county or to state officials.

John Palmer,

Charles Curtis, a U.S. senator from Kansas;

Curtis was then the highest official with acknowledged Indian ancestry e...

It was Asa Kirby, Henry Grammer’s associate.