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

by David Grann

In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.” 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.

Mollie Burkhart,

Gray Horse, O...

Anna ...

Minnie

“peculiar wasting illness,”

Osage Roll,

(In 1923 alone, the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.) The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world.

Fairfax,

Pawhuska,

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,

William K. Hale,

Born a speaker of Osage, Mollie had learned some English in school; nevertheless, Ernest studied her native language until he could talk with her in it.

Elizabeth,

James,

Li...

Bryan and Horace Burkhart,

towns like Whizbang, where, it was said, people whizzed all day and banged all night.

one of the servants attending to the aunt was white—a blunt reminder of the town’s social order.

Oklahoma City

Kansas City.

Charles Whitehorn,

Three Mile Creek,

Big Hill Trading Company,

Scott Mathis,

Mollie’s sister Rita,

Rita’s husband, Bill Smith.

Kelsie Mo...

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.

Two doctors, the brothers James and David Shoun,

the phases a body passes through after death: the stiffening of the limbs (rigor mortis), the corpse’s changing temperature (algor mortis), and the discoloring of the skin from stagnant blood (livor mortis).

“An officer was then literally the law and nothing but his judgment and his trigger finger stood between him and extermination,” the Tulsa Daily World said in 1928, after the death of a veteran lawman who’d worked in the Osage territory. “It was often a case of a lone man against a pack of cunning devils.”

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.

bootleggers like Kelsie Morrison and Henry Grammer,

Osage County

No other evidence was collected. The lawmen were untrained in forensic methods and 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,

Lizzie “keep up the old superstitions and laugh down modern ideas and customs.”)

As a lawyer in town said, “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.

thirteenth-century hymn “Dies Irae,”

John Joseph Mathews

Oda Brown, Anna’s ex-husband,

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.”

Irvin Thompson,

Bl...

Al Spencer, the so-called Phantom Terror,