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

by David Grann

Dick Gregg and Frank “Jelly” Nash,

The Shoun brothers, who had performed the first autopsy, appeared at the cemetery and renewed their search for the bullet. This time, the brothers put on gloves and took out a meat cleaver, cutting Anna’s head into “sausage meat,” as the undertaker later put it. But, once again, the brothers found nothing. The bullet appeared to have vanished.

One day that July, less than two months after Anna’s murder, Lizzie stopped breathing. Mollie couldn’t revive her.

Like Mollie, he was struck by the peculiar vagueness of Lizzie’s sickness; no doctor had ever pinpointed what was causing it. Indeed, no one had uncovered any natural cause for her death. The more Bill delved, conferring with doctors and local investigators, the more he was certain that Lizzie had died of something dreadfully unnatural: she’d been poisoned. And Bill was sure that all three deaths were connected—somehow—to the Osage’s subterranean reservoir of black gold.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased, from the French, the Territory of Louisiana, which contained lands dominated by the Osage.

In 1804, a delegation of Osage chiefs met with Jefferson at the White House.

At the meeting, Jefferson addressed the chiefs as “my children” and said,

they shall know our nation only as friends and benefactors.”

But within four years Jefferson had compelled the Osage to relinquish their territory between the Arkansas River and the Missouri River.

“had no choice, they must either sign the treaty or be declared enemies ...

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...

Osage name, Ne-kah-e-se-y.

nothing was left to waste: the meat was dried, the heart smoked, the intestines made into sausages. Oils from the bison’s brain were rubbed over the hide, which was then transformed into leather for robes and lodge coverings. And still there was more to reap: horns were turned into spoons, sinews into bowstrings, tallow into fuel for torches.

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.

In 1870, the Osage—expelled from their lodges, their graves plundered—agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage, mutilating their bodies and scalping them. An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”

the Office of Indian Affairs

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.”

Osage name Wah-kon-tah-he-um-pah.

Osage names: Anna was Wah-hrah-lum-pah; Minnie, Wah-sha-she; and Rita, Me-se-moie.

John Florer,

began to refer to Ne-kah-e-se-y as Jimmy.

“The Indian must conform to the white man’s ways, peacefully if they will, forcibly if they must.”

St. Louis Catholic missionary school,

she had to catch the white man’s tongue—and

An Osage mother said of her son, “His ears are closed to our talk.”

Mollie’s family was straddling not only two centuries but two civilizations.

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

Under the policy, the Osage reservation would be divvied up into 160-acre parcels, into real estate, with each tribal member receiving one allotment, while the rest of the territory would be opened to settlers. The allotment system, which had already been imposed on many tribes, was designed to end the old communal way of life and turn American Indians into private...

Cherokee ...

Because the Osage had purchased their land, it was harder for the government to impose its policy of allotment.

James Bigheart—who

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.”

(In the Choctaw language, “Oklahoma” means “red people.”)

John Palmer

provision: “That the oil, gas, coal, or other minerals covered by the lands…are hereby reserved to the Osage Tribe.”

headright—essentially, a share in the tribe’s mineral trust.

George Getty,

Jean Paul Getty,

Getty Oil Company,

In 1920, E. W. Marland, who was once so poor that he couldn’t afford train fare, discovered Burbank, one of the highest-producing oil fields in the United States: a new well generated 680 barrels in its first twenty-four hours.

Bigheart, who had died not long after the imposition of allotment, was hailed as the “Osage Moses.”

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.

“turned brutal crimes—the vestiges of the beast in man—into intellectual puzzles.”

(The term “to detect” derived from the Latin verb “to unroof,” and because the devil, according to legend, allowed his henchmen to peer voyeuristically into houses by removing their roofs, detectives were known as “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.

Whizbang.

Denoya,

William J. Burns International Detective Agency

Burns, a former Secret Service agent, had succeeded Pinkerton as the world’s most celebrated private eye.