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

by David Grann

This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression. Instead, citizens responded to a hue and cry by chasing after suspects.

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. By the time of Anna’s death, the informal system of citizen policing had been displaced, but vestiges of it remained, especially in places that still seemed to exist on the periphery of geography and history.

As with all Osage, the birth of her children had been the greatest blessing of Wah’Kon-Tah, the mysterious life force that pervades the sun and the moon and the earth and the stars; the force around which the Osage had structured their lives for centuries, hoping to bring some order out of the chaos and confusion on earth; the force that was there but not there—invisible, remote, giving, awesome, unanswering.

“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 them by their instructions to the children.”

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

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After the U.S. government purchased the land from the Cherokee, it had announced that at noon on September 16, 1893, a settler would be able to claim one of the forty-two thousand parcels of land—if he or she got to the spot first!

“Men, women and horses were laying all over the prairie. Here and there men were fighting to the death over claims which each maintained he was first to reach. Knives and guns were drawn—it was a terrible and exciting scene;

It was a struggle where the game was empathically every man for himself and devil take the hindmost.”

The epitome of American values

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. This strategy would avoid a mad dash on their territory, though whites could then attempt to buy allotments from tribe members. The Osage also managed to slip into the agreement what seemed, at the time, like a curious provision: “That the oil, gas, coal, or other minerals covered by the lands…are hereby reserved to the Osage Tribe.”

With its great black wings of spray, 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. Bigheart, who had died not long after the imposition of allotment, was hailed as the “Osage Moses.” And the dark, slimy, smelly mineral substance seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world.

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.

They were untrained and unregulated and often had criminal records themselves. Beholden to paying clients, they were widely seen as surreptitious figures who burglarized people’s secrets. (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.”)

to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store. One Osage who had served in World War I complained, “I fought in France for this country, and yet I am not allowed even to sign my own checks.” The guardians were usually drawn from the ranks of the most prominent white citizens in Osage County.

In 1928, a survey by the National Research Council concluded that the 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.” In places like Osage County, where there was no coroner trained in forensics and no crime laboratory, poisoning was a perfect way to commit murder. Poisons were abundantly available in products found on the shelves of apothecaries and grocery stores, and unlike a gunshot they could be administered without a sound. And the symptoms of many toxic substances mimicked natural ailments—the nausea and diarrhea of cholera, or the seizure of a heart attack. During Prohibition, there were so many accidental deaths caused from wood alcohol and other toxic brews of bootleg whiskey that a killer could also spike a person’s glass of moonshine without ever arousing suspicions.

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.”) The law mandated that guardians be assigned to any American Indians whom the Department of the Interior deemed “incompetent.” 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. John Palmer, the part-Sioux orphan who had been adopted by an Osage family and who played such an instrumental role in preserving the tribe’s mineral rights, pleaded to members of Congress, “Let not that quantum of white blood or Indian determine the amount that you take over from the members of this tribe. It matters not about the quantum of Indian blood. You gentlemen do not deal with things of that kind.” Such pleas, inevitably, were ignored, and members of Congress would gather in wood-paneled committee rooms and spend hours examining in minute detail the Osage’s expenditures, as if the country’s security were at stake. At a House subcommittee hearing in 1920, lawmakers combed through a report from a governme...

And he came to see the law as a struggle to subdue the violent passions not only in others but also in oneself.

“To believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”

“Today our hearts are divided between two worlds. We are strong and courageous, learning to walk in these two worlds, hanging on to the threads of our culture and traditions as we live in a predominantly non-Indian society. Our history, our culture, our heart, and our home will always be stretching our legs across the plains, singing songs in the morning light, and placing our feet down with the ever beating heart of the drum. We walk in two worlds.”

Jefferson wrote. After I finished reading the manuscript documenting Lewis’s murder, I kept returning to one detail: she had been killed for her headright in 1918. According to most historical accounts, the Osage Reign of Terror spanned from the spring of 1921, when Hale had Anna Brown murdered, to January 1926, when Hale was arrested. So Lewis’s murder meant that the killings over headrights had begun at least three years earlier than was widely assumed, and if Red Corn’s grandfather was poisoned in 1931, then the killings also continued long after Hale’s arrest. These cases underscored that the murders of the Osage for their headrights were not the result of a single conspiracy orchestrated by Hale. He might have led the bloodiest and longest killing spree. But there were countless other killings—killings that were not included in official estimates and that, unlike the cases of Lewis or Mollie Burkhart’s family members, were never investigated or even classified as homicides.