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

by David Grann

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...