David Grann, "Killers of the Flower Moon"

David Grann has now written a whole series of best-selling nonfiction books, a remarkably successful record. His method is to find sensational stories that were once famous but have been mostly forgotten and bring them back for a new audience. I very much enjoyed The Lost City of Z, a story of exploration and disappearance in the Amazon that was front page news in the 1920s but had faded to the point that I had never heard of it. The story told in Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2016) is not as thoroughly forgotten, but certainly most Americans had never heard of it. Grann's is a great formula because you know the stories will sell; after all, they already did, less than a hundred years ago.

The Osage were once one of the great tribes of the plains, rivals of the Lakota and the Comanche for supremacy. But they were devastated by disease, betrayed by their white friends, defeated by the Cherokee, and pushed onto smaller and smaller reservations. In 1878 they bought a godforsaken corner of Oklahoma from the Cherokee and settled there, thinking that surely nobody would bother them any more on land of such little value.

Then, in a year variously given as 1894, 1895, or 1897, oil was discovered on the Osage reservation. It became the hottest oil patch in the world, a place where fortunes were made and lost overnight; three of the famous oilmen who got their starts there founded the companies called Getty, Sinclair, and Phillips. The Osage became the richest people, per capita, in the world; Osage chiefs were the Arab sheikhs of the 1920s. In 1923 alone the 3,000-member tribe's revenue from oil leases was 30 million dollars. People say that "Black Gold" became a common term when an Osage horse by that name won the Kentucky Derby in 1924.

It is worth noting, given the current brouhaha about Indians being sent to boarding schools, that some of the new Osage millionaires spent their money sending their children to the most expensive boarding schools in the country. People are these days trying to deny that Indians ever did that of their own accord, but that is just wrong.

All of this wealth brought a trampling herd of criminals, grifters, and fortune-seekers to Osage County, determined to get their hands on some of that Indian gold. They were aided by a system, imposed by the Federal government, that ruled on which Osage were competent to manage their own money. Those who were not had to employ white "guardians" who controlled their funds and charged them handsomely for the privilege of accessing their own fortunes. Businesses regularly charged Osage several times as much as whites for the same services. Osage were cheated, robbed, scammed, and extorted by a whole system of leeches who were often backed corrupt officials in the county and state governments. They called it "the Indian business" and it made a lot of white people rich.

All of that is no more than you would expect. But the story of the Osage has a much darker side, so disturbing that it is hard to believe even about the America of the 1920s. 

The profits of the oil were distributed to the Osage under a system of "headrights." Headrights could not be bought or sold, only inherited. But if an Osage married an outsider, the headright could pass to the spouse or the mixed-blood children. This launched numerous schemes to marry into Osage wealth and get control of it. One local resident was observed saying to another, "Why don't you just marry a squaw and take her money?" And Osage kept marrying outsiders, for reasons that remain obscure in Grann's book. Some of the Osage hated this and women who married outsiders could be ostracized, but the marriages went on. I wondered if maybe some of the newly wealthy women were trying to escape from Osage culture, and in particular its patriarchal idea of marriage. But anyway there were deep tensions within the Osage that helped to divide and weaken them.

There were also rumors, beginning during World War I when the oil checks first made people rich, that Osage were being murdered for their money. The murders, people said, were covered up by a white power structure of politicians, businessmen, oil barons, and guardians who exploited Osage when they were alive and just killed them when they got inconvenient. But this was all murky and unproved.

Then in 1921 a series of high-profile killings of wealthy Osage caught the nation's attention. From 1921 to 1926 at least 20 wealthy Osage were murdered, a time the Osage call the Reign of Terror. Local law enforcement made no progress in solving the crimes. Some of the Osage were millionaires, so they hired private detectives to investigate, but that never led to anything, either. Eventually the complaints caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had just become the head of something called the Bureau of Investigation or BOI. At that point BOI agents had no real police powers – they could not make arrests or execute search warrants, for example – but Hoover was determined to make them into something much more like a national police force. He decided that the Osage murders were the perfect case to make his agency's reputation.

So in 1925 Hoover sent one of his best agents from Texas to Osage County, letting him assemble a picked team of both undercover and above-ground operators. Within a year they had cracked an important group of cases, convicting both the trigger men and the local boss who organized an insidious plot to kill Osage and inherit their headrights. The triumph helped make Hoover and the (soon to be) FBI. But, as I said, it applied to just a few murders of the at least 20 that had been committed. Which may have been a small part of the actual total. Grann argues that the real number of murders was much higher, likely in the hundreds. The BOI had opened one crack in the local mafia of politicains, lawyers, crooks and thugs who were preying on the Osage, but it seems likely that most cases were never solved and most perpetrators never caught. One white lawyer friendly to the Osage was murdered on the street in Washington, DC, when he went to talk to the Justice Department about the killings; everyone assumed he was killed because he knew too much about the "Indian business," but nothing was ever proved. The murders also went on after the "Reign of Terror" officially ended, likely until the 1930s when the Depression and the drying up of the oil made the Osage poor again.

It's a terrific book, and if it sounds like your kind of thing, read it.

There are some questions, though. The number of murders is murky, as Grann admits. Many of the possible murder cases involved Osage who allegedly died from alcohol poisoning. Some of them may well have been intentionally poisoned. But during Prohibition thousands of Americans died from poisonous moonshine; it was a major nationwide problem. Nobody denies that the Osage drank a lot of moonshine. Which doesn't mean some of them were not murdered, but it makes it impossible to know for sure which deaths were homicides. Grann also tries to estimate  the number of murders by comparing the death rate of the Osage to that of the nation as a whole, but in fact all Indians of that period had much higher death rates than whites or blacks, and the rate varied widely from tribe to tribe, so the high Osage death rate is suggestive but doesn't prove anything. Still, I finished the book believing that at least fifty Osage had been murdered for their money and that the crimes had been covered up, and the money leeched away, by an astonishingly corrupt system that reached at least to the governor of Oklahoma.

The second thing that struck me was the strange passivity of the Osage. In 1921 there were Osage still living who had fought the Cherokee and the US government in the 1870s; plus, more than a hundred Osage had volunteered to fight in World War I. Yet in the face of what looks like an organized murder campaign against their nation they did very little. There was one point where good evidence emerged against a man and some Osage threatened to kill him if he weren't arrested, but that was the only case I noted where any Osage even threatened violence. Of couse any Osage who did kill a white man would likely be executed, but that did not deter many other Indians of that period from acts of violence. For a young man to sacrifce his own life in defense of his tribe was (and remains for some Indian nations) an honored tradition. 

The weird passivity starts with people who told friends they were afraid they were being poisoned by their friends or even their spouses but don't seem to have done anything to defend themselves. They kept living with the spouses they feared, kept buying moonshine they thought might kill them. Why?

And why did the Osage nation as a whole do so little? They had leverage; they could have refused to issue more oil leases until the murders were solved. They could have forced the oil barons to take action against the corrupt county officials who were covering this all up; in 1925, no county sheriff stood a chance in a fight against the Gettys and the Sinclairs. But the Osage did nothing of the kind. They did not even boycott the businesses of the men they suspected most strongly.

Grann says at one point that the Osage felt trapped in a vast fog that covered their whole reservation, stretching across the white world beyond it. They could not tell who were their friends and who their enemies; they did not know what to do or where to turn for help. The people eventually exposed as murderers all posed as friends to the Osage. Maybe the Osage suspected they weren't really friends, but they absolutely needed help from white lawyers and officials, and how could they tell whose friendship was sincere?

And this gets me to what I see as the second tragedy that lies behind the astonishing evil of the murders. What happened to the Plains Indians between 1870 and 1896 was the utter destruction of their way of life, the loss of their homes, and the loss of their world. This operated, not just at the political or cultural level, but psychologically. They were unmoored. Indian men were also unmanned, completely cut off from the activities (buffalo hunting, war) that defined them as men. In the strange passivity of the Osage through the Reign of Terror I think we can get a glimpse of how utterly destructive this loss was to the people who lived through it.

The good news is that both the Osage and the American nation have moved on. The number of Osage has rebounded and is now around 20,000, roughly what it was in 1800. In 2011, the US government reached a settlement with the Osage, paying $380 million for their part in mismanaging the Osage's oil weath and other trust funds. This happened because, on the one hand, the Osage have found their footing in the new America and are much better able to navigate the system, better able to distinguish friends who might help them from leeches out to rob them. On the other, the US government is less out to rob and subjugate Indians, and in some quarters even trying to undo some of the harm done in the past. Which is not to say that everything is fine now; Grann talks to people still haunted by the Reign of Terror and what it says about the fate of Indians in a white world. But the worst times are now very much in the past.