Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (PDF)

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of The Lost City of Z.In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.Look for David Grann’s new book, The Wager, coming in April 2023!

User’s Reviews

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⭐Killers of the Flower Moon by David GrannNew York: Doubleday$28.95 – 339 pages“The whites have bunched us up down here in the backwoods,the roughest part of the United States, thinking ‘we will drive theseIndians down to where there is a big pile of rock and put them therein that corner.’” Now that pile of rock has turned out to be worth millionsof dollars; now everybody wants to get in here and get some of the money.” –Osage Chief Bacon Rind.Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon is the fact that despite the author’s painstaking research, and his marvelous use of period photographs and documents, this factual account of historic events attending “The Osage Murders” contains the atmospheric suspense and tension that is normally associated with a classic murder mystery. In fact, Grann has written a murder mystery – One that asks who methodically killed hundreds of Osage Indians during a four-year reign of terror (1920-24). Osage history reveals the tragic details of how and why. Forced to move from Kansas to Oklahoma, the Osage tribe seemed to be destined to lives of abject poverty when they suddenly found itself catapulted into a world of excessive wealth. Oil is discovered on tribal land. Suddenly, every member of the tribe is potentially wealthy. In an attempt to control the chaos that ensued, the federal government created a document called a “headright” which gave each Osage household legal rights to the oil on their land. After a period of uncontrolled spending in which members of the Osage tribe acquired mansions and fleets of automobiles, the government attempted to control the excessive spending by establishing a “guardian system” which assigned a “legal guardian” to each Osage family. This “guardian” (usually a white banker, businessmen or “civic-minded citizen” was given the power to approve or deny all expenditures for the Osage tribal member (who had been judged to be “incompetent”) by the government. The system was badly flawed, and many of the guardians used their position to embezzle huge sums of money. In time, the guardian documents became bargaining chips in investing in business ventures. Hundreds of guardians used their position as a means of acting as a “middle-man” who would purchase items on behalf of Osage tribal members. The guardian would then sell the item to the Osage for an inflated price. For example, guardians could purchase automobiles on behalf of the Osage tribal member for $250 and then sell them to the Osage member that they represented for $2,500. As the wealth of the Osage grew, so did the schemes for exploiting the tribe. Hundreds of criminals were drawn to the region with schemes designed to acquire a portion of Osage wealth. Many of these new arrivals openly stated that they had come to Oklahoma “to marry an Osage squaw.”It was a method that frequently succeeded. However, some of these opportunists sought a more direct method: murder. Author Grann’s research discovers one individual, William Hale who had arranged for the murder of 24 members of the Osage tribe. By soliciting the help of associates, Hale became one of the wealthiest men in Oklahoma. The astonishing catalogue of slaughter is carried out by men willing to resort to any means to accomplish Hale’s goal. Dozens of victims were poisoned with tainted moonshine and corrupt medical personnel performed autopsies that listed “acute alcoholism” as the cause of death. Others were dispatched with a bullet to the back of the head or between the eyes and the victim’s body was found in his new car on a remote road. One family was killed by a dynamite blast that demolished their home. Often, Hale simply paid an assassin to kill a designated victim. Then, Hale would frequently hire a second assassin to kill the first. In those instances in which murderers were apprehended, Hale bribed juries and law officials and if all else failed, he simply paid another killer. Time and time again, government agents are assigned to investigate and in some instances, just as they uncover significant evidence, they are murdered and the evidence destroyed. One dedicated investigator called the FBI headquarters to report that he was on his way back with conclusive evidence against Hale. The next day his mutilated body is found near a railroad track. He had been murdered and thrown from the train. Another investigator’s body was found in another state, hundreds of miles away. What is most disquieting about the crimes in Killers of the Flower Moon is the awesome extent of corruption that is revealed in the book. State and government officials, medical personnel and lawyers – all are contaminated with the vice of greed. The corruption is so pervasive, the few moral and courageous individuals seem helplessly outnumbered. However, there are two remarkable people in this gruesome tale. One is Molly Burkhart, and Osage who survived the systematic murder of her family…murders in which her husband was implicated. Molly was diagnosed as a diabetic by two doctors who poisoned her insulin injections, in an attempt to slowly kill her. Molly survived and divorced her husband. The second remarkable character is Tom White, the FBI agent that pursued Hale until he brought him to justice. Much of the credit of for this amazing piece of investigative work went to the Director of the newly-created FBI agency, Hubert Hoover who turned out to be a man dedicated to his own self-interest. Through much of the investigation conducted by Tom White, Hoover managed to take credit for White’s courageous work. Jealous of any publicity directed toward agents other than himself, Hoover invariably succeeded in manipulating the factual data to his advantage. This is a remarkable work. Most noteworthy is Grann’s comprehensive account of the primitive nature of investigations in a time before forensics emerged. As a consequence, much of Tom White’s heroic pursuit of a villain who seemed to have the protection of most of Oklahoma’s judges, lawyers and public officials. However, Grann’s greatest achievement is the fact that he uncovers evidence that the total number of victims in the Osage murders exceeded the original 24 and possibly exceeded over 200.

⭐This is a terrific read. Very compelling and thoroughly, exhaustively researched. David Grann does a truly masterful and heartfelt job of relaying this heartbreaking tale of murder, betrayal, and deceit. Grann has a unique and captivating way of telling this wrenching story of the Reign Of Terror on the Osage Indians to murder them and steal their ‘headrights’ on the massive mineral deposits (oil and gas) on their federal lands given them by the US government, finally in 1877. This came only after all the white immigrants and settlers had killed thousands of them, starved them, by disease, pushed them off, outright stole the bulk of all their other beautiful, lush, and rich lands, originally in what is now Kansas, Nebraska, and Arkansas, where their ancestors had lived for hundreds and hundreds of years. The US government broke one treaty after another until they were eventually moved to a portion of what is now Oklahoma.”Osage: (Ni-u-kon-ska), “People of the Middle Waters”, is a Midwestern Native American tribe of the Great Plains. The tribe developed in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys around 700 BC along with other groups of its language family. They migrated west after the 17th century, settling near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as a result of Iroquois invading the Ohio Valley in a search for new hunting grounds.” – WikiThere were many more than the 24 innocent Osage murdered during the “Reign Of Terror” after oil was discovered on their Osage Reservation in 1906. Grann in his scrupulous research and interviews eventually discovers over 650 suspicious deaths, predominantly Osage tribal members, but also anyone white who attempted to help them or knew too much about the murderous gang of conspirators. Even after rich cattleman and Osage ‘guardian’, William K. Hale, his two nephews, Ernest, and Byron (aka Bryan) Burkhart, and their heinous fellow henchmen were finally proven guilty and locked up in Leavenworth from June 1926- June 1929, the murders and mysterious deaths went on, ignored, and uninvestigated by all local Oklahoma authorities. From sheriffs to mayors, judges, Representatives, Senators, governors, police, state and county officials, doctors, coroners, from the very rich and influential to the penniless down and outers, ruthless whites led and together participated in the entire travesty. The murders were carried out by various insidious means, be it shooting, blowing them up as they slept, beatings, countless chilling heartless methods, often by poison or morphine injections, and all by greedy whites time and time again. Their recurring method of marrying into the tribe was always only for one reason: to inherit their money. Unfortunately, it seems they never married for love. The betrayals are endless.I won’t spoil it for you, but the disappointment over the lack of followthrough of the Oklahoma justice system left me disgusted. Let me know how you feel about Bryan Burkhart’s marriage after you finish the book. It’s a real shake your head, life can’t get any stranger tale… or can it?It is my hope that one of my all-time favorite film directors, Martin Scorcese, and co-producer and exceptional actor, Leonardo DeCaprio, do justice to Mr. Grann’s marvelous book in their upcoming film, but most of all I hope that they honor the Osage Nation, all their ancestors, and descendants that have suffered so deeply for generations of ominous, immeasurable, and callous cruelty.I find it both odious and telling that this story, the film based on Grann’s book, the telling of mass murder and racial oppression, should come into the light on exactly the 100th anniversary of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood Massacre. The final injustice would be if these shameful and outrageous events in our American history continued to be removed from our history books. That would be a national sacrilege.One of my favorite lines from Killers Of Flower Moon is a quote of the Osage descendant and retired teacher, Mary Webb. At the end of her interview with the author, she said, “This land is saturated in blood.” Then, she repeated a quote when God cried out to Abel after he killed Cain “The blood cries out from the ground.”Good book, highly recommend.

⭐Firstly I would state that this is a very well written book – it isn’t till you read such examples you realize what a difference it makes to your overall enjoyment! I did not find it too journalistic like some other reviewers (though David Grann is a staff writer) and the author as the footnotes and Appendices show, has great command of voluminous historic paper data.Secondly, the tale it tells works so well because while it is at heart a 1920s crime story it uses the backdrop of the history of Native Americans and their treatment at the hands of the US government and white settlers to provide a much wider panorama to the events and the crimes. In this case the sudden growth of the domestic US oil industry at the turn of the century, created the situation that one of the largest oil reserves was found on the reservation of the Osage Indian nation in recently established Oklahoma. Ironically the tribe had only ended up there because of being forced off its original tribal lands by the government but had wisely in negotiating its purchase preserved its mineral rights. This quickly led to untold wealth and inevitably attracting interest from numerous white persons keen to acquire a share of the new wealth, given the historic approach in the USA to Native Americans.While the attempts by politicians in Washington, early oil magnates and local business and financiers in such a corruptible frontier environment to acquire personal gain provides the backdrop, the central story is the increasing use of cross marriage and murder to try and inherit family interests and ownership of such wealth which takes up the first two thirds of the book. Add into that mix the foundling National Bureau of Investigation (later to morph into the FBI) under its first appointed head Edgar J. Hoover and a scandal that in 1920s USA could not be tackled by openly corrupt local and state law enforcement was a heaven sent opportunity to prove the new national policing approach.The real hero of the tale is Tom White, originally a Texas Ranger who had recently joined the Bureau and was in retrospect the wise choice by Hoover that by his team’s success helped make the reputation of his Bureau in leading the investigation. Sadly as with all such examples Hoover’s autocratic approach reflected little subsequent gratitude but what moves the story beyond its crime plot is the final third where without giving the details away the proving of a wider conspiracy many years later after events had been forgotten is the real revelation.

⭐The Osage Indians lived in Kansas until the 1870s when the government decided that their land was too valuable for them to own, and the Osage Indians were being forced off their land. The Osage Indians were moved to Northeastern Oklahoma on a patch of ground that was deemed worthless – until oil was discovered beneath the reservation land in the 1920s, those dirt scratching Indians became extremely wealthy. The federal government, due to the Osages’ inherent racial weakness, deemed them incapable of managing their own affairs and appointed guardians to manage their affairs, white guardians. Guardians who controlled their money for their own benefit – buying a car for $250, and selling it to their appointed dependee at $1,250 for a healthy profit. However, the tale of greed escalates to one of murder and a devilish plot to murder its womenfolk one by one, in a coldly calculated order, as would gradually bequeath their riches to white speculators in the end by the only viable means: inheritance. And here lies the macabre intimacy that marks this out from other stories of mass killing of American Indians: inheritance, of course, entailed marrying Native women, raising children with them while knowing the plan’s murderous outcome. Every effort is co-ordinated by the wealthy and the institutions of white settlersto hamper investigations until the fledgling FBI steps in.This is a well written – factual but in a flowing narrative, which takes you on a journey of first hand experience of how the First Nation people have been shamefully treated by the American’s and their institutions and legal systems.David Grann has done a wonderful job of investigating these murders. Though some people were incarcerated for the crimes back in the 1920s, the more Grann dug, the more threads he found that led to other guardians who should have been investigated more thoroughly as well.

⭐I don’t normally read crime books but this was part of a book club and I was interested enough to purchase a copy. I’m glad I did.The book is a mix of crime, who dunnit and history, both of the time in the US and also the development of the FBI. Most of my problem with popular history books, and I would put this book in that genre, is that the author writes with confidence about private conversations and thoughts that they cannot possibly know about. This book keeps that to a minimum as the archives provides lots of information so, while there is a bit of poetic license taken in places, on the whole you do feel like you are reading about the facts rather than the author’s imagination.The actual events desribed are interesting and shocking, particularly when you think about how recently these events took place.I would recommend this book to a lot of different readers as it is well paced and certainly brings out the human drama in these historic events and covers lots of different subject areas.

⭐A grim chapter of American history is brought to light with Killers of the Flower Moon, a book specifically about the Osage Native Americans and their betrayal by the government. Furnished with incredible wealth due to the oil on their land, the Osage should have thrived. Unfortunately, greed from outside forces took over and soon the Osage’s land was plundered by the US government – something of a repeated motif in the nascent history of America. Within that there were also others who, jealous of the wealth, manufactured ways of eliminating certain families within the community. This leads to a cover-up and the eventual establishment of the FBI who slowly uncover the mystery.It’s an enlightening read in many ways while its unusual to read J Edgar Hoover and the FBI as the heroes of the piece – at least initially. The problem is that what is a story about racial injustice – of this there can be no doubt – it does veer into a heavy-handed polemic. It’s been fashionable in post-60s writing to simplify the story of America as ‘White Christian Man Bad’ – and we’ve all seen the joyous division that’s sown! – but in a case as unfair as this, we really do not need the blanket statement seeping into everything. At one point an interesting discussion of how new-money Osage natives were patronisingly given overseers – it was deemed that they were too silly to cope with the riches on their own – verges into some nonsensical point about gender politics. It suggests that these overseers created specific gender roles that were alien to the people (Christian White Man Bad time) whereas even a cursory look at history would show that Osage culture already had defined gender roles. This was a bad thing, an evil thing or an incursion of ‘patriarchy’ on the Osage – it was just a simple fact of tradition. To use that as a stick to beat the settlers with is disingenuous. Ultimately, this is still a recommended book – it’s worth paying the extra for the audiobook to hear some of it read in Will Patton’s exquisite South Carolina drawl – but any sense of balance often disappears in tendentious writing.

⭐Years ago, back in the Stone Age, I remember seeing a James Stewart movie called “The FBI Story”, and episodic – and somewhat hagiographic – history of J Edgar Hoover’s decades long expansion of the then Justice Department Bureau of Investigation. One of the episodes covered the Bureau’s investigation of the systematic murders of a large number of very rich members of the Osage Nation, a native American tribe living in Oklahoma. At the time, I was sure this was made up. I mean, based on what we hear about the mistreatment and exploitation of the native peoples, whoever heard of a rich Indian?Imagine then, my great surprise when I ran across this book and realized the story was actually true. The Osage were indeed a very wealthy tribe, based on their ownership of mineral rights on their land in Oklahoma which is, if you know your geology, oil country. Since the idea of rich Indians offended the sensibilities of the right-thinking folk in old Oklahoma, there followed a long drawn out campaign to separate the Osage from their money, ultimately culminating (but not actually ending) in at least two dozen savage murders between 1921 and 1925, a period referred to by the Osage as the “reign of terror”.It’s a shocking and almost unknown story, and the full extent of what happened during that period is not fully and publicly known to this day. Grann, a staff writer at the New Yorker, does make a manful attempt to let the light in, and to be fair, he does a good job on that aspect of the case. He covers the background of the terror, how the Osage came to be in the position they were and how local forces conspired to relieve them of what was theirs, by any means. It should be a mesmerizing read, and yet, it isn’t. It’s good, and you’ll finish it, but somehow it doesn’t grip like a book of this nature should. Perhaps it’s the sheer, jaw-dropping extent of the conspiracy against the Osage, requiring the reader to keep track of large numbers of people in their minds. Perhaps it’s the autonomous actions of different groups and individuals which makes for a somewhat incoherent narrative. Whatever it is, I couldn’t go above three stars for this one. Maybe three and a half. A pity, because this is an important story which should be out there, and Grann has done a decent job bringing all the facts to light.

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