A Culture of Murder

 “Killers of the Flower Moon – The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” book by David Grann, 2017

(Spoilers ahead.) 

This is a penetrating look into the continued attack on indigenous people in the U.S. in the 1920s.  The murders are framed by discriminatory federal policies applied to reservations; private property created on reservation land; paternalistic control of Osage wealth; plain old violent racism and the power of money to corrupt legal systems, lawyers and individuals.  The book is valuable because much of this is still true.  As a key organizer of the murders, a large rancher and businessmen in Osage County said he was confident his wealth and power would acquit him.  Sound familiar?

After several years of incompetent investigations, the FBI took the lead.  If you are uncomfortable seeing the FBI as the decent prosecutors of some of these murders, it doesn’t change the fact that J. Edgar Hoover also created a punitive political surveillance apparatus aimed at the Left. Back in the 1920s, Hoover ‘modernized’ national policing by using scientific techniques to catch criminals, like finger prints, mug shots, written reports and hand writing analysis, which had not be used before by the sloppy and brutal local police of the day.  Amateurish ‘inquests’ were the police rule in Oklahoma, for instance.  Of course Hoover hid the FBI’s bungling and mistakes in this matter too in order to jump-start the myth of the perfect FBI. 

This is an extraordinary and bloody tale.  Native oil wealth had turned Osage County into one of the richest pieces of real estate in the U.S. The reservation lands were hilly grass prairie, filled with rocks and desolate when the Osage were forced to move in the 1870s from southern Kansas to northern Oklahoma.  The joke on the white folks was under the soil, the ‘underground reservation.’  A clever Osage attorney had included land trust oil and mineral rights in the tribal legal documents, which went undiscovered until too late.  To recoup that wealth, a white rancher, his prominent compatriots and local thugs used poison, explosives and executions in their successful attempts at taking over some oil-rich tribal lands in Oklahoma, which had made many Osage wealthy.

A Real CONSPIRACY

The book is a picture of a large conspiracy which only a powerful and monied person or group could organize. At least 24 people officially died in various ways – Osage, witnesses, accomplices, enemies, lawyers. It was later called a ‘reign of terror.’  Any class-conscious detective would immediately see who could be behind such a large local conspiracy.  The first step was to overlook the false façades of friendliness towards the Osage by certain ‘upstanding fellows.’  Lies, threats, murder, bribes and disinformation were the methods of power used by the conspirators to avoid being caught or convicted.  Sound familiar?

Behind the whole situation was Federal law, which allowed these crimes to commence.  The structural racism against the indigenous included land allotments. This was a widespread Federal policy to privatize parts of the reservation so as to have them sold later to people outside the tribe. The oil and mineral rights would be included in these ‘headrights.’  In addition, a murder on that land could be held in the prejudiced and corrupt state courts instead of a better federal court. 

Another key aspect of Federal “Indian” law at that time was that all full-blood Osage were declared ‘incompetent’ to handle their financial affairs.  Light-skinned men were put in guardianship of their assets and were able to steal their money, misdirect it, with-hold it, invest it as they chose and more.  If you were white and married an Osage woman, you could inherit her money if she died.  So even ‘romance’ and marriage was bloody suspect.  The racism was so thick around this situation that one white man married to an Osage woman knew who was killing her relatives and only later confessed.

A Culture of Killing

Grann goes on to describe how Hoover used this case to propagandize for the FBI. Grann reports on the later life of Tom White, the organized and civil lead investigator on some of the Osage murder cases, though many were never brought to trial by the FBI.  Grann visits the Osage Nation several times to dig into loose ends.  He finds the local oil boomtowns are abandoned ruins or shrunken hulks. 10,000 derricks rust or pump a dozen gallons a day, as the oil curse is over.  But the Osage Nation now has 20,000 members, revived from 3-4 thousand at the time of the killings and the bison are back.

Oklahoma Tribal Nations

The head of the conspiracy, Hale, received a life sentence, but was paroled after 20 years.  Grann meets with relatives of one of the principals during the terror, Mollie Burkhart, who was a full-blood Osage at the time.  He visits the graves of Mollie and her 4 murdered relatives. He investigates the unsolved murder of a lawyer who was thrown off a moving train because he knew details of the conspiracy. Archived grand jury, news and financial documents located by Grann indicate a County banker named Burt was the most likely murderer of that lawyer and another Osage, the latter via poison. Both were his wards.  The banker was never indicted, though he was close friends with Hale.

Grann is told that many more Osage people died during the terror than just 24.  He investigates another shooting and concludes, while not connected directly to Hale, it was part of a plot to inherit money by a wife and future husband.  There was no indictment there either.  He concludes that while Hale’s murder spree went for 5 years, there were ‘headright’ killings from 1919 to 1931.  In the guardianship logs Grann found in the archives, he notes prominent white guardians in the County had a high number of dead wards, into the 100s.  Many ‘mysterious deaths’ were registered by the corrupt coroner to the point where nearly every Osage family was affected.  The death rate was far higher than it should have been.  So it was not just one conspiracy, it was a racist financial situation that resulted in ‘a killing culture.’

The FBI tied up the murders in a nice bow, but the spree went far beyond Hale’s crew.  Hoover didn’t care about that. The real cause of all these murders was private property and private wealth, this time in the hands of the ‘wrong people.’  The injunction to ‘follow the money’ is usually correct.  Crime is a function of first class and then cash. As long as those exist, crimes will follow – even without the Osage.

Like the KKK in the South, the conspiracy to kill Osage stake-holders was led by the most prominent people in the County according to Grann – cops, doctors, judges, businessmen, undertakers, coroners, lawyers, bankers, ranchers and politicians.  It was a class conspiracy. They gave the orders to the criminal thugs and weaklings to do their dirty-work. This is the class basis of the murder spree.  Some non-tribal people were aware of what was going on.  Some were afraid to say anything.

The story is another reminder of continued exploitation of Native land and peoples long after settlement. Incidentally, this will never change. Native reservations should be considered areas for social revolution, as their land is still partly socialized and partly under tribal law.  They are also becoming areas with their own working-class.  They are rural bastions of some social change, especially on environmental issues, and as such should be considered allies by urban workers.  They are a progressive base in the countryside, and perhaps someday, a military base too. Though as it is, every reservation leadership is not oppositional and some have been bought by carbon companies, as we saw in the Line 3 struggle here in Minnesota in regards to the Fond du Lac Band of Chippewa. 

A work of solid reporting which formed the basis for the film of the same name, with Robert DeNiro as the leader of the killers, but it goes beyond that film as do so many books.  It also beats all those fake murder 'entertainment' series on streaming because it is real and it is political.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Native American,” “indigenous,” “oil” “FBI,” “murder,” “conspiracy.” 

And I got at May Day Books’ excellent used/cutout book section!

Red Frog / June 29, 2025