What I Am Reading: "Killers of the Flower Moon" by David Grann
This is a true crime story, covering murders of members of the Osage Nation in the 1920s. The Osage tribe, sequestered on a small parcel of land in remote Oklahoma, had become massively wealthy after the discovery of oil on their land, and used their mineral rights to become a sort of micro-petrostate. Each member of the tribe who had a “headright” received a regular payout as the results of profits on drilling leases, and this wealth made them the target of criminals, happy to exploit the racist system that the Osage still had to live under.
The bulk of the book focuses on a specific conspiracy masterminded by a prominent local rancher, that aimed to eliminate specific Osage Nation members so that their inheritance/payoffs passed into hands that he could control and profit from. The criminal enterprise would claim two dozen victims over the course of four years, and create a layer of misinformation, botched and sabotaged investigations, and obfuscation. Osage members were poisoned, shot, and blown up; and other members of the community died dramatically (for example) after declaring that they had information to bring the culprits to justice. Eventually, the Bureau of Investigation was brought in, and J. Edgar Hoover was given an impetus to solve the case in order to cover for a botched attempt to crack it open.
The Bureau of Investigation would later be reorganized as the FBI. Despite Hoover’s modernizing, bureaucratizing ambitions for the Bureau, the case was mostly resolved by old-school frontier lawmen (led by a former Texas ranger). Fortunately, Hoover’s insistence on proper recordkeeping meant that the case was well-documented; with these records complemented by the records kept by the micromanaging Office of Indian Affairs. Government surveillance may be intrusive and oppressive, but it is of considerable benefit to historians.
The first two-thirds of the book are basically a Law & Order story, as the criminals are unmasked and then dramatically brought to justice (with a nephew flipping on his mastermind uncle). However, I found the last segment of the book to be the most interesting, as it reveals that this exploitation was only a small part of the massive, systemic graft that the Osage faced. Government policies prevented many members of the tribe from directly accessing their money, requiring them to live under the financial management of appointed guardians, usually prominent white men. Osage history of this time, called the Reign of Terror, is littered with mysterious deaths, as tribal members of all ages were (presumably) dispatched at the hands of outsiders who had married or otherwise insinuated themselves into the community, and stood to make a profit from inheritance of the headrights. The FBI brought one criminal ring to justice, but there were dozens more unsolved murders or presumed murders in this timeframe (after the oil drilling began in 1907).
The Reign of Terror was just the latest in a series of systemic injustices that the Osage people faced, after having been driven from their ancestral land to this reservation, forced to educate their children in Christian schools, and not having adequate supplies provided until they dispensed with their communal and hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favor of subsistence farming and private property. These injustices echo down to the present day, as the writer documents with specific interviews and by relating his travels to the Osage lands. His historical investigations remind me of Midnight in Peking, another interwar murder story that posits a solution to a killing (or killings) that seems plausible when subject to historical investigation, but is ultimately unprovable and un-justiciable. It is clear, however, that law enforcement and federal leadership massively let down the Osage, regardless of the success story of the Bureau of Investigation’s successful investigation and prosecution.