Review: "Killers of the Flower Moon," David Grann

By Paul Carrier

For a book that runs to a mere 300+ pages, Killers of the Flower Moon covers a lot of territory, from the history of the Osage people to the discovery of oil on their reservation in Oklahoma, the subsequent “Osage Reign of Terror” that claimed the lives of many tribal members in the 1920s, and the birth of the modern FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. 

Among other topics.

But it’s one thing to keep several balls in the air at once, and quite another to do it well. That’s just what author David Grann accomplishes in this shocking, thoroughly reported, engrossing account of a conspiracy -- or, more likely, multiple conspiracies --  to rob the Osage of their oil rights in the most horrific, irreversible way possible: by killing them.

The Osage became so wealthy once oil began gushing from their land that it was said they were the richest group of people, per capita, in the world. Such wealth triggered jealousy and fueled greed among whites, leading to a series of murders. More than two dozen murders, and possibly hundreds of them. One family that was especially hard hit was that of Mollie (Kyle) Burkhart, an Osage who lost her mother and sisters — and came close to losing her own life  — in a conspiracy involving her white husband, Ernest Burkhart, and Burkhart’s uncle, William King Hale.

Killers of the Flower Moon takes so many shocking twists and turns that the reader — at least, this reader — muttered “oh my God!” more than a few times. Corruption and incompetence are rampant among local and state officials. Private eyes and government detectives come and go, without any real progress in solving the crimes. Juries are rigged. Doctors fabricate death certificates. Funeral homes race to bury victims before facts can come to light. Even prominent whites who try to help the tribe are murdered. All as more and more natives die.

The Osage victims are killed by various means — shootings, poisonings, explosives — and in multiple locations, initially suggesting to investigators that there is no lone assassin but rather multiple killers who have been hired to do the bidding of some mastermind.

As the death toll mounts. key documents and pieces of evidence disappear, or never turn up to begin with. Alleged witnesses to a bombing plot that killed one of Mollie’s sisters and her husband when their home blew up die under mysterious circumstances. When doctors perform an autopsy on another of Mollie’s sisters, who was shot in the back of the head, the doctors claim not to have found the bullet that killed her, even though there was no exit wound.

Tom White, a savvy and conscientious federal agent and former Texas Ranger whom Hoover assigns to salvage the bungled investigation, emerges as the right man in the right job at the right time. He discovers that the conspirators, as Grann puts it, “were not only erasing evidence—they were manufacturing it,” to mislead investigators into wasting their time pursuing bogus leads.

But White is not easily diverted, or not for long. Grann details how White and his team built their criminal cases against long odds. The author covers the resulting arrests and trials and the aftermath of the Osage massacre from the perspectives of White, Hoover and, of course, the Osage people.

Yet Grann does more than resurrect a crime spree that was unknown to most Americans before his book was published in 2017.  (There’s also a 2023 movie adaptation directed by Martin Scorsese.) Based on extensive research, Grann posits that the man who was clearly responsible for several of the killings was not behind all of them, and that “countless” Osage murders “were never investigated or classified as homicides.”

The Bureau of Investigation (as the FBI was then known) and the legal system provided justice in some cases. But not in many others.

 

Adding insult to injury, the Osage were poorly treated by the American government even before the Reign of Terror began. For many years, Grann explains, the federal government had a horrific system of “guardianship” that effectively treated many of the Osage people as incompetent to manage their own finances, giving sometimes unscrupulous whites the power to do so. Moreover, the law allowed anyone, including whites, to inherit an Osage’s share of oil revenues, which only encouraged whites to commit murder so they could line their own pockets.

This is a gripping example of a shameful episode from America’s past that never made it into the history books — until Grann rectified that omission. As Mary Jo Webb, whose Osage grandfather was yet another murder victim, told Grann when he visited her in Osage County: “This land is saturated with blood.”