Killers of the Flower Moon: Chapters 5–7

Yet from the outset the fascination with private detectives was mixed with aversion. They were untrained and unregulated and often had criminal records themselves. Beholden to paying clients, they were widely seen as surreptitious figures who burglarized people’s secrets.

The U.S. government, contending that many Osage were unable to handle their money, had required the Office of Indian Affairs to determine which members of the tribe it considered capable of managing their trust funds.

Over the tribe’s vehement objections, many Osage, including Lizzie and Anna, were deemed “incompetent” and were forced to have a local white guardian overseeing and authorizing all of their spending, down to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store.

Though dubbed a “front-page detective” for his incessant self-promotion, he had an impressive track record, including catching those responsible for the 1910 bombing of the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, which killed twenty people.

The New York Times called Burns “perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius, whom this country has produced,” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave him the moniker he longed for: “America’s Sherlock Holmes.”

Unlike Sherlock Holmes, though, Burns had rigged juries, and allegedly kidnapped a suspect, and he routinely used the sordid techniques of imperial spies.

The private detectives, though, struggled to corroborate the informant’s story.

At the time, statutes governing electronic surveillance were nebulous, and Burns was an avid user of a Dictograph—a primitive listening device that could be concealed in anything from a clock to a chandelier.

But, as is so often the case with surveillance, the rush of excitement gave way to the tediousness of other people’s inner lives, and the private detectives eventually stopped bothering to jot down the innocuous details that they overheard.

Some locals thought that Comstock, with his aquiline nose and tan complexion, might be part American Indian—an impression that he did little to discourage as he built up his legal practice.

Authorities, upon examining the body, believed that someone he met during his excursion had slipped him a dose of poison, possibly strychnine—a bitter white alkaloid that, according to a nineteenth-century medical treatise, was “endowed with more destructive energy” than virtually any other poison.

The next morning, McBride’s body was found in a culvert in Maryland.

Since the auctions had begun, in 1912, only a portion of Osage County’s vast underground reservation had been opened to drilling, while the bidding for a single lease, which typically covered a 160-acre tract, had skyrocketed.

In 1923, the Daily Oklahoman said, “Brewster, the hero of the story, ‘Brewster’s Millions,’ was driven almost to nervous prostration in trying to spend $1,000,000 in one year. Had Brewster been in Oklahoma...he could have spent $1,000,000 with just one little nod of his head.”

Because the least valued oil leases were offered first, the barons usually lingered in the back, leaving the initial bidding to upstarts.

Some of them had begun to use their clout to bend the course of history. In 1920, Sinclair, Marland, and other oilmen helped finance the successful presidential bid of Warren Harding.

A reporter said, “Veterans of the New York Stock Exchange have witnessed no more thrilling scramble of humanity than the struggling group of oil men of state and national repute throw themselves into the fray to get at the choice tracts.”

He was representing a consortium of interests that included Frank Phillips and Skelly—the old adversaries now allies.

Travel magazine wrote, “The Osage Indian is today the prince of spendthrifts. Judged by his improvidence, the Prodigal Son was simply a frugal person with an inherent fondness for husks.”

Certainly during the Roaring Twenties, a time marked by what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history,” the Osage were not alone in their profligacy.

After a stint in politics, he tried to discover another gusher but failed.

Another famed oilman in Oklahoma quickly burned through $50 million and ended up destitute.

In practice, the decision to appoint a guardian—to render an American Indian, in effect, a half citizen—was nearly always based on the quantum of Indian blood in the property holder, or what a state supreme court justice referred to as “racial weakness.”

Full of fire and brimstone, he declared, “I have visited and worked in and about most of the cities of our country, and am more or less familiar with their filthy sores and iniquitous cesspools. Yet I never wholly appreciated the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose sins and vices proved their undoing and their downfall, until I visited this Indian nation.”

A few congressmen and witnesses tried to mitigate the scapegoating of the Osage.

But in 1921, just as the government had once adopted a ration system to pay the Osage for seized land—just as it always seemed to turn its gospel of enlightenment into a hammer of coercion—Congress implemented even more draconian legislation controlling how the Osage could spend their money.

The Osage found themselves surrounded by predators—“a flock of buzzards,” as one member of the tribe complained at a council meeting. Venal local officials sought to devour the Osage’s fortunes.

Stickup men were out to rob their bank accounts. Merchants demanded that the Osage pay “special”—that is, inflated—prices. Unscrupulous accountants and lawyers tried to exploit full-blooded Osage’s ill-defined legal status.

One day, two men were out hunting four miles northwest of Fairfax when they spotted a car at the bottom of a rocky swale.

Roan asked him if he could borrow a few dollars; he was still morose about his wife, and he wanted to get a drink of moon liquor.

Once more, the macabre rituals began.

Because the marriage had been contracted according to Osage custom, there was no need for a legal divorce, and they simply went their own ways. Still, they remained bound by a memory of a fleeting intimacy that had apparently ended with no bitterness and perhaps even some hidden warmth.

Ever, throughout the voyage of life, this precept keep in view:
“Do unto others as thou wouldst that they should do to you."

Travel in any direction that you will from Pawhuska and you will notice at night Osage Indian homes outlined with electric lights, which a stranger in the country might conclude to be an ostentatious display of oil wealth.

But the lights are burned, as every Osage knows, as protection against the stealthy approach of a grim specter—an unseen hand—that has laid a blight upon the Osage land and converted the broad acres, which other Indian tribes enviously regard as a demi-paradise, into a Golgotha and field of dead men’s skulls….

A large wooden house and a barn loomed before them, and hidden in the surrounding woods were five-hundred-gallon copper stills. Grammer had set up his own private power plant so that his gangs could work all day and all night—the furtive light of the moon no longer needed to manufacture moonshine.

Closer to the blast, doors on houses were smashed and torn asunder; wooden beams cracked like bones.

Many Osage had come to believe that local authorities were colluding with the killers and that only an outside force like Davis could cut through the corruption and solve the growing number of cases.

Amid this garish corruption, W. W. Vaughan, a fifty-four-year-old attorney who lived in Pawhuska, tried to act with decency.

When the bombing occurred, Hale had been in Texas, and he now saw the charred detritus of the house, which resembled a wreckage of war—“a horrible monument,” as one investigator called it.