Killers of the Flower Moon: Chapters 22–26

We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw...

We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw...

...we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.

...we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.

Like most Americans, when I was in school, I never read about the murders in any books; it was as if these crimes had been excised from history.

To accommodate the dances, the Osage had erected, amid the encroaching wilderness, a pavilion, with a mushroom-shaped metal roof and a circular earth floor surrounded by concentric rows of wooden benches.

The Kansas City Times, in an editorial, said, “The parole of Ernest Burkhart from the Oklahoma state penitentiary recalls what was possibly the most remarkable murder case in the history of the Southwest—the wholesale slaying of Osage Indians for their oil headrights…"

The freeing of a principal in so cold-blooded a plot, after serving little more than a decade of a life sentence, seems to reveal one of the besetting weaknesses of the parole system.

Barred from returning to Oklahoma, he had initially gone to work on a sheep farm in New Mexico, earning $75 a month. A reporter noted at the time, “It will be a far cry from the days of affluence as the husband of an oil-rich Osage Indian woman.”

We got out of the car, and Margie paused in front of a tombstone bearing Mollie Burkhart’s name. The epitaph said, “She was a kind and affectionate wife and a fond mother and a friend to all.”

We seemed to be driving aimlessly, riding up and down over the undulating land, like a ship adrift in the waves.

In the distance was a ravine and, at the bottom, a meandering creek.

Although still officially a town, it seemed on the verge of oblivion. Year by year, its population had shrunk; now it was fewer than fourteen hundred.

Hale relied on others to do his bloodletting, but there was no evidence that Hale’s usual coterie of henchmen—including Bryan Burkhart, Asa Kirby, John Ramsey, and Kelsie Morrison—had trailed McBride to the nation’s capital or were with Vaughan on the train.

But there was a man who’d embezzled money from Grandpa Vaughan’s estate after he died and whom Rosa then sued in civil court.

At first glance, the dispute, which began in 1923, seemed mundane.

Census records indicate that by 1910 he had moved to Pawhuska, apparently one of the legions of acquisitive, dreaming, desperate settlers.

A 1926 photograph shows him dressed in the same style as Hale, with a sharp suit and a hat—an itinerant farmer’s son transformed into a respectable businessman.

Burt employed bizarre accounting methods in order to conceal his fleecing of the Osage.

Partway through the story, it mentioned that Burt had boarded the train with Vaughan in Oklahoma City and was on the journey when Vaughan disappeared from his berth.

She explained that Hale had sent the letter from prison to a member of the tribe and that not long ago a descendant had donated it to the museum. As I read through the letter, I was struck by the buoyant tone.

Because the Whitehorn case was officially unresolved, I expected the trails of evidence to disappear into a morass.

In fact, the reports were bracing in their clarity. Based on leads from informants and from circumstantial evidence, the private detectives began to develop a crystalline theory of the crime.

Then a man named J. J. Faulkner—whom an agent called an “unprincipled, hypocritical crook”—insinuated himself into Hattie’s life, evidently blackmailing her with information that she’d shared with him about her role in the murder.

Yet, in hindsight, the fact that Hale appeared to have played no role in the Whitehorn plot was the very reason the killing was so important. Like the suspicious death of Red Corn’s grandfather, the plot against Whitehorn—and the failed plot against his widow—exposed the secret history of the Reign of Terror: the evil of Hale was not an anomaly.

Citing the terms of the 1906 Allotment Act, the suit alleged that because the company had excavated limestone and other minerals while building the foundations for the turbines, it needed the Osage’s approval to continue operations. Otherwise, Enel was violating the Osage’s sovereignty over their underground reservation.

Middleton’s sentence was commuted to life. Then, after he had served only six and a half years, he was pardoned by the governor of Texas; Middleton had a girlfriend, and Lewis’s family believed that she had bribed authorities.

These cases underscored that the murders of the Osage for their headrights were not the result of a single conspiracy orchestrated by Hale.

In her case, the government official interceded, and she survived.

Other observers in Osage County noted that suspicious deaths were routinely, and falsely, attributed to “consumption,” “wasting illness,” or “causes unknown.”

Louis F. Burns, the eminent historian of the Osage, observed, “I don’t know of a single Osage family which didn’t lose at least one family member because of the headrights.”

Tillie confided to her lawyer that she wanted to prevent Morrison from inheriting her estate and to rescind his guardianship of her children.

An Osage scholar once observed, “Walking through an Osage cemetery and seeing the gravestones that show the inordinate numbers of young people who died in the period is chilling.”

Marvin Stepson had the judicious air of someone who had spent his whole career serving the law.

He also managed, on behalf of Mollie’s family, the team of private eyes that conspicuously never cracked any of the cases.