David Grann uncovers the deadly conspiracy behind murders of oil-rich Osage tribe members | Rebroadcast

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

As we approach Native American Day In several states, we’re resharing this unforgettable conversation with author David Grann from our archives, killers of the Flower Moon.

Lee Rawles:

The Osage tribe was forced from the ancestral lands by the US government, but through shrewd and careful bargaining, they were able to retain the mineral rights to their new home in Osage County, Oklahoma. It turned out to be one of the largest oil fields in the world, but instead of ensuring the prosperity and safety of the tribe, the wealth of the Osage led them to be targeted for what was later known as the Reign of Terror. Welcome. My name is Lee Rawles, and this is the Modern Law Library. I’m here today with David Grann, the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, the Osage Murders, and the birth of the FBI. David, thank you so much for joining us.

David Grann:

Thank you for having me on the show.

Lee Rawles:

Now, David, can you tell me what brought you to this story? This is not anything I know that I was taught in school. How did you find out about these multiple murders of Osage tribe members in the 19 teens through the 1930s?

David Grann:

So yes, I first heard about the story back in 2011 from a historian, and I was pretty shocked that I had never heard of this case. I did not know that the Osage were among the wealthiest people in the world. I did not know that they had been serially murdered, and I did not know that the investigation would become one of the FBI’s first major homicide cases. So it was at that time I headed out to the Osage Nation in northeast Oklahoma and I made a visit to their museum. And when I was there, they had this enormous panoramic photograph on the wall. It was taken in 1924. It shows members of the Osage nation. I gathered with the white settlers. It looks like a very innocent pageant, but I noticed that a panel from the photograph was missing. And I asked the museum director what had happened to it, and she said it had contained a figure so frightening that she decided to remove it.

And she then pointed to that missing panel and she said the devil was standing right there. And the book really grew out of trying to understand who that figure was and the anguishing history it embodied. The museum director went down into the basement at one point and got a image of the missing panel, and it showed a man appearing out very critically from the edge of the photo. And it turned out he was one of the masterminds of many of the killings of the Osage for their oil money back during the early part of the 20th century.

Lee Rawles:

Now, to orient our readers, I think that we do sometimes hear about the Trail of Tears, which was the Cherokee Nation. The Osage had a slightly different journey, and many of their leaders were able to very candidly bargain with the US government. Now, they were facing really terrible odds. The government pretty much always wins, but people like James Big Heart, John Palmer, were able to do some things for the tribe so that they should not have been in such desperate straits. Can you talk a little bit about what made the Osage nations experience a little bit different than some of the other tribes in Oklahoma?

David Grann:

Yeah, sure. So the Osage had once dominated the central part of the country all the way from Kansas and Missouri to the edge of the Rockies in the early 18 hundreds. Thomas Jefferson then president, referred to them as the great nation. He actually met with the delegation of Osage chiefs in 1804 at the White House, and assured them that the country would treat them only as friends,

Lee Rawles:

Although he referred to them as my children. And this seems to be very creepy and to

David Grann:

Paternalistic.

Lee Rawles:

Yes, very paternalistic and foretelling of how the US government would look at these people, these grown

David Grann:

Adults. Exactly. It showed the sense of paternalism that often conceal the real hand of coercion as the Osage would quickly learn as within just a few years, he began to push them off their land. Within a few decades, they were forced to seed more than a hundred million acres of their ancestral land. They were confined eventually to a reservation in Kansas, and then in the 1860s were under siege once more. And it was then that an Osage chief, when they were searching for new homeland, stood up and said they should move to this land. That was then in Indian territory, would later become Oklahoma because the land was hilly and Rocky and infertile. And he said, the white man would finally leave us alone, so my people should move there. And so they did. And they actually purchased their land. They had a deed to this land.

It was about the size of Delaware. Most whites considered this area worthless at the time, and they resettled there. There was only about 2000 of them left the forced migrations and diseases from white men’s diseases massacres that taken a tremendous toll on them. And they resettled there on the seemingly forsaken land. And then lo and behold, it turned out to be sitting upon these enormous deposits of oil, and they began to become within a few years the wealthiest people per capita in the world. In 1923, that year alone, that’s 2000 or so Osage, received collectively what would be worth today more than $400 million. And they lived in mansions and they had servants, many of whom were white. It was set at the time, whereas one America might own a car, each Osage owned 11 of them. And this provoked because of prejudice, because of envy, because of scapegoating, because their lies belied, longstanding stereotypes of Native Americans, all sorts of strange reactions, paternalistic reactions, racist reactions towards the Os C because of their money.

And the white government went so far as to appoint guardians, white guardians to help manage the Osage. Well, and it gets back to that same comment you said about Thomas Jefferson. It was somehow assumed the Osage couldn’t handle their money, which was outrageous. And this really was a racist system. It was based on the quantum of Osage blood. If you were a full-blooded Osage, you were deemed incompetent and given a white guardian, so you could be a great chief who led a nation and suddenly have someone telling you where you can buy a car or what kind of toothpaste. A chief at that time literally set up and said, we are not children. We are men. And this is an injustice. And this system also led to a criminal enterprise where many guardians ended up stealing and swindling millions of dollars.

Lee Rawles:

Now that leads us into the character who dominates the beginning of the book. And this is a woman named Molly Burkhart, who in her own right seems like a very strong woman resourceful. But as the story opens, members of her family are dying. Can you tell me how Molly became sort of the center of this scandal in the center of your book?

David Grann:

Sure. I mean, Molly is a remarkable woman in many ways. She straddles not only two centuries, but two civilizations. She was born in the 1880s in a lodge speaking Osage, practicing Osage traditions as a young girl. She’s then forced to be uprooted by the federal government, forced to go to a Catholic boarding school where her blanket is removed from her back. She can no longer speak. Osage suddenly taught a bewildering new theology of the world. And then within a few decades, because of the money, she’s living in a mansion. She’s married to a white set from Texas, she has servants. And then one day in May of 1921, her older sister, Anna Brown, who lived nearby, disappeared. Molly looked everywhere for her. Her body was later found. About a week later in a ravine, she had been shot in the back of the head, and it was the first sign that Molly’s family was being targeted by a mysterious criminal conspiracy.

Not long after that, Molly’s mother gross, mysteriously sick, and within two weeks stops breathing and evidence would later suggest that she had been poisoned. Not long after that, Molly had another sister named Rita Smith. And one night, about three in the morning, Molly heard a loud explosion and she went to her window and she looked out in the direction of her sister’s house where Rita lived with Rita’s husband and a white maid. And there was nothing there except for an orange ball rising into the sky. Somebody had planted a bomb underneath the house killing Molly’s sister and everybody else who was in the house at the time. And it wasn’t just Molly’s family that was being systematically targeted one by one the Osage with oil money for being targeted and mysteriously killed through shootings poisoning and evenness bombing.

Lee Rawles:

Now, Molly didn’t take this just sitting down. She attempted to put out rewards for information. She attempted to hire private investigators, but was really receiving no help from the locals. How did the FBI become involved in this case?

David Grann:

Yeah, well, I’m glad you mentioned that because I think one of the things that’s remarkable about Molly is that she crusades for justice at a time when as a woman and as an Osage, her views are being discounted by the white authorities. And yet she perseveres. She issues rewards. She hires private detectives all the while a great peril to her own life. This is basically putting a bullseye on her, and yet she doesn’t stop crusading for justice. And in 1923, there was so much corruption and so much neglect of these cases. It was easy to tilt the skills of justice for the powerful, the justice system and much of the country, and particularly in this area, was rotten to the court. You could buy local law enforcement. There was suspicions that local law enforcement was conspiring in the crimes. And because of great prejudice, these cases were neglected.

And so the body just continued to pile up. And by 1923, Molly and other members of the tribe issued a tribal resolution asking and demanding for the federal authorities to send in investigators. By then, there had been officially more than two dozen murders of the Osage, and there were several other murders that a few people had tried to catch. The killer were themselves killed, including a lawyer who was thrown off a speeding train. And so it was then after that tribal resolution that the case wound up was then a very obscure branch of the Justice Department. It was known as the Bureau investigation. Of course, we would later come to know it and it would later be renamed the FBI. And that’s how the case finally wound up with the bureau. And the bureau you need to understand back then was a pretty ragtag organization just had a smattering of agents and field offices, and they did not have jurisdiction over many crimes that would change in the 1930s. And they really didn’t handle murder cases for the most part, but they had a jurisdiction over American Indian reservation. So this murder case fell to them, and it became one of the FBI’s first major homicide cases and one of the first major homicide cases of its new ambitious, secretive director Jay Edgar Hoover.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take a quick break here from our advertisers. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I guess I didn’t fully appreciate until reading your book how young Jay Edgar Hoover was when he took over control of the FBI. You have a picture of him in your book. He is 29. He looks like he’s just gone through puberty. I mean, he really does appear very young, but he already held a lot of power. And he sent a man who was a former Texas Ranger, Tom White to investigate. And Tom White’s search is sort of the core middle part of your book. And at this point in time as he’s coming into town, he’s told Molly is ill and doctors are attending to her, but she’s not getting better. What is he doing to try and figure out what’s gone on in this community?

David Grann:

Yeah, I mean, so the Bureau first received the case in 1923 and badly bungled it for two years. They failed to make any arrests. Not only that, they got a outlaw guy named Blackie out of jail. They hoped to use him as an informant, said he slipped away and robbed the bank and killed the police officer. And so Jer Hoover, who was 29, as she said at the time, he didn’t have the jowls. He didn’t look like a bulldog. He was the new director in 1924, is afraid of a scandal. And it’s hard to believe that the greatest most powerful bureaucrat in the history of this country was insecure about his position and power then. But he was, and it was in 1925 where he summoned this man, Tom White, an old frontier lawman from Texas, who in many ways is like Molly. He straddled two centuries.

He was born in a log cabin at a time when justice was often meted out by the barrel of a gun. By the 1920s, he’s wearing a suit and a fedora. He’s trying to learn how to use fingerprinting and handwriting analysis, which becomes an important part of the case. He has to file paperwork, which he can’t stand, and Hoover summons him to take over the case, essentially hoping to protect his own job. And White was a very experienced frontier lawman, and he puts together an undercover team. Some of the agents he recruits pose as cattlemen another poses as an insurance salesman and actually sells real policies. And perhaps most interestingly, he recruited to the team an American Indian agent. And there are no statistics at the time, but I think it’s fair to say that he was the only American Indian agent in Hoover’s bureau at the time, and they go in undercover. And they do, in many ways, it’s less like a criminal investigation than an espionage case. There are moles, there are double agents, there’s fears of a triple agent. The reports are leaked, they are followed. It is impossible to know who to trust. They begin to get a sense that there are many conspirators, but ultimately what they do is follow the money.

Lee Rawles:

Now, I don’t want to ruin the book and the pacing for any of our listeners who want to pick up killers of the Flower Moon. So I don’t want to reveal too much of what was eventually discovered. But what they do know is that some of the people involved, some of the white people involved, had actually married into the Osage families with the explicit purpose or later developed the purpose of defrauding them, killing them, and inheriting the head rights and taking the money. When you go today and are speaking to people from the Osage nation, that’s such a complicated family history to have because these couples had children and the children have to reckon with one side of their family had plotted to kill the other, or these deaths were so mysterious. Oh, did he just drink himself to death? Did someone poison poisonous whiskey? Was that an accidental shooting? I mean, all of these uncertainties must weigh on the people of the Osage nation. What did you discover when you went to report the story?

David Grann:

Yeah, so I mean, these were actually said deeply intimate crimes, and it had to do with the complicated way in which you could get the oil bunny. And so it involved marrying into families. It involved betraying the very people you pretended to love. The victims discovered in many cases that the people who they felt loved them and calculating for years applauding to kill them, you had perpetrators and victims living in these same houses and these houses of secrets. I tracked down Molly Burkhart’s granddaughter, a lovely woman named Margie, and she told me the effects it had on her family, what it was like to go out without cousins and aunts, what it was like for her father to know that he had lived in such a house. She had showed me a picture, a photograph that probably was Molly’s, and it showed the two children in the house, and yet it showed the father ripped out of the picture. And I just thought that picture told you so much pain that this picture that should have been an ordinary family was so anguishing that someone had ripped out a member of the family who was a perpetrator. And when you speak to so many of the Os H today who have lived with these doubts or have lived with the consequences of losing relatives, losing money and their fortunes that were swindled from them, you get a real sense of how this is living history and how it still reverberates to this day.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take another quick break to hear from our advertisers. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles. You say that back in the 1920s, the tribe had dwindled to some 2000, 3000 people. How are the Osage doing today? What are the numbers and do people still live in the area?

David Grann:

Yeah, I’m glad you asked that because I think it’s really important to underscore how resilient the OS CH are. And they’re a very vibrant nation to this day. In the area of OS H County where the old reservation was, they have about 4,000 os Osage living there. And altogether they have about 20,000 members of their nation. They have their own democratic institutions. And so those 20,000 vote and participate, they have their own court system. They’ve taken many measures to protect themselves. They have found other sources and revenues of income, including casinos that help with education and health benefits. And as one Osage lawyer told me, she said, we were victims of these crimes, but we do not live as victims. And I think that’s a very important point to convey.

Lee Rawles:

Well, David, what do you think your next project will be, and do you have any other books that you think that our listeners would also like to check out aside from Killers of the Flower Moon?

David Grann:

Sure. So my first book was called The Velocity of Z, and that just came out as a movie recently as well, and it’s very different, but it’s about a British explorer, the last of the terrestrial explorers who mapped the Amazon and began to believe there was an ancient civilization there and set out with his son in 1925 to find it and disappeared. And it’s a lot about the question of if there was an ancient civilization in the Amazon, it would really transform our understanding of what the Americas look like before Columbus. It also deals with a lot of racial prejudice because of attitudes and assumptions about indigenous societies in the Amazon. The listeners may be interested in that. And I’m a writer at the New Yorker and I’m working on a magazine story on something a little bit lighter at the moment, but I’m also looking for a new book idea. So if anybody has one, feel free to reach out to me. You can contact me through my [email protected] or on Twitter at David Grand.

Lee Rawles:

Well, David, thank you so much for joining us, and readers can pick up your book, killers of the Flower Moon, the Osage Murders, and the birth of the FBI believe in Prince and ebook ands book, which is how I listen to it as well on commute. So paid for a great commute. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode of the Modern Law Library, please rate review and subscribe on iTunes or whatever your favorite podcast service is.