Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

[cornerofmadness]

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wanted to rate this higher because it is obvious just how much research was done for this. However, Grann also felt the need to jam every detail into this (plus a few no one could know in an effort to make it more novel-like I'd guess, like how someone's paunch moved, or eyes glinted etc). I get it. He wanted us to really know all the players in this story. On the other hand, it slowed everything down (Like having to wade through Agent White's entire life story).

Long story short, this is an interesting topic one you rarely hear about. The Osage tribe was one of the wealthiest groups of people full stop in the 1920s because they had a savvy lawyer who kept their mineral rights when the US government was stripping them of the land that had been their ancestral homes and otherwise treating them like sub-human garbage (like all the other Indigenous groups). So when oil was struck in what looked like the junk land the Osage were the ones reaping the benefits, not the Whites. It upset the White populace in the area so much that the Osage were rich (and in fact employing White servants) that a subsection of them devised various ways to fix that situation.

One was horrifically legal. I wasn't kidding about the sub-human comment. The US Government had ruled that the Native Americans were too child-like and dumb to manage money so every Osage owning oil rights had to have a White man in charge of his money so naturally many never gave the Osage any money, regulated everything down to what they could buy to eat with that money and mostly just outrightly stole it. And still that was not enough. A few had decided to straight up kill the Osage to inherit the headrights to the oil and/or get the life insurance on them.

This follows Mollie Burkhardt and her family especially her sister Anne and her husband Ernest and his uncle William Hale, the benefactor of the local Natives and a law unto himself as far as the town was concerned. The Osage were dying of poison, being shot and even having their homes blown up. Hale started an investigation but only he seemed to be immune to the violence as investigators and people trying to legislate to help the Osage ended up brutally dead.

Eventually the newly formed FBI steps in and Hoover sends in Agent White who is an outsider to the town which is a good thing given the sheer amount of collusion and corruption.

There are plenty of twists and turns but it seriously could have benefitted from trimming it down. What I did love and maybe it's because it falls more to the side of history book vs true crime that it doesn't follow the true crime format of having the pictures just randomly jammed in the center of the book. They are dispersed throughout and that is wonderful. Also just how many pictures exist of these people in 1920 speaks to how rich they were. My family was immigrating here at that time and maybe one or two pictures exist because they were so expensive. There is a crap ton of pics.

I liked it but yeah, really could have stood to loose all the overwhelming piddly details.



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Comments

[under_the_silk_tree]

That book sounds really interesting. I have never heard of this portion of history unsurprisingly not a lot of Native American history was taught at school.

[cornerofmadness]

It was. It definitely needed to be edited down though. We didn't need the every little detail of everyone. I could have slashed out 100 pages easily and not lost much. I do like it though