Review: Vivien Horler
Killers of the Flower Moon – Oil, money, murder and the birth of the FBI, by David Grann (Simon& Schuster)
While few people would condone murder, many might understand how it could be committed in the heat of the moment. But to plan and arrange a series of killings over a number of years, of people who were fond of you, with an eye on the main prize, seems particularly abhorrent.
This is at the centre of an extraordinary tale of greed and utter ruthlessness affecting members of the Native American Osage people in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the early 1920s.
The baddie behind the tale that unfolds in this book is a white man, William Hale, a businessman and cattleman of wide interests, and a respected reserve sheriff. He is considered by many Osage people as a benefactor.
Hale wasn’t the only baddie in Osage County at the time, but he is at the centre of David Grann’s story. The background is that in the 1870s the Osage people were kicked out of Kansas and were settled on a reservation on what was thought to be a worthless tract of tract of land in Oklahoma. Several decades later it was discovered the reservation was above one of the richest oil fields in the US.
For access access to the oil, prospectors paid the Osage for leases and royalties, and this meant the tribe became enormously rich. In 1923 alone, they received more than $30million, the equivalent today of more than $400m. Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita the world.
One of them was Mollie Burkhart, a registered member of the tribe. This gave her headright to the oil riches. Headrights could not be sold, but they could be inherited.
Mollie was married to Ernest Burkhart, a white man, who happened to be Hale’s nephew – handy that, since if Mollie died, Ernest would inherit her headright. But Hale’s plan was much more complicated than that.
One of the first to die was Anna Brown, Mollie’s older sister. Her body was found, slumped beside a creek, with a bullet wound to the head. Mollie was determined to find out who was responsible, but the white authorities weren’t that concerned about a “dead Injun” – even a rich one. So Mollie turned to Hale. He understood how the white justice system worked, and he would help.
Anna had left her headright to her mother, Lizzie, who died soon afterwards. Lizzie also inherited the headright of another daughter, Minnie, who had died three years earlier of “a wasting disease” (or poison) – so she now held three headrights.
Mollie stood to inherit the headrights of her sisters and her mother. Then her remaining sister, Rita, and her husband, died in an explosion at their home.
Were Mollie to die, her heirs would inherit, principally Ernest. And Ernest was the beloved nephew of Hale.
There was more – the guardianship system. The racist regime of the time believed Native Americans did not have the mental capacity to manage their own affairs, so many had “guardians”. A bit like trustees in a trust, these were the people who had to give permission for the Osage to draw the money due to them.
Hale was a guardian. Grann, in his investigation into this amazing story, began to scour the records. Many guardians had more than one ward, and many of those ended up dead. Scott Mathis, owner of the Big Hill Trading Company, had been the guardian of nine Osage, including Mollie’s sister Anna and her mother Lizzie. Altogether seven of Mathis’s listed wards died young, and at least two of the deaths were known to be murders.
As Grann investigated, he found wards were dying in droves. “The numbers were staggering and clearly defied a natural death rate. Because most of these cases had never been investigated, it was impossible to deterimine how many of the deaths were suspicious, let alone who might be responsible for any foul play. Nevertheless…”
One of the heroes of this story is Tom White, an old-style lawman of the fledgling FBI who was appointed by J Edgar Hoover himself to investigate the Osage cases. His work led to a number of people landing up in jail.
The network of conspirators included leaders of society, local doctors and hitmen. It is a terrifying truth that when a society becomes corrupt, it becomes totally rotten. South Africans have personal experience of this.
In the early part of this century, Grann, a staff writer at the New Yorker, stumbled on a reference to the murders, and became fascinated, wanting to fill in the gaps in the FBI’s investigation. He also went to Osage country, where he met Margie Burkhart, granddaughter of Mollie and Ernest. He combed through records, both federal and local.
The result is this remarkable story of evil, wickedness, corruption and the stirling efforts of a few good people.
The book was first published in the US in 2017, and has now been republished to coincide with the Martin Scorsese film of the same name, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone.
How Scorsese has managed to cram the labyrinthine story into a film, even a three-hour one, is hard to imagine. I was talking about the book to a friend who had seen the movie, and she said she hadn’t understood the backstory that I referred to.
Still it sounds like a terrific film which I’m looking forward to see. At least I’ll know what is going on.
- Killers of the Flower Moon was one of Exclusive Books’s top January reads.