In the 1920s, the Osage were considered the richest people per capita in the world, thanks to oil wells on their land. But in the early 1920s, about two dozen tribal members were killed mysteriously. Author David Grann delves into those deaths and the conspiracy behind them in his book “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.” Host Geoff Norcross spoke with Grann in 2017 in front of an audience at the Portland Book Festival.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Americans seem to have an obsession with true crime stories right now. Well, this story is one for the ages. It has murder, good guys, bad guys, sometimes it’s hard to tell who is who. It’s got political and familial intrigue and towering sums of money. The story is told by the author David Grann in his book “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It’s about the murder of Osage Indians in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Geoff Norcross sat down with David Grann in front of an audience at the Portland Book Festival.
Geoff Norcross: David, how did you hear about this story?
David Grann: I first heard about this story - my memory’s getting dodgy these days - but I think it was 2011. I was in conversation with an historian who mentioned it to me and I began to look into it. And I then made a trip out to the Osage Nation in Northeast Oklahoma shortly after. And I visited the Osage Nation Museum. For those of you who have read the book or get the book, you’ll see this across the title page, this photograph, and I saw that photograph in the museum. It went across the entire wall. It was taken in 1924. It showed members of the Osage Nation along with white settlers and it looked extremely innocent. And I noticed that a portion of the photograph, though, had been cut out. I asked the museum director what had happened to it, and she had said it contained a figure so frightening that she decided to remove it. She then pointed to that missing panel and she said the devil was standing right there. The book really grew out of trying to understand who that figure was and the anguishing history he embodied. It led me to what I would come to realize was one of the most sinister crimes in American history and one that I believe tells a much larger story about this country.
Norcross: Who was the devil?
Grann: The devil, it turned out, was a very prominent white settler. She actually then went down into the basement and pulled up the image of that missing panel. She had it and peering out creepily, I could see it was one of the figures who was behind many of the killings of the Osage. He was the so-called ‘devil.’
Norcross: Had you not heard this story before?
Grann: No, I had never heard about it. And what’s so striking to me, it’s very rare in research [to] encounter a metaphor that is also almost literal. So when I saw that photograph, I realized in speaking to the Osage, that photograph had been removed not because they had forgotten what happened, but because they can’t forget what happened. And yet so many Americans, and I include myself 100% among them, knew nothing about this part of our history. It had been erased from our conscious[ness], it had been neglected, it had not been written about, it had been forgotten. When people often ask me why I wrote the book, one of the main answers was to address my own ignorance.
Norcross: Why do you think that is? Why do you think it was scrubbed?
Grann: I think a large reason was because this is a story about a very sinister crime perpetrated against the Osage, who in the early 20th century were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world because of oil under their land. They then began to be murdered one by one; there were poisonings, there was bombings, there were shootings. Many of the victims at the time were ignored because they were Native Americans and I think this part of our history was often ignored or marginalized, obviously outside of the Osage, because it was essentially a Native American story. And when it was told, it would be told from Hoover’s point of view, the way he would want to mythologize the case and leave out the whole fabric of the story.
Norcross: We’ll get to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover’s involvement in all this a little bit later on.
1920s Oklahoma and the Osage lands. Can you set the stage for us? What was it like?
Grann: I’m a city kid. Very odd to go out to the prairie, in this part of Oklahoma. It wasn’t that long ago; we’re talking about the early 20th century. But let me just take one more step back and just tell you quickly a little bit about the Osage so you will understand where we’re talking about and why they were there.
The Osage once controlled much of the central part of this country, all the way from Kansas out to the edge of the Rockies. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson, as president, referred to them as the Great Nation. And several Osage actually went to Washington D.C. and went to the White House and met with Jefferson. He assured them that the federal government would treat them only as friends and benefactors, and then of course within a short span of time they began to be driven off their land. Within a few decades they were forced to cede more than 100 million acres of their ancestral land and they were confined to a reservation in Kansas, where once more they were under siege.
In 1870, they were forced to sell that land to be removed again. And it was then that this Osage chief stood up and he said, we should move to what was then Indian territory, that would later become part of Oklahoma, and he said we should move there because the land was rocky and hilly and infertile. [It] wasn’t good for agriculture and the white man considered it essentially worthless. [He thought] ‘my people will finally be happy in this land, we will be left alone.’ So they went and resettled there. By then, the forced migrations had taken a tremendous toll on the Osage, there were only a few thousand of them. Then lo and behold, the seemingly forsaken land turned out to be sitting upon some of the largest deposits of oil then in the United States.
By the early 1900s, the Osage - these 2,000 or so on the tribal roll - began to receive quarterly checks for the money that was used to pay for leases and royalties. And by 1923, just to give you a sense, they received what would be worth today, more than $400 million. So they were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world. This prairie became these wild boom towns, and it was said at the time, whereas one American might own a car, each Osage owned 11 of them. The wealth of the Osage provoked all sorts of perplexing reactions from white Americans across the country.
Norcross: How do they come to actually own the mineral rights under the land? This was unusual for an Indian tribe at the time, wasn’t it?
Grann: Yes, this is a really important question, an important part of the story. In 1906, the U.S. government forced upon the Osage the culmination of its very brutal assimilation campaign, which was known as allotment. I don’t know how many people here are familiar with allotment, but allotment was essentially a policy to break up Native American communal lands. It was done, in theory, to turn them into private property owners. It was also done, not incidentally, to make it much easier for whites to procure their land.
When the Osage were negotiating though with the federal government, they had more leverage than many other American Indian nations, partly because 1) they own their land. They actually had a deed to it. 2) Oklahoma was in a big race to become a state and the Osage were the last to be allotted, and 3) they were led by one of the greatest chiefs at the time: the man who spoke seven languages, including French, Sioux and Latin. And when they were negotiating with the U.S. government, they managed to insert into their negotiations, into the treaty, what at the time seemed like a very curious provision. What it said was that ‘we shall maintain all the subsurface mineral rights to our land.’
Norcross: Forever and ever.
Grann: Forever and ever, in perpetuity. Now, nobody at the time knew the Osage were sitting upon a fortune of oil. Those say that some sensed there was some oil under their land, but just a trickle at that point. They very shrewdly managed to hold on to this very last realm of their territory, a realm they could not even see. After allotment, the surface territory, like so many Native American nations after allotment, disappeared into the hands mostly of whites. But the Osage maintained control of that whole subsurface territory. Each Osage was essentially granted what was called the head right which was a share in this mineral trust. And a head right could not be bought or sold, it could only be inherited. So the Osage maintained control of this underground area about the size of Delaware. They had become the world’s first underground reservation.
Norcross: How does the money start coming?
Grann: The oil boom began not long after allotment and there was such a demand for oil as more deposits were discovered, that the Osage would hold auctions for leases. They would be held under this elm tree. So many of the oil barons whose names are still familiar to this day would attend. J.P. Getty and his family first struck oil in Osage territory. That was where they first hit oil, where their money first came from. E.W. Marlin would attend. The Phillips brothers from Conoco, Harry Sinclair. They would gather under this elm tree and bid on these leases and a lease could sell for as much as $2,000. And so the elm tree became known as the ‘million dollar elm tree.’
Norcross: And when the money came to the Osage, what happened then?
Grann: The Osage obviously had a tremendous amount of money and it provoked all sorts of reactions. Reporters would travel out to Osage territory and regale the readers about the Osage. They would refer to them as - again, I put these in quotes because the accounts reflect the prejudice of the day - the ‘red millionaires’ and the ‘plutocratic Osage with their terra cotta mansions on their chauffeured cars, their servants, many of whom were white.’
Norcross: Their servants were white?
Grann: Their servants are white. And you can see it in the text of newspaper reporters, because it belied long standing stereotypes of Native Americans that traced all the way back to the first contact. The U.S. Congress went so far as to pass legislation requiring many Osage to have white guardians to manage their wealth. So here you could be an Osage chief, the leader of a great nation with millions of dollars in your trust and you would have a white guardian telling you whether you could buy this car or that car or this toothpaste. This system was not abstractly racist, it was literally racist. It was based on the quantum of Osage blood. If you were a full blooded Osage, you were deemed ‘incompetent.’ And you were given one of these guardians and it wasn’t just racist. It also led to one of the largest state and federally sanctioned criminal enterprises, as many guardians swindled millions and millions of dollars.
Norcross: So millions of dollars of money, white guardianship of this money. It’s almost like the motives are going to start percolating up any minute now. So this is clearly not going to turn out well.
Grann: Yes. And then and very tragically, no. The Osage began to die under very mysterious and sinister circumstances. I write in the book a lot about a really remarkable woman and her family named Mollie Burkhart. Mollie was born in 1886 in a wigwam, speaking Osage, practicing Osage traditions. By the early 1920s, she was married to her white chauffeur. She lived in a mansion. She was speaking English. She straddled, in many ways, not only two centuries, but two civilizations.
Then one day in 1921 in May, her older sister disappears. Mollie looks everywhere for her. A week later she is found in a ravine, shot in the back of the head. It is the first hint and sign that her family, as well as the Osage, had become a prime target of a criminal conspiracy. Not long after that, Mollie’s mother grew increasingly and mysteriously sick, and within two months stopped breathing. Evidence would later indicate that she had been poisoned. So within two months, Mollie had lost her older sister and her mother.
Not long after that, Mollie had a younger sister named Rita, who was so terrified by these killings, she moved closer to town. One night, at about three in the morning, Mollie heard a loud explosion. She got up and she went to the window, she looked out in the direction of her younger sister’s house and all she could see was this large orange ball rising into the sky. It looked as if the sun had burst violently into the night and somebody had planted a bomb underneath the house, killing Mollie’s younger sister, her sister’s husband and an 18 year old maid who left behind two young children. And it was not just Mollie’s family, other Osage were being targeted, systematically murdered, one after the other.
Norcross: Can you tell me about the investigation of these murders, such as it was?
Grann: Yeah, such as it was is the key point. Mollie really crusaded for justice very bravely, but her complaints and others were ignored by many authorities because of prejudice, because the victims were Native Americans. And also it is shocking to the extent of how lawless this country still was back in the 1920s, and how pervasive corruption was among law enforcement, and how easy it was to tip the scales of justice. So these crimes went unresolved for years as the death toll climbed.
There were a few people who did try to investigate the case and they often ended up dead. There was a lawyer who was thrown off a speeding train. There was a man who went to Washington D.C. to try to get federal authorities to investigate. He checked into a boarding house. He carried with him a bible and a pistol. He received a telegram from an associate in Oklahoma that said, ‘Be careful’. That evening, he left the boarding house and at some point he was abducted. A burlap sack was wrapped over his head. His body was found in a culvert the next morning and he had been stabbed more than 20 times, beaten to death. And it was then that the Washington Post carried a headline saying what the Osage long knew, which was “Conspiracy to Kill Rich Indians”, the exact quote of the headline.
Norcross: Was that a revolutionary notion at the time, that the press actually sided with the Indians in their coverage?
Grann: The case was sometimes picked up and told in an almost lurid fashion in this kind of western story. What the press failed to do was to ever dig deeply into what was happening or to ever get closer to identifying who the perpetrators were or who was behind these killings.
Norcross: How did the FBI get involved?
Grann: In 1923, the official death toll climbed to more than two dozen. As I described in the book, the real death toll is much higher. The Osage issued a resolution asking for federal authorities to step in. And it was then that a very obscure branch of the Justice Department, then known as the Bureau of Investigation. And of course we would know it today as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The Bureau back then was a pretty ragtag operation [and] had only a smattering of agents. It had agents that weren’t authorized to make arrests. They weren’t allowed to carry guns.
Norcross: Really?
Grann: Yeah, they were not supposed to carry guns.
Norcross: What kind of authority did they have?
Grann: Well, if they wanted to make an arrest, they could investigate, but they would have to go to a local law enforcement person, like a sheriff or a police officer to actually make arrests. They couldn’t do it themselves.
Norcross: And how likely was the sheriff in Northeast Oklahoma to give that permission at that time?
Grann: Well, they might. But especially with a case like this, as the story will reveal, there was enormous local corruption within the law enforcement who were implicated in these cases. They had very limited jurisdiction over crimes back then, but they did have jurisdiction over American Indian reservations. And so this would become one of the FBI’s first major homicide investigations and one of the first major murder investigations by J. Edgar Hoover, who had just been appointed director at the age of 29.
Norcross: And how did they do?
Grann: They bungled the case initially, kind of astonishingly. Now the Bureau suffered from many of the same problems as law enforcement around the country with poor training, corruption. The Bureau had just come out of its own oil corruption scandal with the Teapot Dome. Initially they fail to make any arrests, for two years. They even got an outlaw, a guy named Blackie, out of jail, and they wanted to use him as an informant and instead he robbed a bank [laughing]. I shouldn’t laugh at this part, he killed the police officer. Hoover was terrified. It’s hard to believe, but Hoover was afraid that a scandal might end his career. Now we know that would not happen, he would become the most autocratic bureaucrat and powerful bureaucrat in the history of this country and go on for decades. But back then, by this time, he’d only been in office for a couple of years. The Teapot Dome had been a huge scandal implicating the Bureau. So he was very worried. It was then that he summoned a field agent - who I write a lot about in the book, along with Mollie Burkhart - a guy named Tom White, who comes from Texas and is assigned to take over the case.
Norcross: Tom White jumps out at me because it can be hard to find an honest actor in all of this. So he’s a rarity in this story.
Grann: Yes, he had a quiet goodness about him. So when he was summoned [to Washington D.C.] in 1925, he hears the new bossman, Hoover, wants to see him. So he shows up in Washington. He doesn’t know why he’s been summoned yet. Hoover had been getting rid of a lot of the old frontier lawmen. Tom White was a lot like Mollie in that he really straddled two centuries and reflects the transformation of the country, [he] came from a tribal family, a tribal community of lawmen. His father was a sheriff. All his brothers were lawmen, all former Texas Rangers. Tom White was a former Texas Ranger, practiced law at a time when justice was often meted out by the barrel of a smoking gun. When he gets to Washington, he could see a lot of these newer agents that are being hired. They were mostly lawyers and accountants, but they had almost no criminal experience. It was said by the old timers that they ‘typed faster than they shot.’ And so White goes up to see Hoover, and not to go off on too much of a side story, but Hoover was a weirdo.
Norcross: You don’t say.
Grann: He was very insecure about his stature. He was about my height, so I guess that’s kind of short and he used to keep a dias behind his desk to stand on. Taller agents were terrified to be summoned to Washington D.C. because if Hoover saw they were tall, he might fire them [laughing]. I’m not making any of this up. When White shows up, you have to understand he stands about 6′3″ and he’s wearing a cowboy hat in violation of contemporary protocols back then. Eventually, he realizes that he’s not there to be fired, but that Hoover needs him basically to save his own hide.
White decides to put together an undercover team, because of the danger. And among the most interesting operatives he recruits is an American Indian agent. Even though the bureau didn’t keep statistics, I think it’s fair to say he was the only American Indian in Hoover’s Bureau at the time. They go in undercover. There were these old frontier lawmen, most of them pose as cattlemen, one poses as an insurance salesman. And according to all the records, [he] sold actual policies. I have no idea what happened to those policies [laughing]. Somebody is still holding a bill of goods probably. And they go undercover, and that’s how the Bureau began its second investigation after the first disastrous one.
Norcross: Staying on the FBI for a little bit, a lot has been written about the agency over the last 100 years. I’m wondering how this experience with the Osage murders fits into that history of the Bureau?
Grann: What’s interesting about this period is you get to see Hoover and the Bureau at a very important stage that is often not told as much, which is really in its early formation. You get to see Hoover’s organizational genius. He professionalized the Bureau in many ways, requiring better education [and] brought in more scientific techniques. White is learning to do fingerprints. He’s gotta use handwriting analysis, which had never been done in the case. So these techniques are being adopted by the Bureau. Note taking becomes a huge part of the Bureau, which you see with the Comey case today. You see these elements, but you can also see Hoover’s megalomania, his secrecy, his ambition, in a very early stage that would then later on obviously have dramatic implications for the country.
Norcross: How do you tell a story like this that’s 100 years old, when so much of what you’re relying on in the official record is told from what is clearly a prejudiced point of view. How do you get the story right?
Grann: It’s a challenge in the sense of getting enough documentation and multiple perspectives to tell a story. And I think that’s true in any type of reporting. Even when there’s not just prejudice, there’s always biases and people telling stories, sometimes unintentionally, because it’s told from certain self interest or vantage points. Part of it was collecting as many records, uncensored records.
Norcross: How did you get them?
Grann: Through Freedom of Information Acts. So Freedom of Information Act, for those not familiar, you can basically file appeals for the release of documents. Interestingly enough, the Bureau’s documents were still censored. But I got someone in law enforcement to leak me the uncensored copies. And those reports tended to actually be fairly revealing because there was no understanding that they would ever be made public. They were the accounts of what happened from certain vantage points and you can quote them often to reveal the prejudice. One of the agents on the case is particularly prejudiced and you could see it in his reports and it clearly hindered the earlier investigation, and so that’s embedded in that.
The other thing I tried to do was to get the Osage perspective as much as I could, which was almost always neglected in the official accounts. I did that through going into Osage archives (not just the Bureau’s archives), family members, descendants, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and getting as many reports, oral histories, accounts, and trial and grand jury testimonies from them. And for me, one of the most interesting and powerful parts of the research was I tracked down descendants of both the murderers and the victims, many of whom still live in the same neighborhoods today.
One of the more moving experiences I had was interviewing a woman named Margie Burkhart, who is Mollie Burkhart’s granddaughter. She took me out to the graveyard over the prairie where so many of her ancestors were murdered and speaking to her, I got a real sense of how this is still living history now. How it still reverberates to this day.
Norcross: Do the Osage still speak about this amongst themselves? Do they tell their children about it?
Grann: It’s probably a mix and I’m always careful not to speak for others that I don’t know precisely the answers. I would say that in the Osage who I spoke to, it was mixed, in that for some it was just such a pain. They all know about it. So unlike other parts of the country, if you’re Osage, you know about the Osage murders. But the degree to which elders might have spoken about it varied. Some found it very traumatizing and didn’t talk about it, others did share it. I think it kind of ran the gamut, but this is still an anguishing part of history for many of them.
Norcross: I’m sure they would have been elderly, but did you talk to anybody who was actually there and had been through it?
Grann: I spoke to second generation whose parents had experienced, through their parents, these incidents. And I actually spoke to one little girl, I mean she was very old when I spoke to her, she was about 100. She had been a little girl at the time of the murders. She was a relative of Mollie Burkhart. She attended some of the funerals. One of the ways I describe in one of the chapters some of the funeral scenes, was through her account.
Norcross: And how much were you actually able to get what Mollie was feeling at the time?
Grann: Some through testimony that she gave, letters that she wrote. I wish there had been more, but I tried as best as I could. This is nonfiction; you write what you have. But I wanted, as best I could, to record her perspective. The first third of the book is told as close as possible from Mollie’s perspective, and I did that because it’s an Osage story, but in part also because, in other accounts, Mollie’s usually was just one sentence. And here was this woman at the very center of this conspiracy, her relatives are dying, she doesn’t know who to trust. So I thought it was really important to try to record that perspective.
Norcross: Tell us about the devil in this story: William Hale.
Grann: Hale was the uncle of the man who Mollie married. Like many white settlers, he showed up in Osage territory, a man with seemingly no past, no history, dirt poor. He then became a cattleman and bought up a lot of land. By the time of the 20s, he is probably the most powerful white man in the area. He was known as the ‘King of the Osage Hills,’ and it also turns out that he was plotting, over years, how to steal some of this oil fortune, and becomes really one of the masterminds of one of these plots, a plot that even after researching it for five years, is a little bit hard to fathom.
Norcross: What did he do?
Grann: He directed his nephew to marry into Mollie’s family, while then plotting, because these were inheritance schemes. Then systematically, with the help of henchmen, the complicity of Mollie’s husband, to systematically murder off the family members. It was a plot that played out over years and I think one of the things I try to underscore in the book is that the Bureau will focus on Hale. But when I began the book, I thought of this as a story about who did it. I thought about it [as] trying to understand who the devil was. And by the end of my research, I dismantled that whole original conception of the story I was going to tell, as the research began to reveal that this was really a story about who didn’t do it. And that there was a much deeper and darker conspiracy that the Bureau never exposed and that the devil really lurked in the hearts of many ordinary citizens.
Norcross: What kind of justice did William Hale come to, if any?
Grann: Hale was prosecuted. He was caught by the Bureau, by Tom White. He and his nephew, who married Mollie, were prosecuted. I think, if my memory serves, Hale did two decades of time and the fact he got out at all is pretty shocking. To this day, the Osage believe it was kind of the final chit of his political power, cashed in. Ernest served more time. But many, many others, as I tried to document in the book, escaped justice.
Norcross: Have you been back?
Grann: I have. For the five years I worked on the book, I would go every year and I would stay in a boarding house, in a room in a boarding house in Pawhuska. It’s one of the towns there. And I would usually go twice a year and stay for a month each time. After the book came out, for me, it was really important to go back there. I went to all the places I reported on, including some towns that only have a few hundred people at this point; they’re really ghost towns, because the oil money has dried up and the towns are just basically boarded up buildings. I had done a lot of reporting in those places and so I would go to these places and present the book to the Osage and to many of the people who helped me do the book. And I should say, I could not have done the book without the help of the Osage.
Norcross: Clearly. What kind of reaction are you getting from them?
Grann: They have been amazingly supportive. This is a wonderful event, but I don’t think I’ll ever have an event quite like I had when I went back to Osage Territory, where they had prepared a special dinner for me, up where they do the dances. I would attend their dances and they presented me with a blanket, which is honorific for someone, an outsider. I want the book to be part of all our history. And again, I’m always reluctant to speak for people. I don’t always ask people why they speak to me. You just speak to people, but I think the Osage understood that this should be part of our national consciousness. And hopefully the book helps at least inch away at that or carve away a little bit at that.
Norcross: Any questions?
Audience member: After you finish the story, you talk further about a number of the other guardians who had multiple fatalities while the Indians were in their ‘guardianship.’ Why would you speculate, or why would you know, that those deaths weren’t followed up as rigorously by the FBI or local authorities as Mollie’s group and Hale?
Grann: I think two things happen. The Bureau focused on Hale because [of] the murders. Hale, in a way, went on just a wild killing spree in the sense that it was spectacularly public; planting a bomb underneath someone’s house is not a quiet way of killing someone. And there’s reasons why he did that, which when you read the book, it was even more sinister why he chose certain means, at certain times. So the Bureau focused on that case and I think they got tunnel vision on that case and on Hale. And then Hoover was under a lot of pressure. He kind of wanted to declare victory, wrap up and go home. So the rest of these cases got closed prematurely. There were lots of these other murders being quietly perpetrated that were ignored. Does that make sense?
Norcross: Let’s talk a little bit about the process here. How long were you working on this book? How many papers? How many stacks of papers?
Grann: I worked on it a long time, longer than anything I’ve ever worked on. When I went to that museum and I saw that photograph, at that point I knew I wanted to tell the book. But then there was the question of, could I tell it? Not whether I wanted to. And that began years of FOIAs, of going to archives, doing family trees to find descendants of everybody to try to see if they might have private papers in their family, other histories that they might be able to share with me. It took about a good four years of really intensive work. I have a very tiny office and the office was filled by tens of thousands of documents by the time I finished, to the point where you could not walk to my desk [laughing]. And I will say the weight that lifted when I was able to finally pack those into crates and put them into a basement. So I can now walk to my desk.
Norcross: But what got left out of the story that just really didn’t feed it, that somehow got left?
Grann: Well, I would say what got left out of the story is one of the more disturbing parts, which is, I always thought that when there was an injustice that wasn’t prosecuted, where justice was not brought, that history can provide an accounting; it can record the voices of the victims and it can identify the perpetrators and that that becomes part of our memory. And I tried to do that as best I could in this story. In some cases, I even identified a new killer, at least based on the circumstantial evidence. But at least in many of the cases, so many people conspired, so much of the evidence has been covered up and the victims can no longer speak and the suspects are gone. And there are many cases where you have clues and pretty strong evidence of murder, but not enough evidence to be able to build the case around or to identify the perpetrators.
The part that got left out for me, which really changed my notion of history, is I always thought of history as the horror of what you know. And by the end of this book, I really thought of it as the horror of what you don’t know.
Norcross: It’s pretty clear that the writing of this book affected you. You take it personally.
Grann: I write about a lot of crime stories, but there was something about the breadth and the nature of these crimes, the combination of greed and prejudice, that took place in the heart of our country not that long ago. And when you meet the descendants, you realize just how much this history still reverberates. When I began the book, I began to collect photographs. And if you see the book’s photographs, I integrated photographs into the book in a way that I’d never done before. I’m really a writer, not a photographer, but I integrated photographs into the book archively. And also I had contemporary photographs as well, because I wanted it to be a work of documentation. And because it’s chasing history, you’re just chasing this ghost of history constantly. When I began the process, I gathered photographs of some of the victims I was writing about. So I had the picture of Mollie’s family members. It began with just a couple photographs, and by the end, I had just so many black and white stills of all these people and so it’s hard not to feel that burden or weight or part of your conscience, as you tell a story like this.
Norcross: Yeah. And of course there’s a larger history that we’ve been writing about: our government’s relationship with Native Americans and their relationship with European Americans as they pushed west. And those are hard truths and those are hard stories to tell and to hear. I’m wondering how this story fits into that whole canon?
Grann: There’s probably smarter people than I [that] could address some of these larger questions. Let’s just take a small thing like Standing Rock, because we’re familiar with that. I interviewed an Osage, a veteran who served in the U.S. Army as a scout, received a purple heart in Afghanistan, was wounded in the knee - I think it was Afghanistan, not Iraq. And during Standing Rock, he walked nearly the whole way from Oklahoma to North Dakota to participate in those demonstrations.
Norcross: This is to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline?
Grann: Yes, to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. And he told me that along the way he thought about the Osage killings. And even though these incidents are separated by almost 100 years, obviously the issues, the specifics are very different. The Sioux weren’t getting oil money, they were trying to protect their land, their environmental concerns and their sacred burial sites. But it was still at heart the same fundamental issue, which was the right of Native Americans to defend and control their own recess, resources and their own sovereignty. And so I think that small story just gives you a sense of how you can’t understand things like Standing Rock unless you understand stories like this. Obviously there are other stories in different forms like this that many other American Indian nations have, but I think it’s important to understand that. I don’t I don’t think you can understand our history unless you, unless we begin to reckon with this.
Similarly I don’t think you can understand what’s happening with the Bureau today and the norms that have evolved over time of trying to depoliticize political investigations, and how to have a national police force that’s not politicized unless we understand these parts of history. So I think we are born out of these experiences and we can’t understand where we are unless we understand where we came from.
Norcross: Another question from the audience.
Audience member: Can you talk about the title?
Norcross: Great question.
Grann: Yes. I tried to pick a title that nobody could ever say. That’s what my cute little 10 year old daughter told me. She said “Daddy, no one’s gonna be able to say that.” I picked the title because, as I was doing research, I learned that the Osage would name each month traditionally after a moon, the moon in the sky. And the month of May was known as the ‘Little Flower Killing Moon’ because during that month all these beautiful little prairie flowers, like little blue jets, spread across the prairie, it looks almost like confetti. I’ve been there. It’s quite beautiful, but it’s also during May that these larger plants come and steal their light and water and those little prairie flowers die. And it was in the month of May where Mollie’s older sister Anna disappeared, where the first kind of major murder took place. So that’s why I chose the title.
Norcross: People are really interested in procedure and they’re interested in the nuts and bolts in investigation. They’re interested in true crime. That’s good for you, isn’t it?
Grann: Yeah, I mean there is an interest. I write a lot about crime stories. I’ll say two things. They get at some very fundamental element of society, tearing apart of society, in some ways. And how do we address it? Crime and punishment are themes that go all the way back. I would say this, though, that there are very few crime stories that I will write about because, even though I do write about crime stories, I may read about them, but I’m not interested in spending years telling crimes that don’t hopefully illuminate something larger about society or get at something deeper. I’m not interested in, maybe people would disagree, trafficking in sensational crimes, if that makes any sense.
Norcross: But why do you think we are so obsessed now? What’s going on?
Grann: I think we live in incredibly bewildering times. And I think there is a desire with procedurals to make sense of the world. And I think that’s true with every crime. The reason we love Sherlock Holmes going all the way back over a century, is that he helps in a Superman way. He’s an intellectual Superman, and he pieces the world back together for us and makes the world livable. And I think there is, in these incredibly bewildering times, an enormous hunger for that. I would say that sometimes that leads to too easy answers, because none of us are Sherlock Holmes, and I think we sometimes need to grapple and live with the ambiguity.
Norcross: The balcony. Is there a question up there?
Audience member: You just indicated to us that you were honored by the Osage once the book came out. Did you get any reaction from the white community?
Grann: Yeah, that’s a great question. When you write a book, you’re worried about all sorts of reactions. You spend a lot of time trying to get things right, you’re ultimately beholden to the truth. That’s at least your goal, which means you’re really not beholden to particular individuals, which is always very difficult reporting. Even when you report about a lot of people you really like, but we’re not advocates, we’re trying to sift through to tell what we think is the most accurate portrayal of what happened.
Of course I was worried about some of the descendants, especially when I went back, who were the descendants of some of the murderers. For the most part, it was okay and I even got an email from a descendant of Hale - a great nephew - how ashamed as part of his history he was, and that if I saw the Osage, to please share that with them. And I did, when I went back, I shared that story, that email he sent me. I did an event in Tulsa where the audience was filled with descendants of the victims. Margie Burkhart was there. If you read the book, Henry Roans children, grandchildren were there, lots and lots of them. Then there was also a descendant of Hale who came and I had never met her before. She came up to me beforehand, Hale was the devil and she came up before me and told me who she was. And at the end, she asked the question and she didn’t say who she was and she kind of danced a little bit around it. But essentially [she was] a little bit ashamed for some of the things, we didn’t do these things, but we feel bad about them. And I said, “Do you mind if I say who you are?” And she said, “No, that’s okay.” And I said who she was and at a certain point, she actually embraced Margie. She went over and embraced, gave a hug to Margie who was there, Margie Burkhart.
It really gives you a sense about how, even today, there is this reckoning. And as I said, there are descendants of the murderers and the victims who live side by side still in Osage County. And there’s an Osage elder who I speak to at the end of the book, this really extraordinary woman who is one of these Osage, who did an enormous amount of effort to document these crimes over the years. I ust want to make sure I give her the proper credit she deserves, Mary Jo Webb. And I don’t think I included this book in the book, I kind of wish I did, but I just didn’t find a space for it. But she said, ‘the descendants of the killers and the guardians, don’t often know what their ancestors did or they don’t want to talk about it, but we don’t hold them responsible for the blood of their forebears,’ which I thought showed a remarkable degree of compassion and understanding.
Norcross: David Grann, thank you so much.
Grann: Thank you.
Miller: David Grann’s book “Killers of the Flower Moon’'. Geoff Norcross spoke with him at the Portland Book Festival.
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