Boston Herald

FBI takes root in ‘Flower Moon’

- By JERRY HARKAVY

The FBI burnished its reputation by gunning down Depression-era gangster John Dillinger and bringing to justice the kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh’s baby. However, a more challengin­g but long forgotten investigat­ion a decade earlier gave the fledgling agency its first major success.

At least two dozen and perhaps as many as several hundred Osage Indians were murdered during what became known as a yearslong “Reign of Terror.” The shocking episode that unfolded on the high- grass prairie during the 1920s was fueled by oil wealth, greed and prejudice.

Like so many other Native Americans, the Osage were driven from their ancestral lands as settlers moved into the West. The tribe ended up on barren and seemingly worthless reservatio­n lands in northeast Oklahoma.

But when huge oil deposits were discovered there, it appeared the tribe had finally hit the jackpot.

The Osage received “headrights” that entitled them to a share of the income from oil leases and royalties. The newfound wealth allowed them to build mansions, drive luxury cars and send children to posh boarding schools, breeding resentment from jealous whites and giving rise to a growing string of unsolved killings.

“The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered,” writes David Grann in “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” his riveting account of the killings that first came to light in May 1921 when the body of an Osage woman who had gone missing was found by squirrel hunters in a ravine. The slain body of another member of the tribe was found at roughly the same time.

The body count kept growing.

White authoritie­s seemed indifferen­t about the murders, prompting members of the tribe to hire private detectives to try to crack the case.

But the chilling conspiraci­es designed to wrest the oil headrights from the victims came to light only after J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigat­ion, later renamed the FBI, got involved.

The hero of the saga is Tom White, a larger-thanlife former Texas Ranger who deployed undercover agents to help expose corrupt guardiansh­ips that allowed greedy whites to swindle the Osage out of their headrights.

At the center of the conspiracy was the politicall­y powerful William Hale, known to all as the “King of the Osage Hills.”

Readers with a taste for true-crime narratives would be hard-pressed to find one more gripping than this unraveling of a mystery that once captivated the nation but is now barely remembered. History buffs with an interest in the settlement of the West and the treatment of its indigenous population­s will find even more to chew on.

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