Sleeping with the enemy
How marriages of economic convenience in the 1920s turned murderous
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
David Grann’s “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” is a very painful, but essential book in understanding American history of the same rank and nature as Dee Brown’s 1970 classic, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”
The basic story is that the United States moved the Osage Indian tribe out of eastern United States westward, starting in 1808. When settlers wanted their land in Kansas, they were moved into a miserable corner of northeastern Oklahoma. The supreme irony came when it turned out that the piece of Oklahoma they had been moved to, rocky and infertile as farmland, turned out to have oil under it, making the Osage rich. “Red millionaires” the others called them.
The Osage were a tribe with a proud identity and a culture, that included a language, dances, ceremonies and gods. May was the month of the flower-killing moon in the title, the month when taller plants grow taller than smaller flowering plants, in the light of a very bright moon, bringing about the death of the smaller plants. The symbolism of the whites killing the lesser Indians for their money is clear.
First, white Americans began to marry Osage women. The men who married them were called contemptuously “squaw men.” Then, Osage began to turn up dead.
Some had been shot. Others had been poisoned. The lawmen and judicial authorities of Oklahoma at that time were careless and corrupt, sometimes careless because they were corrupt.
The bottom line was, first, that most of them considered the Osage to be less than human, many of them resentedthe fact that the Indians had been the beneficiaries of the oil found under their land, and some of them considered it acceptable that other whites carried out sharp deeds, including murder, to get their hands on as much of the Osages' wealthas they could manage.
Most of the evildoing took place inthe 1920s, less than 100 years ago.
What is basically a picture of partly racially motivated, inhuman, lawless behavior is mitigated by the actions of a few white men, in part motivated by the inception of a new Bureau of Investigation, which became the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, headed by then America’s new hero, J. Edgar Hoover, that brought some of the killers of the Osage to justice of a sort. I say “of a sort” because some of the Killers of the Flower Moon were convicted and sent to prison, some of them to be let out after serving symbolic sentences.
In spite of the title, the book isn’t really about the birth of the FBI, although the importance of the Osage murders case to the building of the reputation of that organization is evident. J. Edgar Hoover appears in the story to a limited degree only, although his marionette approach to law enforcement, particularly the staff who peopled his new organization, is clear.
David Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, who also wrote the best-selling “The Lost City of Z,” not only chases down every loose end in the publicly available account of the Osage members, weaving a riveting story, but he also pursued as an eagle-eyed reporter modern loose ends, adding poignant details that extend the story into our times.
His success in tracking the story adds to the horror of what occurred in Oklahoma in the 1920s but also makes it at least partly comprehensible how human beings could have done what was done to the Osage and remain identifiable as human beings with feelings, a perception otherwise hard to grasp. For example, how could a man plan the murder by explosion of a household that included his own young son?