Oil wealth, greed, prejudice fueled the Osage murders

“Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” (Doubleday), by David Grann

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.

The tribe ended up on barren and seemingly worthless reservation lands in northeast Oklahoma. But when huge oil deposits were discovered there, it appeared that the tribe had finally hit the jackpot.

“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.

Research by Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, sheds new light on the murders, including archival evidence implicating a bank president. The author also suggests that the Reign of Terror went on far longer than initially thought, beginning as early as 1918 and continuing for years after 1925.