Killers of the Flower Moon

In the eighteen seventies, when the federal government relocated the Osage Nation from Kansas to a rocky corner of northeastern Oklahoma, the Osage purchased their new reservation outright. They paid for it themselves. The federal agent who handled the transaction reportedly said the land was worthless.

Then, in nineteen oh seven, the oil came in.

By the nineteen twenties, the per-capita income of Osage headright holders made them among the wealthiest people on earth. The headright system was unique: unlike most Indigenous nations subjected to the Dawes Act, the Osage had been allowed to retain subsurface mineral rights collectively, with each share, called a headright, passing to heirs by inheritance. Oil leases generated royalty income that flowed to every headright holder. White neighbors, guardians, and associates took notice.

Between nineteen twenty-one and nineteen twenty-five, a documented count of at least twenty-four Osage people died under suspicious circumstances. Scholarly estimates range higher, some placing the figure above sixty, because many Osage deaths in this period were never formally investigated. Among the known victims were Anna Brown, her mother Lizzie Q, Henry Roan, and Bill and Rita Smith, whose house was bombed with nitroglycerin. The pattern was systematic: white men were marrying into Osage families, manipulating wills, and in documented cases arranging murders to inherit headrights.

The Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, took the case under its director J. Edgar Hoover. The investigation eventually convicted the ringleader of one murder conspiracy, a local cattle rancher named William Hale, who was found guilty in nineteen twenty-nine. The prosecutions were limited, and most of the deaths were never adjudicated.

David Grann documented this history in his two thousand seventeen book "Killers of the Flower Moon," which Martin Scorsese adapted into a film in twenty twenty-three. Both drew heavily on Osage community accounts, which had maintained this history when the federal record did not.

The Osage Nation Museum in Pawhuska holds the community's own telling of this period, centered on Osage voices rather than the FBI's.