The Osage and the Headrights

In nineteen oh six, the United States government allotted land to individual Osage citizens, as it had done and was doing to tribal nations across Indian Territory. But the Osage had negotiated something unusual. They retained collective ownership of the mineral rights beneath their allotted land. Every enrolled Osage member received a share of whatever oil and gas money came up from the ground. Those shares were called headrights.

In nineteen twenty-one, just north and west of Tulsa, an oilman named William Hale was watching those headrights make his Osage neighbors extraordinarily wealthy, and he had decided he wanted that wealth for himself. What followed, from the early nineteen twenties through the middle of the decade, was a systematic campaign of murder targeting Osage headright holders and their families. At least sixty Osage were killed in ways that were confirmed as homicide. Researchers, including journalist David Grann, have documented evidence suggesting the true number may run into the hundreds, and that the poisonings, shootings, and house explosions that characterized the killings extended back years before the FBI's eventual involvement.

Hale, a cattleman who called himself the King of the Osage Hills, had engineered marriages between his nephews and Osage women, making the nephews and eventually Hale himself the heirs to the headrights once those women died. After multiple trials and appeals, he was finally convicted in federal court in nineteen twenty-nine, sentenced to life, and paroled in nineteen forty-seven.

The Osage Reign of Terror, as it came to be known, helped establish the early Federal Bureau of Investigation as a national law enforcement agency. J. Edgar Hoover sent agents to Osage County to investigate after local and state authorities had consistently looked the other way. It also exposed the full moral cost of the guardianship system, in which courts had appointed white guardians to manage the finances of Osage citizens deemed incompetent to handle their own money, a designation that was applied widely and corruptly.

The Osage Nation still holds its mineral rights today, the last tribal nation in the United States to do so. The headrights still exist. What they cost, in human life, is a matter of record.