In the 1870s, the Osage Indians were forced off their land in Kansas — land they had been forced onto just a few decades earlier. This time, they were sent to live on a rocky, arid reservation in Oklahoma. The new land was barren, the buffalo had been depleted, and the Indians began to starve.
And then someone discovered oil.
Money poured in. Prospectors paid the Osage for oil leases and royalties, and by the start of the 20th century every member of the tribe was receiving healthy quarterly checks. They built magnificent houses, bought cars, hired servants. Suddenly, the Oklahoma Osage were among the richest people in the world.
But wherever there are Indians with anything — land, animals and, especially, money and oil rights — there are white people ready to fleece them. David Grann's "Killers of the Flower Moon" tells the horrifying story of mass murder in Gray Horse, Okla. Over a period of five years in the 1920s, more than two dozen Osage Indians were killed — poisoned, shot, blown up, hit by cars — for their money and oil rights.
"Flower Moon" opens with the feel of an Erik Larson book — "Devil in the White City," perhaps: an entertaining murder mystery set in the historical context of 100 years ago.
But Grann's book quickly grows darker, and then darker still. It is superbly done — meticulously researched, well-written — but it is hard to be entertained by a story of such unmitigated evil.
When the oil money started flowing, the U.S. government quickly decided that Indians could not possibly be capable of managing their own finances. Many of them were assigned white guardians, "overseeing and authorizing all of their spending, down to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store," Grann writes. "The guardians were usually drawn from the ranks of the most prominent white citizens in Osage County."
Prominent, yes. But not necessarily trustworthy. Guardians skimmed off millions of dollars from the Indians whose wealth they were supposed to manage. Merchants in Gray Horse jacked prices way up for the Indians, but not for white citizens.
