Killers of the Flower Moon

This book carried me along and I had trouble stopping the ride. I also had to text people and talk about it. And it made me uncomfortable. My friend Ellen passed it to me at lunch, which seemed unusual but I get it now. I want to give it to other people and I've told people to read it. Which seems strange since it's been popular and made into a blockbuster movie. But uh, it deserves it.

Highly recommended. (★ ★ ★ ★ ★)

The first section is a murder mystery. The Osage are being killed! We attempt to find who done it! We investigate, we get autopsies and hire detectives and we do our darn best, but it's just so hard and mysteriously every lead dries up and every witness dies and why?! Who can save the Osage? We can't do it and maybe it's impossible for us.

In the second section, J Edgar Hoover wants power and he sends his Federal Investigators out to solve an important crime. It is very difficult and so hard for an outsider, but through perseverance and quick action, Tom White is able to solve the case and find the Devil. The author is a real sonofabitch here because the Devil is staring at us from the beginning of the book. This is literally true and is shown to us. The devil has woven a web through the world of the Osage, has bound them up in silk and is eating them up slowly. And the Devil just grins at us even when justice gets brought.

I am underselling these sections, which would have been a very good book by themselves because of the power of the third section, which is a kick in the stomach.

The third section made me really think about the problem of stories and perspective. When power or a system works for you, it's hard to credit the stories of people who say it isn't working.

I was just going for a long drive and listening to Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales episcode about the Radium Girls and it rings the same bells as the end of this book.

When women say "this hurts" or "I am in pain" or "I am dying" it's credited less than when men say the same thing. In the story of the Radium Girls, the legal system is stacked against giving them justice or disrupting the local economy.

When people tell us the power structure isn't doing what it says, but it keeps working just fine for us, we can believe them or believe our own comfortable eyes. And naturally we credit what we can see. Nobody ever through me up against a wall and made me empty my pockets! That's true for us normally, but ever truer if seeing means we have to become less comfortable, if we have to become allies with strangers who aren't like us or who we don't understand.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, the same play happens. For many people, the legal system is working. They are getting rich. They are gaining power. But for some people, they cry out that cases aren't investigated, they are being poisoned, the people who claim to protect them are hurting them, stealing from them - and the system isn't doing anything it says it does. And the third part turns the knife of the thrilling conclusion of the first 2. It shows that the justice was... a story. The past isn't really past. The comfortable don't want to look.

This book had a LOT of "Oh no" being mumbled as I read it.

The Osage were pushed to a place they were not suited for.

The earth was plundered and the money did what money does.

What was done for the money was horrible.

What was done to cover the crimes was horrible.

When the FBI had what they needed from some horrible crimes, they left.

And when some horrible crimes were known, we condemned the crimes, but did not address their origins or machinations enough.

"Es ist ein Wunder, daß ich all meine Hoffnungen noch nicht aufgegeben habe, denn sie erscheinen absurd und unerfüllbar. Doch ich halte daran fest, trotz allem, weil ich noch stets an das Gute im Menschen glaube."

This was an informative and disturbing history of events in the 1920s in the state of Oklahoma. For readers who are stressed out by recent political fighting in the 21st century, this story shows that the intersection of racism, power, and corruption is a longstanding theme in American affairs--both locally and nationally. I’m happy to have learned about this history, though sad to have discovered the inner workings of how the Osage were treated for so long. Overall, I’d recommend this book. However, I found the writing style distracting. I think it’s the attempt to pack the collection of many details and sequences of deep research into a narrative. The stylistic affect is that it’s aimed too low. With all the transitions of “One day, two men were out hunting,” “One day, Hale’s pastures were set on fire,” I often felt like I was reading a 6th grade SRA card. I also found that a lot of key information was appended after the main narrative, and might have been hinted at earlier for a better impact.

I have been reading this book off and on for a while, and when I read that they are going to make a movie of it, I decided I should power thru and finish it. And I am glad I did! It tells the story of the Osage Indian murders in the 1920s. The Osage Indians were, like many tribes. forced onto "barren" lands as a reservation, but it turned into a real gold mine, as oil was discovered there. Soon, the Osage were among the richest people in the world.

Of course, white man couldn't have that and quickly started passing laws declaring the Native Americans were too "child like" to have that much money and the only thing that would save them would be white guardianship. And you don't need much of an imagination to see what kinds of corruption and thieving that led to.

Even worse was the idea of "headrights", which is the inheritance of the portion of the oil windfall. A white man could inherit the headright if the woman he was married to "died". Even more diabolical, if other of her relatives were to die first, she would gradually get more and more headrights, and then you could get them if she died.

The end results was literally countless Osage Indian deaths. This book documents some of the more egregious plots planned by the evil Mr. Hall, but only something like 20 may have been his planning. Literally hundreds of others died during this "Reign of Terror", often with little or no oversight.

White man's imagination and cruelty of "others" has no bounds and this story is a chilling example of it. A forgotten chapter that is well explored here. The only drawback is that there are a lot of names to keep track of. Really, if he is white, he is bad. There were a few who tried to stem the tide of violence, but it was a corrupt society from top to bottom. The FBI, early in Hoover's reign, came in and got some justice, but very little. Chilling story well told, with a great deal of sympathy and feeling.

Lawmen were then still largely amateurs. They rarely attended training academies or steeped themselves in the emerging scientific methods of detection, such as the analysis of fingerprints and blood patterns. Frontier lawmen, in particular, were primarily gunfighters and trackers; they were expected to deter crimes and to apprehend a known gunman alive if possible, dead if necessary. “An officer was then literally the law and nothing but his judgment and his trigger finger stood between him and extermination,” the Tulsa Daily World said in 1928, after the death of a veteran lawman who’d worked in the Osage territory. “It was often a case of a lone man against a pack of cunning devils.” Because these enforcers received pitiful salaries and were prized for being quick draws, it’s not surprising that the boundary between good lawmen and bad lawmen was porous. The leader of the Dalton Gang, an infamous nineteenth-century band of outlaws, once served as the main lawman on the Osage reservation.

What first struck me about this book is how well written it was; short sentences, skirted by the use of a simple language. Reading this book was an easy task, partly because of that, and partly because the contents were so interesting.The Osage is a native American nation which found oil on their land. After that, the white man rained Hell upon them, partly by creating corrupt laws that made the Osage legally unable to use their money as they should, but also by literally conspiring to kill them in order to be able to get hold of their money. That's basically how this book starts, and subsequently just escalated and blew my mind again and again.I mean, stuff like this happened throughout:

Undertakers charged the Osage exorbitant rates for a funeral, trying to gouge them, and this was no exception. The undertaker demanded $1,450 for the casket, $100 for preparing and embalming the body, and $25 for the rental of a hearse. By the time he was done tallying the accessories, including gloves for the grave digger, the total cost was astronomical. As a lawyer in town said, “It was getting so that you could not bury an Osage Indian at a cost of under $6,000”—a sum that, adjusted for inflation, is the equivalent of nearly $80,000 today.

Just imagine that happening to white males; the world would turn on its head. But here? No, the atrocity apartheid exhibition sprawled and murdered on.According to this book, the Osage behaved like gentlepeople about the entire matter, to little avail. Some times though, things did happen:

By 1877, there were virtually no more American buffalo to hunt—a development hastened by the authorities who encouraged settlers to eradicate the beasts, knowing that, in the words of an army officer, “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” U.S. policy toward the tribes shifted from containment to forced assimilation, and officials increasingly tried to turn the Osage into churchgoing, English-speaking, fully clothed tillers of the soil. The government owed the tribe annuity payments for the sale of its Kansas land but refused to distribute them until able-bodied men like Ne-kah-e-se-y took up farming. And even then the government insisted on making the payments in the form of clothing and food rations. An Osage chief complained, “We are not dogs that we should be fed like dogs.” Unaccustomed to the white man’s agricultural methods and deprived of buffalo, the Osage began to go hungry; their bones soon looked as if they might break through their skin. Many members of the tribe died. An Osage delegation, including the chief Wah-Ti-An-Kah, was urgently dispatched to Washington, D.C., to petition the commissioner of Indian Affairs to abolish the ration system. According to an account by John Joseph Mathews, members of the delegation wore their best blankets and leggings, while Wah-Ti-An-Kah wrapped himself in a red blanket so entirely that you could see little more than his eyes, dark wells that burned with an entire history. The delegation went to the commissioner’s office and waited for him. When the commissioner arrived, he informed an interpreter, “Tell these gentlemen that I am sorry that I have another appointment at this time—I am sorry I had forgotten about it until just now.”

As the commissioner tried to leave, Wah-Ti-An-Kah blocked his path to the door and let go of his blanket. To the shock of even his fellow Osage, he was naked, except for his breechcloth and his moccasins, and his face was painted as if he were leading a war party. “He stood there towering like some primitive god of the dark forests,” Mathews wrote. Wah-Ti-An-Kah told the interpreter, “Tell this man to sit down.” When the commissioner complied, Wah-Ti-An-Kah said, “We have come [a] long way to talk about this.” The commissioner said, “Surely this man who doesn’t know how to act—who comes to my office almost naked, with war paint on his face, is not civilized enough to know how to use money.” Wah-Ti-An-Kah said that he was not ashamed of his body, and after he and the delegation pressed their case, the commissioner agreed to end the ration policy. Wah-Ti-An-Kah picked up his blanket and said, “Tell this man it is all right now—he can go.”

And as more and more Osage were dying, in continually greater numbers:

That August, as the number of suspicious deaths continued to climb, many Osage prevailed upon Barney McBride, a wealthy fifty-five-year-old white oilman, to go to Washington, D.C., and ask federal authorities to investigate. McBride had been married to a Creek Indian, now deceased, and was raising his stepdaughter. He had taken a strong interest in Indian affairs in Oklahoma, and he was trusted by the Osage; a reporter described him as a “kind-hearted, white-haired man.” Given that he also knew many officials in Washington, he was considered an ideal messenger. When McBride checked in to a rooming house in the capital, he found a telegram from an associate waiting for him. “Be careful,” it said. McBride carried with him a Bible and a .45-caliber revolver. In the evening, he stopped at the Elks Club to play billiards. When he headed outside, someone seized him and tied a burlap sack tightly over his head. The next morning, McBride’s body was found in a culvert in Maryland. He had been stabbed more than twenty times, his skull had been beaten in, and he had been stripped naked, except for his socks and shoes, in one of which had been left a card with his name. The forensic evidence suggested that there had been more than one assailant, and authorities suspected that his killers had shadowed him from Oklahoma. News of the murder quickly reached Mollie and her family. The killing—which the Washington Post called “the most brutal in crime annals in the District”—appeared to be more than simply a murder. It had the hallmarks of a message, a warning. In a headline, the Post noted what seemed to be increasingly clear: CONSPIRACY BELIEVED TO KILL RICH INDIANS.

This is quite akin to how native Americans in the north of the USA have gone "missing", i.e. are "disappeared", to use a fairly modern-day version of the Mexican term; people are simply murdered and gotten rid of.Reading of how the Osage were basically held captives in their community, waiting to die...

In early March, the dogs in the neighborhood began to die, one after the other; their bodies were found slumped on doorsteps and on the streets. Bill was certain that they’d been poisoned. He and Rita found themselves in the grip of tense silence. He confided in a friend that he didn’t “expect to live very long.”

The book is quite hagiographical where it comes to Tom White, who was first the special agent in charge of the FBI's field office in Houston, but he seems to deserve it. Upon taking on Hoover's decree to resolve the Osage murder matter:

White had no doubt what would happen if he didn’t succeed: previous agents on the case had been banished to distant outposts or cast out from the bureau entirely. Hoover had said, “There can be no excuse offered for…failure.” White was also aware that several of those who had tried to catch the killers had themselves been killed. From the moment he walked out of Hoover’s office, he was a marked man.

Lovely. Still, White was quite the Sherlock Holmes where it comes to deduction:

As White strove to be a modern evidence man, he had to learn many new techniques, but the most useful one was timeless: coldly, methodically separating hearsay from facts that he could prove. He didn’t want to hang a man simply because he had constructed a seductive tale. And after years of bumbling, potentially crooked investigations into the Osage murders, White needed to weed out half facts and build an indubitable narrative based on what he called an “unbroken chain of evidence.”

And the violence...

Tom’s sergeant was shot six times by an assailant, while a bystander was struck twice. As the sergeant lay on the ground, bleeding, he asked for a slip of paper and scribbled on it a message for Ranger headquarters: “I am shot all to pieces. Everything quiet.” Somehow, he survived his wounds, but the innocent bystander died.

And the racism...

One skeptical reporter noted, “The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward the full-blood Indian…is fairly well recognized.” A prominent member of the Osage tribe put the matter more bluntly: “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.”

Anyway, the book does take turns that I didn't think of when reading it. I like that in a book.This is one of the best true-crime books that I've read in 2017.