Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann was all the rage several years ago. I heard interviews with him on both Fresh Air and Longform and sort of put it on my internal TBR list, but never really sought it out. I had mishandled my Libby hold list and didn't have a book on my Kindle, so this one was available to check out right away and so that's how it ended up on my Kindle.

In this investigative piece, Grann examines the murders of several members of the Osage tribe in the 1920s. The Osage had been expelled from their native lands in Kansas in the 1870s, paid a pittance, and forced to resettle in an arid part of Oklahoma. Soon enough, all the buffalo had been hunted, and the tribe was in a bad place. Then oil was discovered under their land and for a brief period of time, the Osage were the richest people in the world, per capita. "Headrights," the right to proceeds from that oil, had been granted to the Osage in a a treaty from 1906. 

But soon enough The Osage Reign of Terror began. Charles Whiteborn, a full-blooded Osage was found shot between the eyes in 1921. A couple of years later Anna Brown was found shot to death in a ravine. Other tribe members died one by one in suspicious circumstances - showing symptoms of strychnine poisoning, stabbing, and one memorable house explosion. I also can't really let it go that one of the supporters of the Osage tribe was thrown off a moving train. Like in a bad movie! 

"The official death toll of the Osage Reign of Terror had climbed to a least twenty-four members of the tribe. Among the victims were two more men who had tried to assist the investigation: one, a prominent Osage rancher, plunged down a flight of stairs after being drugged; the other was gunned down in Oklahoma City on hi sway to brief state officials about the case." (page 94)

By the mid-1920s, the FBI was involved and eventually some conspirators were arrested and convicted, but Grann goes further into the investigation and argues in this book that the Reign of Terror was more widespread than ever before reported with more deaths, more conspirators, and more government involvement. The original accounting suggests maybe a couple of dozen deaths related to the Reign of Terror, but "[s]cholars and investigators who have since looked in the murders believe that the Osage death toll was in the scores, if not the hundreds." (page 283)

This is such a complicated story and I imagine that it's hard to write about in a linear format, what with multiple storylines occurring simultaneously. I also am going to give huge props to Grann for his exhaustive research and the huge swath of interviewing he did. I found a lot to like about this book. I also found it confusing, boring (despite a house explosion! and someone being thrown off a train!), and hard to follow.  

I do think if you're unaware of the historical traumas that the US government has burdened tribes with, the first part of this book does a nice job of writing about federal policies through the lens of this one tribe. From moving tribes to reservations to forcing assimilation, culminating in the allotment policy that gave the Osage headrights, it's a nice case study of how messed up even well-intentioned policies go. (Whether or not you think the policies were ever well-intentioned is a matter for you to do decide on your own.)

Eh. I learned a lot. But I wouldn't say this is a must read, despite the critical reception it received at the time. 3.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

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." (page 42)

Louis F. Burns, the eminent historian of the Osage, observed, "I don't know of a single Osage family which didn't lose at least one family member because of the head rights." (page 283)

"A murdered Indian's survivors don't have the right to the satisfaction of justice for past crimes, or even knowing who killed their children, their mothers or fathers, brothers or sisters their grandparents. They can only guess - like I was forced to." (page 286)

Things I looked up:

In 1850, Allan Pinkerton founded the first American private detective agency; in advertisements, the company's motto, "We Never Sleep," was inscribed under a large, unblinking, Masonic-like eye, which gave rise to the term "private eye." (page 57)

I feel like this is a great little piece of trivia. 

In 1984, the French criminologist Bertillon had helped to wrongfully convict Alfred Dreyfus of treason, having presented a wildly incorrect handwriting analysis. (page 159)

So Alphonse Bertillon created an identification system based on physical measurements called anthroprometry. Initially the method used five measurements - head length, head breadth, length of middle finger, length of left foot, and cubit (distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger). It was used by law enforcement to help identify criminals, who until then could only rely on photographs and names. It was eventually replaced by fingerprinting. He also standardized the process for mug shots and getting mug shots, in addition to the above five measurements, was common practice for a while.

The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal that divided the French from 1894 until its 1906 resolution. Basically a French officer was falsely accused of treason and Bertillon, who was not a handwriting expert, testified against Dreyfus using convoluted logic about handwriting on a document. The story involves a lot of division among religions and classes and is fascinating. 

In the infamous Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb murder case, in 1924, investigators had correctly detected similarities between Leopold's typed school notes and the typed ransom note. (page 159)

Leopold and Loeb were two college students who kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old in Chicago in 1924. 

...Carl Panzram - a repeat killer who'd confessed to slaying twenty-one people...(page 226)

Panzram sounds real bad. He confessed to having committed 21 murders, but only five could be confirmed. He is suspected of more than 100 killings in the United States alone, but also probably committed murder overseas, as well.