History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset
New York reporter and author David Grann’s debut non-fiction
book ‘The Lost City of Z’ (turned into a spectacular Hollywood movie by James
Gray in 2016), a critically acclaimed best-seller, dealt with the obscure and
fascinating real story of a Victorian British explorer (Percival Fawcett),
whose calamitous journey through the Amazonian Jungle (in 1925) in search of a
lost city was full of chilling details. It’s a sensational historical mystery,
riffing on the themes of obsession, perseverance, death, and madness. Grann’s
follow up book Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of
the FBI (published April 2017) retells one of the most unknown and terrifying
chapters in American history. The true-crime non-fiction delves deep into
string of unsolved murders that occurred in the Osage Indian Nation of Oklahoma in the
1920s. David Grann has spent little more than five years for the book,
profoundly focusing on yet another monstrous crime committed by the American
whites against the Native Americans.
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is a tale of murder, greed, bigotry,
betrayal, valor, and persecution which unearths crimes that has long been
exorcised from history. Like most of the Native American tribes, the Osage were
forced from their native lands in the late 19th century to
northeastern Oklahoma (in the 1870s). The migration and other tyrannical
processes set forth by the federal government nearly wiped-out two-thirds of the
Native American population, in a span of 70 years. However, the Osage people
were blessed with well-reasoned, perceptive leaders, who unlike other tribes
firmly settled on their new land, and also secured mining rights. Although the
vast stretches of lands in Oklahoma were initially considered ‘worthless’, by
the tail-end of 19th century the Osages had discovered black gold.
By the early 1920s, oil leases and mineral rights generated millions of dollars
for the Osage (a total of $30 million in 1923 alone which Grann says
is equal to at least $400 million today). Around this time the Osage people
were considered the wealthiest in the United States (per-capita). A single well
on Osage land is said to have pumped out 680 barrels in a day. Soon, the lavish lifestyle of the Osage
attracted unsavory reports from biased, racist reporters (words like ‘rich
redskins’ are thrown out).
The Osage of the 1920s were wealthy beyond most rich
American whites. They bought huge mansions, luxurious cars, and even hired
white servants. But the tribe’s wealth pulled in army of financiers, outlaws, opportunists, and other loathsome fortune-seekers. In an attempt to legally
fleece the tribe members, the federal government appointed ‘prominent’ white
citizens (lawyers, judges, real estate magnates, bankers, etc) as legal
guardians to many Osages who were deemed ‘incompetent’ to handle their money. The
guardianship allowed them to steal liberally, while strictly restricting the
tribes’ ability to spend. But still the most invaluable aspect of ever-growing
oil money is the ‘head rights’, which couldn’t be bought off by white-skinned
outsiders. That’s when the killings began.
In May 1921, two badly decomposed bodies were discovered by
chance in different locations within the Indian reservation. Charles Whitehorn
(age 30) and Anna Brown (age 34), both the deceased were members of the tribe and had been shot dead.
In the next four years, at least 24 people were poisoned, blown up, hit by
cars, and shot for their money and oil rights (including some local whites who
apparently helped their Osage neighbors). Known as ‘Reign of Terror’, these
baffling series of murder posed heavy challenges to the local and state
authorities; partly because they were corrupted to the bone and partly due to
their utter lack of deductive skills. These were frontier men, who often
uprooted crime through shoot-outs and hangings. Meanwhile, the murders caught
the attention of an ambitious, authoritative young bureaucrat named J.Edgar
Hoover, who considered the cases as a perfect opportunity to prove the worth of
his newly formed bureau of investigations (later known as FBI). Hoover sent in
Special Agent Tom White, a former Texas Ranger and a man of action. White
formed a team of undercover agents, who took over different roles in the Osage
community: from cattleman to insurance salesman. Soon, the team zeroed-in on a
kingpin behind this bloody conspiracy. David Grann meticulously recreates the
stunning breakthroughs and tense interplay between criminals and lawmen, which eventually
led to the capture of a master criminal. Contrary to the records of FBI,
however, the tale doesn’t end there. He further delves into yellowing archival
records, old newspapers, and fading memories (of Osage descendants) to come to
a shocking conclusion. As Grann has said in an interview (to Rolling Stone),
“When I began the story I was thinking, 'It's a whodunit kind of thing,
right?' And by the end, it was like, 'Who didn't do it?'”
David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a success in two
ways: he deftly constructs the details of the murder and its investigation so
as to turn it into a compelling puzzle; he never forgets to chronicle the human
impact of the brutal murders in the Osage community, then and now. In the
opening passages, we get the feel of Erik Larson’s ‘Devil in the White City’, a
well-documented non-fiction book on 1893 Chicago fair and serial killings by H.
H. Holmes. However, ‘Flower Moon’ is much darker, eschewing the idea of a singular
villain figure, and shockingly ambiguous than Larson’s book. What the Osage confronted
in the 1920s is not a great criminal mastermind, but a highly ingrained culture
of killing. There is more to the story, mentioned in the annals of FBI
investigations. The last section of the book, which unfurls the harsh truth
behind the hundreds of murders and suspicious deaths of the Osage, tells a lot
about the darkest ideals of American society. Beneath its boasting of
transformation towards modernity and economic ascension lie unimaginable
violence, naked greed, and indelible racist notions. The FBI narrative that
pinned the ‘Reign of Terror’ on a single individual also tells a lot about the
universal conception of evil: that the law would come in and remove that particular
evil to once again ‘normalize’ the society. But the truth is far more
frightening, as we avoid acknowledging the society’s depth of complicity pertaining
to a crime.
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| Martin Scorsese is possibly developing a film adaptation of the book with Leonardo Di Caprio and Robert de Niro |
“History can often provide at least some final accounting”,
Grann writes. Nevertheless, the author’s powerful writing style does more than
that. It is true that it’s too late to identify those who violently preyed upon
the Osages, let alone punish them. Yet Killers of the Flower Moon would make
sure that these diabolical acts in American history aren’t easily forgotten.
When all is said and done, the legacy of sadness and persecution encompassing
the Osage and other native tribes still remains. So will the stain of blood
that saturates their history. It’s a truly devastating and fury-inducing read,
showcasing where the real horrors of history rests: in what we don’t know and in what we fail to acknowledge.
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