Killers of the Flower Moon

by David Grann

   Mollie was forced to attend the St. Louis School. Credit 15

  Mollie’s family was straddling not only two centuries but two civilizations. Her family’s distress increased in the late 1890s as the U.S. government intensified its push for the culmination of its assimilation campaign: allotment. Under the policy, the Osage reservation would be divvied up into 160-acre parcels, into real estate, with each tribal member receiving one allotment, while the rest of the territory would be opened to settlers. The allotment system, which had already been imposed on many tribes, was designed to end the old communal way of life and turn American Indians into private-property owners—a situation that would, not incidentally, make it easier to procure their land.

  The Osage had seen what had happened to the Cherokee Outlet, a vast prairie that was part of the Cherokees’ territory and was near the western border of the Osage reservation. After the U.S. government purchased the land from the Cherokee, it had announced that at noon on September 16, 1893, a settler would be able to claim one of the forty-two thousand parcels of land—if he or she got to the spot first! For days before the starting date, tens of thousands of men, women, and children had come, from as far away as California and New York, and gathered along the boundary; the ragged, dirty, desperate mass of humanity stretched across the horizon, like an army pitted against itself.

  Finally, after several “sooners” who’d tried to sneak across the line early had been shot, the starting gun sounded—A RACE FOR LAND SUCH AS WAS NEVER BEFORE WITNESSED ON EARTH, as one newspaper put it. A reporter wrote, “Men knocked each other down as they rushed onward. Women shrieked and fell, fainting, only to be trampled and perhaps killed.” The reporter continued, “Men, women and horses were laying all over the prairie. Here and there men were fighting to the death over claims which each maintained he was first to reach. Knives and guns were drawn—it was a terrible and exciting scene; no pen can do it justice….It was a struggle where the game was empathically every man for himself and devil take the hindmost.” By nightfall, the Cherokee Outlet had been carved into pieces.

   The land run of 1893 Credit 16

  Because the Osage had purchased their land, it was harder for the government to impose its policy of allotment. The tribe, led by one of its greatest chiefs, James Bigheart—who spoke seven languages, among them Sioux, French, English, and Latin, and who had taken to wearing a suit—was able to forestall the process. But pressure was mounting. Theodore Roosevelt had already warned what would befall an Indian who refused his allotment: “Let him, like these whites, who will not work, perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers.”

  By the early twentieth century, Bigheart and other Osage knew that they could no longer avoid what a government official called the “great storm” gathering. The U.S. government planned to break up Indian Territory and make it a part of what would be a new state called Oklahoma. (In the Choctaw language, “Oklahoma” means “red people.”) Bigheart had succeeded in delaying the process for several years—the Osage were the last tribe in Indian Territory to be allotted—and this had given the Osage more leverage as government officials were eager to avoid any final impediments to statehood. In 1904, Bigheart sent a zealous young lawyer named John Palmer across the country “to keep his finger on the Washington pulse.” The orphaned son of a white trader and a Sioux woman, Palmer had been adopted as a child by an Osage family and had since married an Osage woman. A U.S. senator from Oklahoma called Palmer “the most eloquent Indian alive.”

  For months, Bigheart and Palmer and other members of the tribe negotiated with government officials over the terms of allotment. The Osage prevailed upon the government to divide the land solely among members of the tribe, thereby increasing each individual’s allotment from 160 acres to 657 acres. This strategy would avoid a mad dash on their territory, though whites could then attempt to buy allotments from tribe members. The Osage also managed to slip into the agreement what seemed, at the time, like a curious provision: “That the oil, gas, coal, or other minerals covered by the lands…are hereby reserved to the Osage Tribe.”

  The tribe knew that there were some oil deposits under the reservation. More than a decade earlier, an Osage Indian had shown John Florer, the owner of the trading post in Gray Horse, a rainbow sheen floating on the surface of a creek in the eastern part of the reservation. The Osage Indian dabbed his blanket at the spot and squeezed the liquid into a container. Florer thought that the liquid smelled like the axle grease sold in his store, and he rushed back and showed the sample to others, who confirmed his suspicions: it was oil. With the tribe’s approval, Florer and a wealthy banking partner obtained a lease to begin drilling on the reservation. Few imagined that the tribe was sitting on a fortune, but by the time of the allotment negotiations several small wells had begun operating, and the Osage shrewdly managed to hold on to this last realm of their land—a realm that they could not even see. After the terms of the Allotment Act were agreed upon, in 1906, Palmer boasted to Congress, “I wrote that Osage agreement out in longhand.”

  Like others on the Osage tribal roll, Mollie and her family members each received a headright—essentially, a share in the tribe’s mineral trust. When, the following year, Oklahoma entered the Union as the forty-sixth state, members of the tribe were able to sell their surface land in what was now Osage County. But to keep the mineral trust under tribal control, no one could buy or sell headrights. These could only be inherited. Mollie and her family had become part of the first underground reservation.

  The tribe soon began leasing areas to more and more white prospectors for exploration. Mollie saw workers—tool dressers, rope chokers, mule peelers, gang pushers—toiling furiously. After lowering a torpedo filled with nitroglycerin into the belly of the earth, the muddied workers would detonate it, occasionally turning up a fragment of an ancient American Indian spear or an arrowhead. They’d stare at it in bewilderment. These men built wooden structures that ascended into the sky, like temples, and they chanted their own private language: “Bounce, you cats, bounce. Load up on them hooks, you snappers. That’s high. Ring her off, collar-pecker. Up on the mops. Out, growler-board.” Many wildcatters dug dry wells, or “dusters,” and scurried away in despair. An Osage remarked that such white men “ack like tomorrow they ain’t gonna be no more worl’.”

  In the early twentieth century, George Getty, an attorney from Minneapolis, began his family’s quest for oil in the eastern part of Osage territory, on a parcel of land, Lot 50, that he’d leased for $500. When his son, Jean Paul Getty, was a boy, he visited the area with him. “It was pioneer days,” Jean Paul, who founded the Getty Oil Company, later recalled. “No motorcars, very few telephones, not many electric lights. Even though it was the beginning of the twentieth century, you still very much felt the influence of the nineteenth century.” He went on, “It seemed a great adventure. My parents never saw the charm of it all that I did. We used to go often to Lot 50, about nine miles into the Osage, in a horse-drawn wagon. It took a couple of hours and we had to cross a river to get there.”

   Workers strike oil in Osage territory. Credit 17

  Before encountering the Indians, Jean Paul had asked his father, “Are they dangerous? Will we have to fight them off?”

  His father laughed. “No,” he said. “They’re rather quiet and peaceful.”

  One damp spring day in 1917, Frank Phillips—a wildcatter who’d previously sold a tonic to prevent baldness—was out with his workers on Lot 185, less than half a mile from Lot 50. They were on a platform drilling when the derrick began to tremble, as if a locomotive were rushing by. From the hole in the ground came a rumbling, gurgling sound, and the workers began to run, their screams smothered by what had become a roar. A driller grabbed Phillips and pulled him off the platform just as the earth burst open and a black column of oil spewed into the air.

  Each new find seemed more breathtaking than the last. In 1920, E. W. Marland, who was once so poor that he couldn’t afford
train fare, discovered Burbank, one of the highest-producing oil fields in the United States: a new well generated 680 barrels in its first twenty-four hours.

  Many of the Osage would rush to see a gusher when it erupted, scrambling for the best view, making sure not to cause a spark, their eyes following the oil as it shot fifty, sixty, sometimes a hundred feet in the air. With its great black wings of spray, arcing above the rigging, it rose before them like an angel of death. The spray coated the fields and the flowers and smeared the faces of the workers and the spectators. Still, people hugged and tossed their hats in celebration. Bigheart, who had died not long after the imposition of allotment, was hailed as the “Osage Moses.” And the dark, slimy, smelly mineral substance seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world.

  5   THE DEVIL’S DISCIPLES

  Money was the one means at Mollie’s disposal that might induce the indifferent white authorities to pursue a killer of Indians. After Lizzie died in July 1921, Mollie’s brother-in-law, Bill Smith, had presented his suspicions to authorities that she’d been slowly poisoned, but by August they had still not looked into the case. Nor had any progress been made in the then-three-month-old probe of Anna’s murder. To prod investigators, Mollie’s family issued a statement saying that because of “the foulness of the crime” and “the dangers that exist to other people,” they were offering a $2,000 cash reward for any information leading to the apprehension of those responsible. The Whitehorn family also offered a $2,500 reward to catch Charles’s slayers. And William Hale, who campaigned for stamping out the criminal element from Osage County, promised his own reward to anyone who caught the killers, dead or alive. “We’ve got to stop this bloody business,” he said.

  But the situation with law enforcement continued to deteriorate. The Oklahoma attorney general soon charged Sheriff Freas with willfully “failing to enforce the law” by permitting bootlegging and gambling. Freas denied the allegations, and while the case awaited trial, these two powerful lawmen were pitted against each other. Given this turmoil, Hale announced that it was time to hire a private eye.

  During much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private detective agencies had filled the vacuum left by decentralized, underfunded, incompetent, and corrupt sheriff and police departments. In literature and in the popular imagination, the all-seeing private eye—the gumshoe, the cinder dick, the sleuthhound, the shadow—displaced the crusading sheriff as the archetype of rough justice. He moved across the dangerous new frontiers of deep alleyways and roiling slums. His signature was not the smoking six-shooter; instead, like Sherlock Holmes, he relied upon the startling powers of reason and deduction, the ability to observe what the Watsons of the world merely saw. He found order in a scramble of clues and, as one author put it, “turned brutal crimes—the vestiges of the beast in man—into intellectual puzzles.”

  Yet from the outset the fascination with private detectives was mixed with aversion. They were untrained and unregulated and often had criminal records themselves. Beholden to paying clients, they were widely seen as surreptitious figures who burglarized people’s secrets. (The term “to detect” derived from the Latin verb “to unroof,” and because the devil, according to legend, allowed his henchmen to peer voyeuristically into houses by removing their roofs, detectives were known as “the devil’s disciples.”) 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.” In a manual of general principles and rules that served as a blueprint for the industry, Pinkerton admitted that the detective must at times “depart from the strict line of truth” and “resort to deception.” Yet even many people who despised the profession deemed it a necessary evil. As one private eye put it, he might be a “miserable snake,” but he was also “the silent, secret, and effective Avenger of the outraged Majesty of the Law when everything else fails.”

  Hale recruited a brooding private detective from Kansas City, who went by the name of Pike. To preserve his cover, Pike, who smoked a corn pipe and had a smudge of a mustache, met Hale at a concealed spot near Whizbang. (Civic leaders like Hale considered the name Whizbang undignified and instead called the town Denoya, after a prominent Osage family.) As smoke from the oil fields melted into the sky, Hale conferred with Pike. Then Pike slipped away to pursue his investigation.

  At the direction of Mollie and her family, Anna’s estate also hired private detectives. The estate was being administered by Scott Mathis, the Big Hill Trading Company owner, who had long managed the financial affairs of Anna and Lizzie as a guardian. The U.S. government, contending that many Osage were unable to handle their money, had required the Office of Indian Affairs to determine which members of the tribe it considered capable of managing their trust funds. Over the tribe’s vehement objections, many Osage, including Lizzie and Anna, were deemed “incompetent,” and were forced to have a local white guardian overseeing and authorizing all of their spending, down to the toothpaste they purchased at the corner store. One Osage who had served in World War I complained, “I fought in France for this country, and yet I am not allowed even to sign my own checks.” The guardians were usually drawn from the ranks of the most prominent white citizens in Osage County.

  Mathis put together a team of private eyes, as did the estate for Whitehorn. The private detectives investigating the Osage deaths had often worked for the William J. Burns International Detective Agency before venturing out on their own. Burns, a former Secret Service agent, had succeeded Pinkerton as the world’s most celebrated private eye. A short, stout man, with a luxuriant mustache and a shock of red hair, Burns had once aspired to be an actor, and he cultivated a mystique, in part by writing pulp detective stories about his cases. In one such book, he declared, “My name is William J. Burns, and my address is New York, London, Paris, Montreal, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and wherever else a law-abiding citizen may find need of men who know how to go quietly about throwing out of ambush a hidden assassin or drawing from cover criminals who prey upon those who walk straight.” Though dubbed a “front-page detective” for his incessant self-promotion, he had an impressive track record, including catching those responsible for the 1910 bombing of the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, which killed twenty people. The New York Times called Burns “perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius, whom this country has produced,” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave him the moniker he longed for: “America’s Sherlock Holmes.”

   The Big Hill Trading Company was run by Scott Mathis, who was a guardian of Anna and Lizzie. Credit 18

  Unlike Sherlock Holmes, though, Burns had rigged juries, and allegedly kidnapped a suspect, and he routinely used the sordid techniques of imperial spies. After being caught breaking in to a New York law office in an attempt to steal evidence, he said that such methods were sometimes needed to prove a conspiracy and that such lines had been crossed “a thousand times” by private investigators. Burns perfectly embodied the new profession.

   The private detective William J. Burns Credit 19

  That summer, the team of operatives hired by Mathis began to infiltrate Osage County. Each agent identified himself, in his daily reports, only by a coded number. At the outset, operative No. 10 asked Mathis, who’d been a juror on the inquest, to show him the crime scene. “Mathis and myself drove out to the place where the body was found,” No. 10 wrote.

  One of the investigators spoke to Anna’s main servant. She revealed that after the body was found, she’d obtained a set of Anna’s keys and had gone, with Anna’s sister Rita Smith, to Anna’s house. Incredibly, no one from the sheriff’s office had searched the place yet. The women eased open the door and stepped through the silence. They could see Anna’s jewelry and blankets and pictures, the accumulated treasures of her life, now resembling the r
uins of a lost city. The servant, who had helped dress Anna the day she disappeared, recalled, “Everything was just as we left it”—except for one thing. Anna’s alligator purse, which she had taken to Mollie’s luncheon, was now lying on the floor, the servant said, with “everything torn out of it.”

  Nothing else in the house appeared to have been stolen, and the presence of the bag indicated that Anna had likely returned to her house at some point after the luncheon. Mollie’s brother-in-law Bryan seemed to be telling the truth about having brought her home. But had he taken her back out? Or had she gone away with someone else?

  No. 10 turned to another potentially rich vein of clues: the records of Anna’s incoming and outgoing telephone calls. In those days, phone calls were manually patched through by an operator at a switchboard, with long-distance calls often relayed through multiple switchboards. These operators frequently kept a written record of the calls. According to the log of a Fairfax operator, at about 8:30, on the night Anna disappeared, someone had rung her house from a phone belonging to a business in Ralston, a town six miles southwest of Gray Horse. The records showed that someone, presumably Anna, had picked up. That meant that Anna was likely still in her house at 8:30—further evidence that Bryan had been truthful about taking her home.