Killers of the Flower Moon

by David Grann

  When I asked why, she pointed to the blank space and said, “The devil was standing right there.”

  She disappeared for a moment, then returned with a small, slightly blurred print of the missing panel: it showed William K. Hale, staring coldly at the camera. The Osage had removed his image, not to forget the murders, as most Americans had, but because they cannot forget.

  A few years ago, Red Corn told me, she was at a party in Bartlesville and a man approached her. “He said that he had Anna Brown’s skull,” she recalled. It was evidently the part of Brown’s skull that the undertaker had kept, in 1921, and given to bureau agents for analysis. Outraged, Red Corn told the man, “That needs to be buried here.” She called the Osage chief, and Anna’s skull was retrieved and, at a quiet ceremony, interred with her other remains.

   The missing panel of the photograph that shows Hale (far left), dressed in a suit and cap and wearing glasses. The entire panoramic photograph—which includes Hale on the very far left—is shown on the title page at the beginning of the book. Credit 64

  Red Corn gave me the names of several Osage who, she thought, might have information about the murders, and she promised to later share with me a related story about her grandfather. “It’s hard for us to talk about what happened during the Reign of Terror,” she explained. “So many Osage lost a mother or a father or a sister or a brother or a cousin. That pain never goes away.”

  Over several weekends each June, the Osage hold their ceremonial dances, I’n-Lon-Schka. These dances—which take place, at different times, in Hominy, Pawhuska, and Gray Horse, three areas where the Osage first settled when they came to the reservation, in the 1870s—help preserve fading traditions and bind the community together. The Osage come from all over to attend the dances, which provide a chance to see old family and friends and cook out and reminisce. The historian Burns once wrote, “To believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been saved and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. What is gone is treasured because it was what we once were. We gather our past and present into the depths of our being and face tomorrow. We are still Osage. We live and we reach old age for our forefathers.”

  During a subsequent visit to the region, I headed to Gray Horse to see the dances and meet one of the people Red Corn had suggested I find—someone who had been profoundly affected by the murders. Almost nothing remained of the original Gray Horse settlement but some rotted beams and bricks buried in the wild grasses, which the wind ruffled in ghostly rhythms.

  To accommodate the dances, the Osage had erected, amid the encroaching wilderness, a pavilion, with a mushroom-shaped metal roof and a circular earth floor surrounded by concentric rows of wooden benches. When I arrived on a Saturday afternoon, the pavilion was crowded with people. Gathered in the center, around a sacred drum used to commune with Wah’Kon-Tah, were several male musicians and singers. Ringed around them were the “lady singers,” as they are called, and in a circle farther out were dozens of male dancers, young and old, wearing leggings, brightly colored ribbon shirts, and bands of bells below their knees; each of these dancers had on a headdress—typically made of an eagle feather, porcupine quills, and a deer tail—which stood up like a Mohawk.

  At the sound of the drumming and singing, these dancers stepped in a counterclockwise circle to commemorate the rotation of the earth, their feet pounding the soft earth, their bells jangling. As the drumming and choral singing intensified, they crouched slightly and stepped more quickly, moving together with precision. One man nodded his head while another flapped his arms like an eagle. Others gestured as if they were scouting or hunting.

  There was a time when women were not allowed to dance at these events, but they now joined in as well. Wearing blouses and broadcloth skirts and handwoven belts, they formed a slower-moving, dignified circle around the male dancers, keeping their torsos and heads straight as they bobbed up and down with each step.

  Many Osage looked on from the benches, fanning themselves in the heat; a few stole glances at cell phones, but most watched reverently. Each bench bore the name of an Osage family, and as I walked around to the southern side of the pavilion, I found the one I was looking for: “Burkhart.”

  Before long, an Osage woman walked toward me. In her early fifties, she wore a powder-blue dress and stylish glasses, and her long black glossy hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her expressive face seemed vaguely recognizable. “Hi, I’m Margie Burkhart,” she said, extending her hand. Margie is the granddaughter of Mollie Burkhart. She serves on a board that directs health-care services for the Osage, and she had driven from her home in Tahlequah, seventy miles southeast of Tulsa, to the dances with her husband, Andrew Lowe, a Creek Seminole.

  The three of us sat on the wooden bench and, while watching the dancers, spoke about Margie’s family. Her father, now deceased, was James “Cowboy” Burkhart—the son of Mollie and Ernest Burkhart. Cowboy and his sister, Elizabeth, also now dead, had witnessed the Reign of Terror from inside their father’s house of secrets. Margie said of Ernest, “He took away everything from my dad—his aunts, his cousins, his trust.” Though Cowboy was haunted by the knowledge of what Ernest had done, he adored Mollie. “He always spoke fondly of her,” Margie recalled. “When he was little, he’d get these real bad earaches, and he said she’d blow in his ears to make the pain go away.”

   Margie Burkhart, the granddaughter of Mollie and Ernest Credit 65

  After Mollie divorced Ernest, she lived with her new husband, John Cobb, on the reservation. Margie was told that it had been a good marriage, a period of happiness for her grandmother. On June 16, 1937, Mollie died. The death, which wasn’t considered suspicious, received little notice in the press. The Fairfax Chief published a short obituary: “Mrs. Mollie Cobb, 50 years of age…passed away at 11 o’clock Wednesday night at her home. She had been ill for some time. She was a full-blood Osage.”

  Later that year, Ernest Burkhart was paroled. The Osage Tribal Council issued a resolution, protesting that “anyone convicted of such vicious and barbarous crimes should not be freed to return to the scene of these crimes.” The Kansas City Times, in an editorial, said, “The parole of Ernest Burkhart from the Oklahoma state penitentiary recalls what was possibly the most remarkable murder case in the history of the Southwest—the wholesale slaying of Osage Indians for their oil headrights….The freeing of a principal in so cold-blooded a plot, after serving little more than a decade of a life sentence, seems to reveal one of the besetting weaknesses of the parole system.”

  Margie said that after Ernest got out, he robbed an Osage home and was sent back to prison. In 1947, while Ernest was still in jail, Hale was released, having served twenty years at Leavenworth. Parole board officials maintained that their ruling was based on the grounds of Hale’s advanced age—he was seventy-two—and his record as a good prisoner. An Osage leader said that Hale “should have been hanged for his crimes,” and members of the tribe were convinced that the board’s decision was the last vestige of Hale’s political influence. He was forbidden to set foot again in Oklahoma, but according to relatives he once visited them and said, “If that damn Ernest had kept his mouth shut we’d be rich today.”

  Margie told me that she never met Hale, who died in 1962, in an Arizona nursing home. But she saw Ernest after he got out of prison again, in 1959. Barred from returning to Oklahoma, he had initially gone to work on a sheep farm in New Mexico, earning $75 a month. A reporter noted at the time, “It will be a far cry from the days of affluence as the husband of an oil-rich Osage Indian woman.” In 1966, hoping to return to Oklahoma, Ernest applied for a pardon. The records no longer exist, but his appeal, which went before a five-member review board in Oklahoma, was based at least partly on his cooperation with the bureau’s investigation of the murders. (White had always credited Burkhart’s confession as salvaging his case.) Despite intense protests from the Osage, the board ruled, three t
o two, in favor of a pardon, which the governor then granted. HEADRIGHTS KILLER WINS PARDON VOTE, the Oklahoman declared, adding, OSAGES TERRORIZED.

  Stooped and with thinning hair, Ernest went back to Osage County, where at first he stayed with his brother Bryan. “When I met Ernest, I had just become a teenager,” Margie recalled. “I was very surprised he looked so grandfatherly. He was very slight with graying hair; his eyes looked so kind. He wasn’t rough even after all those years in prison. And I couldn’t fathom that this man had done all that…” Her voice trailed off amid the insistent beating of the drum. After a while, she continued, “It was so hard on my dad. He and Liz were ostracized by the tribe, and that hurt so much. They needed family and support, and they didn’t have any.”

  The experience made her father angry—angry at the world. Andrew, Margie’s husband, pointed out that Elizabeth was also deeply affected. “She was kind of paranoid,” he said.

  Margie nodded and said, “Aunt Liz couldn’t stay in one place and was always changing her address and phone number.”

  Elizabeth showed little interest in seeing Ernest, who eventually moved in to a mice-infested trailer just outside Osage County, but Cowboy occasionally visited. “I think a part of him longed for a father,” Margie said. “But he knew what his father had done. He called him Old Dynamite.” When Ernest died, in 1986, he was cremated, and his ashes were given to Cowboy in a box. Ernest had left instructions with Cowboy to spread them around the Osage Hills. “Those ashes were in the house for days, just sitting there,” Margie recalled. “Finally, one night my dad got real mad and took the box and just chucked it over a bridge.”

   Ernest Burkhart Credit 66

   Cowboy and Elizabeth with their father, Ernest, whose face was torn out of the photograph years later Credit 67

  During a break in the dancing, as the sun began its descent in the sky, Margie offered to show me around Gray Horse. The three of us got in her car, and she began driving down a narrow, dusty road. Not far from the pavilion, almost concealed amid the blackjacks, was one of the few houses standing in Gray Horse. “That’s where I grew up,” Margie said. To my surprise, it was a small, spare, wooden house, more like a cabin than a mansion. The Great Depression had wiped out many Osage fortunes that had already been diminished by guardians and thieves. Margie said that Mollie’s was no exception. The price of a barrel of oil, which reached more than $3 during the boom years, plummeted to 65 cents in 1931, and an annual headright payment fell to less than $800. The following year, the Literary Digest published an article headlined OSAGE OIL WEALTH FADING. It reported, “These Indians became accustomed to lives of glorious ease. But now…their income from oil is rapidly disappearing, and that was practically all they had.” Compounding the situation was the gradual depletion of the oil fields. In 1929, even before the stock market crash, a national newspaper story reported, “In five years, if the oil map continues to shift, the tribe may have to go back to work.”

  Over the next few decades, most of the boomtowns, including Gray Horse, began to die off. “When I was little, I could hear the oil wells pumping,” Margie recalled. “Then one day they stopped.” Today more than ten thousand wells remain scattered across the reservation, but they are generally what oilmen call “stripper” wells, each one generating less than fifteen barrels a day. When an auction for Osage oil leases was held in Tulsa in 2012, three leases sold for less than $15,000 in total. Margie, who inherited a little more than half of a headright from her father, still receives a quarterly check for her share in the mineral trust. The amount varies depending on the prices of oil but in recent years has usually amounted to a few thousand dollars. “It certainly helps, but it’s not enough to live on,” she said.

  The Osage have found new sources of revenue, including from seven casinos that have been built on their territory. (They were formerly called the Million Dollar Elm Casinos.) They generate tens of millions of dollars for the Osage, helping to fund their government, educational programs, and health-care benefits. The Osage were also able to retrieve at least a portion of the oil funds mismanaged over decades by the U.S. government. In 2011, after an eleven-year legal battle, the government agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the Osage for $380 million.

  As we drove through Gray Horse, we came upon a clearing in the woods, where there was an old cemetery. We got out of the car, and Margie paused in front of a tombstone bearing Mollie Burkhart’s name. The epitaph said, “She was a kind and affectionate wife and a fond mother and a friend to all.” Nearby were the plots for Mollie’s murdered sisters and her murdered brother-in-law, Bill Smith, and her murdered mother, Lizzie, and her murdered first husband, Henry Roan. Margie looked around at the tombs and asked, “What kind of person could do this?”

  Margie had earlier laid flowers around the graves, and she bent down and straightened one. “I always try to decorate the stones,” she said.

  We resumed driving and cut along a dirt road through the prairie. Lush tall grasses spread as far as the eye could see, a rolling green expanse that was disturbed only by a few small, rusted oil pumps and by cattle grazing here and there. Earlier, when I drove to Gray Horse, I’d been startled by the sight of bison roaming through the prairie with their bowed heads and massive woolly bodies supported seemingly impossibly on narrow legs. In the nineteenth century, bison were extinguished from the prairie, but in recent years they have been reintroduced by conservationists. The media mogul Ted Turner had been raising bison on a forty-thousand-acre ranch between Fairfax and Pawhuska—a ranch that in 2016 was bought by the Osage Nation.

   The graves of Mollie and her murdered family members Credit 68

  As Margie and her husband and I continued across the prairie, the sun floated above the rim of the earth—a perfect orange sphere that soon became half a sun, then a quarter, before dying off with a burst of dazzling light. Margie said, “I like it when the sky gets pink like this.”

  We seemed to be driving aimlessly, riding up and down over the undulating land, like a ship adrift in the waves. Suddenly, at a peak, Margie jolted the car to a stop. In the distance was a ravine and, at the bottom, a meandering creek. “Over there, that’s where they shot Anna,” Margie said. “My dad took me horseback riding and showed me the spot. I was young and we only had our horses. It was kind of scary.”

  In 2009, an Osage named Elise Paschen published a poem called “Wi’-gi-e,” which means “prayer” in Osage. Narrated from Mollie Burkhart’s point of view, the poem is about the murder of Anna Brown:

  Because she died where the ravine falls into water.

  Because they dragged her down to the creek.

  In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt.

  Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring.

  Because I turned the log with my foot.

  Her slippers floated downstream into the dam.

  Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body.

  The poem ends with these lines:

  During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon.

  I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver.

  I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.

  By the time Margie drove on, the prairie was shrouded in the dark of night. Only the beams from the headlights illuminated the dusty road. Margie said that her parents first told her what Ernest and Hale had done when she was a child. “I used to worry whenever I did something naughty, ‘What if I’m the bad seed?’ ” Margie recalled. She said that occasionally The FBI Story would air on local television, and she and her family would watch it and cry.

  As she spoke, I realized that the Reign of Terror had ravaged—still ravaged—generations. A great-grandson of Henry Roan’s once spoke of the legacy of the murders: “I think somewhere it is in the back of our minds. We may not realize it, but it is there, especially if it was a family member that was killed. You just have it in the back of your head that you don’
t trust anybody.”

  We emerged from the prairie and headed into downtown Fairfax. Although still officially a town, it seemed on the verge of oblivion. Year by year, its population had shrunk; now it was fewer than fourteen hundred. The main street was lined with the western-style buildings that had been constructed during the boom, but they were abandoned. We paused by the largest storefront, its window darkened with grime and cobwebs. “That was the Big Hill Trading Company,” Margie said. “When I was growing up, it was still in business. It was huge and had these great wooden banisters and old wood floors. Everything smelled of wood.” I looked down the street, trying to envision what Mollie Burkhart and Tom White had seen—the Pierce-Arrow motorcars and the cafés and the oilmen and the aristocratic Osage, the wild furies that had once burned there. Now, even on a Saturday night, it was a “ghost town,” as Margie put it.

  She drove on again and turned off the main street into a small residential area. A few of the old mansions remained, but they were deserted and decaying; some were completely imprisoned in vines. At one point, Margie slowed down, as if searching for something.

  “What are you looking for?” her husband asked.

  “The place where the house was blown up.”

  “Isn’t it back the other way?” he said.

  “No, it’s—ah, here it is,” she said, pulling over by the lot, where another house had since been built.