KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Nonfiction

The richest and unluckiest

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON:
The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
By David Grann
291 pp. Doubleday

Reviewed by Jack Shakely

The Osage were the tallest of all the Indian people, standing well over six feet on average, and perhaps the fittest. When the artist George Catlin first spied them in 1835 in their original home in the Missouri Valley, he proclaimed them “ the finest example of physical beauty, Indian or white, I have ever seen.”

Shunted aside to a rocky reservation in what is now eastern Oklahoma, the Osage found that they were sitting on one of the largest oil reserves ever discovered. By the beginning of World War One, the Osage were the richest people in America.

Also the unluckiest.

This is a tale of treachery of whites against the Osage so profound that it stuns the imagination. Almost every judge, every sheriff, every deputy and most of the bankers in Osage County, Oklahoma, in the 1920s were in on the take. If we didn’t have graphic proof, it would be hard to believe.

It started with a government that found the terms “Indian” and “incompetent” synonymous. Congress created a system of guardianship for the Osage that not just fostered cheating, it formalized it. And many of these guardians, appointed by the same crooked judges who ruled the Indians incompetent in the first place, decided that cheating was too slow, a lot slower than a bullet in the back of the head.

Just a quick glance at the scores of excellent photos that accompany David Grann’s new nonfiction tells the reader of the perils ahead. Here is a small tribe of Indians, rich beyond understanding, dressed in blankets and moccasins, standing beside their white neighbors decked out in three-piece suits, bow ties, fedoras and knowing smiles. The prejudice, envy and greed concealed in those pictures reveal a scene as predictable as it was deadly.

Grann is the author of the award-winning The Lost City of Z. In many ways, “Z” was the perfect vehicle for a participatory journalist like Grann. His protagonist was the flamboyant, eccentric, intrepid early 20^th century explorer Percy Fawcett, who went crashing into the jungles of South America with a sense of immortality and a faith in an ancient Brazilian city festooned in gold. When Grann entered Amazonia 80 years later, the “Green Hell” of the jungles, with its stinging insects and poison-tipped arrows, hadn’t changed at all, still offering beauty and death.

But Pawhuska wasn’t the Amazon. Whatever mystery the Osage hills might have held was long gone by the time the oil wells were up and running. It isn’t Grann’s fault that perhaps the greatest scene of corruption and murder in the early 20^th century should be played out on such a mundane, pedestrian field. There are deaths—dozens, perhaps hundreds of deaths, but Killers of the Flower Moon suffers from the banality of its setting. Much of the middle of the book reads like the police reports that in fact they are. If murder can be boring, this was it.

Grann is aware of the bleached-out pallet of his story, but when he tries to spice it up a little, it sounds like this: 

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. 

I’m just wondering, was it a dark and stormy night?

Part of the story’s problem is the lack of a discernable hero. The closest Grann can find is Tom White, an amiable, tall former Texas Ranger who, as the regional head of the fledgling FBI, is honest, earnest and hard-working. But he really doesn’t do much. The bad guys are so bad that they keep killing each other off before White has a chance to bring them to trial. The author also tries to weave J. Edgar Hoover and the new Bureau into the narrative, but outside of a few congratulatory telegrams from Hoover, the two men rarely interacted, and met only once.

The white man’s prejudice against the Indian at the time was palpable, and duly noted by Grann. He quotes an Osage leader commenting on an up-coming trial: “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.”

Cruelty abounds in Grann’s book, as do governmental indifference and duplicity. But in his meticulous research, he curiously drains away the passion so obvious in “Z”. It’s clear that he never really sank his teeth into this story’s heart. And neither will the reader.