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 grap...