Killers of the Flower Moon: Chapters 1–4

She had often gone on “sprees,” as her family disparagingly called them: dancing and drinking with friends until dawn.

To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties. In the early twentieth century, each person on the tribal roll began receiving a quarterly check. The amount was initially for only a few dollars, but over time, as more oil was tapped, the dividends grew into the hundreds, then the thousands.

The public had become transfixed by the tribe’s prosperity, which belied the images of American Indians that could be traced back to the brutal first contact with whites—the original sin from which the country was born.

Reporters tantalized their readers with stories about the “plutocratic Osage” and the “red millionaires,” with their brick-and-terra-cotta mansions and chandeliers, with their diamond rings and fur coats and chauffeured cars.

One writer marveled at Osage girls who attended the best boarding schools and wore sumptuous French clothing, as if “une très jolie demoiselle of the Paris boulevards had inadvertently strayed into this little reservation town.”

The streets clamored with cowboys, fortune seekers, bootleggers, soothsayers, medicine men, outlaws, U.S. marshals, New York financiers, and oil magnates.

She owned several cars and had a staff of servants—the Indians’ pot-lickers, as many settlers derided these migrant workers.

Growing up in Texas, the son of a poor cotton farmer, he’d been enchanted by tales of the Osage Hills—that vestige of the American frontier where cowboys and Indians were said to still roam.

“All the forces of dissipation and evil are here found,” a U.S. government official reported. “Gambling, drinking, adultery, lying, thieving, murdering.”

He was more brooding than Ernest and had inscrutable yellow-flecked eyes and thinning hair that he wore slicked back.

Genial and witty, the thirty-year-old Whitehorn was married to a woman who was part white, part Cheyenne. A local newspaper noted that he was “popular among both the whites and the members of his own tribe.”

A week after Anna disappeared, an oil worker was on a hill a mile north of downtown Pawhuska when he noticed something poking out of the brush near the base of a derrick.

There was a burst of heat and light, and the boy watched as the squirrel was hit and began to tumble lifelessly over the edge of a ravine. He chased after it, making his way down a steep wooded slope and into a gulch where the air was thicker and where he could hear the murmuring of the creek.

The undertaker tried to determine if the woman was Anna Brown, whom he’d known.

It was hard for Mollie and Rita to discern if the face was Anna’s...

A coroner’s inquest, composed of jurors and led by a justice of the peace, was hastily convened at the ravine. Inquests were a remnant of a time when ordinary citizens largely assumed the burden of investigating crimes and maintaining order.

An influential nineteenth-century manual on medical jurisprudence cited the saying “A medical man, when he sees a dead body, should notice everything.”

In the nineteenth century, scientists believed that they had solved the riddle by studying the phases a body passes through after death: the stiffening of the limbs (rigor mortis), the corpse’s changing temperature (algor mortis), and the discoloring of the skin from stagnant blood (livor mortis).

As with all Osage, the birth of her children had been the greatest blessing of Wah’Kon-Tah, the mysterious life-force that pervades the sun and the moon and the earth and the stars; the force around which the Osage had structured their lives for centuries, hoping to bring some order out of the chaos and confusion on earth; the force that was there but not there—invisible, remote, giving, awesome, unanswering.

Undertakers charged the Osage exorbitant rates for a funeral, trying to gouge them, and this was no exception.

Undertakers charged the Osage exorbitant rates for a funeral, trying to gouge them, and this was no exception.

The funeral service for Anna began at the church. William Hale, Ernest’s uncle, was very close to Anna and Mollie’s family, and he served as one of the pallbearers.

The priest chanted the rhythmic thirteenth-century hymn “Dies Irae,” which culminates with a supplication:
SWEET JESUS LORD MOST BLEST,
GRANT THE DEAD ETERNAL REST.

Ordinarily at the cemetery the lid of a coffin was lifted a final time before interment, allowing loved ones to say good-bye, but the condition of Anna’s body made that impossible.

At the grave site, standing with Ernest, Mollie could hear the old people’s song of death, their chants interspersed with weeping.

Precisely at noon—as the sun, the greatest manifestation of the Great Mystery, reached its zenith—men took hold of the casket and began to lower it into the hole.

Precisely at noon—as the sun, the greatest manifestation of the Great Mystery, reached its zenith—men took hold of the casket and began to lower it into the hole.

The authorities had provided a translator for Mollie, but she waved him off and spoke in succinct English, the way the nuns had taught her as a child.

There was no evidence implicating Bryan other than the fact that he’d been with Anna before she disappeared.

A prevailing theory was that her killer came from outside the reservation.

The passage of Prohibition had only compounded the territory’s feeling of lawlessness by encouraging organized crime and creating, in the words of one historian, “the greatest criminal bonanza in American history.”

Mollie and others began to harbor suspicions about Anna’s ex-husband, Oda Brown, who called himself a businessman but spent most of his time carousing.

He didn’t divulge what he knew, however, and upon receiving the message the sheriff set out in what the press described as a “fast automobile.”

The money had come suddenly, swiftly, madly. Mollie had been ten years old when the oil was first discovered, had witnessed, firsthand, the ensuing frenzy.

But within four years Jefferson had compelled the Osage to relinquish their territory between the Arkansas River and the Missouri River.

Deliberate and thoughtful, he had an ability to study each situation before choosing a course of action. Years later, when the tribe created its first court system, which adjudicated mostly minor crimes, he was elected one of the three judges.

After the tail was cut off—as a trophy for the conqueror—nothing was left to waste: the meat was dried, the heart smoked, the intestines made into sausages. Oils from the bison’s brain were rubbed over the hide, which was then transformed into leather for robes and lodge coverings. And still there was more to reap: horns were turned into spoons, sinews into bowstrings, tallow into fuel for torches.

After completing their trek to the new reservation, members of the tribe built several camps, the most significant one being in Pawhuska, where, on a prominent hilltop, the Office of Indian Affairs erected an imposing sandstone building for its field office.

U.S. policy toward the tribes shifted from containment to forced assimilation, and officials increasingly tried to turn the Osage into churchgoing, English-speaking, fully clothed tillers of the soil.

But the process of acculturation was accelerating as settlers began to move onto the reservation.

Mollie had reached Pawhuska. Although the reservation’s capital then seemed a small, squalid place—a “muddy little trading post,” as one visitor described it—it was likely the biggest settlement Mollie had ever seen.

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 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.”