Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, Sundown by John Joseph Mathews, and Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan

This so-called Indian business, as White discovered, was an elaborate criminal operation, in which various sectors of society were complicit. The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens: businessmen and ranchers and lawyers and politicians. So were the lawmen and prosecutors and judges who facilitated and concealed the swindling (and, sometimes, acted as guardians and administrators themselves).

Like many people, I hadn't heard of the Osage Murders until recently. Earlier this year, when I read Cimarron, Edna Ferber's story of white settlement in the Oklahoma territory, I thought the detail about the Osage growing rich on their oil deposits was a fanciful fiction, a Tarantino-style literary justification for people who had been marginalized in the real world. But as David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon makes clear--and as Martin Scorsese's movie adaptation, out this week, will make even clearer--the story is true, and underappreciated: after oil headrights made many among the Osage tribe rich, they were subjected to a spate of horrible murders by covetous white settlers.

Grann's book focuses on the story of Mollie Burkhart. Like many Osage women at the time period, Mollie is married to a white man who lives off of her wealth. Her sister, Anna, is shot and killed; Anna's death is followed by the murder--by bomb--of another sister and brother-in-law. These murders were just a few of the many that took place in what's now known as the Osage "Reign of Terror," but their startling nature and obvious connection to one another made them the focus of the FBI's investigation. The FBI is, for Grann, the story's second thread, a watershed moment in the transition of the Bureau from a group of ragtag cowboys to an efficient, professionalized institution under the control of J. Edgar Hoover. What the FBI, led by a rangy Texan named Tom White, uncover is a conspiracy of elaborate scope. The deaths in Mollie's family are ultimately traced back to her own husband, Ernest, working under the guidance of his uncle, a powerful cattle rancher named William Hale.

Killers of the Flower Moon is, to some degree, more interesting as a story than it is a book; it has the breezy efficiency of many similar pop history books, though I can imagine the prose is a shade better than many of its equivalents. Its greatest moments are journalistic ones, as with the stunning final chapter in which Grann's research reveals that the scope of the conspiracy among Oklahoma's white settlers was much larger than initially imagined. Though Hale is--spoiler alert--convicted and sent to prison, Grann is able to identify a handful of powerful bankers and operatives with bloody hands who were never apprehended. The story is simply a story of racism write large, a system of depredation that goes above and beyond Hale to the very nature of white settlement in the Oklahoma territory.

Killers of the Flower Moon offers a kind of double revelation: as Grann uncovers the further secrets of the Osage murders, so too he uncovers a part of history that has been hidden from view for too long. In the 1920s, the Osage murders were front page news, but in the wake of the Great Depression and the drying up of the Osage oil feeds, they were largely forgotten. Grann's book and Scorsese's movie will, I imagine, move the story into a kind of public consciousness that will be difficult to dispel a second time; the Osage murders will go from a thing that nobody knew to a thing that everybody knows. What more can you ask for from a popular history book?

If I had my way, I'd direct people's attention to the system of allotment that facilitated both the Osage's incredible wealth and the murders that attended it. The 1887 Dawes Act split many tribal lands into small "allotments" which could then be claimed by individual Indians, who supposedly would be transformed by the virtue of property ownership into real Americans. Of course, when the land was divvied up, there was usually a big chunk left over that went into the ownership of white settlers. In this case, the allotment had the ironic effect of giving individual Osage "headrights" over the vast oil reserves that made money through lucrative leases. And yet, the money was control as the Osage, being considered by the government incompetent to handle their own affairs, were put under the authority of guardians. A guardian might be a trusted community figure or, as in Mollie Burkhart's case, a husband, and in most cases the murders were orchestrated by these guardians in order to ensure the headrights passed to them.

It was a system of such obvious and vicious racism that it shocks us today, but other vestiges of injustice remain as relevant as ever. Consider, for example, the threat posed by the judicial determination that the murders took place outside tribal land, moving the case out of federal courts and into local courts where men like William Hale could bribe, threaten, and kill their way to possible acquittal. And then consider a case like McGirt v. Oklahoma from last year, at the heart of which was the very question of whether Oklahoma tribes have jurisdiction over crimes committed against them on their own lands. Killers of the Flower Moon, both book and film, may bring the Osage murders into a kind of sustained historical consciousness, but whether we'll absorb the right social and political lessons from them is another matter.

Away from the activity of Progress which had become so important, he felt a pleasure which seemed to be absent when he was in town. On the few occasions when the pounding hoofs of his pony flushed a small flock of prairie chickens, he would come to the realization that he didn't see them in large flocks any more; that it had been years since he had heard the familiar booming carried across the April prairie. When he came to little blackjack-covered ravines that reached out like feathered fingers into the prairie, he didn't seem to miss the band of deer bounding away; their white tails bobbing and seeming to float away among the black boles of the trees. Had he seen one lone frightened buck, he might not have missed the band, but there were no more deer, and he was not acutely conscious of their absence. Sometimes as he rode along, a golden eagle would sit high on a limestone escarpment, watching him, and the redtailed hawks were always present and seemed to taunt him as usual about being earthbound; circling low and screaming weakly their contempt.

Before it was stolen from them, or dried up and blew away, how did the Osage get their riches? What must that have been like for a people a single generation away from mass white settlement? Part of that story can be found in Sundown, a novel by the Osage writer John Joseph Mathews. Sundown is--to my understanding--regarded as one of the first English-language novels published by a Native American, along with D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded, which came out in 1936, two years Mathews' novel. Like Archilde in The Surrounded, and like Mathews and McNickle themselves, Challenge Windzer, the novel's protagonist, is part-Native and part-white, an inheritance that at times leaves him torn between two modes of existence, feeling as if he fits into neither. Chal is a teenager when the oil boom begins in earnest, and part of what makes Sundown such a fascinating text is that it represents a contemporary, though fictional, account of the real-life stories that Grann has resurrected.

Challenge's father John names him for the "challenge" he hopes he will represent for his people against those who would oppress them. John is pro-allotment, a big believer in progress, a word that means turning "away from the blanket" and embracing business and industrialization. He is enthusiastic about Chal's decision to play football for the University of Oklahoma. But Chal's experience at school is a tortured one: not knowing how to act or speak, he grows a reputation for being taciturn. How can he explain, for example, why is it is such a desecration for an Osage man to be struck with a paddle, as his frat brothers do to him in a hazing frenzy? A couple of Chal's friends from "the Agency" drop out, despite being football stars, unable to handle the difficulty of the experience: one turns to the bottle and the other returns "to the blanket." Chal tries to muddle on, yearning for the ability to do as his peers do, to dance and flirt and sweat for grades.

Chal is a difficult protagonist to follow. So much of the novel's drama derives from his inability to act, but neither can he articulate his difficulties--he's like Hamlet, if Hamlet didn't know how to make a speech. Chal's life is largely a series of unmade gestures. When the first World War breaks out, he moves from college to flight school, where excels as a pilot, but his social relations are much the same; he longs to speak or act, but can't find the words, and so every episode just sort of... ends. But neither can Chal take part in the Osage rituals he sees among those who still live in the traditional fashion. He longs for the Osage hills of his youth, filled with animal life and a proper canvas for the size of his imagination. But when he returns home, he finds the land largely diminished by the oil derricks, which have depleted the waters and repelled the animals. This is his father's progress, a sacrifice whose rewards his father can't even enjoy--he's killed by white men who covet his headrights.

His father's death marks a final blow for Chal, who descends into a life of hard drinking and carousing, one that's ironically made possible by the flow of payments from his oil headrights. What Sundown suggests, I suppose, is that the trouble for the Osage didn't begin with the murders. Rather, the murders are themselves the consequence of devastating social changes, brought on by white settlement and a belief that old ways could be discarded in favor of an elusive "progress" that turned out to be another settler trick. 

Ben still noticed how few Indians were visible on the streets of town, a couple of dark men, perhaps, sitting on the running board of a car. He said nothing about this to anyone, but he knew the Indians were going home. They'd become peyote men with long hair and some of these were still the richest people in the world. They'd entered a house of fear and closed the door, become invisible once again. But out in the country, their homes and barns were strung with lights in hopes that no secrets would hide in the darkness. In other circumstances, the lights in the night's black country would have been beautiful. But these were lights of terror, and farther out, the fires could be seen scattered around the dark hills while people went to the roundhouse and the peyote lodge and sang and drummed, and the drumming joined the early rains, and it was felt in the topsoil and subsoil of earth. It filled up the hollow dark nights when the moon was swallowed by earth's hazardous shadow.

So, Killers of the Flower Moon is a book about recovering a lost history. But as with all lost histories, they're not lost to everybody: as the Osage contributors to the film make clear, the Reign of Terror has never been forgotten about their communities. Linda Hogan's novel of the Reign of Terror, Mean Spirit, came out nearly thirty years before David Grann's book. Hogan is Chickasaw, not Osage, but Mean Spirit suggests that the memory of this bloodthirsty period remains strong among the Native American groups who call modern-day Oklahoma home. And, in fact, Mean Spirit tells almost exactly the same story as Killers of the Flower Moon, only lightly fictionalized: the villainous cattle baron is John Hale, rather than William Hale. Anna Brown becomes Grace Blanket, an Osage woman shot to death in the book's opening chapters, while her children--who, as her inheritors, are the next to be threatened--look on in fear.

Amazingly, Hogan seems to have decided that the story described in Killers of the Flower Moon didn't have enough characters: Mean Spirit is so crowded with people it's almost Dickensian. Uncharitably, you might say it's kind of a mess; I found myself unable to remember who was who and how they were all related. It's a mistake, I think, not to have streamlined the story a little. More than once, when someone was killed--or revealed to be a villain, in league with Hale and the other oil-grabbers--I felt nothing, because I had barely processed who that character was or was pretending to be. I actually found myself wondering if it was better or worse to have read Killers before reading Mean Spirit. Perhaps it would have been clearer to approach the story on its own terms rather than as a slightly recombinated version of history. Or maybe it would have made it all even more inscrutable.

That said, the great strength of Mean Spirit is the detail that Hogan adds to the plainness of history. Consider this passage, which follows the bombing of a house that kills Grace's sister Sara (Hogan spares the husband figure, here a half-Indian named Benoit, not a white guy named Bill, so that he can be fingered for the murders):

Benoit was still in jail and people continued to find pieces of Benoit and Sara's blown-apart life. A mattress remained on top of a tree and some hawks built a nest in it. One of the cattle grazers who leased Indian land filed a lien against Benoit's estate for the cost of a calf that had been hit on the skull and killed by a flying cast iron skillet. Treasure-hunters traveled in far and wide to search the land for possessions that had blown free of the explosion. A silver cuff link was found beneath the steps of a farmhouse a quarter mile away. One man, out scavenging the woods that autumn with a war surplus metal detector, found a nightgown hanging neatly over a tree limb. It was his wife's size. He took it home.

One addition I really liked is the character of John Stink, an Osage deaf-mute who is mistakenly buried alive. When he emerges from his burial--the Osage place rocks only loosely over the bodies--he assumes he's become a ghost. The only thing is, everyone else assumes that he's a ghost too, and they go on for months or years like that. I was delighted, too, to discover in the book's acknowledgements that John Stink was a real person, though he seems to have had little or no connection to the Reign of Terror. Also added are a series of "Watchers," people from the "Hill tribes" of Osage who still choose to live in a traditional manner, who come down to hang out outside the house of Grace Blanket's family. It wasn't clear to me that the Watchers ever really did any protecting, but the symbolism is powerful: when the oil seeps up through the land like blood, it is the traditional Osage who have no need for money or motorcars who watch over their wayward relatives.

Hogan also replaces Tom White, the Texan FBI agent who led the investigation into Hale, with a Lakota FBI operative named Stacey Red Hawk. Like the Watchers, Red Hawk's role in the actual plot felt elusive to me, but his role is more symbolic than it is principal: he widens the perspective of the novel from an Osage story to something that implicates Indians of all tribes, and Indianness in general; even Stacey Red Hawk, toward the novel's end, has abjured the Bureau of Investigation, humbled by the simplicity and depth of the lives lived by the Hill Osage.

Mean Spirit is more comic than Solar Storms, the other Hogan novel that I read. And it's very different in this way from Sundown, which is almost completely humorous. Perhaps it's a difference of stakes--the Osage writer and the Chickasaw--but perhaps it is a difference of historical perspective, too. John Joseph Mathews, like Chal Windzer, may have looked around at a world that seemed intent on destroying the Osage one way or another, either by recruiting him into the white capitalist world of oil barony, or assimilating him at the end of a fratboy's wooden paddle--or by just plain shooting him, exploding him, or poisoning. At times, Chal seems unsure whether the life of the Osage can survive. Hogan, perhaps, has the luxury of writing with the knowledge that, while the Reign of Terror brutalized families and ended dozens of hundreds of lives prematurely, the Osage live on, as the rest of us are all getting to see right now as well.