Killers of the Flower Moon : : the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

Locations
Call Number: 976.6 Gr, Adult Book / Nonfiction / True Crime / Grann, David
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch, Traverwood Branch, Westgate Branch

Maps on endpapers.
Chronicle one: the marked woman -- The vanishing -- An act of God or man? -- King of the Osage Hills -- Underground reservation -- The devil's disciples -- Million dollar elm -- This thing of darkness -- Chronicle two: the evidence man -- Department of easy virtue -- The undercover cowboys -- Eliminating the impossible -- The third man -- A wilderness of mirrors -- A hangman's son -- Dying words -- The hidden face -- For the betterment of the Bureau -- The quick-draw artist, the yegg, and the soup man -- The state of the game -- A traitor to his blood -- So help you God! -- The hot house -- Chronicle three: the reporter -- Ghostlands -- A case not closed -- Standing in two worlds -- The lost manuscript -- Blood cries out.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Incredible Book! submitted by mogul55 on July 7, 2018, 9:10pm Before my college recommended this book for me to read, I didn't have time to read very much and the hobby more or less faded away over the years. After I flipped through the first couple chapters of Killers of the Flower Moon, I became just as obsessed with the mystery of the Osage Indian murders as did the private eyes and David Grann. It is a very well written narrative, and I highly recommend it to anyone.

Well worth a read. submitted by JoCeAn on July 12, 2018, 9:11pm From someone who doesn’t normally read non fiction, this was a very interesting and well written book. I couldn’t put it down. Well worth a read.

**** submitted by shannonwait on July 29, 2018, 7:45am A very propulsive read, with lots twists and turns. I came away with a better understanding of the Osage, their culture, and the exploitation they faced.

Riveting and Sad submitted by wellscai on August 4, 2018, 10:44am Such an interesting book about a topic I knew nothing about. The exploitation and murder of so many Osage tribal members during the early 20th century is shocking and sadly all to real, and Grann told their story with a good amount of respect and outrage.

Incredible submitted by jaromatorio on July 24, 2020, 11:13am ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is the non-fictional account of the calculated murders of dozens of members of the Osage tribe during the 1920s, and the subsequent investigation by the FBI and prosecution of those responsible. It is amazing.
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Like most white Americans, I know shamefully little about the history of this country pre-European colonization (though I learned a TON from the fantastic book '1491'!) and even less about the issues that specifc tribes have encountered from 1492-present. In reading this book, I learned that the Osage people (a Great Plains tribe) had been forcebly resettled on land in Oklahoma that happened to sit atop a massive oil field. ⁣The Osage retained communal mineral rights during the allotment process, and many Osage became wealthy through returns from leasing fees generated by their headrights. According to the book, at one point in the early 20th Century, the Osage were the richest people per capita in the entire world.⠀
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Of course with this great wealth came plenty of people looking to take advantage of an already marginalized population, and the state imposed guardianships over many Osage who were forced to relinquish control of their money to white guardians. And as if this weren't bad enough, starting in the late 1910s-early 1920s, members of the Osage tribe in the area began getting murdered one by one. Though these initially appeared to be random killings, it soon became clear that these murders were part of something much larger. ⠀
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I can't say much more or it'll give everything away, but please read this book!!⠀

Engaging history submitted by hiker15 on August 23, 2020, 12:21pm Many non-fiction books are a slog to get through but this one is a page-turner! It is like mystery fiction - but it actually happened. It was an eye-opener how poorly the Osage Indians in Oklahoma were treated by whites and how whites essentially stole the oil royalties that the Osage received for the oil pumped from their land. Also interesting how the FBI came into being and how they investigated the murders of the Osage.

Definitely a great read!

Incredible book submitted by cjcris23 on June 28, 2024, 1:55pm I love all of David Grann’s books, and this is a great intro to his style of writing. This is an excellent example of narrative non-fiction that will keep you interested and engaged until the very end.

No Tidy Conclusions submitted by mecunningham on July 18, 2024, 8:11am In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann initially set out to tell the story of the “Reign of Terror” that haunted Oklahoma’s Osage community in the early 1920s. Made wealthy by means of their lucrative oil fields, the Osage found that the money in turn made them targets—of scams and swindlers, of government-appointed “guardians” intent on skimming as much as they could, and of a murderer. Or, perhaps, murderers. One by one, between 1920 and 1924, members of the Osage Nation died under circumstances either mysterious or violent, with few law enforcement officials interested in performing more than a perfunctory investigation.

Eventually, FBI agent Thomas White arrived to conduct a serious and in-depth inquiry into the Osage deaths, motivated by both his own sense of justice and the urging of newly appointed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. White, aided by a team of undercover agents tasked with infiltrating the community, solved the crimes with remarkable speed, deducing that local leader William Hale had orchestrated a dark scheme to obtain Osage oil rights.

And there, it would seem, Killers of the Flower Moon could have ended, another true-crime history telling a story that was known at the time but has since been largely forgotten outside the families of those affected by the killings. Grann, however, goes a step further. In the book’s final section, he recounts his own research into the cases and his conclusion that the Osage Reign of Terror began years before Hale was on the scene and continued long after his conviction and imprisonment. The story is far less tidy than Thomas White or J. Edgar Hoover ever suspected, and there are far more guilty parties than ever identified.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a fast and absorbing read, a condemnation of the way that Native American nations have been treated by a U.S. government interested only in what it could extract from them. Grann has a compelling cast of historical characters to work with, first and foremost Mollie Burkhart (sister and daughter of several murdered women) and Tom White.

Grann is not able to offer a tidy conclusion to his story; time and neglect have made solving all the cases an impossibility. Instead, Killers of the Flower Moon is a lesson in remembering and recovering the past, and ensuring that the suffering of those who have been done so wrong for so long is never forgotten.