The Osage are an Indian tribe that originally
controlled much of the territory bought by Thomas Jefferson as the Louisiana
Purchase: Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and the lands west to the Rockies. But
despite the usual white promises, the Osage were soon forced to give up most of
these traditional hunting lands and settle for a much smaller area of southeast
Kansas. This ‘homeland’ lasted for a time, but, as always, settler encroachment
forced the Osage to sell their Kansas lands as well (for $1.25 an acre to white
settlers), and purchase rocky land unsuitable for farming in “Indian Territory”
that would eventually become Oklahoma. The towns of Grayhorse and Pawhuska grew
up in this Osage territory, and especially after the 1893 race for free land
(made famous in the musical Oklahoma),
white settlers began to invade even this inhospitable terrain. Oklahoma settlement
might have signaled an end to the Osage but for some clever dealing by tribal
representatives James Bigheart and John Palmer, who managed to persuade the
U.S. government not only to legally parcel out the Osage land to individual
members of the tribe (657 acres each), but to include in Osage rights any “oil,
gas, coal or other minerals covered by the land.” This 1906 allotment made the
Osage rich—for not long after Oklahoma became the 46th state in
1907, rich oil deposits were discovered in those once-unpromising Osage lands. With
major oil companies bidding for drilling rights, their ownership of “headrights”
beneath their parcels made the Osage wealthy—by all accounts the wealthiest
group of people in the world at the time.
This
wealth was a mixed blessing. Though initially the Osage could and did buy
whatever they wanted, from mansions to fancy cars, their money attracted the
worst hustlers America had to offer. This included a paternalistic U.S. Congress,
which added its devilry by deciding to “care for” these unsophisticated
Indians, assigning them “guardians” to (ostensibly) protect their wealth. In a
1921 law, Congress not only empowered guardians to oversee their Osage ward’s
finances, but severely restricted the amount each Indian could withdraw from his
or her funds to an annual pittance. This accorded with the government’s
estimate that all Indians had an inborn “racial weakness” that made them incompetent to manage their money. As
one guardian put it, an Osage adult was “like a child six or eight years old,
and when he sees a new toy he wants to buy it” (78).
It
is this guardian system that David Grann puts at the heart of his shocking tale
of Osage murders, Killers of the Flower
Moon (2017). For in whatever way they could, white settlers in and around
Osage territory flocked to the area to figure out how to fleece these wealthy
Indians, legally or otherwise. Some, like Ernest Burkhart, married Osage women
like Mollie (originally Wah-kon-tah-he-um-pah), and became her guardian. Mollie’s
mother Lizzie and her sister Anna, also had white guardians, while her sister
Minnie was married to Bill Smith, until Minnie suddenly “died” mysteriously, after
which Smith married Mollie’s other sister Rita. As for Mollie’s husband, Ernest
Burkhart, he was conveniently the nephew of the wealthiest white man around
Pawhuska, William T. Hale. All of them would figure in the series of strange
deaths and murders which make up the main tale.
Essentially,
William Hale was the inspiration behind the more than twenty-four deaths of
Mollie Burkhart’s family and relations, in a diabolical and long-running scheme
to get control of those valuable Osage “headrights.” So what we have is yet
another example of the rape and theft of Native American possessions that began
almost immediately with the English settlement of New England and moved west as
the American continent expanded all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and beyond.
Settlers would arrive in a newly opened territory, find Indians blocking their
ability to grab the new land, and call for the United States military to clear
the pesky Indians out. As noted above, the Oklahoma territory was supposed to
be a more or less permanent home for Indians displaced from the East. But like
every other safe haven, Oklahoma land was lusted after by always encroaching
white settlers, and when abundant and accessible oil was discovered, the
encroachment turned to outright murder. At first, of course, the murders were
somehow left unsolved by what passed for local law enforcement. But around the
mid-1920s, the FBI established an Oklahoma field office in Oklahoma City, and
put an ex-Texas Ranger named Tom White in charge of it, specifically to solve
the growing catalogue of Osage murders. White and his investigators met the
usual resistance from locals, but eventually uncovered a web of collusion that
included the countless guardians swindling (and/or murdering) Indians in every
way they could, local law enforcement and judges covering it up, medical
doctors falsifying death certificates, and the guiding hand of the area’s most
prominent citizen, William T. Hale, directing it all. As Grann notes, “One
government study estimated that before 1925 guardians had pilfered at least $8
million directly from the restricted accounts of their Osage wards” (154). That’s
$8 million in 1920s dollars.
Eventually,
White and his agents were able to ferret out the schemes and those behind the
murders in Mollie Burkhart’s family, though Mollie herself had a difficult time
believing that the man she had married and loved, Ernest Burkhart, was
colluding with his uncle to swindle her and murder her relatives. But she saw
the light and went into seclusion while the FBI brought the perpetrators to
trial in the summer of 1926. Even then, William Hale was confident he’d never
be convicted; he controlled nearly all the law enforcement and political power in
the area. And that became a central question: given the attitude of white
settlers towards Indians, could or would a jury of twelve white men ever punish
a white man for killing an American Indian? An Osage tribe member put it
succinctly:
“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” (215).
That very question hangs over the
entire history of the treatment of indigenous peoples by white settlers in the
New World, and it is quite clear from the record that for most of that history,
Native Americans were not considered human at all. Indeed, it could be argued
that they were considered less than animals. And that is the thinking behind
the ability of a whole culture in Oklahoma, even into the twentieth century, to
collude in the twenty-four murders of Mollie Burkhart’s family, and the
hundreds and hundreds more that subsequent research has turned up. In the trial
in question, however, the question was soon answered: on August 20, 1926, the trial
of William Hale and his accomplice James Ramsey ended in a hung jury. Twelve
white men in Oklahoma could not
convict a white man of the murder of an Osage Indian. Fortunately, in this
case, the prosecutors filed for another trial, and this one—benefiting from the
direct testimony of Ernest Burkhart himself, who had earlier been found guilty
of blowing up his sister-in-law’s house while she was inside—ended differently.
On October 29, the jury found William Hale and John Ramsey guilty of
first-degree murder, and the judge sentenced them to life in prison. Then, five
years later, without the corrupting influence of William Hale, Mollie Burkhart
(now divorced from Ernest Burkhart and married to John Cobb) won her case to be
freed of guardianship: she was “restored to competency, and the order
heretofore made adjudging her to be an incompetent person is hereby vacated”
(229).
Grann
goes on to explore the case further, and finds that the murders solved by the
FBI (J. Edgar Hoover publicized the case relentlessly as an example of his bureau’s efficiency) were only the
tip of a very large iceberg. A relation of one murdered Osage Indian, a
reporter at the Washington Post,
investigated the murder of his grandmother in a book called The Deaths of Sybil Bolton (1994).
Dennis McAuliffe therein wrote of the real scale of the Osage murders:
“Over the sixteen-year period from 1907 to 1923, 605 Osages
died, averaging about 38 per year, an annual death rate of about 19 per 1,000.
The national death rate now is about 8.5 per 1,000; in the 1920s, when counting
methods were not so precise and the statistics were segregated into white and
black racial categories, it averaged almost 12 per 1000 for whites. By all
rights, their higher standard of living should have brought the Osages a lower
death rate than America’s whites. Yet Osages were dying at more than
one-and-a-half times the national rate…” (283)
Louis F. Burns, an Osage historian,
wrote that “I don’t know of a single Osage family which didn’t lose at least
one family member because of the head rights” (283), while Garrick Bailey, an
anthropologist specializing in Osage culture said that “…virtually every
element of society was complicit in the murderous system.”
In
sum, the Osage murders provide a stunning example of a racially-charged history
that Americans have never fully come to terms with. Not only could white
Americans not bear the presence of Native Americans on lands they coveted for
their own (and which they obtained for nothing), they could bear even less the
spectacle of their inferiors possessing the goods and wealth that they
venerated as inerrant signs of mental and moral and spiritual worth. The only
solution was to set upon these wealthy Indians in every way possible so as to
rape them of that which threatened to allow them to “pass” as human. Not even
murder was off limits for such a project; for murder and genocide had been the core
of the project, the preferred solution of the “civilized” invaders, from the
very beginning.
Lawrence DiStasi
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