more wealth that all of America\u2019s gold rushes combined.<\/a>\u00a0 And it\u00a0belonged to the members of the tribe.\u00a0 Almost overnight, they went from poverty to becoming the most wealthy people, per capita, in the world.<\/p>\nThey moved from buffalo-skin lodges to sprawling mansions staffed by servants.\u00a0 White servants.\u00a0 Native women traded their buckskin clothing for designer fashions.\u00a0 Some families\u2013like that of Maria Tallchief who would become a worldclass ballerina\u2013 pursued education, international travel, and high culture. Others, though, did not really know what to do with so much money.\u00a0 The story goes that\u00a0some Osage would buy an automobile and,\u00a0if a tire went flat, instead of fixing it, they would buy another one.<\/p>\n
Then in the 1920s, there was a series of murders.\u00a0 Some victims were shot.\u00a0 Others were poisoned.\u00a0 A house was blown up, killing all of the inhabitants.\u00a0 In some cases, individual family members were picked off, one by one.<\/p>\n
State and local authorities were baffled by the crimes.\u00a0 One attorney phoned from Oklahoma City that he had information about the murders from a man dying in a hospital, but as he rushed with the news back to Pawhuska, someone threw him off the train to his death.\u00a0 Another attorney went to Washington D.C. to beg for help in solving the crimes from the federal government, which had jurisdiction over Indian land, but he was murdered in the shadow of the nation\u2019s capital.<\/p>\n
But when the death toll reached 29, the Osage murders attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, the head of a brand new agency that would be known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.\u00a0 This would become the FBI\u2019s first major case.\u00a0 Hoover put in charge a former frontier lawman, an ex-Texas Ranger turned FBI agent named Tom White, who put together a team of undercover operatives, and headed to Oklahoma, trying to solve what turned out to be one of the most remarkable crimes in American history.<\/p>\n
In this book, the author, David Grann, has the reader looking over the shoulder of White as he collects evidence, interviews witnesses, and interrogates suspects.\u00a0 At the same time, the reader is following along with the author, an investigative journalist, who has access to material that the FBI at the time did not, as he makes his own discoveries.<\/p>\n
Reading the book is thus like reading an especially complicated and well-written mystery novel.\u00a0 But the events described in this book\u00a0actually happened.<\/p>\n
A work of fiction has to be, paradoxically, believable, even when it indulges in the wildest fantasy.\u00a0 The reader has to find the story, however impossible, plausible in its own terms, forcing the author to defer to the limits of what a reader can imagine.\u00a0 Reality, on the other hand, is not so restrained.\u00a0 Thus, truth really can be stranger than fiction.<\/p>\n
I will give no spoilers, but suffice it to say that the 27 murders were not the work of some serial killer, such as we have sadly become familiar with today, some sexually perverted psychotic.\u00a0 The true nature of the crimes turned out to be far more terrifying than that.<\/p>\n
Some cautions, a suggestion, and an observation:<\/p>\n
(1)\u00a0 This book packs an emotional wallop.\u00a0 My wife, who is a much more sensitive, empathetic, and better person than I am, found it almost too much to handle.\u00a0 \u201cThis all happened to real people!\u201d she correctly observed.\u00a0 Fictional murders performed by fictional murderers solved by a fictional detective do not have the same impact and can be read about with detached amusement, since none of it is real.\u00a0 Killers of the Flower Moon\u00a0<\/em>discloses human sin in a way that\u00a0is unsettling and haunting, though I think\u00a0the experience is good for us.\u00a0 Also,\u00a0the book is so well-written that it leaves us with a cathartic aesthetic satisfaction.<\/p>\n(2)\u00a0 Don\u2019t open this book on a day when you are busy with lots of important things you have to accomplish.\u00a0 If you do, you will get none of them done.\u00a0 The book is that gripping and full of suspense, immersing you into a very different world that you will have a hard time getting out of.\u00a0 And, at the end, when the mystery is solved, the author stumbles upon additional information that throws us for another loop!<\/p>\n
(3)\u00a0 Buy the hard copy, not the Kindle version.\u00a0 The print edition is full of photographs, showing the people involved in the story so that you can imagine them as they actually were.\u00a0 The Kindle version, I am told, does not have those photographs.\u00a0 They add a great deal to the story.\u00a0 I have been doing most of my reading for pleasure on my Kindle, but it was good to return to an actual book once again.<\/p>\n
(4)\u00a0 After reading the book, my next drive through Osage County had a new resonance.\u00a0 Pawhuska was no longer just a sleepy little town to me.\u00a0 I noted the buildings that played a role in the book\u2013the theater where they bid the oil leases!\u00a0 the courthouse overlooking the town!\u00a0 the old mansions now decaying\u00a0relics\u00a0from a once-prosperous time.<\/p>\n
The book reminded me that beneath the surface of unassuming towns, ordinary-seeming families, and individual human beings whom we pass without noticing on the street, there are often depths of history, untold stories of tragedy, heroism, suffering, and greatness.<\/p>\n
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