Killers of the Flower Moon – David Grann

If the title is odd, the subtitle is more telling – Oil, Money, Murder, and the Birth of the FBI.

The oil comes from beneath the land owned by the Osage tribe. The American Indians, shunted from state to state to make room for the white settlers, in 1870 ended up in this rocky, sterile, and unwanted region of what became Oklahoma.

As for the money, in a shrewd or lucky move, the rights to any subterranean minerals on the reservation were retained collectively by the tribe, to be distributed via ‘headrights’ that could not be bought or sold, only inherited. It turned out there was oil under those sterile soils, and as the volume and price of oil increased in the early 1900s, the headright owners became some of the wealthiest citizens of the United States. Except they were not really full citizens, many designated as financially incompetent to manage their own wealth and placed by the paternalistic federal government under the financial guardianship of mainly white, professional, men. Good intentions maybe, but the result was exploitation on an industrial scale, with many making a good living from the ‘Indian Business’.

But for some this was not enough. A combination of rampant greed and racist resentment led to a trail of killings as a way to funnel the headright income away from the Osage. Execution style shootings, poisoning, a couple even blown up in their house, but no culprits, only inadequate inquests, sketchy investigations, and spurious explanations.

Law enforcement was patchy in those days, less so in the Indian reservations, and largely left in the hands of the local worthies – lawyers, doctors, businessmen – who were most at benefit from the old Indian Business and now from the new rash of dying Osage. When some Osage used their money to bring in private investigators, any who got close to the truth were warned off or died in mysterious circumstances, including falling from a moving train.

Eventually the federal government took notice and J Edgar Hoover, who was establishing a federal bureau of investigation, saw the opportunity to bolster its credentials. A Texan named Tom White was brought in along with a host of undercover agents, and eventually under his persistence the grizzly truth (or part of it) was laid bare.

David Grann skilfully picks through the sorry tale. Tom White’s piecing together of the evidence and unmasking the network of conspirators is contextualised with interesting historical asides and Grann’s own recently researched information, to provide a gripping, if socially uncomfortable, read.