Date: 30 September 2018
Location: Bob and Linda
On a nice, but very warm fall Sunday afternoon the Happy Bookers met to discuss David Grann’s best-selling book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.
It appears that all of us enjoyed–or at least appreciated–the book, largely because we learned so much about a situation that most of us were not even aware of. The Osage Indians were repeatedly driven from their ancestral lands until they finally acquired an area of un-wanted, barren scrub land in Oklahoma. Amazingly, in the process they had obtained rights to all resources beneath the surface of the land, and when large deposits of oil were discovered, they became the richest people per capita in the world. But their incredible fortunes came with a catch: the government considered the Osage incapable of handling their fortunes and appointed “Guardians” to control their wealth.
The blatant racism here is difficult to accept, at least for 21st century Americans. To make things worse, some Guardians controlled the funds of many Indians, and the number of deceased Indians for some of these Guardians far exceeded normal mortality rates. The Osage were being murdered in order to gain total control of their fortunes, and the story focuses on the murders of multiple family members of one Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart.
A key part of the story was the investigation of the murders by the fledgling federal organization headed by J. Edgar Hoover. Of course we all know now that Hoover was a flawed individual who eventually tried to treat the FBI as his own personal agency. Nevertheless, he was intelligent enough to realize that his preferred college-educated investigators would have trouble in the rough and tumble Oklahoma badlands. Instead he gave the investigation lead to Tom White, a former Texas ranger and member of a long family line of lawmen. White himself assembled an unusual team and eventually they were able to bring at least two of the murderers to justice. As Grann makes clear, however, there were many other crimes, including probable murders, which were never solved and presumably never will be.
Adding to our appreciation of the book was that many of us had heard Grann himself discuss his research and the writing of the book just a few days earlier at the library’s Vive le Livre fund-raising dinner. Obviously, his talk did not cover all the details given in the book, but his presentation was well organized, with interesting slides and more personal observations. In fact, some of us found his presentation more interesting and compelling than the book itself.
This was not the first of Grann’s works that the Happy Bookers had read. Back in 2015 we read his The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. We all agreed that Grann is an excellent researcher and convincing writer, and we hope he continues to uncover still other stories to educate and enlighten us.
As always, we finished our meeting with a really nice meal and more lighthearted camaraderie.
—Bob