Oil and Blood: The Osage Murders from Cautionary Tales

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Speaker 1: Pushkin, wealth, greed, desire, murder. These are just some of the plagues that befell the Osage people after vast oil reserves were discovered beneath their land. Killers of the Flower Moon tells a story of the disregard for human life and betrayal and greed. Today on Revision's History, we're presenting a special episode of Cautionary Tales. You'll hear the story behind David Grant's book Killers of the Flower Moon, which has been adapted for the screen by Martin Scorsese and is now exclusively in theaters. Plus hear about the investigation that began almost ninety years later. Here's the episode. Listen to Cautionary Tales wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 2: This cautionary Tale is based on David Gran's book Killers of the Flower Moon and produced in association with Apple Original Film. The film of the same title is now exclusively in theaters. Once upon a time, the O Sage Nation stretched across the center of the North American continent, from the Rocky Mountains through to what is now Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. President Thomas Jefferson viewed the O Sage people with where we respect When in eighteen oh four, he met with a group of towering O Sage chiefs at the White House. He remarked that they were the finest men we have ever seen. The wary respect did not last. By eighteen seventy, the O Sage people had been pushed into buying land that one observer described as broken, rocky, and utterly unfit for cultivation. Ravaged by smallpox, the death of the buffalo, and brutal attacks from settlers, only a few thousand of them remained alive. The O Sage chief wati Ankhar, tried to look on the bright side. My people will be happy in this land. He said, there are many hills here. White man does not like country whether a hills, and he will not come. But the white man did come. O Sage children were forcibly enrolled in Catholic boarding schools, days travel away from their parents, and made to change their names and their clothes to the European style. The United States policy was that the Indian must conform to the white man's ways peacefully if they will, forcibly if they must. In nineteen oh six, the US government wanted to create a new state, Oklahoma and hand it over to white settlers. They pressed the Osage nation to agree to a new deal concerning the rights to the land they had purchased. The Osage negotiators played a weak hand well. Under the deal that they agreed, the entire tribe of two thousand, two hundred and twenty nine souls collectively held the rights to whatever lay beneath their land. And what lay beneath, as the Osage negotiators suspected and the white Man had not guessed, was oil vast reserves of black gold. As the oil started to flow, so did the money. Every quarter, every member of the Osage tribe received a check to reflect the money being paid by the oil men. At first, it was little more than pocket money. Soon each check each individual was the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in today's money every quarter, and the checks kept growing. Newspapers couldn't get enough of stories about what they called the red millionaires. O Sage girls dressed in the latest Parisian fashions. O Sage cookouts a circle of expensive automobiles surrounding an open campfire where the bronzed and blanketed owners are cooking meat in the primitive style. O Sage elders arriving for a ceremonial dance in a private plane. Luck had finally smiled on the o Sage Nation, or had it. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Minnie Smith was the first of the four sisters to die. She'd been young, fit and healthy, and then she'd grown ill quite suddenly. The doctors in Osage County were baffled by her death, but of course they had a diagnosis, a peculiar wasting illness. Maybe peculiar, it certainly was. Minnie left behind a husband, a white man called Bill Smith. A few months after Minnie's death in nineteen eighteen, Bill married another of the sisters, Rita. Then there was Anna. She had also married a wife man, but she had divorced him, and at the age of thirty four, she had a habit of disappearing on wild nights of drinking and dancing. She had plenty of places to go as the oil flowed in Osage County. Once modest settlements became bustling towns full of oil workers, bootleggers, and gangsters. One overnight oil rush town was named wiz Bang, where people whizzed all day and banged all night. Anna enjoyed such places that they were risky. She always kept a small pistol in her purse. And then one night in nineteen twenty one, she went out partying and didn't come home. Not the first night, not the second, and not the third. Which brings us to Sister number four, Molly, the serious, responsible sister, the one who ended up taking care of all the other and their mother too. In her hunt for her missing sister, Molly could call on perhaps the most influential man in Osage County, her husband's uncle, William Hale, the man they called the King of the Osage Hills. Hale had been a cowboy when he was young. Now he was a bespectacled, three piece suit wearing pillar of the community. Behind his owlish glasses, he remained a formidable character. He was not the kind of man to ask you to do something he told you, said Molly's husband Ernest. But although Hale was rich, powerful and domineering, he was also a reverend and a deputy sheriff, and widely regarded as the most public spirited man in Osage County. He had supported local schools and charities before the Osage people struck oil. One doctor said, I couldn't begin to remember how many sick people have received medical attention at his expense, nor how many hungry mouths have tasted of his bounty. William Hale himself once wrote, I never had better friends in my life than the o Sages. Uncle William was like a guardian angel for Molly's family. If anyone could help Molly find her sister, it would be him. In the second half of the twentieth century, economists began to observe a pattern striking oil is not the guarantee of national prosperity that you might expect. Indeed, the reverse is often true. Think of Iraq and Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria. There are plenty of countries with vast reserves of oil, and few of them seem to have flourished as a result. Even the wealthy exceptions, such as Saudi Arabia often have a thin and brittle kind of wealth. It's a challenge to build foundations for enduring prosperity for something that will last longer than wiz bang when the oil money is gone. Economists debate the causes and cures of this problem, and they call it the resource curse, But I prefer a more lyrical description by a former minister of oil, Rich Venezuela, when he was asked to describe the effect of all that black gold on his country. It is the devil's excrement, he declared. We are drowning in the devil's excrement. The Oce age had never heard of the resource curse or the devil's excrement, though one of their elders, it seemed to anticipate the idea. Someday this oil will go, he said, and there will be no more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father. There'll be no fine motor cars and new clothes. Then I know my people will be happier. But were those fat checks involved in the peculiar death of one sister and the disappearance of another? Uncle William Hale had quietly expressed his doubts about Bill Smith. He'd married Minnie, remember then she had died suddenly and mysteriously. Months later he married her sister Rita. Marrying one o sage woman would set a man up for life. Marrying two. You had to wander about Bill's motives. But then it wasn't as if Bill had stood to gain financially from Minnie's death. Under the system of head rights, it wouldn't be Bill who'd keep getting those fat checks. Instead, Minnie's head right passed to her mother, Lizzie. So would Anna's head wright if anything had happened to Anna. And after Anna had been missing for a week, there was news a rotting corpse had been discovered. The undertakers scattered salt and ice on it to reduce the swelling and the stink. By the time the sisters Molly and Rita arrived, the vultures were wheeling overhead. Was it Anna? The face of the corpse was unrecognizable, but Molly knew the traditional blanket and the clothes were Anna's. She had washed them freshly for her sister the last time she saw her alive a week ago, and there was anna distinctive gold filling. It was her for sure. Rita wept. Molly was resolute. She hired private detectives, and she had help from her husband's uncle, William Hale, who swore he'd get justice for Anna. He got his personal doctors to perform an autopsy. They found a bullet hole in the woman's skull. Although even after chopping her brain into mints, they never could find the bullet. Curious, but as both the sheriff and the private investigators started to look into the mystery, it wasn't just Minnie's and Anna's deaths that they'd have to solve. Another one of the sisters did not have long to live. Cautionary tales will return in a moment. The Indian must conform to the white man's ways. But not like this, decided the federal government. Not with luxury cars and private planes. Congressional committees took to pouring over reports of O Sage expenditure, like disapproving parents, scrutinizing the bank account of a teenager, and their devised a system just like the one you'd impose on a child. If the US Department of the Interior decided that a member of a Native American tribe wasn't competent to manage their own affairs, their finances would be handed over to a guardian. The idea of competence was a sham. In truth, the system of guardianship was purely a matter of racism. Full blooded O Sage people would always be pronounced incompetent and assigned a guardian guardianship was supposedly intended to protect O sage people from themselves. In fact, and of course, and by design, it made them easy to exploit. Guardians had to approve any item of expenditure down to toothpaste and groceries. The guardians were the ones writing the checks, and it was the easiest thing in the world for a guardian to steal from their O sage ward. One's gam for example, was for a guardian to buy a car for a couple of hundred dollars, then parted onto their ward for a thousand. Since O sage people were forbidden to have direct control of their own money, they might not have known about the deception, but in any case they were powerless to do much about it. At least, some O sage people had white friends. Molly didn't have to rely on some exploitative stranger for guardianship. Her own husband, Ernest was her guardian. That meant she had as much control over her money as most women of the day, and just as you'd expect from the nephew of the upstanding William Hale, Ernest took good care of Molly. She suffered from diabetes. He made sure she went regularly to his uncle's trusted doctors, the ones who had performed Anna's autopsy. They gave her the regular injections of insulin she needed to stay alive. But the private detectives that Molly hired weren't making much progress in figuring out who had shot Anna and why. They interviewed Ernest's brother, the last person who'd seen her alive. Anna's ex husband was grilled too, but he had nothing to gain from her death. Anna's money went to her mother, Lizzie. The evidence to charge anyone seemed thin anyway. The local sheriff and his deputies were busy, busy taking bribes, busy colluding with bootlegging gangs, and soon enough they were busy dealing with other untimely deaths. A mood of fear set in o Sage. People began to install electric lights outside their homes, pushing back the darkness in the hope of dissuading the creep of the assassins who would be next. At one stage, even the powerful friend of the Osage, William Hale, seemed to be a target. Unknown men set fire to his pastures, and the flames spread for mile upon mile. If the King of the Osage Hills could be attacked. Nobody was safe. Rita's husband, Bill Smith, developed his own aspisions about what was going on. He hired his own private detectives. He told friends he was determined to get to the bottom of the killings and that he was getting warm, but perhaps his enemies were getting warm too. On several nights, Bill and his wife Rita were awoken by movement outside the house. It sounded like intruders scouting around getting the lay of the land. Rita and Bill were scared. Leaving many of their possessions behind, they abruptly moved to a neighborhood in the town of Fairfax. Most people there had a guard dog, but over the course of a few days, one by one the neighborhood guard dogs began to sicken, lay down, and die. In the early hours of March tenth, nineteen twenty three, the entire town was jolted awake. Close to the blast, windows shattered, timber, snatched, doors flew from their hinders. People were not flat further away. The town shook and shook and wouldn't stop. A rush of bewildered townsfolk headed towards the epicenter. It was Bill and Rita's new house. There was nothing left of it but rubble and choking black smoke. Apparently Bill Smith's investigation had got a little too warm. Molly was the only one of her sisters left, and despite regular injections to treat her diabetes, Molly herself was getting sicker and sicker. In nineteen twenty five, a lawman strode into Osage County, Oklahoma. Tom White was a movie caricature of a Western hero. Six foot four, square jawed, incorruptible, and fearless. He wore a big cowboy hat even when in the office. The office itself was the Bureau of Investigation of Washington, DC, a new organization run by an ambitious young man, j Edgar Hoover. Hoover wanted to make the reputation of his new bureau by solving a high profile case, a case that had gripped the nation, so he had sent Tom White to Osage County. The authorities in Oklahoma had made no progress in solving any of the craft Tis, neither the deaths of Molly's family, nor around twenty other murders of the Osage and their allies. There were too many possible suspects, too many rumors and stories and no hard evidence. Witnesses had a tendency to die in strange circumstances, the car crash, bad whiskey falling down the stairs. When the cowboy hatted Tom White agreed to go to Osage County, he knew that investigations had been stalled for years, that the local officials were corrupt, and that some previous investigators had been murdered themselves. If he took the job, he'd have a target on his back. It wasn't going to stop him. Tom White summoned a posse of undercover agents to join him in Oklahoma City. The only member of a Native American tribe who worked for the Bureau, John Wren, who was part ute several experienced gunslingers who could easily pose as cowboys or rustlers, a former insurance salesman whose cover story was that he was an insurance salesman. More than twenty o Sage people had been murdered, along with several other locals. White decided to focus on a few, including the sisters, Anna who was shot, Rita whose house exploded. In his book Killers of the Flower Moon, David Gran describes Tom White's investigation as taking place in a wilderness of mirrors, evidence inexplicably vanished. Why hadn't the doctor has managed to find the bullet in Anna's skull? Useful looking leads turned out to be deliberate deceptions. One woman initially said Anna had been killed by a jealous wife after fooling around with the husband, but later admitted that a strange White man had come to her house and forced her to sign a fake statement. And Tom White realized something else. Some unknown person in his team was a double agent, leaking the bureau's internal reports, feeding back everything to the men they were pursuing. Who were those men? After spending the summer of nineteen twenty five trying to navigate the wilderness of mirrors, Tom White started to piece together a theory. One of the murdered o Sage men had a life insurance policy for twenty five thousand dollars, a huge sum, but rather than naming his wife as a beneficiary, he had named his wealthy friend, William Hale, the King of the Osage Hills. That seemed strange, although Hale explained to White that the poor man had discovered his wife was having an affair and Hale had comforted him in his distress. That would explain everything. Then, a woman who lived near Hale's farm told investigators that when Hale's land had been set ablaze, it was by Hale's workers on Hale's orders. He had collected thirty thousand dollars in insurance money. Hale controlled everything around here, she told the agents. White looked more and more closely at Hale's affairs. Those head rights, the unbelievably lucrative rights to the money from o Sage County's oil fields, couldn't be bought or sold. They could only be inherited. Minnie's and Anna's head rights had gone to their mother, Lizzie. Then Lizzie herself had died from a mysterious illness, all of her accumulated head rights went to Molly and her sister Rita. This slow burning family tragedy started to develop a remorseless logic in Tom White's mind, even the use of a bomb to murder Rita and her husband Bill, because their will specified that if they died simultaneously, everything would pass to Molly. Molly herself was very ill, despite the close attention she was receiving from William Hale's personal physicians. She hadn't died, not yet, but perhaps the killers weren't in a hurry, since Molly's money was all controlled by her husband, Ernest, a man who was absolutely loyal to his uncle William Hale. Earnest, it seemed, might be complicit in the plot to murder every member of his wife's family and presumably his wife herself. Solving the mystery was one thing, Securing a conviction was quite another. In an Oklahoma court, everyone from the sheriff to the juries would be bought and paid for by William Hale. Even if Tom White could get the case tried in a federal court, would a white jury convict as one O sage elder commented, The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an O sage is murder or merely cruelty to animals. The trials were a sensation, I say trials, since there were several murders and several murderers working for Hale. One was declared a mistrial after it became clear that members of the jury had been bribed. Ernest made a full confession of his and his uncle's crimes, then withdrew it and agreed to testify for his uncle's defense, then repented and confessed again. It's hard to know why he changed his mind, but perhaps it was the sight of his wife, Molly, sitting silently in the courtroom day after day, solemnly watching as it became clear that the man she had loved had conspired to murder every member of her family, including her. Finally, a jury reached a verdict. The clerk read it out to the charge of first degree murder. William K. Hale had been found guilty, but the jury ruled out the death penalty that would normally be of foregone conclusion. Hale and others would serve long prison terms for their appalling crimes. Orson Wells once said that if you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story. It's tempting to stop the story. On November seventeenth, nineteen twenty six, Tom White has gone out on a high, retiring from the Bureau to take a more settled job does the wardens and Leavenworth Prison, and he's just learning the rope of the new job when some new inmates, shackled, pale and blinking in the sunlight, are warped up the prison driveway are the US Marshals. White recognizes the distinctive round face of William K. Hale, and Hale recognizes him too by Hello, Tom offers Hale, Hello, Bill says Warden Tom White. He shakes William Hale's hand and watches as Hale is marched off to his cell. But I can't end the story there. When Tom White and the Bureau of Investigation convicted Hale and his immediate conspirators, they declared victory and got out of town. But the killings didn't stop. Then you can still drown in the devil's excrement, even if the devil himself has gone to jail. Cautionary tales will return after the break. This cautionary tale relies on David Grand's magisterial book Killers of the Flower Moon. When I told David I was hoping to base an episode on it, he told me take a look at the final section of the book. That's the part of the history that often gets left out. The final section begins in twenty twelve, almost ninety year years after our comic book hero Tom White strode into town. Another investigator followed in his footsteps. He wasn't a former Texas Ranger, standing tall, packing heat and wearing a cowboy hat. He was a bespectacled writer from New York, David Gran himself. Gran had questions in his mind about the murders, and he wanted to see Osage County to meet some of the twenty first century O Sage people. The oil boom ended in the nineteen thirties. The boomtowns of the area are depopulated now. Wizbang is long gone, the clues that it ever existed covered by grass. There's still a little oil and steal a little money for the people with head rights, but not enough to change a life or to end it. Under the head right system, some of that money remains in a trust, and some things don't change. It isn't managed by the O Sage Nation, but by the US government, mismanaged, the Osage say, and their legal struggle over the money continues. The O Sage Nation is twenty thousand strong, of whom four thousand still live in Osage County, in and around their capital, Poor Huskar. The Osage have an elected government and ratified a new constitution in two thousand and six. In some ways, the Sage Chief's prophecy has come true. Someday this oil will go and there will be no more fat checks every few months from the Great White Father. Then I know my people will be happier. The terror of the nineteen twenties is a low bar for happiness. One O Sage historian Lewis F. Burns wrote, to believe that the Osages survived intact from their ordeal is a delusion of the mind. What has been possible to salvage has been saved, and is dearer to our hearts because it survived. But much of what the O Sage nation had now exists only in memory. David Grant visited the region several times to meet people and hear their stories. He attended a ceremonial dance, watching the drummers and the singers, the dancers in headdresses stepping together counterclockwise, intensity building. At the dance, a woman came up to David gran and introduced herself. She was in her fifties wearing a blue dress with long black hair in a ponytail. She seemed familiar somehow, Hi, she said, I'm Margie Burkhart. She was the granddaughter of Ernest and Molly Burkhart. Mollie who'd watched her sisters and mother die one by one, Ernest, who'd conspired in their murder. Margie talked about her father, Cowboy Burkhart, how much he had doted on his mother, Molly, and how haunted he had been by the crimes of his father. She drove David Graham to the site of the bombed house, and as they sat outside in the car, she told him that little Cowboy and his sister had been due to visit their aunt Rita the night her house blew up, but Cowboy had earache, so it didn't go. Ernest would have known very well what would happen to the house that night, as Margie explained to gran my dad had to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him. The more often David Graham visited Osage County and the more stories he heard, the more he came to realize that reality didn't quite squeeze into the neat story of William Hale's murderous plot and Tom White's brilliant investigation. Hale was guilty of organizing the murder of Molly Burkhardt's family, to be sure, and the Oceage haven't forgotten in the Oceage Nation Museum poor Huskar. There's an expansive group photograph from nineteen twenty four depicting many members of the tribe alongside the most influential and admired White locals. A section of the picture has been cut away, the section depicting William Hale. The museum director, Catherine Redcorn explained to David gran that it was too painful to show the devil was standing right there. But there's no evidence connecting Hale with the murder of Barney McBride, an oil man who'd set off for Washington, d c determined to appeal to the federal authorities for help in solving the Osage murders. His naked body was found the next morning, a sack tied over his head, his skull smashed in had been stabbed two dozen times. Nor was Hale apparently connected with the murder of Charlie Whitehorn, who disappeared around the same time as Anna. He was found under a bush, a bloated, fly blown corpse, identified only by a letter in his pocket. Between his eyes gaped two bullet holes. His widow, Hattie, then seemed sure to die of a mysterious illness until her sisters moved her away from the area, where she staged a full and surprising recovery. Hale didn't seem to be behind the death of George Bigheart, who died in an Oklahoma City hospital in nineteen twenty three after being poisoned, or W. W. Vaughan, big Heart's lawyer, who rushed to his deathbed to hear his testimony and collect some vital incriminating documents. Vaughn then phoned the Osage County sheriff to tell him that he knew who killed big Heart, and a lot more than that. Vaughan boarded a train home but never made it. His body was found by the tracks north of Oklahoma City, neck broken, incriminating documents god In his conversations with O Sage people, Gran kept hearing similar stories O Sage grandparents who died young in the nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties, With the family convinced of foul play and the authorities showing no interest. Digging into the archives, he sometimes found clues. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Gran's detective work reveals the identity of the influential man who killed W. W. Vaughan, but some of them ers will never be solved. Too much evidence was deliberately destroyed by corrupt officials. And then there are other heartbreaking cases of white guardians with three, four or more O Sage wards who all died young for no apparent reason, deaths that at the time were never even recognized as murder at all. The resource curse is seen as a subtle economic problem. There's a lively academic debate on why some nations seem to suffer more than others and what policies they should adopt, But the basic truth of the resource curse isn't subtle at all. It's that money brings trouble, civil wars, nasty geopolitics, brutal dictatorships. Or if you're the last remaining two thousand, two hundred and twenty nine members of the O Sage nation suddenly rich and hemmed on all sides by a society with no respect for you at all, it brings murder. The Oceage was surrounded by murderers. Those murderers weren't all orchestrated by William Hale. They didn't need to be. They had their own reference and their own motives, and they were protected by a white society that didn't much care about dead rich Indians. Sometimes a conspiracy is so big you simply can't call it a conspiracy. This cautionary tale is based, with permission, on David Grand's book Killers of the Flower Moon. The film of the same title is now in theaters, directed by Martin SCORSESEI and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert de Niro, and Lilli Gladstone. This episode was produced in association with Apple Original Films. Next week, I'll be back discussing this story with Jim Roan Gray, a former principal chief of the Osage Nation. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jammas Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne, Dital Millard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review, tell your friends and if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm, slash yes