By Miriam R. Kramer

David Grann unearthed a stunning chapter in Native American history with his nonfiction work Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. In 2017 he appeared in multiple top ten books of the year lists from news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, NPR, and Slate. His revelatory book about widespread murder in the Osage settlements in Oklahoma and how this phenomenon helped J. Edgar Hoover birth the FBI has become a modern classic. Recently director Martin Scorsese turned his hand to adapting the story into a film, which is heading into this 2024 Oscar season with multiple nominations.

Grann’s story begins in 1921 with a woman named Mollie Burkhart, an Osage Indian woman living in the Osage settlement of Gray Horse, Oklahoma. Distressed by the mysterious murder of one of her sisters, Anna Brown, Mollie saw one of her other sisters die of a mysterious wasting disease several years earlier. As a member of the Osage tribe, she was an accidental inheritor of tremendous wealth.

The Osage, driven in the 1870s from their lands in Kansas, ended up on a rocky Oklahoma reservation that seemed worthless until prospectors discovered that the land sat above huge oil deposits. Because of an unusually canny legal proviso in their favor, each member of the tribe could lease their land, but were due yearly profits from any oil wealth, which came to a staggering amount that only increased over the years to equal today’s equivalent of $400 million in 1923 alone. At one point the Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world, while still seen as second-class citizens for their skin color and status as Native Americans.

Most importantly, headrights, the right to these profits and land per person, could not be sold, but only handed down by inheritance through family connections, marriage, and children.

Mollie Burkhart, like her sisters and many other Native Americans, married a white person. She bore her husband children, practiced Catholicism and even spoke some English, although she kept to many Osage traditions and wore Osage clothes. Her husband, Ernest Burkhart, a Texan, had moved to Fairfax, a city in the Osage territory, to live with his uncle, a cattleman named William K. Hale.

Hale, a shrewd businessman, had connections with prosperous lawyers, doctors, bankers, and other professional people in the bustling Osage towns, including Gray Horse, Fairfax, and the capital, Pawhuska. Ernest’s brothers, Bryan and Horace, had also been lured to the Osage community by the prospect of oil wealth. Hale became like a father to them, a figure who gave commands and expected them to be carried out without reservation or delay.

Along with the Osage, the reservations towns bustled with colorful miscreants and businessman, making them a remnant of the lawless Wild West. Bootleggers scoffed at Prohibition with their stills, cowboys and dubious medicine men walked the streets, and outlaws strode alongside financiers and oil magnates in a motley crowd drawn there to make their fortune. The Osage mingled with them through marriage and other social connections, although these Native Americans were wealthy to the point of not needing to work. White and Black servants took care of their houses and met their needs.

As Mollie worried about the deaths of her sisters and her mother, who also died of a wasting disease, Grann paints a picture of an Osage community diminishing quickly and unnaturally through violent murder and general illness. Mollie’s last remaining sister, Rita, was blown up in her nearby house. Mollie inherited all headrights for Osage wealth from her mother and all but one sister.

Murders in Osage towns remained unsolved. There seemed to be no way for private eyes and figures of law and order to make headway through asking members of so-called respectable society for clues or help.

When J. Edgar Hoover, acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, heard about the murders on the reservation, he found a way to consolidate power at a branch of the Justice Department that would eventually become the Federal Bureau of Investigation. With a former Texas Ranger named Tom White at the helm, Hoover sent a crew of federal investigators to infiltrate the Osage reservation and solve both overt and covert murders.

Despite the Osage’s unusual wealth and seeming privilege, David Grann uncovered a little-known historical episode with a typical theme: the dismissal and murder of Native Americans seen as savages as whites expanded throughout the continent grabbing money and resources.

As the mixed Osage-white community meets J. Edgar Hoover’s chosen men during the Osage Reign of Terror in the early- to mid-1920s, Grann shows the humanity and innovation of the original investigators. These men adapted to the Osage towns and community before Hoover could eventually impose his tightly ordered version of colorless bureaucrats who spread across the country to solve crimes with no consideration for local conditions.

Grann’s true-crime depiction starts slowly in showing the complexity of interactions between the Osage and the white professional community. It is difficult to keep names straight when reading about ne’er-do-wells who met with doctors who attended to wealthy Osage Indians who got married to and divorced from various whites.

Eventually the story speeds up, however, as the scope of the murders comes into focus and the investigators from the yet-to-be-named FBI arrived to solve crimes committed by a startling large ring of criminals on the reservation. Grann has revealed an ugly aspect of American greed and sense of entitlement in the face of those they considered second-class citizens.

This tale also depicts the clash of two civilizations, one of which started as a tribe that did not even believe in ownership of land and ended up with incredible wealth that did it little good. It also shows how distrust is handed down through generations, as Osage descendants today believe that crimes against their community were and are still considered unimportant, handled inadequately even by the nascent FBI.

Martin Scorsese’s film version first paints a vibrant picture of the towns, with their exciting lawlessness and colorful mix of people. His interiors are then purposefully dark and depressing to depict the malaise within the community.

Robert DeNiro as William K. Hale, also known as King, shows his usual impeccable acting, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart gamely takes on his character, although I find it hard to forget who he is. Lily Gladstone, a Native American actor nominated for Best Actress, is perfectly cast as Mollie Burkhart. Her performance is beautifully subtle and accurate to the character depicted in the book. She deserves all her accolades.

Out of necessity the film version focuses much more on the personal relationships between Mollie, her sisters, the Burkharts, William K. Hale, and a few other characters. It also takes a more superficial view of the federal investigators who arrive towards the end of the film to save the day. Grann’s depiction, on the other hand, covers a huge cast of intertwined characters, both from the Osage community and the Bureau of Investigation.

Despite some excellent acting, it is hard to understand why this film is nominated for Best Picture unless the Academy of Motion Pictures simply defaults to nominating a much-loved director’s pictures and finds the movie important in making this story better known. At almost three-and-a-half hours, Killers of the Flower Moon moves, as these Oklahomans might have said, like molasses in June. It comes across as plodding, confusing, and turgid, with a constant low hum of melancholy early blues and country music in the background. Watching on Apple TV+ at home, I often wanted to stop the film and watch animal videos on my phone or check my messages.

Killers of the Flower Moon is well worth reading for true crime aficionados, those interested in American and Native American history, and readers who want to see the dark underbelly of how the West was won. Give the movie a miss unless you are a devotee of DeNiro, interested in seeing Lily Gladstone’s breakthrough performance, or want to see striking visuals of the community that bred a shadow over the oil-rich lands.