Killers of the Flower Moon

In a way, I'm glad that I wasn't able to write my book review when I first sat down to do so. I had very mixed feelings about Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Gramm. I wondered if once I discussed the book at Books & Beer Club if I'd feel any differently about it.

The answer is - no, I don't!

No one in the book club disliked the book. Only two gave the book thumbs up. The rest of us gave it a sideways thumb and most of us for the same reasons.

All of us were fascinated by the story of the Osage murders. How had we never heard of this before? The Osage Indians, like many other Native American tribes, have a storied past. In the late 1800s, they were relocated from Kansas to what is present-day Oklahoma. In the early 1900s, oil was discovered under their land. Most tribe members became wealthy and received leasing fees generated by the drilling of oil on their land. The history is more involved than that, but for the purpose of reviewing the book, that's enough.

The Osage weren't merely rich. They were really rich. A white husband of an Osage wife was asked what he did for a living. He replied that he didn't have to work, he had an Indian wife. They lived lavish lifestyles, had impressive homes. The biggest blot on this wealth was the fact that the majority of Osage had guardians handling all financial aspects of their lives. You can start to imagine the problems that might stem from that.

In the 1920s, many Osage members were being mysteriously murdered. Local officials weren't doing much to solve these murder mysteries and the Bureau of Investigation, in the days prior to it becoming the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was put on the case of those murders that were considered to have taken place on Federal land.

Some of what was expressed in the book was timely. I was able to make lots of connections between the text and things going on in the world today.

As is often the case, I'm going to share with you some of my random observations.

• For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression.

Police departments weren't really in existence until the mid-1800s when the dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state.

• The land grabs of settlers in the late 1800s was really a land grab. A time was set, a shotgun went off and whomever got there first got to claim the land. When I taught about this aspect of the settling of Oregon, I envisioned it as a peaceful process. A wagon train would approach unsettled land. Pioneers would calmly divvy up the land and start building their homes and their fences, often with the cooperation and assistance of other pioneers. The description of the race for (previously) Indian land was so violent. People shooting each other, knocking each other down. Fainting, trampling, deaths. Here and there men were fighting to the death over claims which each maintained he was first to reach. Not what I envisioned at all!

• I'd also never given much thought to the evolution of detectives and investigators. During much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private detective agencies had filled the vacuum left by decentralized, underfunded, incompetent, and corrupt sheriff and police departments.

• It was slow going linking the murders together since most of the murders were carried out in very different ways. There was no signature. The story was focused on Molly Burkhart and the murders of her family members. Two of Molly's sisters had been murdered. Her mother, Lizzie, was diabetic, and under their noses, doctors were giving Lizzie poison rather than insulin.

• I hate slurs against Jews. In this case, the slur was by one of the "bad guys" involved in the murders. A man filled with venom and bigotry, he'd once complained that Hale and Ernest Burkhart were "too much Jew - they want everything for nothing. No, they weren't Jewish. Ernest was Mollie's husband and Hale was his uncle. They were bad to the bone.

•  I thought the book would be more about the formation of the FBI than it was. In fact, more of the focus was on J. Edgar Hoover than the FBI. In the early days, there were no real forensics. Crime scene evidence wasn't preserved, finger prints and DNA weren't yet sciences. Which made me think of my recent jury duty experience. Lots of deputies were called to the stand and each one had to give a full accounting of all his or her forensic training. It's amazing what can be done now that couldn't be done then.

• And speaking of juries... There was one question that the judge and the prosecutors and the defense never asked the jurors but that was central to the proceedings: Would a jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian? One skeptical reported noted, "The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward the full-blood Indian...is fairly well recognized." A prominent member of the Osage tribe put the matter more bluntly: "It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killnig an Osage is murder - or merely cruelty to animals."

• At book club, we agreed that it was probably good that we didn't know anything about the Osage murders before reading the book. This way we were able to read this as a murder mystery, trying to figure out "whodunnit" and why. 

• I chuckled over this passage regarding Tom White, the primary investigator from the FBI.  White's body was beginning to fail him. He had arthritis. He tripped walking (walking!) and injured himself.

• I didn't find Killers of the Flower Moon particularly well-written. While the story was definitely interesting and held my attention, Grann's writing often bogged me down. White assisted on the writing the history of the Osage murders. That book was never published because the story wasn't found to be captivating enough. Fred Groves, White's co-writer, eventually wrote a fictionalized version of the story called The Years of Fear. That sounded like it might be more readable, but the one review I found of that story said that it was actually less readable!

•  Grann stumbled across a reference to the murders and that got his interest going. This was not something that he'd read about in any history book. He did lots of research, met with lots of Osage Nation members. 

• And as I dug deeper into the Osage murder cases - into the murk of autopsies and witness testimony and probate records - I began to see certain holes in the bureau's investigation.

•  There were deaths by gunshot, explosions, poison, being pushed by a train. How many ways can you think of to commit murder? What made these murders so crazy was that people who seemed to figure out what was going on were murdered, too. The number of murders first estimated was 24 when in fact there were probably hundreds of murders that just weren't connected by a common thread. The murders also took place over a longer time period than originally suspected. Finally, descendants of the Osage from Molly's time period, when they'd meet Grann doing his research, viewed him as a hope. As a way to discover what really happened to their missing or mysteriously dead relatives.

In summary, the story was fascinating but the writing bogged it down. One of the book club members mentioned that the movie rights have been picked up by a studio. This could be an engaging movie as long as the action is captivating and the storytelling is concise.