Everybodys control the plane was delayed you can insert your own airline joke here but tonight he will talk about his book a story of historical crime of greed and fear and racial cleansing part political history and in the book will be conversation long after he catches the next playing. It is easy to read the book because he tells the story in a detailed rich and suspenseful way. It is hard to read this book because it is true and devastating and maddening. But he is a magnificent storyteller for the New York Times magazine or atlantic or Washington Post wall street journals previous awardwinning books and if you cannot take their word than the Supreme Court stuff on justice he signed that in one of his opinions. David graham. [applause] two my first book was called velocity about a trip to the amazon i tried to find that ancient city after leaving 9 00 oclock this morning to get to kansas it would have been easier to track through the jungle but i did comment it is great to be here. So you waiting is amazing. Thank you so to talk about the killers of the flower moon and the project can four or five years ago making it out to the osage nation and this is just a fraction. And it looks very. You can see them gathering with white settlers but the photograph to the left was cut out it looks like somebody took scissors to its. So i asked the band director what happened to the missing portrait . Her voice was so frightening he said they decided to remove it and she said the devil was standing right there. And then trying to understand. But to be one of the most sinister crimes in american history. So beginning with the 20th century because back then were millionaires. So prospect has been they were on the tribal rule and would receive a check and a more you and 19 but you point out that that the lies the longstanding stereotype. A car, each of 11 of them and this picture is revealing as it shows the traditional with her daughters in the 1920s as slackers. This is even more remarkable. I found recently this old footage that was shot in the 1920s. It was actually taken by an osage that have been moving Motion Picture camera. Here you can see a snippet but it will give you a sense of what they actually look like in the 1920s. The history of how they had gotten a hold of this land goes all the way back with them controlling much of the century in the area that stretched from what is kansas and missouri all the way to the edge of the rockies. President Thomas Jefferson referred and et no three as the great nation and the following year bac met with a delegation f chiefs he described as the finest men and they begin to drive them off the land. They were forced to seize more than 100 million acres of their land. They were confined to a reservation in kansas and then they were more under siege by the settlers and among those was none other than the family of Laura Ingalls wilder who later wrote as you all know little house on the prairie. And the scene in the novel she asked why dont you like indians . I just dont like them. This is indian country, isnt it, she said. One evening were as father explained to her the government will soon make them move away. Thats why we are here. White people are going to settle all this country and we get the best land because we get here first and take your pick. Many began to seize the land by massacring several. Officials said at the time the questionable which of these people are savages. In the 1870s they agreed to sell their land in kansas and searched once more for a homeland and it was then the osagosage chief stood up at a tl Council Meeting and a record of the statement still exists today. He said we should move to this territory of what was then then indian to pray and would later become the state of oklahoma and he said because the land was rocky and it was infertile and harmonic and the white van would finally leave us alone. It was about the size of delaware and whites deemed worthless so he said this would be a place they would finally be happy and at peace said they purchased the land for 70 cents per acre and had a deed to their own land and migrated t there. The first migration have taken a tremendous toll on the tribe. There were only a few thousand left about one third of what they had been over 70 years earlier on the reservation. Now in 19 oh, before oklahoma was about to become a state, the u. S. Government forced upon the culmination of the assimilation campaign but it was a policy that was imposed on many nations at the time and what it was was in the parcels of land each member of the tribe would receive an allotment and open up to the white settlers. Now they have seen what happened to other territories in the reservation. This was an old land rock and this is an actual photograph of it they would race to get the land they had gotten and it would put a stake into it and lay claim to the land and many were trampled in the process of. To turn American Indians into private properties. A situation that would make it much easier to procure their land. But when they were negotiated in their terms of allotment because they had a deed to their land and recently published it purchased it wa there was the re to make Oklahoma State the last tribe in its territory and they were led by one of the greatest chiefs at the time a man who spoke seven languages including latin and french and he and other leaders managed to slip into their agreement, at the time that seemed rather curious. What is essentially said a it ee shall maintain control of all the subsurface mineral rights to our land. They had some sense that there was a little bit of oil under their land but nobody thought they were sitting upon a fortune and so they managed to hold on to the last realm of their land that they couldnt even see and each member on the 2,000 or so received the head right which is the collective mineral trust. After the allotment, much of the surface territory quickly disappeared into the hands of whites but a headlight couldnt be bought or sold. It can only be inherited and so they maintained control over what had become the worlds first underground reservation. Before long, the oil boom had begun. Their first such demand for the osage oil especially by 1912, 1913 as more deposits were found iand soon it was discovered some of the largest deposits in the United States were sitting right under the earth and they would hold auctions for leases and so many of the oil barons youve heard of, j. P. Getty and his family first made their wealth in the osage territory and they would attend these auctions with Frank Phillips and his brother and they would arrived with his brothers on the Phillips Company arriving on a private train them as the millionaires a special. In good weather they were held outside under this large stately tree. A single for about 160 acres could sell for just 2 million it became known as the Million Dollar elm. Now, as the wealth increased, Many Americans began to express because the prejudice alarm and they began to be scapegoated further money. Here was the 1920s, but period of the great gatsby but somehow the osage wealth became a concern and members of the u. S. Congress would literally sit in these mahogany paneled rooms and debate what are we going to give aboudoabout all of this osage m, how can they have all this money . And they went so far as to pass legislation requiring many to have white guardians. This system was racist in every way. In fact it was based on the quantum of osage blood. If you were a fullblooded osage, you were suddenly deemed incompetent and given a guardian to oversee your finances. Here you can be a chiefly to being a great nation, have millions of dollars in your trust and you could have some local prominent white citizen telling you which car to buy and whether you could get the toothpaste down at the corner store. It also created one of the largest state and federally sanctioned criminal enterprises as many guardians would direct purchases and friends stores so they would then take kick back and skim money and embezzled millions and millions of dollars. This chief testified at a hearing before congress and i just want to read you what he said because its very striking. He said the whites have punched us down in the roughest parts of the country thinking it would drive the indians down to where there is a big pile of rock and put them there in the corner. Now that the pile of rocks has turned out to be worth millions of dollars, he said, everybody wants to get in here and get some of that money. Then the osage began to die under mysterious circumstances and nobody was more profoundly affected the families of the woman molly burkhart. Bali is a remarkable woman. She grew up born in the 1880s, she grew up in a launch like you saw in the early picture at one of the osage camps speaking only osage, practicing the osage traditions. Then adjust the tender age of seven forced by the u. S. Government to be uprooted from her home and placed in a boarding school to learn the wide mans ways. She had to suddenly remove her blanket and speak only english and wasnt allowed to speak osage. Within a few decades because of the oil money she was living in a mansion and married a white settler from texas named ernest burkhart. In many ways, she struggled to civilization. In may of 1921, molly had a sister named anna brown and of that day she came over to mollys house. Mollie liked to entertain and was having a party that day with relatives and friends. Her oldest sister you can see a picture of her she left the house and wasnt seen again. She vanished. Mollie looked everywhere for her and have the family looked everywhere for and a week later she was found in a ravine. Picture taken by an fbi investigator. She had been shot in the back of the head and was dead. It was the first hint that mollys family and tribe has become a prime target of a conspiracy. Not long after, literally within days, mollys mother began to grow mysteriously sick. Here you can see a picture of her mother in the middle, anna brown is off to the left of the older sister and molly is to the right. Mollies mother seemed to grow in substantial each day as if she were withering away. Within two months, she stopped breathing and evidence would later suggest that she had been poisoned. So within a span of two months, molly lost her sister and her mother. Mollie had another sister who was so frightened by these deaths she lived in the countryside with her white husband, stayed in the house and decided to move closer to town to be closer to molly. She purchased this house here and they moved in thinking they would be safe. One night while very early in the morning, three in the morning, molly heard a loud explosion. Frightened, she got up and went to the window, looked down in the direction of her sisters house and all she could see was an orange ball rising into the sky. It looked as if the sun burst violently into the night and there was no longer a house there. Somebody planted a bomb underneath it killing mollys sister, her sisters husband and of the 18yearolthe 18yearolt behind two young children. Now, molly and Many Campaign for justice to pursue the killers, but because of prejudice, the white authorities often neglected the crimes because the victims were native americans. One of the things that shocked me was how corrupt much of the Justice System was, how lawless the country was still back in the 1920s especially in this remnant of the frontier. Many lawn and had very little training. It was often easy if you are powerful to fight off a law meant. Mollie and other osage turned to private investigators who had a much larger prominent role in society back then because they often had to fill this void, but the problem with private investigators were they often had criminal backgrounds and were available to the highest bidder. The boundary between a good man and a bad man were extremely porous and many of the private investigators who were working this case seemed to be concealing evidence rather than unearthing it. While this was going on it wasnt only mollys family that was being systematically targeted. Other osage providing. It was a champion steer over who got a call one day and left his house and when he came back he dropped dead frothing at the mouth and evidence later indicated that he also had been poisoned. For those of you familiar with Agatha Christie mysteries you know that agatha is a poison that causes the body to come both as with with electricity and you slowly suffocate while conscious until you die. One of the reasons poisoning was so common back then to kill the osage is because even though scientists knew how to conduct poison the local lawmakers wouldnt perform toxicology so you could simply go to the local drugstore or grocery store, pick up a form of poison and give it to somebody or spike wicker and it was an easy way to kill somebody and be undetected. By 1923, other people who also were trying to catch the killers were also being killed. There was one man, a lawyer who started to gather evidence and one day received a call from an osage was buying of poisoning in Oklahoma City. He told his wife before he left, with ten children, ive got evidence in his hiding spot if anything happens to make sure you get it and give it to the authorities. He then went to Oklahoma City and met with the osage to gather evidence. After he died of the poisoning, he called local authorities and as i have enough evidence to catch the killers. Im coming back to osage county. Im getting on the next train but when the train arrived he wasnt there. He didnt get off. They sent out the bloodhounds looking for him. There were local boy scout troops in the area that took up the search and he was eventually found his body lying by the railroad tracks. Somebody had thrown him from the train. When his wife went to the hiding spot somebody had already gotten there and cleaned out all the evidence as well as the money that he left for her and the ten children that were left destitute. Many children then raised by osage families. There was another man who went to washington, d. C. To get federal authorities to investigate the cases especially given the local production. He got to the house in the capital, checked in and received a telegram from an associate in oklahoma but said be careful. He then carried withi with him e and a pistol. He left the boarding house and was abducted into some point somebody grabbed the black sack around his head and he was found at the next morning in a colbert. Hed been beaten to death, stabbed more than 20 times. The Washington Post that the times said in the headlines with the osage had already knew. A conspiracy to kill rich indians. Finally, in 1923, after the official death toll of more than 20 for osage, the Tribal Council issued a resolution demanding federal authorities to intervene and it was then that the case was taken up by a rather severe branch of the justice department, one that surely wasnt seeing much on this day in particular and was then known as the bureau of investigation and would later be renamed the fbi. And i think it is somewhat fitting to this day to talk a little bit about the bureau because i think it is hardly in a lot of peoples minds. The bureau back then was a ragtag operation that have only a smattering of agents. They were not authorized to carry gun. If they wanted to arrest somebody, they have to get a local law meant to make the arrest and they had very little jurisdiction over crime, but they have jurisdiction over American Indian reservations and so that is why the osage murders became one of the fbis major homicide cases and in 1925, the new boss man, j. Edgar hoover summoned this man to washington. He said he needed to see him right away. Now, tom white is also a remarkable man ended some ways he is like molly and reflected and embodied the transformation of a country. He was born in a cabin in texas on the frontier. He was from essentially a tribe of walden. His father was a sheriff. He grew up and saw people being harmed. He became a texas ranger asked d many of his brothers. He practiced law riding on a horse with a perl handled gun at a time justice was often needed by this poking barrel of a gun and by the 1920s, 192 1925 men n hoover suddenly summoned him to washing he has to wear a suit, he has to learn techniques like fingerprinting, handwriting analysis would be an important part of the case and he has to file paperwork which he cant stand and when he gets to the bureau, he doesnbureau, he doey hoover summoned him that hoover at the time was replacing many of the old frontier involvement with a new breed of age and. These college boys who type faster than they shot. And in fact they had very little criminal experience and so hoover had kept on the role just a few frontier lawmen known as the cowboys and this is a picture of hoover taking just a few months before so this is exactly what hoover looked like. Only 29 years at the time when he became director, not yet an autocratic or have all the power that he would have over the next several decades. He was due to his job and he was still insecure about his power and the funny thing about hoover was he hated taller agency spoke they hated to be summoned because if they were told they thought they might fire and he often had a bias behind his desk to stand on it so he would seem taller. rightparen he summoned white, he stood 6foot four. [laughter] even though he had on the new suit he was supposed to wear he was wearing a cowboy hat which violated all new protocol. Here he was looming over hoover and hoover began to tell him about the osage murder cases and the bureau at that time had been working on the case for two years and the results have been completely disastrous. Not only had agents failed to make any arrests during the time, but they got an outlaw, Blackie Thompson out of prison. They said dont worry about a week goweek of discomfort we arg to use him as an informant. Shortly after he got out of prison, he robbed a bank and killed a police officer. Now, he would later be his own unfortunate fate after he tried to escape from prison and was gunned down. What hoover, again hard to believe was insecure about his power back then and feared a scandal could end his dreams of building a bureaucratic empire. The bureau have just been entangled in this tea pot dome scandal which was another Oil Corruption scandal involving kickbacks, bribes, coverups, destruction of evidence and he feared that if there were another scandal he might be ousted so when he gets there he realized he hasnt summoned to be fired hoover summoned him to save his own tail and he needs one of the experienced frontier lawmen to help try to take over the case. And he realizes given the danger that the only way to try to crack the case is to put together an Undercover Team and he recruits several of the old frontier lawmen from the cowboy, heres a picture of one of them. It is and anif you send and givs photograph. Most interestingly, he recruited an american and an agent and to my knowledge, there were no statistics then but i think its fair to say he was the only agent and the bureau at the time and they go undercover and infiltrated the legion. They posted thi this and one pod as an insurance salesman and according to the record actually sold insurance policies. I have no idea what happened to them. [laughter] and in the investigation they have to learn the techniques are discussed like fingerprinting and handwriting analysis. In many ways it marked the revolution of Law Enforcement and most importantly the kind of professionalism of Law Enforcement and the case has many twists and turns and it was a criminal investigation and espionage case with Double Agents and possibly travel agent. It was impossible to know who to trust in power, who was conspiring against you. Agents were followed, the reports were leaked, they carried guns even though they were not authorized because of the dangers. And i will reveal all of the ins and outs of the investigation because i think it is more powerful to read about it in context because it is very multilayered and ultimately, what the agents do is follow the money and the money leads them to try to track who is profiting from their crimes and in particular who is profiting for the murders and it leads them to a very prominent white settler and whats more he turns out to be somebody molly trusted and one of the things that made the crime so sinister is that it involved the steeply calculated the plots that are often unfolded and involve people pretending to love you, pretending to be intimate with you while all the time plotting and scheming and conspiring to kill you and your family membe members. In my own way as i couldnt find a way to quite capture the level of the deception, but there is a quote from shakespeare from Julius Caesar which i think needs this level of the trail. The quote rights will i find a cavern dark enough to bask by monstrous seeks non conspiracy hiding with his finals and affability. After i visited the osage nation and saw that picture on the wall, the Museum Director had gone down to the basement and retrieve an image of the missing panel and brought it up to show me and tearing up from the corner fo was one of the masterminds from the bureau whom have arrested. He was the socalled devil. And it occurred to me that they had removed the photograph not to forget as so Many Americans had come about because they cant forget. Now, i just want to say a quick word about the way i structured the story because it is in a way ive never structured one in the past. It is told in three chronicles. Largely from the point of view of a different individual. The first is told largely from the perspective of molly burkhart. Here is the picture before she died and she was a very remarkable woman aids and even though i dont say so explicitly in the book, one of the things that really struck me was her coverage because she quietly crusade for justice when people would ignore her and all the while putting a bullseye on her back. Over the years i went through many archives trying to learn what her life was like because in so many accounts she was just a name or sentence. She had no agency. Her perspective had been obliterated from history. One of the documents i found very revealing was shortly before she died, just two years before she died, i found the documents but appealed her incompetency. So if memory serves me correct the document was from 1934. And the government and the legal system finally deemed her competent associate with this woman two years before she died in 1934 being granted the full fledgefullfledged rights of a citizen. To be able to control her own fortune and control her own destiny. The second chronicles told largely from the point of view of tom white. Whats interesting about this photo as you can see his transformation. The old cowboy once riding on a horse now dressed with a fedora and a suit and here you can see from for. [laughter] the final perspective is told in the present from my Vantage Point, the Vantage Point of a reporter or historian. And i did this so i could fill in the gaps of the narrative. I sure would have happened to the osage money today. Many this is a picture i saw of it are boarded up in the town where anna brown was last seen before she disappeared that night. During the research, i tracked down descendents of both the murders and the victim and one of the most powerful experiences with speaking to these people. One of the dissent since was marjorie burkhart was the descendent granddaughter molly burkhart. Shes a lovely woman. And she provided me details about her family history. She told me what it was like to grow up and what it was like for her father who grew up as a child in the conspiracy known as the osage reign of terror, to live in houses with secrets and to not know if the perpetrators were your loved ones were not. Speaking to her drove home to me how this history still reverberate to this day. She took me out to the cemetery where molly grew up and where so many murdered osage including so many of molly is murdered siblings and relatives are and whats amazing is when you walk through that graveyard or any graveyard in the territory began to look at the dates and notice so many deaths during this period and you look at the ages and see how young they are and begin to realize this was in many ways a genocidal crime. One of the reasons i told the story this way is to kind of show the elusiveness of history especially when documenting a conspiracy when the people are covering up the crime. Its often only over time with my perspectives or evidence that we get a full portrait of what happened and one of the things i try to show him my chronicle basein my chroniclebased on thes and interviews and evidence that they provided to me is that there was a much deeper and darker conspiracies in the bureau ever exposed. I would be happy to answer any questions if you still have energy. [laughter] [applause] we are going to have a book signing on the stage and since we are running so late we probably have time for about five questions that most. In the 1950s there was a movie called the fbi story and there was a segment dealing with a situation i think an oklahoma dealing with the legal situation and bombings and killings, insurance and so forth. Was his character based on tom white, and have you seen the movie and how accurate is it flex thank you for the question. I wish i had a cliff. There is a segment in the fbi story that deals with this case. I thought based on his kind of the first version of a generic man in many ways, hoover was interesting. He never gave public credit to tom white for the undercover operatives that worked on the case. It mythologized his own role and in the version told him that it is very fictionalized and its brought out as accurate but in many ways it is fictionalized. One of the ironies is the only people i can find that publicly thanked tom white and the undercover operatives were the osage tribe issued a tribal resolution thanking them by name. I was just wondering, i havent read the book yet but if you go into any details about how many after the conspiracy was discovered how they were never returned to their families . Said, one of the things when i began the story i thought of it very much as kind of a for lack of a better word, kind of faith who did it come a mystery of who did it and i thought of it very much as a typical traditional crime story with this kind of a singular bad streak with accomplishe accompl. I began to see if much more as a story of who did not do it and there were so many people who were getting rich and so many people complicit in these crimes who were doctors administering voices and morticians covering up bullet wounds, reporter repot didnt report what was happening. There were law men that were being bought up, politicians who are profiting from the crime so this really is a story about a culture of killing and a much more frightening concept to think that the darkness might lurk not just one persons heart but so many seemingly ordinary people. And your question which is many had rights or stolen, while this stolen and never recovered. Many were able to escape justice. Thank you for the wonderful presentation. I do have one question that maybe a bit offbase. In 1921 there wa 1921 was the df black wall street outside of tulsa. What was going on in oklahoma during this time . There were the tulsa race riots. The ku klux klan. They are debating what to do with the wealth and you get the sense of how widespread the prejudice was. But there were very fragile legal institutions. We spent many decades and if there was a central thing to take away from the book is how important it is that we are a country of law whether it is an impartial system and tilted crystals of justice. Its something when you read what happened back then whether it was the tulsa race riots or the murders it drives that home and is something not to be taken for granted. I am a member of the osage tribe and wondered if we can have a show of hands how many here are osage. [applause] its been amazing. It was a experience along the way. There were other descendents of the osage including those that stood up and expressed a morris indicates a hug on how the history is still reverberating and how it is something we need to reckon with. You have the murders and victims living sidebyside wit side bye state intertwined and its still very much the story of america the man that was the central villain of the story was pulled from prison to soon. What was the rest of his life like and then was there a sort of up organizing figure did the killing stop or was there more . The even bigger challenge was bringing them to justice the prejudice was so widespread that there were questions about whether they would convict a white man for killing a native american and whats more, you could corrupt the system and so that it became a challenge. Eventually he did serve two decades and should have died in prison. He was able to call in one last political favor. The conspiracy in many ways while this person was responsible for many deaths, there were killings going on in separate families and often it would be one person and with a complicity team nobody did anything to stop it and people knew about it. Too many people were getting wealthy and so this was a story where there was complicity and many willing executioners. Its often easier to think of ththe figures pulling all the strings but what happened and they perpetrated another crying and collectively then what youve goyougot was a mass kill. Thank you all for waiting. [applause]