I am the director of Reading Services welcome to the Public Library thank you for your patience and flexibility for setting land speed records to get david branch here the circumstances brought out of 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 gun