Kunal Goel
David Grann’s exceptional book, Killers of the Flower Moon, weaves together a complex narrative of human greed, true crime, and the racially motivated serial murders that played a role in the establishment of the FBI. Therefore, it seems inadequate to describe Martin Scorsese’s expansive film adaptation as merely his “first Western” which stars Robert De Niro, and Leonardo DiCaprio.
When it comes to recounting the tragic history of the Indigenous people in America, very few narratives manage to do justice to their story. Often, these accounts focus on the violence and suffering experienced by the victims, reducing their pain to mere entertainment. Some narratives even prioritize the white characters, relegating Native Americans to secondary roles. However, Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese, takes a different approach, avoiding many of these stereotypes. Scorsese is careful to present the story from multiple perspectives, including that of Mollie, portrayed by Lily Gladstone, who is a member of the Osage nation.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro starrer Epic Reveals The Dark American History
Killers of the Flower Moon is a captivating account of a dark chapter in American history that took place between 1921 and 1925. The story centers around a sinister conspiracy to murder nearly sixty members of the Osage tribe. During the late 19th century, the Osage Indian Tribe of Oklahoma found themselves in possession of vast oil reserves on their land. This newfound wealth made them one of the wealthiest nations globally, which caused unease within the federal government.
Consequently, Caucasian guardians were appointed to oversee the tribe’s financial affairs, purportedly to offer assistance. Unfortunately, this immense wealth also fueled envy and resentment among neighboring communities who had not experienced the same fortune.
Tragically, the tensions escalated into violence when the body of a prosperous Osage woman was discovered in the woods in 1921. The brutality continued, leading to the deaths of at least sixty wealthy members of the Osage tribe by 1925. Recognizing the need for intervention, the FBI became involved in the investigation. Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) took charge and delved into the intricate web of deceit masterminded by local cattleman William Hale (Robert De Niro). Hale’s greed drove him to concoct a plan to seize control of the valuable Osage oil. In his pursuit of power, he even orchestrated the marriage between his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), and Mollie Kile (Lily Gladstone), a native Osage woman, in an attempt to solidify his claim to the land.
Comment: It wasn’t just Hale and his nephew Burkhart….read on….the Guardians were killing their Osage victims.
In an interview with Deadline, Martin Scorsese said,
“What I responded to when I read David Grann’s book was the natural order of things. The idea that one could rationalize that if the Osage are not going to be of any use, if they’re going to be phased out anyway, why don’t we just, you know, help them go? And, ultimately, do we really feel any guilt for that? I don’t mean you and I, but when you’re doing what was being done to the Osage, and if you tend to dehumanize someone…”
Martin Scorsese Chose To Portray Human Nature
In an interview with Deadline, Martin Scorsese explained what he tried to portray in Killers of The Flower Moon. He wanted to tell a story that shows why hate was justified as a means to take over land and oil money and how culture had a role to play in that. (Really???)
Comment: Here is Where I Disagree. Martin Scorsese is a Member of the Satanic Cabal and he would not be promoted or allowed to Flourish If He Were Not a Member of this Satanic Cabal. As a Member he must BIAS his movies to justify their Looting, Killing & Pirating of Other People’s Assets. The Criminal Cabal is the British Empire and it is as evil and rotten as anyone can imagine.
“Do [the Osage] behave differently, culturally? Yes, on all levels. There’s no way they could fit in to the European model, the capitalist model, in terms of money and private property. So, then [the attitude is] we’re coming, and we’re not going away. Either you join us, or you have to go. Now, we love and admire you, by the way, but it’s just that your time is up. (Comment: This is more B.S. cuz the British Empire does not love or admire anybody. He is just softening us up so we endorse Genocide.)
I heard someone recently say, when they fire an executive, well, their time is over. And the person behind that fired person, it’s their time. Is this the natural order of who we are as human beings?”
This shows the deep-rooted racism that pushed the white westerners to wipe out the Osage people due to their boosting wealth as it felt like an insult to their self-proclaimed cultural superiority. ( Bingo!)
Killers of The Flower Moon is slated to release on October 20, 2023.
Read This: John Lithgow Joins Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’
Source: Deadline
The Saga of the Osage’s Land Only Got Stranger After Killers of the Flower Moon
A viral tweet claims the land at the movie’s center is now all owned by the Pioneer Woman’s family. The real story is weirder.
At the height of the “boys think about the Roman Empire daily” discourse of mid-September, when everyone on the internet seemed to be saying what their “Roman Empire” was, @thenoasletter issued a tweet that went viral and quickly got millions of views: “my mom just said her ‘roman empire’ is how the pioneer woman’s family owns all the land killers of the flower moon is about.” Is this really true? Did the family of Ree Drummond—the folksy ranch wife, blogger, and Food Network star, famous for her cans-based approach to cooking and for being married to a guy she calls “the Marlboro Man”—somehow end up holding the land in Osage County, Oklahoma, where greedy white settlers murdered members of the Osage Nation for their mineral rights during the 1920s, the “Reign of Terror” that became the subject of a bestselling David Grann book and a forthcoming Martin Scorsese movie?
The person to ask about this history is Rachel Adams-Heard, a Bloomberg reporter whose 2022 podcast, In Trust, looked at what happened to the Osage Nation’s land and mineral rights after the Reign of Terror. Adams-Heard shows how the transfer of wealth from Osage to white hands wasn’t just a matter of murder, but also happened within the boundaries of the law. Because many Osages were assigned white “guardians” by the state, and couldn’t make financial transactions without their approval, there was ample room for corruption.
Rebecca Onion: Let’s look first at the numbers. How much of the former Osage land is actually currently Drummond land, in that area?
Rachel Adams-Heard: Osage County is almost 1.5 million acres, which is massive. It’s bigger than the state of Delaware. When you add up all of the land that the extended members of the Drummond family own today—or as of last year, when we did our analysis—it is nearly 9 percent of the entire county. My colleagues Linly Lin and Devon Pendleton also valued the land. It’s valued at $275 million at least, because this land is really prime grazing land. It’s covered in bluestem grass, which is one of the best ways to fatten cattle.
One thing the Drummonds we interviewed would stress to us when we brought them these findings is that they respect each other’s fence lines. So it’s not that all of that 9 percent is owned by one immediate family. We’re talking about second, third cousins in some cases.
If people have read David Grann’s book, they know that the dispute covered in it is not about land, per se—it was about what was called “headrights,” which was about Osage access to money from the oil that was making that land so valuable. Oil isn’t such a big factor in Osage County now, 100 years later. So what’s at stake has changed.
Yeah. It might be helpful to do a little history here. Osage County, we already established, biggest county in Oklahoma. You’ll hear “Osage County” and you’ll also hear “the Osage Reservation,” and they have the same boundaries. Former Osage Chief Jim Gray explained it like this to me, which I found helpful: Basically, when Oklahoma became a state, Osage County was established directly on top of the Osage Reservation. Through this policy called “allotment,” the surface land was divided up into these individual parcels and distributed to individual Osage citizens. But all the mineral rights beneath the surface were put into one big pot and divided into equal shares, between 2,229 Osage tribal members in all, and those are what later became called “headrights.”
So before allotment, all the land had been owned by the Osage Nation. It was for the nation to decide how it would be used. But now it was all divided into sections. Some were too small to profitably farm, so it was these headrights that ended up being far more lucrative in this time period, because oil production took off in the 1910s and ’20s. Because of the way that those headrights could, for the most part, be transferred only through inheritance, that was when you saw these horrible schemes like the ones depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon.
But yes, the bulk of Killers of the Flower Moon really focuses on the transfer of those headrights, not necessarily the land itself. But land was still a huge part of all this. William K. Hale [played by Robert De Niro in the movie], who was convicted for aiding and abetting the murder of the Osage man Henry Roan—he was a rancher. That was one of his biggest business enterprises. When he was arrested, he sold his land to a partnership between the Drummond family and another prominent Oklahoma ranching family, the Mullendore family.
So, if you’re talking about the surface land in Killers of the Flower Moon, you might be thinking about that land, the land that William K. Hale owned when he was arrested.
A lot of Killers of the Flower Moon looks at one particular community within the Osage Reservation, the Fairfax/Gray Horse District, and where the early Drummond family members in Osage County primarily had their businesses was around Hominy. We’re talking about the same county, but it’s a slightly different community. Hominy doesn’t really come up as much in the book.
One of the more interesting and probably more relevant-to-the-movie things that we found was about the William K. Hale land that was sold. It was a big contiguous position, which was hard to come by at the time because allotment had divided the land into such small parcels, and there were a lot of rules around how and when Osage families could sell that land. After I found out that the Drummond family was part of this partnership that bought it, I just kept an eye out for anything that indicated how they paid for it, what they ended up doing with that land.
This particular Osage man, Myron Bangs Jr., he was incredibly skeptical of his guardians. He on several occasions wrote U.S. officials and suggested that he thought that his guardians—one was Roy Cecil Drummond, and later it was Fred Gentner Drummond—were improperly using his land, that he didn’t trust the way that they were managing his money. But because U.S. policy basically determined that Osage citizens were incompetent, he really had no power to get out from under that guardianship. So to see that he might not have known that his money was used to purchase this land from a man who was convicted of aiding and abetting a murder of another Osage man—I mean, that was really striking to see.
It’s really hard to look at individual land transactions and know the reason why that land was sold by an Osage family, or the reason why it was purchased by the original three Drummond brothers. That was one of the biggest challenges of reporting this. But what we were able to see is really that this family was able to amass so much wealth relatively quickly, in a place that had all been entirely owned by the Osage Nation just a decade or two earlier.
It’s important to go back to their original business in Osage County, when the three brothers’ father, Frederick Drummond, first came to Oklahoma. This was before statehood, and he got into the trading business. He would sell goods to Osages. When their oil wealth took off, these trading posts run by white settlers were able to take advantage of that. They started charging more and more, and Osage families started shopping more and more, just like you’d expect any wealthy person to do. But these places weren’t really like a store, like we think of today. They sold farming supplies and food and clothes and even caskets. In fact, the undertaking business was probably one of the most lucrative parts.
And the other thing, too, is that it’s easy to look at the annual guardianship fees that were charged, $1,000 here or there, and think, like, Oh, well, that’s not enough to really change things, but it adds up over time. In the case of Myron Bangs Jr.’s guardianship alone, there was some $15,000 that ultimately went to his guardians as a fee, which is a quarter of a million dollars, at least, in today’s money.
Comment: SOUNDS JUST LIKE BRITNEY SPEARS’ FATHER….
Another layer of wealth-building.
With the Hale land, the Drummonds did end up selling most of that to the Mullendore family. And then a lot of that was later sold to other parties. But there was a portion that was passed on through later generations of Drummonds and eventually went to Charles Drummond, who was Ree Drummond’s father-in-law. In the early 2000s, he sold that piece, which was around 400 acres, along with many, many other acres, to Ted Turner, who ended up with a portion of what had been the William K. Hale land. But some 15 or so years later, Turner put it up for sale. It was the Osage Nation who ended up winning the bid.
So that piece of land that had gone from Osage families, to William K. Hale, to the Drummonds and Mullendores, to the Drummonds, to Ted Turner, is now back with the Osage Nation.
Generally speaking, they still stand by the idea that they never heard anything about their ancestors that alarmed them, or that indicated that they were anything other than trustworthy men. They said that they either didn’t know that their ancestors were guardians, or if they did, they had always heard it was because they were trusted by their Osage neighbors.
COMMENT: OUTLAWS inhabited these lands the Worst of the Worst and no one wanted to deal with these criminals which is why they were living on originally barren land b/c they were hiding from the Law.
We never heard from Ree Drummond. We obviously reached out several times.
Have you been to her businesses in Pawhuska? I’ve never been there. I think it’s interesting that she has a store there now. Very full-circle.
Yeah. Every time I was in Pawhuska, the store was really busy. It’s called the Mercantile, and everyone calls it “the Merc.” Then she has a kind of high-end hotel or boutique hotel called the Boarding House. She has several other restaurants.
https://www.kunc.org/npr-news/2017-04-17/in-the-1920s-a-community-conspired-to-kill-native-americans-for-their-oil-money
Now the government decides to step in, believing the Osage incompetent and not savvy enough to control their riches. So, they created ‘guardianships’ for each member of the tribe. Under the guardianship, which was mostly given to the local white men thus, corruption was rampant. Under control, the guardian could petition to inherit their estate if the ward died before legal competency.
Comment: So the Fed made the Indians WARDS of Outlaws, Crooks, & Criminals.
It wasn’t long before mysterious deaths and murders began to occur. Too many to be anything but sinister. The blatant corruption and thirst for greed were among lawyers, bankers, doctors, undertakers, teachers, and law enforcement officers. But unfortunately, most of the crimes went unreported or even prosecuted while they had been raking in millions.
This is a Stellar Article as it shows HOW THE ORGANIZED Corruption Went from the Top(Governor) to Bottom (Husband of a Native.)
The Reign of Terror of the Osage Indians; Greed and Murder
Osage Indians
Ancestral Lands of the Osage Indians
The American Osage Indians
.The Osage Indians believed themselves to be The Children of The Middle Waters. Their belief was that the People of The Sky(Tzi-sho) met the People of The Earth (Hun-kah), forming their tribe, The Children of The Middle Waters (Nee-kah-shkahn). Beginning in 1808, they had little choice but to cede their ancestral lands in Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas and most of their land in Oklahoma for the white settlers. The last of their ceding was in 1872, when they left Kansas and were removed to a reservation in Oklahoma.
Miraculously, oil was discovered on their reservation where, fortunately, the Osage had retained their mineral rights. Under the Osage Act of 1906, each of the 2229 members of the Osage Tribe were given ‘headrights’ of the oil bonanza with royalties to be paid. Suddenly, the Osage were the richest in America. Then, the Reign of Terror began.
Detail Map of Osage Murders
Issuing Guardianships of Osage Indians
Now the government decides to step in, believing the Osage incompetent and not savvy enough to control their riches. So, they created ‘guardianships’ for each member of the tribe. Under the guardianship, which was mostly given to the local white men thus, corruption was rampant. Under control, the guardian could petition to inherit their estate if the ward died before legal competency.
It wasn’t long before mysterious deaths and murders began to occur. Too many to be anything but sinister. The blatant corruption and thirst for greed were among lawyers, bankers, doctors, undertakers, teachers, and law enforcement officers. But unfortunately, most of the crimes went unreported or even prosecuted while they had been raking in millions.
Investigations By BOI and FBI
The leader of the corruption and murders was William Hale, a rancher who called himself “King of Osage Hill.” Hale bribed everyone he could, and ordered the murders of the Osage. He had his nephew, Ernest Burkhart marry Osage woman, Mollie Brown as a ‘straw man to control her headright.
The Osage Tribunal Council suspected Hale and his followers of the corruption and murders and were collecting proof. In desperation, they turned to the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), the forerunner of the FBI(FBI). J. Edgar Hoover received the case on April 2, 1923, focusing on the 24 murders between 1921-1923. He agreed to send undercover FBI agents led by Tom White to gather info. They soon discovered the deaths of 60 and probably more.
Among the first of the bodies was Anna Brown’s, found on May 27, 1921. A drifter, Kelsie Morrison confessed to her murder ordered by Hale and Burkhart. Hale had paid him $1,000. And ordered the murder of his nephew’s wife Mollie, and her mother, Lizzie.
Mollie and Ernest Burkhart
Anna Brown
Main Characters of The Osage Terror
Listed are the main characters of the tragedy:
- William Hale, leader of the corruption and murders
- Mollie Burkhart, wife of Ernest Burkhart
- Anna Brown, sister of Mollie
- Rita & Bill Smith, sister, and brother-in-law of Mollie, murdered
- Shoun Brothers, crooked doctors falsifying death certificates
- W. W. Vaughn, attorney for the Osage, murdered
- Henry Roan, murdered
- Kelsie Morrison murderer
- Herman Davis, Oklahoma’s Governor, corrupt investigator
Trial of Hale, Ramsey, and Burkhart
After a few mishaps between state and federal courts, Hale, Ramsey, and Burkhart were found guilty and sentenced to life. Burkhart was paroled in 1937 but was back in prison after a robbery. Hale, after serving 20 years was paroled in 1947 on the condition he leave Oklahoma and never return. Instead, he left for Arizona, where he died in a nursing home in 1962.
Monument in Honor of the Osage Tribe
The monument is located at the Highway 18 and Interstate 44, Ft. Smith, Arkansas. It stands 35 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and 80 feet in length.
A marker stands in the St. Francis Cemetery honoring a mass grave of the Osage Indians.
Guardians & Murdered Wards
I pulled some of the guardian papers and there was this little booklet that came out. It had a little fabric cover. All it was was essentially identifying the name of a guardian and which Osage they were in charge of. And when I opened up the book, I could see the name of the guardian and when I began to look at the names of the Osage under them I could see written next to many of them simply the word “Dead. Dead. Dead.” It was almost like a ledger; it was like this forensic, bureaucratic accounting.
But when you’re looking at it, you’re beginning to realize you’re looking at hints of a systematic murder campaign, because there’s no way all these people died in a span of just a couple years. It defied any natural death rate. The Osage were wealthy, they had good doctors. … And then when you begin to look into each of those individual cases, you start to find trails of evidence suggesting poisonings, a murder. You start to try to trace the money … and where the wealth went. And what you begin to discover is something even more horrifying than the bureau ever exposed.
Comment: And it STILL hasn’t been Exposed IS MY POINT. The FBI only convicted Burkhart, Nephew and Hale Mastermind and a Rogue Drifter who murdered as well. The VAST MAJORITY OF GUARDIAN KILLERS WERE NEVER ARRESTED , PROSECUTED or Convicted and their children inherited this wealth-by-murder. Time for these Murders to be investigated and the land Returned to their rightful owners-The OSAGE.
Radio producer Taylor Haney, radio editor Shannon Rhoades and digital producer Nicole Cohen contributed to this story.
Comment: Kinda obvious ain’t it that the Guardians were murdering their wards.
The Osage Today
In 2000, the Osage Tribe sued the government, alleging their misuse of trust funds for their people. In 2011, the government settled the claim for 380 million. Today, the Osage have built seven lucrative casinos to build homes, schools, and hospitals and invest in the future.
The Osage Museum, Pawhuska, Oklahoma, is accessible to the public and full of artifacts and the history of the Osage. 918-287-5441. The staff is excellent and highly knowledgeable.
The book, Killers of the Flower Moon by author David Grann is an epic read. He spent several years documenting the FBI’s historical facts, records, and interviews with descendants of the Osage carnage.
The movie, Killers of the Flower Moon is set for release in 2023, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro.
Book Killers of the Flower Moon
Movie Killers of the Flower Moon Due For Release 2023
Sources Used
https://blogs.loc.gov/bloodlines
https://www.justice.gov
https://www.famoustrials.com/osage
https://osagenews.org
