Webb walked me outside onto the front porch. It was dusk, and the fringes of the sky had darkened. The town and the street were empty, and beyond them the prairie, too. 'This land is saturated with blood,' Webb said. For a moment, she fell silent, and we could hear the leaves of the blackjacks rattling restlessly in the wind. Then she repeated what God told Cain after he killed Abel: 'The blood cries out from the ground.'
But Mathis, who managed Anna’s financial affairs, contacted Mollie, and she led a grim procession toward the creek that included Ernest, Bryan, Mollie’s sister Rita, and Rita’s husband, Bill Smith. Many who knew Anna followed them, along with the morbidly curious.
An Oklahoma reporter observed, “Travel in any direction that you will from Pawhuska and you will notice at night Osage Indian homes outlined with electric lights, which a stranger in the country might conclude to be an ostentatious display of oil wealth. But the lights are burned, as every Osage knows, as protection against the stealthy approach of a grim specter—an unseen hand—that has laid a blight upon the Osage land and converted the broad acres, which other Indian tribes enviously regard as a demi-paradise, into a Golgotha and field of dead men’s skulls….The perennial question in the Osage land is, ‘who will be next?’ ”
There were fewer and fewer Osage who knew the old prayers for the dead. Who would chant every morning at dawn for her?
One day, Hale’s pastures were set on fire, the blaze spreading for miles, the blackened earth strewn with the carcasses of cattle. To Mollie, even the King of the Osage Hills seemed vulnerable, and after pursuing justice for so long, she retreated behind the closed doors and the shuttered windows of her house. She stopped entertaining guests or attending church; it was as if the murders had shattered even her faith in God.
White found himself wandering through a wilderness of mirrors—his work more akin to espionage than to criminal investigation.
An Osage, speaking to a reporter about the guardians, stated, “Your money draws ’em and you’re absolutely helpless. They have all the law and all the machinery on their side. Tell everybody, when you write your story, that they’re scalping our souls out here.”
The doctor recalled asking Hale, “Bill, what are you going to do, kill this Indian?” Hale, laughing, said, “Hell, yes.”
White observed the way Ramsey kept saying “the Indian,” rather than Roan’s name. As if to justify his crime, Ramsey said that even now “white people in Oklahoma thought no more of killing an Indian than they did in 1724.”
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 killing an Osage is murder—or merely cruelty to animals.”
Under the headline OLD WILD WEST STILL LIVES IN LAND OF OSAGE MURDERS, a wire service sent out a nationwide bulletin that the story, “however depressing, is nevertheless blown through with a breath of the romantic, devil-may-care frontier west that we thought was gone. And it is an amazing story, too. So amazing that at first you wonder if it can possibly have happened in modern, twentieth-century America.”
Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese // Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (1/3)