OSAGE MURDERS
IN POST-WWI AMERICA, MEMBERS OF THE OIL-RICH OSAGE NATION OF OKLAHOMA WERE TARGETED BY GREEDY AND JEALOUS WHITE LANDOWNERS, WHO EMBARKED ON A CAMPAIGN OF MURDER…
First came the oil. Then came the blood. On 27 May 1921, the blackened, bloated, maggot-ridden corpse of a 34-year-old Native American, Anna Brown, was discovered by a boy and his father out riding their horses through an area known as Three Mile Creek. The young boy had shot at a squirrel and followed it down into a gulch. He smelled death in the air. Before them was a decomposing corpse buzzing with flies. Together, they rode out to Fairfax, the nearest town, and informed the authorities of their grisly find.
News spread and a crowd gathered at the site. Anna’s body was black from the process of decomposition, her facial features completely unrecognisable, the springtime climate and animal predation having done a brutal and undignified job on her remains. A shawl, her gold teeth and an earring were used to identify her. When the body was turned over by a doctor serving as coroner at the scene, a flap of loose flesh fell away to reveal a hole in the back of Anna’s skull. Clearly, it had been caused by a bullet. She had vanished a few days earlier.
A CHANGE IN FORTUNE
Displaced by the US government in the early 19th century, the Osage were moved from their ancestral homelands between the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers. First, they settled in Kansas. They moved again, this time to Oklahoma Territory, having signed a treaty with the Cherokee and purchased a sprawl of inhospitable terrain in the middle of nowhere.
Then, a twist. In the 1890s, on land once deemed so worthless in the eyes of the whites it was only fit for Indians, black gold spewed from the ground. In 1906, the government passed the Osage Act, which gave members of the reservation who owned plots ‘head rights’ – meaning that they received money from oil produced on their parcels of land. Prospectors wishing to dig had to pay them for the privilege, as well as royalties atop. Some Osage became phenomenally wealthy, almost overnight.
Once people living in abject poverty, they were now richer than the fabled King Croesus. But so much money swilling about attracted villainy like flies to dung. Osage County became the last lawless place, a remnant of 19th century frontier-style life. A boomtown atmosphere developed with tents and oil derricks and saloons and brothels everywhere. These places were filled with venal criminal types, chancers and grifters, all of them chasing dollars by hook or by crook.
The Osage knew they were ripe for exploitation too; especially so because they were not in charge of their own mon
