As soon as he saw the huge photo, taken in 1924, stretching across a wall at the Osage Nation Museum in the town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, writer David Grann was struck by its sense of mystery. Why were dozens of the tribe members standing so solemnly alongside a group of stoney-faced white men? Why was a section of the photo on one side missing?
Grann, a feature writer with the New Yorker magazine who has also written some notable non-fiction books, had travelled to Pawhuska, seat of the Osage Nation tribal government, in 2012, after hearing a rumour about a wave of murders in the area during the 1920s.
The story he’d heard was that dozens of wealthy Osage people had been killed for their money, which flowed from the deep oil wells across their reservation land in Oklahoma.
During the 1920s, the Osage had become the richest people per capita in the world, spending their cash on fleets of fancy cars. But their wealth made them targets.
“I had never heard about that story before,” says Grann, on the phone from New York. “I couldn’t find much information about it, so I decided to make a trip to Oklahoma.
“At the time, I wasn’t planning on writing an article or a book. I went to the museum in Pawhuska and there was this quite extraordinary panoramic photograph with members of the Osage Nation standing alongside white settlers.
“I noticed a portion on the left was missing and I was meeting the museum director, Kathryn Red Corn, who has since become a good friend. I asked her why that part was missing. She said, ‘It contains this figure who is so frightening, they decided to remove it.’ She pointed to the missing panel and said, ‘The devil was standing right there.’ It took my breath away.
“She went down into the basement and pulled up an image of the missing panel and showed it to me. It showed one of the killers of the Osage people: William Hale.”
Grann knew almost immediately this would be his next book.
“It’s very unusual for a book to have a simple origin story, but that photo really was an origin story,” he says. “I kept thinking about the photo and that the Osage had removed that section – not to forget what had happened, but because they couldn’t forget what had happened.
“And so many people, including myself, had never been taught this history. It had been removed from our consciousness. I knew instantly, then, that this was a story I wanted to tell, and then the question became, could I tell it? Could I find the material: the written records, the photographs, the documents?”
The killing moon
Grann uncovered more information than he’d bargained for as he worked on the project for the next five years, juggling his research with his role at the New Yorker.
The book, Killers of the Flower Moon, is named after the tiny flowers that cover the Osage prairies each spring. When the full moon appears in May, the light stimulates the growth of weeds, which smother the flowers. “This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon,” he writes on the first page, before moving swiftly on to the gruesome circumstances of the murder of Osage woman Anna Brown in May 1921.
The number of murders, originally estimated to be about two dozen, has never been fully established. Grann’s research included combing through a cache of records at the National Archives at Fort Worth, Texas, where he uncovered a much larger number of linked deaths – possibly hundreds – which had never been investigated, stretching across a longer period of time.
“I started to realise that this was not a book about who did it but about who didn’t do it,” he says. “It was a story about a culture of killing and complicity, a story about all these morticians covering up bullet wounds, doctors administering poison, lawmen on the take, many others who were complicit in their silence.
“It was a fusion of greed and racism leading to these monstrous crimes.”
One of the book’s key figures is Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman married to a white man, Ernest Burkhart, who was William Hale’s nephew. Mollie, like her sister Anna Brown, had inherited rights to the revenues from the oil on Osage land, territory the Great Plains tribe had been relocated to from their original homeland of Kansas.
When the oil deposits were discovered, the Osage – who owned the land – went to court to make a case to retain communal mineral rights. They won, but the government continued to exert control: Congress imposed a “guardianship” system, whereby all Osage financial transactions required a white person as co-signatory, as if they were children. Guardianship was fraught: it exposed the Osage to crooks and scammers and marriages made with the intention of gaining access to an Osage woman’s wealth.
Killers of the Flower Moon was published in 2017. It topped the New York Times bestseller list and won a nomination as a National Book Awards finalist. It’s now having an early resurgence, thanks to a film written and directed by Martin Scorsese, who filmed it on Osage land and developed it in close consultation with the Osage people.
Earlier this year, it previewed at the Cannes Film Festival to great acclaim, and at a private screening in Pawhuska for the Osage community. Its length is a heroic three hours, 26 minutes. Reviews from the Cannes screening described it as “an epic of creeping, existential horror”; “a saga of industrialised gangsterism in America’s wide open spaces”.
Grann’s book includes the role J Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the FBI, played in the erratic, dangerous criminal investigation, but Scorsese’s narrative is more driven by the relationships between the whites and the Osage. The film stars Lily Gladstone, of the Blackfeet Nation of Montana, as Mollie, Robert De Niro as cattleman William Hale, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart. Many of the other cast and crew are from the Osage community, and the actors, including De Niro and DiCaprio, learned to speak the tribe’s language, which is an integral part of the dialogue.
Grann, who attended the screenings at Cannes and Pawhuska, finds it all “a bit surreal – a word I hate, by the way”.
“You see this world coming to life and the people you’ve written about inhabited by actors who are breathing life into them and giving them thoughts and expressions.”
Killers is not the first film adaptation of a Grann book. His 2009 debut, The Lost City of Z, about a British explorer who disappeared in the Amazon jungle in 1925, and one of his stories, The Old Man and the Gun, about a polite elderly bank robber, were both turned into movies.
Scorsese has also bought the rights to his latest book, The Wager, about a British naval shipwreck and subsequent mutiny on a barren island off the coast of Patagonia in 1741.
Grann visited the Amazon and the Patagonian island to research those books and, to burrow into the Osage history, he moved to Pawhuska for a month twice a year for the five-year duration.
“I think over time people got used to me, being immersive and present. My hunch was that maybe the Osage elders spoke to me because it was important that other people were made aware of this history.
“A few of the young people have told me, ‘How did you get my grandfather or grandmother to tell you these stories which they would never share with me?’ In some cases, I think it was just so painful. Maybe having someone neutral made it easier to share some of it. I often felt I was chasing history as it was vanishing, because many of them were elderly and many have since passed.”
Kiwi squid games
Grann, 56, grew up in Westport, Connecticut, a small, well-heeled town 90km north of New York City. His father was an oncologist, his mother a renowned book editor who became CEO of Penguin Putnam publishers.
After gaining master’s degrees in international relations and creative writing, Grann started out in journalism in 1989 and worked at Washington political newspaper The Hill before becoming a senior editor at the New Republic.
“I began as a reporter. There is always a premium on what is new; everything has to be of the moment. I wrote stories about the present or very recent times and then I was almost liberated. I found myself being drawn more to stories that are forgotten or lost to history that can tell us as much about our world as contemporary stories.”
Grann joined the staff of the New Yorker in 2003, where his first story involved a trip to New Zealand. He’d pitched an in-depth feature on the hunt for the giant squid, the Architeuthis dux, which has obsessed seagoers for centuries. In Auckland, he trailed Steve O’Shea, a marine biologist at Auckland University of Technology, who wanted to capture giant squid “babies” (paralarvae) and grow them in a lab environment.
The story culminated in Grann venturing out on a small boat with O’Shea at the tail-end of a cyclone. The mission failed – after a few gruelling days – when O’Shea fumbled and dropped the paralarva specimen he’d just caught.
“That was one of the craziest stories I had ever done,” laughs Grann. “When I began that story, I was behind schedule, newly hired and starting to get very nervous. So I assured the editor that we were going to go out on this expedition and capture the baby squid and grow it, and we would be the first ever to document it.
“I oversold it. Even in those times, flying to New Zealand was not cheap. This whole thing becomes a mess. I’m not going to curse, but it was a friggin’ disaster. When we lost this tiny little thing, Steve O’Shea had this look of despair like I have never seen and all I could think was, ‘I’m dead. There’s no story.’ It was only afterwards that I realised: that was the story.
“It had so much pathos; it was much more interesting than the fairytale I had concocted in my imagination. It taught me so much about journalism – about how you have to be really open about where the story takes you. It really was one of my most profound lessons.”
That New Yorker story, “The Hunt for the Most Elusive Creature in the Sea”, set the tone for Grann’s career, being given the freedom to fully explore a story and get it right. As he puts it, good journalism “takes infrastructure. Reporting is expensive, and it takes time.
“One of my great concerns is that we are in a battle for the truth now more than ever, and in a lot of local communities, the institutional support is not there. Here in New York, or maybe Washington, you probably get pretty good coverage, but I always say it’s a great time to be a corrupt politician in some small towns.
“There’s no one to expose it if you don’t have the nagging reporter turning up.”
Grann is also distressed about the distortion of history in the US. A young adults edition of Killers of the Flower Moon, designed to help younger readers understand the Osage “Reign of Terror”, has become too fraught a subject for teachers in many areas because of state-by-state legislation banning the teaching of critical race theory, which argues that American legal institutions created and maintained inequalities based on race.
Oklahoma passed a bill in 2021 banning the teaching of specific race concepts; eight other states have passed similar laws and others plan to follow suit.
“We are engaged in a battle over a reckoning with our past,” says Grann. “There are parts of Native American history which are not taught, or are papered over, or white-washed. There is a fight going on in various states over what history should be taught.
“I think it’s absurd. It’s not like if you don’t teach it, the history just goes away. It still informs us, we are still standing on it, it shapes us. Why not learn about the past to learn about the kind of nation you want to be in the future? There is so much ambiguity in this HB 1775 law, teachers are afraid and not sure what they can teach.”
The devil’s descendants
Grann makes a sound between a gulp and a laugh when asked if he has met any descendants of the “devil”, William Hale, the man removed from the photo in the museum.
“Yeah, yeah. What’s important to understand is that you will have descendants of the murderers and the victims in the same family and the same house, because white people were marrying into the Osage families.
“One of the first events I did after the book came out was in Oklahoma, in Tulsa. It was a large auditorium and many members of the Osage Nation had come, including many descendants of people who had been killed by William Hale, or others.
“Before I got on the stage, a woman came up and introduced herself as the grand-niece of William Hale, and my first reaction was to recoil. “We spoke a little bit and at the end of the session, she asked a question. I asked her, ‘Do you mind if I say who you are?’ She said, ‘Yes, it’s okay.’ I will say that I have never seen a room get quieter. There was an absolute hush in that room. It’s why you see this history still reverberates, you still see this reckoning play out.”
Grann and his family – his wife, Kyra Darnton, a documentary-maker, and their two children – try to return to Pawhuska each year. “When you go out of Pawhuska, you start to get into prairie and much smaller towns. You may drive for half an hour before you get to the open fields. You see bison on the land that was Ted Turner’s ranch [the Osage bought the CNN founder’s 17,500ha ranch in 2016 for US$74 million]. There’s beautiful wildlife, rolling land, some hills. It’s become my home away from home. I go back once or twice a year.”
Grann hopes the film will be one more step in the Osage efforts to heal the wounds of the past. Many of the Osage Nation people, led by principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear, still receive royalties from the oil industry, subsidising a land buy-back programme. They also plan to become self-sufficient food producers.
The book, and now the film, may boost another income source, tourism.
“The book and the movie will help begin to restore some of the memories and some of the history, but it doesn’t end there,” says Grann. “I look at history as a tapestry of stories and representation, so I hope people go and read Charles H Red Corn’s novel [A Pipe for February, which is cited in Killers] or John Joseph Mathews, a beautiful Osage poet I quote, who was writing about Anna Brown, the first murder described in the book.
“That’s my small hope, about all this happening, and that’s what is most meaningful to me.”
Killers of the Flower Moon is released in New Zealand cinemas on October 19.