EPISODE 101: The History Behind Killers of the Flower Moon

·1 hr 25 min·6 clips

An Osage leader told a journalist: 'Tell everybody when you write your story that they are scalping our souls out here' — describing the federally mandated guardian system that legally transferred millions of dollars from the tribe to white managers.

1. History on Fire episode 101 tells the history behind David Grann's 2017 book and the 2023 Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon, both subtitled 'The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.' 2. Host Daniele Bolelli narrates solo, drawing primarily on David Grann's book as well as primary Osage sources and FBI investigation records. 3. The episode's thesis is that the Osage Reign of Terror — systematic murders of wealthy tribal members between roughly 1918 and 1931 — was enabled by a web of institutional corruption including federally mandated financial guardianship, crooked local law enforcement, and political corruption at the state level. 4. The Osage, described by 19th-century painter George Catlin as 'the tallest race of men in North America' with many members six-and-a-half to seven feet tall, were forced off over 100 million acres in Missouri and Kansas through a series of treaties in which the US repeatedly broke its promises. 5. After the Civil War, the Osage were relocated to northeastern Oklahoma on land considered so worthless that no one else wanted it — land that turned out to sit on some of the largest oil deposits in North America. 6. By the 1910s, Osage tribal members had become extraordinarily wealthy from oil leases, at which point Congress ruled they were too inexperienced to manage their own wealth and mandated non-Indian guardians to manage their finances on their behalf. 7. The guardian system became, in Bolelli's words, 'a much bigger institutionalized scam': judges appointed political supporters as overseers of the wealthiest tribal members as electoral payoffs, and when overseers were caught stealing, judges made the cases disappear. 8. Two-thirds of the Osage tribe had already been wiped out by forced migration and disease by the late 1800s; the Reign of Terror of the 1920s targeted those who had survived and prospered. 9. The story's central family is that of Molly Burkhart, an Osage woman married to white man Ernest Burkhart in 1918; her sister Minnie died of a 'wasting illness' at age 27, followed by sister Anna being found shot in the back of the head execution-style in May 1921. 10. Anna's murder was followed in close succession by the suspicious death of their mother Lizzie and the deaths of other tribal members — including Charles Whitehorn, found with a bullet between his eyes — before the full pattern became visible. 11. William Hale — Ernest Burkhart's uncle, a cattle rancher with a reputation as a community benefactor who donated to schools and hospitals — publicly offered a reward for information about the murders while secretly directing the investigation away from himself. 12. Lawyer W.W. Vaughn made an honest effort to investigate the murders; after a dying Osage friend named George Bigheart gave him key information in an Oklahoma City hospital, Vaughn was thrown from a train and killed before reaching the county sheriff, and all his accumulated evidence was taken. 13. Oklahoma's governor was impeached for corruption related to oil industry bribes, the state's special investigator for the murders was later convicted of bribery and then murdered a lawyer after his pardon, and local sheriffs and investigators were widely understood to be on Hale's payroll. 14. FBI agent Tom White, sent by J. Edgar Hoover from the Houston office, assembled an undercover team including the agency's only Native American agent, John Wren, who was part Ute. 15. White's investigation established that the common thread was that each murder moved Osage oil inheritance toward Molly Burkhart — whose husband Ernest was William Hale's nephew — and Bolelli reads directly from Grann's book that 'the plan was so brazen, so sinister that it was hard to fathom.' 16. Hale's scheme included setting up a $25,000 life insurance policy on a murdered Osage man named Henry Roan naming himself as sole beneficiary, then leading a jewelry store owner to shoot dead a witness named Asa Kirby who could have testified against him. 17. Molly herself began getting progressively sicker and told her priest she believed she was being poisoned — with suspicion falling on doctors paid by Hale who were injecting her under the guise of medical treatment. 18. Bolelli's narration moves quickly between historical context, investigative procedural detail, and direct quotes from Grann's book, creating a true-crime rhythm without sacrificing historical analysis. 19. Listeners interested in Native American history, the origins of the FBI, 1920s American crime history, or the background to the Scorsese film will find this episode thorough and primary-source rich. 20. Those who have already seen the film or read the book will know the ending, though the historical context Bolelli provides for the Osage's broader history significantly extends beyond the film's scope.

As heard by us

A history episode that frames the Osage murders as a case of wealth, corruption, and official failure.

Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon provides the frame, but the episode is really about the Osage murders, the oil wealth that made the Osage a target, and the guardianship system that turned official paperwork into a tool for theft and abuse.

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Why you'd press play

For the Osage story behind Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon.

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