Killers of the Flower Moon by David Gann

    This was a great book that I read in anticipation of seeing the movie. Spoiler alert. The book is separated into three parts, which broadly cover background on the characters, the investigation and prosecution of murders, and then the author's realization that there were countless more murders than anyone realized. This starts as a book about a few murders, but by the end, you realize that is was not jus a conspiracy to murder some Osage landowners to get their oil rights, but a massive social phenomenon of murder. There were several different unconnected plots to kill Osage who owned oil rights. And even if they weren't killed, most Osage were assigned "guardians" to manage their finances, and who often denied them so many funds that they were dirt poor. And then when they did need to spend money, they were gouged, so that everything became exorbitant, and they often needed to buy directly from their guardians. So it was common for a guardian to buy a car for $250 and sell it to an Osage person for $1,250.

    The Osage ended up above a bunch of oil in Oklahoma after being pushed out from territory between the Arkansas and Missouri Rivers during the Jefferson administration. They were pushed first onto lands in Kansas, and then made to sell those lands. But they were massacred by impatient settlers as well. The Osage population declined by a two-thirds due to diseases and forced migrations. The Reign of Terror that this book describes occurred as white settlers sought to appropriate Osage oil fortunes. What was critical in order for these murders to occur was the dehumanization of Indians on the frontier. It was extremely difficult to get any white jury to convict a white man of killing an Indian, and one of the whites in the community even is quoted as saying it wouldn't have been considered murder in the not-too-distant past. One Osage chief said the question was whether the federal government would treat it as murder or animal abuse. The results of the Reign of Terror are still not totally accounted for, but it looks like the Osage death rate was 19 per year per 100,000 in a rich community, compared to a rate of 12 for whites. I don't know what the word is for this phenomenon, but the Reign of Terror was a kind of social mass murder; it was a spontaneous, grassroots genocide. The book was very disturbing, and very well-written. I finished it in two days.