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Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Tucked away in a series of file boxes that reside at the National Archives at Fort Worth are several documents that paint a tragic picture of the reality that shook the Osage Nation in the early 20th century. This carefully curated pile of ledgers, letters, and court documents would become the basis for David Grann's 2017 best-selling book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese would adapt into a four-hour epic film released in late 2023.
Both the book and the movie used the source materials stored at the National Archives in Fort Worth as the bedrock to tell the tragic story of the murders of several members of the Osage Nation that occurred in Oklahoma in the 1920s.
During this era, the Osage Nation found substantial prominence after discovering oil on their 675-acre patch of land in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Owing to an agreement Osage Nation entered into with the U.S. government after purchasing and settling on a permanent reservation in 1906, each Nation member was entitled to receive headrights — the rights belonging to Nation members to receive a share in the distribution of income earned from the sale of the oil. This meant, following the black gold boom, the Osage became some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
What came after were a series of murders headed up by Oklahoma cattle rancher and crime boss William King Hale. Hale’s end game was to try to take as many oil headrights as he could from the Osage people no matter what it took. One of Hale’s key henchmen was his own nephew, Ernest Burkhart, who married an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle. After the two tied the knot in 1917, they had three children all while Burkhart was conspiring with his uncle to kill off members of Mollie’s family and take their headrights.
Hale and Burkhart were also aided by U.S. government policy, which put a system of guardianship in place. Under this system, any Osage who was deemed "incompetent" was assigned a guardian, which was almost always a White man. Unfortunately, this system often resulted in many of these guardians withholding or flagrantly stealing money from the Osage .
The National Archives at Fort Worth is full of guardianship ledgers that chronicle many Osage people’s daily expenditures that range from purchasing homes to daily grocery lists.
“We have hundreds of boxes of different guardianship files,” archivist Jenny McMillen Sweeney says. “So, people who are coming and looking for their ancestors will get to see the original [ledgers].”
Outside of these ancestral requests, McMillen Sweeney says most of the documents that pertain to the book and film are digitized, so anyone from anywhere can view them.
“This is what we offered 60 Minutes when they inquired about the documents for a news story they were doing prior to the release of the movie,” she says. “The digitized versions of these documents made it so they didn’t have to fly all the way out here.”
McMillen Sweeney says after the release of Grann’s book, she looked up the names mentioned and had the files pertaining to each person pulled and digitized in case there were any requests to view them, a step that proved to be advantageous given the resurgence of interest in the subject following the release of Scorsese's film.
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“I didn't know about [the Osage murders] until coming here,” McMillen Sweeney says. “I mean, I have a master's degree in history and didn't know anything about it before I came here. Surely it was known, obviously in the Osage community and probably outskirts of communities in Oklahoma, but not on this level.”
What the newspapers of this time dubbed as the "Reign of Terror," began in 1921 with the death of Mollie’s sister Anna Brown and another Osage man Charles Whitehorn, who were both shot in the head and found in the wilderness. Over the next four years, King and Burkhart were involved in the deaths of more than 20 members of the Osage Nation, many of whom were part of Mollie Kyle's immediate family — and thus related to Burkhart via marriage.
In one document brought out by the archivists, Mollie writes to Burkhart while he is in jail awaiting his trial date for his role in the "Reign of Terror." The short letter written in pencil reads, “Went to town in the car and took Elizabeth (their daughter) to school. I’ve been sick myself, but I feel better now.” The letter closes with Mollie stating that she would like to hear from Burkhart soon, signed, “From your wife Mollie Burkhart.”
This nonchalant letter is not what one would expect a man accused of murder to receive from his wife, let alone a man accused of murdering her mother and two sisters. Yet, this archival remnant remains as a sign of Mollie and Earnest’s relationship through the trial phase of this American tragedy.
COURTESY ARCHIE MASON
A crop from the 1924 panorama showing members of the Osage Nation alongside prominent local white businessmen and leaders.
Grann used the double entendre of the flower moon to convey the underlying motif that surround these murders. The flower moon, he writes, is a time in May when larger plants begin to engulf smaller flowers, with many of them dying in the process. It is said that the larger flowers steal sunlight and water, taking all of the resources for themselves and leaving nothing for anything else.
Outside of this somber comparison, is a ray of light in the form of “Killers of the Flower Moon” actress Lily Gladstone’s recent Golden Globe win for her portrayal of Mollie Burkhart in the film. Gladstone made history with this win, being the very first indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture. Gladstone, who learned some of her native tongue while growing up in school, spoke a bit of the Blackfeet language during her acceptance speech.
“I'm so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language, which I'm not fluent in,” Gladstone said. “This [win] is a historic one. It doesn't belong to just me. I'm holding it right now. I'm holding it with all my beautiful sisters in the film at this table over here and my mother, Tantoo Cardinal, standing on all of your shoulders. Thank you."
When asked about the direction he took with his latest film, Scorsese said in a press conference, “What I wanted to capture, ultimately, was the very nature of the virus or the cancer that creates this sense of a kind of easygoing genocide. When there is betrayal that deep, and we know for a fact that it was that way, there's our story."
