Welcome to Week Two of the Online Book Club where we’re discussing Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. This week we’re going over Chronicle One: The Marked Woman.
Were you surprised that the opening paragraph begins to describe the meaning of the book’s title? The tiny flowers of April begin to get crushed by other invading plants and flowers in May under the large moon, leaving them to die. We readers soon find out that Mollie Burkhart’s sister Anna Brown and another man Charles Whitehorn were murdered in May 1921.
Chronicle One covers nearly 100 pages, and I’m still finding it incredible how much history Grann was able to pack into these first chapters. I think he did a great job intertwining the story of the Osage’s forced relocations over the years, and eventually discovering oil, alongside the history of Mollie and her family. I was stunned to learn that in 1923 the Osage took in today’s equivalent of 400 million dollars! I thought about the comparison of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s opulent The Great Gatsby taking place in Long Island in 1922, and just how prosperous the times were for many people across the nation. We learn that one lease of 160 Osage acres could go for one million dollars, with deals happening under the “Million Dollar Elm.” On the other hand, the Osage were forced to have financial guardians and, eventually, were not allowed to withdraw more than a few thousand dollars each year. I think I was even more stunned to read that after Thomas Jefferson initially convinced the Osage to relinquish part of their territory, in the following 20 years they’d be forced to cede around a hundred million acres. I couldn’t comprehend what that looks like in real life so I looked it up; it’s roughly the size of Rhode Island.
From the get-go I could tell Mollie Burkhart’s life was going to be filled with loss and grief, but I was not expecting this. Had you heard of the Osage Reign of Terror before this book or film adaptation were released? By the time we’re introduced to Mollie she has already lost her father and sister Minnie, leaving her mother Lizzie, sister Rita, and Rita’s husband Bill Smith. Did you have any feelings about Bill being married to Minnie and marrying Rita a few months after Minnie’s death? Did it make you suspect Bill had anything to do with the local murders?
I grew up in a small town and know how fast gossip spreads. Can you imagine how it must have felt to be a family member of someone murdered and having to hear so many different stories and theories from neighbors about who was behind it all? In Anna’s case alone they suspected Mollie’s husband Ernest and his brother Bryan Burkhart, Anna’s ex-husband Oda Brown and an unnamed forger, Anna’s brother-in-law Bill Smith, and a woman named Rose Osage.
Roughly two years after Anna’s death, Rita, Bill, and their servant Nettie died when their home was bombed. This is when Governor Jack C. Walton begins to take action and sends in an investigator. Unfortunately, the investigator is soon found to be accepting bribes. After pardoning the investigator, Governor Walton is impeached and removed from office “partly for having abused the system of pardons and paroles.” After this, a local prosecutor, working off of a tip, travels by train to get evidence of who is behind the murders. He never made it home; his body was found thrown from the train, and the incriminating documents were gone.
At this point, the official death toll was at least twenty-four members of the tribe and others who had tried assisting the investigation. Life for the Osage community, especially Mollie and her family, is in terrifying chaos. William Hale, Ernest Burkhart’s uncle, is also targeted when his pastures were set on fire. Over time, Mollie stopped leaving the house and her diabetes seemed to be worsening.
In 1925, Mollie sent a secret message to her priest reporting her life was in danger; she wasn’t dying of diabetes, she, too, was being poisoned.
This brings us to the end of Chronicle One: The Marked Woman. What do you think about Mollie, Ernest, and William Hale? Were you shocked to learn about the history of law enforcement and private investigators during this time? If you’ve seen the film, are the actors doing justice to the roles they were given? Watch the actors and director of the film discuss Mollie Burkhart. https://youtu.be/ehVqG84cYzo?si=2_SVfpL4LTlxtk9u
There’s so much to talk about that I couldn’t fit it all in the blog post! I look forward to chatting with you in the comments, and come back next week when we’ll be discussing Chronicle Two: The Evidence Man.