Skip to main content

Killers of the Flower Moon


Book Review


 Title: Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Murder and the Birth of the FBI

Author: David Grann

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2017

Pages: 339

Human greed has no limits. Worse, greed can make people inhuman. David Grann’s book which is classified as ‘history’ reads more like a crime thriller. It tells us the bloodcurdling history of how almost an entire tribe of people, the Osage Indians of Oklahoma, were killed with meticulous planning by a few individuals whose greed overwhelmed their humanity. A few hundred people were killed and many of those deaths were passed off as natural. The author of this book quotes the Osage historian Louis F Burns, “I don’t know of a single Osage family which didn’t lose at least one family member because of the head rights.” The head rights refer to the legal grants given to the Osage people for selling the oil in their lands.

The whites in North America perpetrated many atrocities on the original inhabitants of those lands. Even in the beginning of the 20th century, the atrocities continued to be perpetrated though in apparently less cruel ways. The Osages were also victims of the white marauding. “In the early 1870s, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma,” the author tells us. These hapless people were pushed out of their own homelands, in short. But a few decades later, it was discovered that there were enormous oil deposits beneath the new Osage homes. Some vicious whites were quick enough to devise ways and means of grabbing money from the Osage people by cheating them. Some went to the extent of marrying Osage women and then taking possession of their wealth. Some did not hesitate to kill their Osage wives and relatives.

This book focuses on one particular family: that of Molly Burkhart, an Osage woman who married a white man named Ernest Burkhart. This Ernest looked the paragon of virtues so much so that Molly couldn’t even believe what he had done to her and her family when it all came to light later. Ernest and his uncle William Hale emerge as diabolic characters in this book of ‘history’.

But they are not the only killers of the Osages. There are many others. This book chose to focus on them because they present one of the darkest sides of human nature. They killed too many people, innocent and unsuspecting people, just for the sake of wealth all of which nobody would need in an entire lifetime.

What shakes us most, perhaps, is the fact that these white killers didn’t even regret their crimes when their wickedness was discovered and brought to the court of justice. They tried to bribe the judges and witnesses in order to escape arrest. They even killed an attorney and some of the witnesses.

They didn’t even think of the Osages as people, in the first place. One of the Osages remarked during the trial, “It is a question in my mind whether this jury is considering a murder case or not. The question for them to decide is whether a white man killing an Osage is murder – or merely cruelty to animals.”

This book touches the depths of human depravity. This is not history. This is much more than that.

Martin Scorsese has made a movie on this with the same title. I don’t know how shocking the movie is. The book jolted me. I shuddered again and again and found it hard to believe that some people could be as devilish as William Hale and Ernest Burkhart. And there are many others too mentioned in the book though briefly.

The book ends with a remark from one of the descendants of an Osage who was killed during ‘The Reign of Terror’ [as the Osage killings came to be known later]: “The blood cries out from the ground.” That is what the biblical God told Cain after he killed Abel.

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    I recently read this... it stays with one for some time... It is not easy history. But the blood cries from many grounds even now... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's the saddest side, Yam, that we humans never learn... the meaning of being human!

      Delete
  2. Sounds something like that of Armenian tribes.Americans suffer from this Heart of Darkness that bears American Dreams only because of the white thirst for sucking red human blood. They are indeed cannibals. A very simple book review, prompting book lovers to read!👍

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Europeans had this notion that they were the torchbearers of civilisation. But history often shows them on the other side.

      Delete
  3. It has been argued that the root of all evil is when man stopped being nomads and became settlers. I don't remember the name of the book.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh, so that's what the movie is about! I kept hearing about it, but I got no details about the plot, so I heard a weird title with no context. I'm glad this has come out. There are so many more atrocities in the past that need to be known. Love of money is the root of all evil. Sadly, I think we're still working through this lesson.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A stark reminder that humanity often struggles to learn from its own past, repeating the same tragic mistakes.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Not only was Ernest Burkhart excessively greedy, but he had ensnared Molly to such an extent that she did not even suspect him in the least, all the while claiming to be the embodiment of righteousness.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...