The United States recognizes more than 560 indigenous nations. They are still called tribes due to the inheritance of colonial language, but some, like the Comanchería, had an immense territory and treated countries like Spain on a one-on-one basis. In addition to a myriad of rancherías and settlements, there are 11 state and 326 federal reservations, where 60% of the Indians live. Few carry a past as gruesome as the Osages.
This town was the victim in the 20th century of a wave of crimes and frauds, forgotten for years until David Grann rescued them in The Moon Killers (Random House). His essay reads like a novel and has inspired Martin Scorsese's film of the same name, which opens this Friday. One more step on the ladder of Broken Arrow, A Man Called Horse, Blue Soldier, Little Big Man or Dances with Wolves... The other story.
Like so many natives, the Osages had to say goodbye to their lands, between the Missouri and Arkansas rivers. When others were still fighting, such as the Modoc, Lakota, Cheyenne, Nez Perce, and Apache, they had already abandoned resistance and resigned themselves to the reservations. The first one they had was in Kansas, but settlers like the family of Laura Ingalls, the author of Little House on the Prairie (Noguer), also kicked them out from there.
Increasingly cornered, the Osages believed they found their definitive home in the setting of many stories and novels by Dorothy M. Johnson: the then-called Indian Territory. The portion they lived in would become the 46th state, Oklahoma, in 1907. Many Indians from the most diverse backgrounds ended up confined there. The reason is simple. The land was so wild and rocky that no one else wanted it.
The members of this community gave up their land in Kansas in 1870 at a ridiculous price ($2.50 per hectare), but they obtained enough to acquire 600,000 hectares in Oklahoma at 70 cents per acre (less than $1.5 per acre). hectare). They thought they would continue to starve because that land did not grow good crops nor was it suitable for feeding livestock, “but at least we will live in peace.”
They were wrong. His land had a curse. Petroleum. The wasteland to which they were sent sat on an immense oil field. When the fever for black gold broke out, the rents began to fatten the pockets of the Indians. The first royalties were just a handful of dollars, but in 1921 they already amounted to about 30 million euros, which today would be equivalent to about 358 million euros.
It was an outrage for a community that, despite having been decimated, had about 3,000 members. From that time are photographs of Indian women with traditional dresses or mink fur coats worthy of Paris, London or New York. Cars, mansions with domestic service... The epicenter of opulence, as the book and the movie tell it, was in Osage County, in the center of its new lands.
The wealth of those who until then had been seen (and treated) almost as beggars attracted countless scoundrels and criminals of all stripes. David Grann, who before this historical essay published the adventure novel The Lost City of Z (Debolsillo), explains that in 1924 the reserve received the unusual letter from a white woman. “I'm looking for love, would you be so kind as to tell that to the richest Indian out there.”
The United States, which did not give them citizenship until 1924, treated the Indians like children and required white guardians for them. In theory, to manage their fortune, but brazen men like William K. Hale, the worst of them all (played by Robert De Niro), were outright thieves. To escape from their guardians, many Indian men and women entered into interracial marriages. Result? Many white men and women were widowed shortly after…
When the FBI decided to investigate so many strange deaths (random gas explosions, unexplained accidents or sudden deaths) it was an open secret that the Osages were being murdered to collect their insurance or inherit their property. William K. Hale, who presented himself as “the greatest friend of the Osage nation,” went on trial as the person responsible for a criminal network, suspected of between 24 and 60 murders.
The investigators were not interested in stirring things up much and found the perfect excuse. The accused was sentenced in 1929 to life imprisonment in his first trial (for the death of a married couple and his maid in an explosion). Why continue investigating if the prisoner would not get out of jail? The truth is that in 1947, when almost no one remembered the drama, he was released. He died in an Arizona nursing home in 1962, aged 72.
The case, which the FBI placed between 1921 and 1926, was not thoroughly investigated. The Moon Killers suggests that the number of victims will never be known, perhaps 600, in an ordeal of greed and blood that actually began in 1907 and lasted until the 1930s. But even the tears dry up. Witnesses of a forgotten infamy, most of the 10,000 wells that were opened in their day are today inactive or produce meager quantities of oil.
