we’ve moved,” Bill told a friend, “maybe they’ll leave us alone.”
Not long afterward, a man appeared at the Smiths’ door. He told
Bill that he’d heard he was selling some farmland. Bill told him
that he was mistaken. The man, Bill noticed, had a wild look about
him, the look of an outlaw, and he kept glancing around the house
as if he were casing it.
In early March, the dogs in the neighborhood began to die, one
after the other; their bodies were found slumped on doorsteps and
on the streets. Bill was certain that they’d been poisoned. He and
Rita found themselves in the grip of tense silence. He confided in
a friend that he didn’t “expect to live very long.”
On March 9, a day of swirling winds, Bill drove with a friend to
the bootlegger Henry Grammer’s ranch, which was on the western
edge of the reservation. Bill told his friend that he needed a drink.
But Bill knew that Grammer, whom the Osage Chief called the
“county’s most notorious character,” possessed secrets and
controlled an unseen world. The Roan investigation had produced
one revelation: before disappearing, Roan had said that he was
going to get whiskey at Grammer’s ranch—the same place,
coincidentally or not, where Mollie’s sister Anna often got her
whiskey, too.
Grammer was a rodeo star who had performed at Madison
Square Garden and been crowned the steer-roping champion of
the world. He was also an alleged train robber, a kingpin
bootlegger with connections to the Kansas City Mob, and a blazing
gunman. The porous legal system seemed unable to contain him.
In 1904, in Montana, he gunned down a sheepshearer, yet he
received only a three-year sentence. In a later incident, in Osage
County, a man came into a hospital bleeding profusely from a
gunshot wound, moaning, “I’m going to die, I’m going to die.” He
fingered Grammer as his shooter, then passed out. But when the