donated it to the museum. As I read through the letter, I was
struck by the buoyant tone. Hale wrote, “I am in perfect health. I
weigh 185 lbs. I haven’t got a grey hair.” When he got out of jail,
he said, he hoped to return to the reservation: “I had rather live at
Gray Horse than any place on earth.” And he insisted, “I will
always be the Osages true Friend.”
Red Corn shook her head. “Can you believe it?” she said.
I assumed that she had invited me to the museum in order to
show me the letter, but I soon discovered that she had another
reason. “I thought this might be a good time to tell you that story I
mentioned before, about my grandfather,” she said. She explained
that after her grandfather divorced her grandmother, he wed a
white woman, and in 1931 he began to suspect that he was being
poisoned—by his second wife. When relatives visited her
grandfather’s home, Red Corn recalled, he was scared. He would
tell them, “Don’t eat or drink anything in this house.” Not long
after, Red Corn’s grandfather dropped dead; he was forty-six years
old. “Up until then he’d been in good health,” Red Corn said.
“There was nothing wrong with him. His wife made off with a lot
of the money.” The family was convinced that he had been
poisoned, but there was never an investigation: “Back then,
everyone covered these things up. The undertakers. The doctors.
The police.”
Red Corn did not know more than these fragmentary details
relayed to her by relatives, and she hoped that I could investigate
her grandfather’s death. After a long pause, she said, “There were a
lot more murders during the Reign of Terror than people know
about. A lot more.”
During my years researching the murders of the Osage, I had
turned my small office in New York into a grim repository. The