A NOTE ON THE SOURCES
This book is based extensively on primary and unpublished
materials. They include thousands of pages of FBI files, secret
grand jury testimony, court transcripts, informants’ statements,
logs from private eyes, pardon and parole records, private
correspondence, an unpublished manuscript co-authored by one
of the detectives, diary entries, Osage Tribal Council records, oral
histories, field reports from the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
congressional records, Justice Department memos and telegrams,
crime scene photographs, wills and last testaments, guardian
reports, and the murderers’ confessions. These materials were
drawn from archives around the country. Some records were
obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, while FBI
documents that had been redacted by the government were
provided to me, uncensored, by a former law-enforcement officer.
Moreover, several private papers came directly from descendants,
among them the relatives of the victims of the Reign of Terror;
further information was often gleaned from my interviews with
these family members.
I also benefited from a number of contemporaneous newspaper
dispatches and other published accounts. In reconstructing the
history of the Osage, I would have been lost without the seminal
works of two Osage writers: the historian Louis F. Burns and the
prose poet John Joseph Mathews. In addition, I was greatly aided
by the research of Terry Wilson, a former professor of Native
American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and
Garrick Bailey, a leading anthropologist of the Osage.