Many people in the county turned out for Roan’s funeral. The
Osage elders sang the traditional songs for the dead, only now the
songs seemed for the living, for those who had to endure this
world of killing. Hale served again as a pallbearer, holding aloft the
casket of his friend. One of Hale’s favorite poems echoed Jesus’s
command in the Sermon on the Mount:
Man’s judgment errs, but there is One who “doeth all things well.”
Ever, throughout the voyage of life, this precept keep in view:
“Do unto others as thou wouldst that they should do to you.”Mollie had always assisted the authorities, but as they began
looking into Roan’s death, she became uneasy. She was, in her
own way, a product of the spirit of American self-construction. She
arranged the details of her past the way she tidied up her house,
and she had never told Ernest, her instinctively jealous second
husband, about her Osage wedding with Roan. Ernest had
provided Mollie support during these terrible times, and they had
recently had a third child, a girl whom they had named Anna. If
Mollie were to let the authorities know of her connection to Roan,
she would have to admit to Ernest that she’d deceived him all
these years. And so she decided not to say a word, not to her
husband or the authorities. Mollie had her secrets, too.
After Roan’s death, electric lightbulbs began to appear on the
outside of Osage houses, dangling from rooftops and windowsills
and over back doors, their collective glow hollowing the dark. An
Oklahoma reporter observed, “Travel in any direction that you will
from Pawhuska and you will notice at night Osage Indian homes
outlined with electric lights, which a stranger in the country might
conclude to be an ostentatious display of oil wealth. But the lights
are burned, as every Osage knows, as protection against the