Killers of the Flower Moon

The official death toll of the Osage Reign of Terror had climbed
to at least twenty-four members of the tribe. Among the victims
were two more men who had tried to assist the investigation: one,
a prominent Osage rancher, plunged down a flight of stairs after
being drugged; the other was gunned down in Oklahoma City on
his way to brief state officials about the case. News of the murders
began to spread. In an article titled “The ‘Black Curse’ of the
Osages,” the Literary Digest, a national publication, reported that
members of the tribe had been “shot in lonely pastures, bored by
steel as they sat in their automobiles, poisoned to die slowly, and
dynamited as they slept in their homes.” The article went on, “In
the meantime the curse goes on. Where it will end, no one knows.”
The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s
most murdered. The press later described the killings as being as
“dark and sordid as any murder story of the century” and the
“bloodiest chapter in American crime history.”