9 THE UNDERCOVER COWBOYS

After taking over the Oklahoma City field office in July 1925,

White reviewed the bureau’s voluminous files on the Osage
murders, which had been amassed over the previous two years.
Murder cases that are not solved quickly are often never solved.
Evidence dries up; memories fade. More than four years had
elapsed since the killings of Anna Brown and Charles Whitehorn,
and frequently the only way to crack such cases is to find an
overlooked clue submerged within the original cache of records.

The files on the murders of the Osage contained history in its
rawest form: bits of data vacuumed up without any chronology or
narrative, like a novel whose pages were out of order. White
scoured this randomness for a hidden design. Though he was
accustomed on the frontier to dealing with violent death, the
brutality detailed in the reports was breathtaking. An agent wrote
of the bombing of the Smiths’ house, “The two women perished
instantly, their bodies being blown asunder, and pieces of their
flesh being later found plastered on a house 300 feet away.”
Previous agents had concentrated on the six cases that seemed
most likely to be solved: the bombing deaths of Rita Smith and her
husband, Bill Smith, and their servant Nettie Brookshire, and the
fatal shootings of Anna Brown, Henry Roan, and Charles
Whitehorn.

White struggled to find links among all the two dozen murders,
but a few things were evident: rich Osage Indians were being
targeted, and three of the victims—Anna Brown, Rita Smith, and