As we drove through Gray Horse, we came upon a clearing in
the woods, where there was an old cemetery. We got out of the car,
and Margie paused in front of a tombstone bearing Mollie
Burkhart’s name. The epitaph said, “She was a kind and
affectionate wife and a fond mother and a friend to all.” Nearby
were the plots for Mollie’s murdered sisters and her murdered
brother-in-law, Bill Smith, and her murdered mother, Lizzie, and
her murdered first husband, Henry Roan. Margie looked around at
the tombs and asked, “What kind of person could do this?”
Margie had earlier laid flowers around the graves, and she bent
down and straightened one. “I always try to decorate the stones,”
she said.
We resumed driving and cut along a dirt road through the
prairie. Lush tall grasses spread as far as the eye could see, a
rolling green expanse that was disturbed only by a few small,
rusted oil pumps and by cattle grazing here and there. Earlier,
when I drove to Gray Horse, I’d been startled by the sight of bison
roaming through the prairie with their bowed heads and massive
woolly bodies supported seemingly impossibly on narrow legs. In
the nineteenth century, bison were extinguished from the prairie,
but in recent years they have been reintroduced by
conservationists. The media mogul Ted Turner had been raising
bison on a forty-thousand-acre ranch between Fairfax and
Pawhuska—a ranch that in 2016 was bought by the Osage Nation.