widow with ten children?” Martha had said to me.
As I reviewed various records at the National Archives as well as
information from other sources, I began to piece together a clearer
portrait of Burt. Born in Missouri in 1874, he was the son of a
farmer. Census records indicate that by 1910 he had moved to
Pawhuska, apparently one of the legions of acquisitive, dreaming,
desperate settlers. He opened a trading store and later became
president of a bank. A 1926 photograph shows him dressed in the
same style as Hale, with a sharp suit and a hat—an itinerant
farmer’s son transformed into a respectable businessman.
Much of his wealth, though, flowed from the deeply corrupt
“Indian business”—the swindling of millionaire Osage. A court
record noted that Burt had run a loan business targeting the
Osage. During a 1915 hearing before a joint commission of
Congress that was investigating American Indian affairs, a tribal
attorney said that Burt would borrow money from other whites
and then relend it to the Osage at astronomical interest rates. “Mr.
Burt is one of the men whom I say and believe is on the inside of
affairs at Pawhuska,” the attorney testified. “He told me that he
was only paying 6 per cent for this money, and he could make a
great deal more out of it by loaning it back to the Indians.” He
continued, “He is getting the money for 6 per cent and probably
will be able to get—I would be afraid to guess how much—but
somewhere from 10 to 50 per cent.”
Burt employed bizarre accounting methods in order to conceal
his fleecing of the Osage. At a probate hearing after the death of
George Bigheart, an attorney expressed bafflement at why loans
ostensibly from Burt’s bank to the Osage were issued from Burt’s
personal checkbook. Burt insisted that he’d “never made any deals
I have to cover up.”
“I did not mean anything personal Mr. Burt, but that is just a