The new windmill farm built above the Osage’s underground
reservation Credit 71New government environmental regulations for oil drilling were
having an even more profound effect on the Osage’s underground
reservation. The regulations, issued in 2014, were costly to satisfy,
and as a consequence oilmen had virtually stopped drilling new
wells, given that they produced only marginal returns. An oil
producer told a reporter, “For the first time in a hundred years,
there’s no drilling in Osage County.”
I continued researching the murders, but there were fewer
archives to examine, fewer documents to find. Then one day at the
public library in Pawhuska I noticed, tucked amid volumes of
Osage history, a spiral-bound manuscript titled “The Murder of
Mary DeNoya-Bellieu-Lewis.” It appeared to have been assembled
by hand, its pages printed on a computer. According to an
introductory note, dated January 1998, the manuscript was
compiled by Anna Marie Jefferson, the great-great-grandniece of
Mary Lewis. “My great-grandmother...first told me the story about
Mary,” Jefferson wrote. “I first heard about this around 1975.”
Jefferson began to gather, from relatives and newspaper clippings
and other records, bits of information about the murder—an
endeavor that spanned two decades. She must have left a copy of
the manuscript with the library, determined that the story not fall
into the chasm of history.
I sat down and began to read. Mary Lewis, who was born in
1861, was an allotted member of the tribe. “With this money she
was able to enjoy a prosperous life,” Jefferson wrote. Lewis had
two marriages that ended in divorce, and in 1918, in her mid-
fifties, she was raising a ten-year-old adopted child. That summer,