ways the killers did this: “In connection with the mysterious
deaths of a large number of Indians, the perpetrators of the crime
would get an Indian intoxicated, have a doctor examine him and
pronounce him intoxicated, following which a morphine
hypodermic would be injected into the Indian, and after the
doctor’s departure the [killers] would inject an enormous amount
of morphine under the armpit of the drunken Indian, which would
result in his death. The doctor’s certificate would subsequently
read ‘death from alcoholic poison.’ ” Other observers in Osage
County noted that suspicious deaths were routinely, and falsely,
attributed to “consumption,” “wasting illness,” or “causes
unknown.” Scholars and investigators who have since looked into
the murders believe that the Osage death toll was in the scores, if
not the hundreds. To get a better sense of the decimation,
McAuliffe looked at the Authentic Osage Indian Roll Book, which
cites the deaths of many of the original allotted members of the
tribe. He writes, “Over the sixteen-year period from 1907 to 1923,
605 Osages died, averaging about 38 per year, an annual death rate
of about 19 per 1,000. The national death rate now is about 8.5 per
1,000; in the 1920s, when counting methods were not so precise
and the statistics were segregated into white and black racial
categories, it averaged almost 12 per 1,000 for whites. By all rights,
their higher standard of living should have brought the Osages a
lower death rate than America’s whites. Yet Osages were dying at
more than one-and-a-half times the national rate—and those
numbers do not include Osages born after 1907 and not listed on
the roll.”
Louis F. Burns, the eminent historian of the Osage, observed, “I
don’t know of a single Osage family which didn’t lose at least one
family member because of the head rights.” And at least one
bureau agent who had left the case prior to White’s arrival had
realized that there was a culture of killing. According to a