Blood and Oil: The Osage Reign of Terror, 1921-1931

Every Osage citizen on the tribal roll held a share of whatever lay beneath the reservation, and that share could not be sold. It could only be inherited. The Osage had insisted on it when their land was divided into allotments: the surface could be parceled out, but the rock under their hills in the Arkansas River country, dismissed by federal surveyors as broken ground unfit for farming, would stay the property of the nation. Then drillers struck the Burbank field in 1920, and the royalty shares called headrights made the Osage, per capita, among the wealthiest people in the world.

Money that could only pass by inheritance drew guardians, lawyers and husbands, and in 1921 the deaths began. Anna Brown was found shot in a ravine. Her mother, Lizzie Q, died that July. Henry Roan was found shot in his car. In Fairfax a bomb tore apart the house where Anna's sister Rita lived with her husband Bill Smith, killing both of them and the young woman who worked for them. The book follows the killings through the guardianship courts, the federal investigation and the trials at Guthrie and Pawhuska. The verdicts put men in prison. The guardianship system that had made murder profitable outlived them, and the closing chapters trace its long shadow and the Osage Nation that survived it.