“Killers of the Flower Moon”: Murdering the Osage for ill-gotten gains

[TomSea]

“Killers of the Flower Moon”: Murdering the Osage for ill-gotten gains
By Monte Whaley | mwhaley@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
July 13, 2017 at 9:11 pm

America’s history of mistreatment of Native American tribes is a mosaic of neglect, mass starvation and disease. And don’t forget occasional full-on, large-scale killing.

That includes the 1864 Sand Creek massacre in Colorado, when the U.S. Cavalry attacked a village of mostly Cheyenne and Arapaho, killing as many as 163 mostly women and children.

But nothing quite matches what happened to the Osage in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Slowly but surely, certain members of the Osage tribe were killed. Not out of overt racism, but of simple greed over the vast oil rights that the Osage held.

Officially, the toll of the dead Osage reaches at least 20. But journalist David Grann suspects that hundreds of the Osage may have been killed because of their ties to oil. Those deaths still haunt the tribe to this day.

Grann expertly tells the tale in “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.” It’s a stunning story in many ways.

Continued: http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/13/killers-of-the-flower-moon-the-osage-murders-and-the-birth-of-the-fbi-book-review/