Key insights from
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
What you'll learn
Across the plains of Osage, Oklahoma, small flowers begin to bloom in April. By May, however, larger plants spring up, overshadow, and choke out the smaller flowers that had blossomed first. The Osage Indians refer to May as the season of “the flower-killing moon.” This natural cycle is a fitting metaphor for the systematic murder of Osage Indians at the hands of greedy settlers wanting claim to Osage lands.
Key insights
- • What you'll learn
- 1 After a century of relocations, the Osage people settled and became exclusively entitled to oil-rich land.
- 2 One Osage Indian’s family members were killed off one by one till she was the remaining survivor.
- 3 Influential townspeople who tried to assist the Osage murder investigations were brutally murdered themselves.
- 4 The FBI was simply the “Bureau of Investigation” until 1935—and it was started without congressional approval.
- 5 There were close friends and family members complicit in the murders of numerous Osage Indians.
- 6 Even with sufficient evidence, the murder trials were grueling and fraught with corruption.
- 7 There were hundreds of Osage murders, many of which were never brought to trial.
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