In the 1920s, the Osage Indians living on a reservation in Oklahoma were among the wealthiest Americans. On their land, or rather under it, huge deposits of oil were discovered. In 1923 alone, in today’s terms, they earned more than 400 million dollars. At that time, they were the richest people per capita not only in the United States, but probably in the world, with a tribe of just 2 000 souls. “The ‘Red Millionaires’, as one local newspaper called them, were no ordinary Native Americans. Many of them lived in luxurious palaces, dressed in the latest fashions and sent their children to the best schools. Petrodollars have completely changed the fabric of a small and close-knit community.
Soon after the discovery of black gold, the reserve was plagued by murders, disappearances and suspicious deaths. When local law enforcement failed to unravel the mysterious crimes, the Indians turned to Washington for help. Agents from the newly created bureau that would become known a few years later as the FBI visited Oklahoma. The agents were trying to find out what was behind the unexplained deaths. Why was no one brought to justice? Who was behind the murders anyway? Unpleasant details began to emerge. There was a dark side to the discovery of oil …
From prairie to reserve
The ancestors of the “Red Millionaires” were once the masters of a vast territory stretching from present-day Missouri and Kansas to the Rocky Mountains in the west. In the 17th century, those lands were first visited by white French fur traders, and from then on, slowly but steadily, the Native Americans began to lose their customs, their freedom and, ultimately, their land. Coexistence and trade with the French even benefited them at first, when they first started to ride horses and get their hands on guns. These two European acquisitions further cemented their reputation as bold warriors and made them one of the most important tribes in those regions.
The beginning of their demise could be dated back to 1803, when the USA bought the territory west of the Mississippi River from France. From then on, English-speaking settlers began to rapidly displace the Indians living there, and it was not long before they were all driven from their homes. The fertile land attracted people from all over the country who, even with guns in their hands, sought a place in the sun at the expense of the natives. Many of them became victims of massacres and forced relocations. The pressure of the uncompromising newcomers was too great and the prairies soon had a new master – the young and expansionist United States of America.
The Osage Indians also left the places that had been their homeland for centuries. For little money, they were forced to sell more than 200,000 square kilometres of land to the state – about ten times the size of Slovenia. If we had not signed the treaty, we would have been declared enemies of the state,” explained the tribal chief at the time.
They then used the money from the sale to buy a small, uninhabited piece of land in southern Kansas, where they planned to start a new life. The state assured them that no one would harass them anymore, but it turned out that the promise had been made with a fig in its pocket. Once again, white settlers began to grab more and more land with impunity, and the story repeated itself – the Indians were pushed out again.
It was all part of a national plan to drive the indigenous peoples out of fertile areas and replace them with whites.
The Osage Indians are once again forced to sell their land and faced with the decision of where to move to so that they can finally live in peace. They chose northern Oklahoma, where the soil was rocky, dry and unsuitable for farming, and thus unattractive to white settlers. So in 1870 they bought from the state an inhospitable and forgotten piece of land that became their new home. The Osage Indians, like many other indigenous peoples, traded the vast prairies for tight reserves, losing almost everything – culture, freedom and homeland – within a few generations.
Indian privatisation
At the turn of the 20th century, the state did everything in its power to turn Native Americans into obedient and God-fearing Americans. The first schools and churches appeared on the reservation to provide for the spiritual and cultural transformation of the Indians. The younger generations were already speaking English and attending Sunday mass, while the older generations were still trying to preserve their ancestral traditions.
Due to the barren land, white settlers were relatively scarce and the Osage Indians finally found their peace. In the early years of the 20th century, under pressure from the state, they took another step forward on their road to civilisation. At that time, the land on which the natives lived was usually owned communally, by the tribe, which did not suit the state, which was based on private property. So Washington decided that all Indian reservations should be divided into smaller parts. Each newly created parcel of land was given an owner who could dispose of it as he wished.
In 1906, the Osage Indians also entered the world of private property and capitalism. At that time, each member of the tribe became the proud owner of 2.5 square kilometres of rocky and barren land. In negotiations with the State, the then Chief managed to add a seemingly insignificant clause to the land distribution treaty, stipulating that “oil, gas, coal and other minerals belong exclusively to the Osage Indians”. Although oil had been discovered in the USA 50 years before, no one knew at the time that there was a fortune hidden beneath the Oklahoma reservation. Certainly Washington did not know, otherwise they would probably not have been so generous.
Big Heart, the name of the chieftain, was apparently shrewd and far-sighted enough to include an obscure clause in the treaty that made his tribe rich a few years later. According to the treaty, everything that was hidden under the reservation land was the property of the Indians. Anyone who wanted to extract oil or mine coal on their land would have to pay compensation to the Indians. Each member of the tribe also owned a share of any minerals that may have been hidden underground. Unlike a parcel of land, a share of underground minerals could not be sold or leased, but was a heritable right.
Chief Big Heart was a wise man, and even if the whites had bought up the whole reserve, the tribe would still have owned all that lay beneath the inhospitable soil of their new homeland. Although he went hunting for eternity before the black gold was discovered on the reservation, he made his mark on the history of the Osage tribe.
Second-class millionaires in the Wild West
Oil first began gushing from Oklahoma soil around the time World War I ended on the other side of the Atlantic. News of the underground riches attracted many oil-seekers and adventurers of all kinds to the secluded reserve. Pawhuska, the largest settlement in the reserve, boomed within a few years. Hotels, restaurants and houses have sprung up where tents once stood. White settlers, who had succumbed to the oil rush, were now welcome guests, as they had to pay compensation to the Indians for each well they drilled. And with every day that passed, more and more of them were drilled, and many became rich overnight. The Indians too – suddenly and unexpectedly.
Until a few years ago, they lived in abject poverty, but with the influx of petrodollars, life in the reserve has turned upside down. Most of the Indians moved out of their tents and into real houses with windows and doors. Some even travelled to Europe for holidays and enrolled their children at Harvard. On the streets of Pawhuska, one could meet ladies wearing French blouses and English hats. The local newspapers were full of stories about “red millionaires” who had their own chauffeurs, servants and cooks. What was perhaps particularly interesting was the fact that these jobs were also done by white people.
The notion that somewhere in Oklahoma there were obscenely rich Indians being served dinner and driven around on errands by white people was both fascinating and outrageous to the American public. In reality, the Osage Indians lived no differently from the rich in New York or Chicago.
Unlike the usual American millionaires, the Osage Indians were, to put it mildly, subject to a different set of rules. News of the Indian oil boom soon reached the ears of politicians in Washington, and in 1921 Congress passed a law stipulating that every full-blooded Indian should be assigned a trustee to ensure that his money was spent wisely. The congressmen justified their decision on the grounds that Indians were incapable of disposing of their own property. The trustees were usually prominent citizens, such as businessmen, doctors or lawyers.
The law created a layer of middlemen who, for the most part, profited with impunity at the expense of the Indians. In Pawhuska alone, which had a population of about 8000, there were more than 80 lawyers. To give you a better idea, there were just as many in Washington. If a native wanted to buy a car or just toothpaste, he had to get permission from his white guardian. Such permission was not always free. The Osage Indians were just second-class millionaires.
In the 1920s, Oklahoma still resembled the Wild West, teeming with bandits, liquor dealers and criminals on the run from justice. Gangs of cattle rustlers roamed the surrounding hills. In 1923, for example, the last recorded train robbery in those parts took place. Oil attracted newcomers from all over the USA and soon they became the majority on the reservation.
The discovery of black gold did not only bring money. Soon after the Indians moved out of their tents and into their stone and luxury houses, unexplained deaths began to occur on the reserve. In the 1920s, the Osage Indians may have been the richest community in the USA, but they also had the highest mortality rate.
One of those who saw the dark side of the oil boom first-hand was Mollie Burkhart. She was born at a time when no one knew that one of the country’s largest oil deposits lay beneath the dusty ground. As a child, she ran barefoot between tents with her sisters Anna, Minnie and Rita, listening to stories of the glorious history of their ancestors told by the elders. By her teenage years, she was fluent in English and attending mass regularly, but always dressed in traditional costume.
She was in her thirties when oil was discovered in the reserve and, like many newly rich people, she moved into a big house and got a maid. She hired as a chauffeur the young and white-white Ernest, who later became her husband. Mollie was a member of the Aboriginal generation, combining the old world and the new, torn between two civilisations. Ernest was a loving man who learned the language and was warmly welcomed into the Indian community.
A close-knit community
Thanks to petrodollars, Mollie and Ernest lived in luxury and with complete freedom. They threw parties, dined in restaurants and went to the theatre. With the influx of money, life in the once secluded Pawhuska even became pleasant and fun.
The oil bubble in which Mollie lived dissolved in the spring of 1921 when her younger sister Anna suddenly disappeared. Everyone in the family knew that Anna was suffering from a disease that had been rampant on reservations across the country for years – alcoholism. So their first thought was that she must be drinking in secret in the woods again, because at that time the country was under Prohibition. But when Anne was nowhere to be seen for three days, they thought the worst. Her body was found in a roadside ditch not far from Pawhuska. She died of a gunshot wound to the head, but since no trace of her was found at the crime scene, her death was ruled an accident caused by alcohol poisoning.
Mollie was shocked and horrified. In the backwoods and wilds of Oklahoma, law enforcement officers did not look like policemen. Harve Freas, the local sheriff in charge of the investigation, was known as “the fear and trembling of criminals” and had no choice in the matter when it came to bringing a chicken thief to his senses. He was a little worse when it came to more complicated cases, and Anna’s death was certainly suspicious and complicated. So Mollie enlisted the help of the man who had the most authority on the reservation, and whose acquaintance was said to stretch all the way to the offices of politicians in Oklahoma City, the nation’s capital.
William Hale, also known as the King of the Osage Hills, was one of the richest men around, and everyone knew that his word or his money opened all the doors. He came to the reservation from Texas before the oil boom, virtually without breaking a sweat, and through hard work he soon became one of the biggest cattle ranchers in the area and the richest white man among the “red millionaires”. He was respected by the indigenous people because, in the days before oil, he used his own money to help build schools and hospitals on the reserve.
When he learned of the tragic event, he immediately responded and offered his help, as he also had a personal connection to the Burkhart family. Ernest, Mollie’s husband, was his nephew, as was Bryan, Anna’s ex-fiancé. In a close-knit community, everyone knew and cared for each other. Hale wanted to get to the bottom of the case and hired a whole squad of private detectives to investigate the suspicious circumstances of Anna’s death.
Invisible dark forces
While Anna was still lying in the morgue, hunters came across a new body in the woods. It was Charles Whitehorn, an Aboriginal man who had been missing for more than a week. He died the same death as Anna. The murder of two young and wealthy Indians was a clear sign to the community that dark forces were at work. Not even two months had passed when Mollie’s mother Lizzie, the head of the family, died in her bed at home. Doctors could not establish the cause of death and attributed it to the shock of Anna’s murder.
Mollie then thought of her other sister, Minnie, who also died two years ago after a short and mysterious illness. Even then, the doctors did not know what was fatal for a young girl who had been in good health all her life. Mollie was convinced that the deaths were not the result of a tragic accident or a mysterious illness. Someone was looking after her family’s life.
Her only surviving blood relative was her sister Rita. Both were angry and scared to death. Angry at the incompetent sheriff and scared because they suspected that they themselves would soon fall victim to the dark forces. They said goodbye to their mother by putting enough food in her grave to last three days – the length of the journey to the eternal hunting grounds.
It was not only Mollie’s family that was affected by the mysterious deaths; in the following months, other people began to lose relatives. They were all Indians. Some, like Lizzie, fell ill overnight and died in their beds at home, others ended up with a bullet in their heads. The sheriff was not up to the job, and the investigation by the private detectives hired by William Hale was also fruitless – no new leads, no serious suspects. The Reserve was in the grip of fear.
Cracks began to appear in the close-knit community. People who had grown up together suddenly became suspicious of each other. Children were no longer allowed to play in the street and all doors were locked at night. Light bulbs were hung outside every house and kept on all night – this was the Indians’ way of trying to protect themselves from the invisible dark forces that haunted the reserve.
White people who were trying to help the Indians were also dying. One of them was Barney McBride, an oil rich man who was married to a Native American woman and was highly respected by the locals. At their request, he went to Washington, where he had many acquaintances in high circles. But perhaps in the capital they will have more sympathy for the atrocities taking place on the reservation. His naked and mutilated body was found a few days later near Washington. The police there said he had a fractured skull and twenty stab wounds. His death was a warning that the tentacles of killers can reach anyone.
Suspicious deaths did not bother the oil prospectors. Auctions were held in the reserve, with newcomers bidding for the best black gold deposits. The flow of money did not dry up, but the natives were not happy. At night, light bulbs were still burning outside the houses. All conversations revolved around death and people still lived in fear. Mollie’s sister Rita also feared for her life and moved from the outskirts of the reserve to the centre of Pawhuska, closer to her sister. But the move didn’t help her – in the spring of 1923, she too was murdered.
This time, the killers were particularly brazen. They planted 20 litres of nitroglycerin under her house. The explosion could be heard all over the reserve. Shocked neighbours ran out into the street in their night gowns and stared at the rubble billowing black smoke. The scene was reminiscent of a war zone. Her husband and their white maid were also killed in the explosion. Mollie was left alone with Ernest. The outrageous and horrific crime reverberated in Oklahoma for a long time.
Undercover cowboys
By then, the Indians were already convinced that the Sheriff and his deputies had no real intention of solving the crimes. They did not care about the fate of the Native Americans. What is more, they believed that the local authorities were linked to the killers, whoever they were. So they called a tribal council, decided that help should be sought elsewhere, and they turned to the federal government.
BI, the Bureau of Investigation, a body under the Ministry of Justice, responded to their request. Ten years later, they added the letter “F” and the famous FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was born. In 1923, however, it was still a small and relatively insignificant department fighting for its place under the Washington political sun. Its head was the young and ambitious Edgar Hoover, then still anonymous, who would later become one of the most influential men in the country.
Hoover believed that a successful investigation in Oklahoma could bring media exposure to the office and, as a result, restore its reputation, which had been tarnished by some previous scandals. He accepted the Indians’ request and assured them that the murderers would be brought to justice. For his services, he gave them a bill which, in today’s equivalent, would amount to approximately USD 300 000 – the price of the State carrying out its function and enforcing its own laws. The second-class citizens accepted the offer, because it was their last hope. Hoover entrusted the task to Tom White, a former Texas Ranger.
Back then, there were no impeccably dressed men in black with the unmistakable tie that is now the symbol of the FBI. Most of the agents then were former rangers, bounty hunters or retired sheriffs – nicknamed “cowboys” for their rough manners.
Tom White, with his cowboy hat and high boots, was more like a western character than a federal agent, but he had all the qualities a good lawman should have – he was principled, professional and above all honest. Compared to his colleagues, he was of a much more subdued variety. He never drank too much and did not like to resort to violence. Tom White was an American hero of a special kind.
Too much work for one man, he assembled a team of vetted agents to gather information under various guises in the reserve, one of them posing as a cattle farmer, whose job was to befriend the most powerful man in the reserve, William Hale. Another agent played the role of an insurance agent in Pawhuska, trying to get as much information as possible. White’s ace up his sleeve was John Wren, the only Indian in the service of the Bureau of Investigation. He posed as a shaman searching for lost relatives on the reservation. A team of undercover cowboys dug in.
Investigation
It took Tom White several weeks to wade through police reports and expert opinions of all varieties. He soon realised that the local authorities had, to put it mildly, done a poor job. The reports were often flawed and carelessly written. Much evidence had simply disappeared. For example, medical reports showed that Anna had a gunshot wound to the head, although there was no sign of a bullet. There were so many similar holes in the investigation that White was convinced something stank.
When he arrived in Pawhuska, he was greeted by more than 20 unsolved murders. In reality, the figure was much higher, as deaths by poisoning were often treated as the result of disease, and no missing persons were recorded by the local authorities. The scale of the crimes was particularly shocking when one considers that there were barely two thousand indigenous people living on the reserve.
White had no evidence that all the murders were linked, but two things were clear – all the victims were wealthy Aboriginal people and three of the victims, Anna, Rita and Lizzie, were related. This made it all the more strange that no one had questioned Mollie. White learned that she had not left the house for a long time and that she was suffering from diabetes. Had she been poisoned too? The cowboy was in a hurry.
Investigator White concluded that the murders could not have been the work of one man. It was a well-coordinated action that required several people to work together. Although the investigation did not produce enough evidence to bring charges, the local authorities put forward a number of theories to White that incriminated many people on the reserve.
In fact, there were too many theories, all based solely on rumours.White was convinced that someone was spreading false rumours in order to cover his tracks. As he went round in circles without solid evidence, he remembered the simple and ingenious principle that Sherlock Holmes adhered to – When you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however improbable, is the truth.
He re-read the statements of everyone involved and tried to separate fact from fiction. He focused first on Anna’s murder and re-interviewed all the witnesses. The network of undercover agents was also working at full speed and soon details came to light that gave the investigation new impetus.
The sausage unravels
One witness told White that on the evening of Anna’s disappearance, she saw two men forcibly push her into a car. One of them was Bryan Burkhart, Anna’s ex-fiancé and grandson of the King of the Osage Hills, William Hale. This statement was not in any of the sheriff’s reports, and White knew immediately that he had stumbled upon an important piece of the puzzle. Bryan claimed to have been in Texas that fateful evening. The web of lies and deceit began to unravel.
The next person to help White with his confession was one of the private detectives hired by William Hale. Although he initially demanded payment in exchange for information about the murders, his negotiating position was rather poor. The robbery had landed him in prison. Eventually, White promised to reduce his sentence and this was enough to loosen the robbery detective’s tongue.
He admitted that Hale had not hired him to solve Anna’s murder, on the contrary – he had come to the reserve to cover the tracks of the real killers. The detective therefore falsified evidence and intimidated witnesses. All this was allegedly ordered by William Hale. The startling revelation could mean one of two things: one of the most respected men in the community was either protecting his nephew Bryan, or he was involved in a murder himself. Finally, the detective revealed another chilling detail – during all his meetings with Hale, Ernest, Mollie’s husband, was always present, alongside Bryan.
From then on, Tom White no longer wandered in the dark. The mysterious killers finally got a face, and it wasn’t long before new evidence finally unmasked the King of the Osage Hills. Henry Roan, one of the Aborigines found in the woods with a bullet in his head, had signed a life insurance policy worth tens of thousands of dollars shortly before his death. The contract named William Hale as the beneficiary.
A bitter realisation
The picture of what happened in the reserve that the investigation revealed was horrifying. Behind the murders was a philanthropist who built hospitals and schools. A white man who had been taken in by the Indians. William Hale was proof that the darkest forces are hidden in man.
To get his hands on the oil millions, he persuaded his gullible nephew Ernest to marry Mollie. He hatched a simple and dastardly plan. First he murdered Minnie, then Anna, Rita and finally the head of the family, Lizzie. He did not choose his means – Minnie and Lizzie were poisoned, Anna was shot in cold blood and Rita died in an explosion. In this way, Mollie inherited all their rights to the cash compensation that the Aborigines received in exchange for the licence to extract oil. She then became probably the richest Indian woman in the USA. The final step in Hale’s diabolical plan involved Mollie’s death, so that her only surviving relative, Ernest, would inherit the rights to the compensation.
It is to the credit of a loving husband that the perpetrators were finally brought to justice. Under the weight of the evidence that Tom White had waved under his nose at the hearing, Ernest broke down and confessed. He admitted that he had participated in the murder of his sisters-in-law and that he had tried to poison his wife. He also admitted that the murders had been orchestrated by his uncle, who had provided all the necessary weapons, explosives and poison.
Ernest, his conscience suddenly awakened, pleaded in court for forgiveness. Mollie, watching her husband weeping in the courtroom, could not believe that she had shared a bed for so many years with a man she did not know. The truth was too painful to face.
Thanks to Ernesto’s confession, Bryan and Hale soon found themselves in front of a judge. The trial was initially suspended because it turned out that several jurors had been bribed, and the defendants walked free. In Oklahoma, it was difficult to find 12 white men to convict another white man of murdering an Indian.
Many were silent when they should have spoken up. This is especially true of the local representatives of the law who allowed the crimes to happen in the first place. The natives threatened to take justice into their own hands, and Tom White suddenly found himself in the absurd position of having to protect from the fury of the natives the man he himself had brought to justice. For Tom White, the law was not just a letter on a piece of paper.
Epilog
The trial only ended when the prosecution offered Bryan immunity in exchange for testifying against his uncle. After several agonising months, Ernest Burkhart and William Hale were sentenced to life imprisonment. Tom White did his job and returned to Washington. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Bureau of Investigation, was beaming with joy – the successful solving of the case had brought the Bureau the much-needed publicity. Within a few years, it had grown into the most successful and largest crime-fighting bureau in the country – the FBI.
After the murderers were convicted and the cowboys left, peace returned to Oklahoma for a while. The light bulbs in front of the houses went out and children were running around the streets of Pawhuska again. But the peace that reigned in the secluded reservation was deceptive. In reality, nothing had changed. The flow of petrodollars did not dry up and soon the Indians began to die again. Only this time, there were no federal agents to unmask the killers.
William Hale and Ernest Burkhart may have been in prison, but human greed and hypocrisy cannot be put behind bars. Incidentally, both were released after twenty years. The first was released on good behaviour, and the second was even pardoned by the Governor of Oklahoma.
No one knows exactly how many Indians died in those years. Agents have officially solved only three murders, and some researchers have counted hundreds more unexplained deaths. The vast majority have never been explained and the criminals have rarely been convicted. White men who poisoned their Indian wives still lived on the reservation.
The murders continued until 1925, when Congress amended the law on the right to a cash allowance for oil extraction. The right remained hereditary, but could no longer be inherited by whites. This legal safeguard saved many lives and, who knew, may even have prevented the extinction of the Osage Indians.
“In time, the oil will run out and then there will be no more big cars and expensive clothes in the reserve. Only then will my people be happy,” one Indian elder once said. He was right. The Osage still receive cash compensation for oil exploration, but the sums are incomparably lower than in the past. The red millionaires are long gone, and probably for the better. The reserve is still inhabited by whites, some of them descendants of criminals, but the community is still close-knit and cohesive. The Osage Indians have never been as numerous as they are today. They have finally found their peace.
