The Takeaway
Slaughter of Osage Natives Reveals Complicated Web of Conspiracy
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It's a history of Oklahoma that is little known: A story of an oil boom and great wealth, of Native Americans, and tremendous tragedy.
Five years ago when writer David Grann visited the Osage Nation Museum, he noticed part of a panoramic photo was missing. The museum director told him the "devil" had been standing there before taking him to see the missing image. It was the picture of a man who turned out to be one of the masterminds behind the mass murder of the oil-rich Osage in the 1920's.
David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of "The Lost City of Z" and "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes." He spent half a decade researching and writing about how the oil wealthy Osage could not overcome the inhumanity and injustice that faced Native Americans at the time, and how their systematic killings would become one of the FBI's first homicide investigations.
His newest book, "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI," draws on new evidence behind the conspiracy that still haunts the Osage to this day. Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear Grann discuss this case, and his new work.
