The Osage Murders

Another chapter in my recent book Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/3OWWt4l concerns the Osage murders, made infamous by the book Killers of the Flower Moon and the 2023 movie of the same name. 

On May 27, 1921, the body of Anna Brown was found beside a road between Fairfax and Grayhorse in Osage County, Oklahoma. Brown had been shot through the head. Initial reports mentioned that, as a member of the Osage tribe, she was receiving about $1,000 per month in “oil royalties;” but the only theory of the crime local authorities could offer was that she had been the victim of highway robbery.

As it turned out, Anna Brown was not the victim of highway robbery but of one of the most diabolical get-rich schemes in American history. Because of a series of land deals made with the federal government going back to the late 1800s, the Osage held the rights to one of the largest deposits of oil in the United States. To divide up the profits from the commonly owned mineral rights, a system was adopted by which each Osage member would receive an equal share of the revenue. This came to be called a headright. Private companies could lease the land and then pay a percentage of their profits into a trust fund managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA would then distribute payments to the holders of the headrights.

During the Oklahoma oil boom of the early 1900s, the Osage people became some of the wealthiest in the world, as members of the tribe, like Anna Brown, received payments that today would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

The sudden wealth of the Osage people drew lots of swindlers looking to cheat tribal members out of their money; so, the U. S Government established a system that was supposedly designed to help the Osage protect their wealth. White guardians were assigned to manage the money of any members of the tribe who were judged incompetent. In practice, the guardianship program was a racist system under which simply being Native American was sufficient reason to be deemed “incompetent."

The guardians often paid themselves from money they were supposed to be safeguarding for the Osage, but this was not the worst of the abuses. The law allowed that headrights could not be sold but they could be inherited. This provision spawned the "Reign of Terror" during which many white people married into the Osage tribe and then killed or hired someone else to kill their spouses and/or their spouse’s relatives in order to gain their headrights.

Anna Brown was not the first victim of the scheme, but most of the murders occurred in the early 1920s, and her case was the first to receive much publicity. In total, at least 24 members of the Osage tribe were killed or died under mysterious circumstances during the "Reign of Terror," and some estimates place the number much higher. Most of the murders occurred in the Fairfax-Grayhorse area, and many of the victims were members of the same family, relatives of Anna.

Several people were arrested for questioning or as suspects in Anna's death, including Ernest Burkhart, who was married to Anna’s sister Mollie, but the coroner ultimately ruled that Anna had been killed by parties unknown. 

During the two years following Anna's death, her mother died under suspicious circumstances, her ex-husband was found dead with a gunshot to the back of the head, and a second sister (Rita) and her husband were killed when their house exploded.

The coincidence of so many members of the Osage tribe, especially members of the same family, dying so close together in time and place was too obvious to ignore, and the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) finally initiated an investigation. The investigative team kept encountering the names of William K. Hale and Ernest Burkhart, the same Ernest Burkhart who was married to Anna's sister Mollie and who had been arrested for questioning in Anna's death. Hale, a wealthy, prominent citizen, was Burkhart's uncle, and he was eventually identified as the mastermind behind the murders of Anna and her family. The scheme was for Burkhart to inherit all the family's wealth and then turn a large portion of it over to his uncle. 

Hale and Burkhart were arrested for conspiring to kill the family members of Burkhart's wife, Mollie. Mollie herself was found to be dying of gradual poisoning, but the scheme was uncovered in time to save her life. Hale and Burkhart were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, but both were paroled after twenty years or so. 

My recent book contains a considerably more detailed account of the Osage murders than I've given here, or if you really want to delve into the subject, here's a link to Killers of the Flower Moon https://amzn.to/3DeN1qJ.

Goingsnake Gunfight

Like the Boudinot and Ridge murders I wrote about last week, the Goingsnake gunfight that left eleven people dead near Christie, Oklahoma, in April of 1872, is something I've previously written about on this blog. However, since one of the chapters in my new book, Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/4fbdFhZ, is devoted to the gunfight, I'm going to summarize the event again. 

Exactly what happened is a matter of dispute to this day, because the two sides involved in the gunfight, Cherokee tribal members and the US Marshals Service, told markedly different stories. What we know for sure is that Ezekial "Zeke" Proctor, a member of the Cherokee tribe, was scheduled for trial in the Goingsnake District of the Cherokee Nation on April 15 on a charge of having killed Polly Beck two months earlier.

Polly, who was married to a white man named Kesterson, was also a member of the Cherokee tribe, but a combination of family and tribal resentments had cast her and Proctor on opposite sides. Polly's family had sided with the Treaty Party (see last week's post) over thirty years earlier when the tribal members were removed from their homelands in the Southeast to present-day Oklahoma, whereas Proctor's family had sided with the Anti-Treaty Party. Also, Kesterson had previously been married to Proctor's sister, and Proctor reportedly blamed him for the breakup of the marriage.  

Most important, perhaps, was a jurisdictional dispute between Proctor and his allies on one side and Polly's family and friends on the other. After Proctor killed Polly and wounded Kesterson, Kesterson had journeyed to Fort Smith to enlist U.S. authorities in the matter, while Proctor and his allies felt strongly that the matter should be left to Cherokee tribal authority. The US Marshals Service now claimed jurisdiction in the assault on Kesterson, but the Cherokee Nation considered Kesterson an adopted citizen and resented any interference in the matter by the US government.

On the day of Proctor's trial for the murder of Polly Beck, a party of deputy marshals, along with some of Polly's kinsmen, showed up with the avowed intention of arresting Proctor on the assault charge, should he be acquitted on the murder charge. As I say, exactly what happened next is a matter of dispute, but a gunfight broke out almost immediately, and when the shooting ceased, nine men lay dead, two mortally wounded, and several others suffering wounds of varying severity. Most of the fatalities (seven or eight) were deputy marshals. 

Even what to call this incident has been a matter of disagreement over the years. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, reports from the deputy marshals called it a massacre, and the white press adopted that terminology. So, for many years, the incident was known in popular culture as the Goingsnake Massacre. More recently, the term Goingsnake Tragedy has been suggested as a more objective term. 

Check out my new book for a much more detailed account of the Goingsnake Tragedy. https://amzn.to/4fbdFhZ

The Murder of Elias Boudinot and the Ridges

I've previously written on this blog about the feud that developed in the early 1800s between the Treaty Party and the Anti-Treaty Party factions of the Cherokee Nation over the tribe's removal from its ancestral homelands in the southeast United States to what is now Oklahoma. One of the chapters in my book Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/3Urovbn (scheduled for release on Monday) touches on the same subject. Specifically, the book chapter deals with the murders of Treaty Party leaders Elias Boudinot, Major Ridge, and his son John Ridge by members of the Anti-Treaty Party.

The murders, which took place in June of 1839, occurred in present-day Oklahoma, but they grew out of a feud that dated back several years to a time prior to removal of the Cherokees from the Southeast. When the federal government began pressing the Cherokees in the early 1800s to sign treaties ceding their lands in Georgia and other southeastern states in exchange for land west of the Mississippi, Boudinot and the Ridges were among the leaders who aligned with the Treaty Party, which favored removal. The Treaty Party was mainly composed of mixed-race Cherokees, who had intermarried with whites and largely adopted American and European culture. The much larger Anti-Treaty Party, led by tribal chief John Ross, was composed mainly of purebred Cherokees, who eschewed the ways of the white man and wanted to preserve tribal culture.

Even Boudinot and the Ridges had initially opposed removal. In fact, Major Ridge was among the tribal leaders who had adopted a resolution in 1829 calling for any member of the tribe who signed further treaties ceding Cherokee lands to be subject to the death penalty. However, he and other mixed-race members of the tribe had gradually come to see removal as the only practical step. 

Because they cooperated with the federal government, members of the Treaty Party received support and transportation when they removed to Oklahoma in 1837. The Anti-Treaty Party, on the other hand, had to be rounded up and removed forcibly in the fall of 1838, an infamous trek that came to be known as the "Trail of Tears." The ordeal the purebred Cherokees underwent during the trip further embittered them against Treaty Party members.

After the Anti-Treaty Party arrived in their new land, they, the Treaty Party, and the Old Settlers (i.e. Cherokees who had come west years earlier), met to try to reach a consensus government, but the meeting ended in impasse, as the Treaty Party insisted on retaining the government they had already established in the new land. 

After the meeting, held on June 21, 1839, broke up, some members of the Anti-Treaty Party met secretly and invoked the old "blood" law that Major Ridge himself had once espoused, calling for the deaths of Ridge, his son, and Elias Boudinot. A few of those present were appointed as executioners by drawing lots. 

The killings were carried out the next day. John Ridge was killed at his home on Honey Creek in the northeast part of Indian Territory near present-day Southwest City, Missouri. His father, who had left for Arkansas earlier on the 22nd, was overtaken along the road and killed near the state line. Meanwhile, a different party of executioners killed Elias Boudinot on the same day near his home at Park Hill, a Cherokee settlement in the Tahlequah area.

In the aftermath of the slaughter, John Ross was accused of authorizing it, but the best evidence seems to suggest that the killings were carried out in secret without the tribal chief’s knowledge. Stand Watie, who was Boudinot’s brother, and other Treaty Party members swore revenge, and federal troops were summoned from Fort Gibson to help keep the peace for a brief time. 

A tentative truce was fashioned, but the resentments left over from the feud between the Treaty Party and the Anti-Treaty Party continued for many years. During the Civil War, for instance, most former Treaty Party members sided with the Confederacy, while most Anti-Treaty Party members joined the Union forces, and both sides used the cover of war to discharge old grudges. Confederate general Stand Watie or troops under his command, for instance, are reported to have burned the John Ross home during the war.

The sketch above is a very condensed version of the events chronicled in my new book.