Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

The subtitle is The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. This is a meticulously researched account of an appalling widespread conspiracy against the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. At the beginning of the 20th century, when oil was being discovered on Indian Reservations, everyone was clamoring to take land away from native Americans and trying to take advantage of them to the advantage of whites. The undercurrent of this is not the main story being told, but it resonates in the present where this is not ancient history. The Osage had a leg up on other American Indian nations because they purchased their land rather than being granted it, and therefore they owned it outright, and were at the time the richest Americans--which put them in danger. The story centers on an Osage family that died, in ones and twos, of causes ranging from the odd and ambiguous to the obviously violent. First, Minnie Smith, 27 years old, died in 1918 of what doctors termed a “peculiar wasting illness”; then, in 1921, her sister Anna Brown was shot, her body left in a ravine. Their mother, Lizzie Kyle, died weeks later, also felled by an unidentified wasting illness. By this point, her family suspected she’d been poisoned. A bomb killed a third sister, Rita Smith, along with her husband, Bill, in 1923. The last living sister, Mollie Burkhart, made it to 1925 before she sent secret word to a priest that her life was in peril. The story is a bit long winded, but does demonstrate the lack of a coordinated law enforcement agency in the United States at the time, and the development of one in response to this abysmal segment of American history.