Killers of the Flower Moon: The true story behind the Scorsese film
As soon as he saw the huge photo, taken in 1924, stretching across a wall at the Osage Nation Museum in the town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, writer David Grann was struck by its sense of mystery. Why were dozens of the tribe members standing so solemnly alongside a group of stoney-faced white men? Why was a section of the photo on one side missing?
Grann, a feature writer with the New Yorker magazine who has also written some notable non-fiction books, had travelled to Pawhuska, seat of the Osage Nation tribal government, in 2012, after hearing a rumour about a wave of murders in the area during the 1920s.
The story he’d heard was that dozens of wealthy Osage people had been killed for their money, which flowed from the deep oil wells across their reservation land in Oklahoma.
During the 1920s, the Osage had become the richest people per capita in the world, spending their cash on fleets of fancy cars. But their wealth made them targets.
“I had never heard about that story before,” says Grann, on the phone from New York. “I couldn’t find much information about it, so I decided to make a trip to Oklahoma.
“At the time, I wasn’t planning on writing an article or a book. I went to the museum in Pawhuska and there was this quite extraordinary panoramic photograph with members of the Osage Nation standing alongside white settlers.
“I noticed a portion on the left was missing and I was meeting the museum director, Kathryn Red Corn, who has since become a good friend. I asked her why that part was missing. She said, ‘It contains this figure who is so frightening, they decided to remove it.’ She pointed to the missing panel and said, ‘The devil was standing right there.’ It took my breath away.
“She went down into the basement and pulled up an image of the missing panel and showed it to me. It showed one of the killers of the Osage people: William Hale.”
Grann knew almost immediately this would be his next book.
“It’s very unusual for a book to have a simple origin story, but that photo really was an origin story,” he says. “I kept thinking about the photo and that the Osage had removed that section – not to forget what had happened, but because they couldn’t forget what had happened.