📚😀 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann.
📖 Black gold. Texas tea. So goes the old “Beverly Hillbillies” sitcom rhyme. In this case, the tea is underground in Oklahoma, in the early days of American oil exploitation. Years before, the Osage native American tribe had been invaded and driven out of their ancestral lands into a remote corner of Oklahoma which was thought to be mostly barren of natural resources. When a vast reservoir of oil was discovered under their reservation, the impoverished Osage tribe became wildly, fabulously wealthy overnight. But this was during an era of profound inequity, racism, ignorance, cruelty, and apartheid across the United States. In every state, white supremacy was endemic, absolute, and brutally enforced by violence — legally or otherwise. What powerful white men wanted, they took. And they wanted the Osage people’s oil.
#nospoilers
Read this astonishing true story to learn how and why a young J. Edgar Hoover, then-new director of the fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation, got involved. What was revealed was a hideously evil, meticulously planned, years-long scheme to murder and steal hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of oil rights from the Osage people. A heartbreaking true story, painstakingly researched, exceptionally well-written, and vividly told. 📖