How the Osage Tribe became rich before the Reign of Terror

The latest episode of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles is in partnership with the Tulsa World to introduce the story of the Osage Reign of Terror and the upcoming film Killers of the Flower Moon. In this episode, show producer Ambre Moton is joined by two writers from the Tulsa World, Randy Krehbiel and Jimmie Tramel, to explore the history of the Osages and what led to the crimes committed against them.

Read all of the coverage of the film Killers of the Flower Moon and related stories here.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Slack and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises podcast. I'm Ambre Moton, the producer and editor of the show, filling in for Nat Cardona, who is taking some well-deserved time off. 

Our next few episodes are going to take us back to the late 1800s through the 1920s to Osage County in Oklahoma. With the help of and in partnership with reporters from the Tulsa World, the daily newspaper for the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and primary paper for the northeastern and eastern parts of the state.

Before we dive into those conversations, a tiny bit of background over the next set of episodes we're going to cover the Osage reign of terror, a series of murders of members of the Osage tribe and those who supported them that took place in the 1920s. By all accounts, these crimes are committed by people attempting to gain control of the Osage as oil rights and the profits from it.

We'll cover some of the history of the tribe, the crimes themselves, the investigation by the be a lie, which later became the FBI, and later a look at the crimes place and pop culture captured in books, newspapers and the soon to be released Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon, which was filmed in the same area that the events took place.

But back to the beginning, I spoke with Randy Krehbiel of the Tulsa World, someone we'll hear from several times as we tell this story about how the Osage tribe ended up in what is now Oklahoma.

My name is Randy Krehbiel. I've been at the Tulsa World since 1979. I came here as a sportswriter, did that for about 13 years, switched over to news. And over the years, I've written a lot of things. I've written about a lot of different subjects, but I've written a lot about history and the history of this area era.

I actually published the book several years ago on the 1921 race massacre, and I've written a book on the history of the Tulsa World and the city of Tulsa. And so all of these things are really interesting to me. And and some things, you know, you kind of know about for a while and some things you don't. My main job actually is covering state and federal government.

What kind of led you to writing about the Osage tribe, the the reign of terror and everything that goes into the story of killing of the flower moon?

You know, I had actually written a little bit about it probably 15 years ago or something like that. And there's nothing in-depth like, you know, the book or the David Green book or some of the other books that have been written about it. And I got into it and, it's just like a lot of other things. It's, you know, part of our our story.

It's part of how we we got here and, you know, I think I was probably somewhat fascinated, if that's the right word, by just just how terrible some of these people were. And also, you know, the people who were victimized by them, too, you know. So it's you know, it's part of who we are. And not only, you know, in Oklahoma, but really across the country.

And it's it's part of it's part of the history that, you know, we probably don't like to think about as much It does it doesn't make us feel as good as 4th of July.

Kind of, I guess, on that topic. I think people obviously in Oklahoma, but people of a certain age, I guess I should say, because I'm not sure that it's necessarily being taught as widely as it used to be, are aware of, you know, like the Trail of Tears and the establishment of, you know, Indian territory. But like people may not be familiar with the existence of the Osage people and everything they went through.

So can you just kind of talk a little bit about how they ended up in what is now Tulsa and kind of what what went into that?

Yes, ages originally were a very large tribe and they they're they're sort of their home grounds, at least at the time of, you know, European encounter was most of the state of Missouri and and some of Arkansas and then out onto the plains in Kansas and Oklahoma and then in the 1800s and they were kind of pushed by treaty into an area in Missouri and then that and then into Kansas and in 1872, they sold their reservation in Kansas and bought 1.7 million acres from the Cherokee Nation.

And for their what became their final reservation. And because they bought their reservation, they they owned it. They they had a title to it. It gave them a little different status going forward and and it allowed them to get some concessions. Then when the state of Oklahoma was created really in 1960 to accommodate and become a state until 1907, but by that time, they had been reduced to, you know, just a few thousand people.

They all all of that moving around and man squished together. And they'd undergone a lot of illness and so forth. So they they were down by statehood. They were down to fewer than 2500 people living on the reservation.

It's my understanding that the Osage land that they had, it wasn't, I guess, the most hospitable, especially when it comes to like agriculture. So how did they initially I'm assuming they didn't buy it and then strike oil immediately?

No, actually, yeah. So the story is, is that they actually chose that land because they thought it was the least attractive to white people and they would be left alone. And the story the chief Standing bear tells and there's a tell the story, too, is that they sent out these scouting parties and they told them to throw their spear into the ground.

And if the spear stuck, they were supposed to move on because it meant the soil was too thick and too rich and there'd be white people coming for it. But if they threw their spear into the ground and it fell over because it had hit rock, that's where they wanted wanted to be. And so the story is, again, that they actually chose pretty poor agricultural land.

Now, it almost immediately didn't work out that way because it wasn't very good for farming, but it was very good for for grazing. And they had, you know, the cattlemen from Texas driving cattle up into Kansas. So they wound up, you know, making a fairly good living off leasing their their land to the cattlemen for grazing.

That's a great visual, though. The story that you said that it was cheap standing there. Right, that he said that the steers. That's a great visual. We have to take a quick break, so don't go too far. An important thing to note is that in 1887, the Dawes Act divided up communally owned reservations into privately owned allotments as a way to force Native Americans to assimilate, to make each member of the tribe an owner of 160 acres and selling the quote unquote, surplus land to non-natives.

This made tribal members, private property owners and effectively ended their communal way of living since the Osage bought their land outright. They were exempt from the allotments under the Dawes Act. Instead, Chief James Big Heart insisted on what is known as the Osage Allotment Act in 1906, where the Osage allotted all of their land to their people, giving 657 acres each to the over 2200 registered Osage.

I also spoke with Jimmie Tramel, pop culture writer at the Tulsa World.

Hey, I'm Jimmie Tramel. I'm a pop culture writer at the Tulsa World, a newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and TulsaWorld.Com. I was a sportswriter for 25 years, but for the last ten years, I've been our pop culture person.

You know, I think everybody or most people of a certain age anyway, should be familiar with the Trail of Tears, everything with how Oklahoma was formed. But they may not have, you know, all of the insight into what happened with the Osage people.

What you just said is fascinating and said you should know. I think maybe the words you use, we should have known about this. But like the Tulsa race massacre of the 1920s, the Osage reign of terror occurred in the same era. And until recently, I think many people not I mean, Oklahomans and around the world, we're not familiar with these things.

Sometimes it takes pop culture to bring awareness to these things that the history books haven't told us. Like the movie HBO's Watchmen brought the Tulsa Race massacre into the consciousness. And I think this movie, Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, is Bring is doing the same thing to bring the awareness to the Osage reign of terror.

Yes. And thank you for mentioning the film is called Killers of the Flower Moon.

Yes. Filmed in Oklahoma, we're on the same turf where the actual Osage reign of terror happened. At one point in history, the the Osage nation of It's a Tribe, one of many tribes in Oklahoma was prior to statehood. Oklahoma was known as Indian Territory because all the tribes had land here that were there. People could live, and maybe this would never be a state, but actually it became a state in 1907.

But the Osage land, I think a lot of people would say was not the best land in Oklahoma. But guess what? Oil was found under that land and the Osage people became like the wealthiest people on Earth overnight almost. And then what happens when moneys are involved is greed, betrayal, and in this case, even murder, where there were several murders of the Osage, because people wanted their oil money.

It's funny how money can motivate people to do such heinous things, right?

Yeah. I mean, brings out the worst in people and in many occasions. And and eventually you hope someone will step up and do right. But if you when you read the book Killers of the Flower Moon, you'll see that many people who should have known better were conspirators in this.

What kind of wealth? Do you know how that translates into terms to current day?

Well, this kind of wealth, when they would run out of gas in an automobile they had purchased rather than just fill up with a new tank of gas. They would be so like, here's a new car. So that kind of money.

That does incite less scrupulous people to do bad things, definitely.

And that's where we're going to leave the story for today. Thanks for listening to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss our next episode where we discuss the crimes that became known as the Osage Reign of Terror.

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Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, a product of Lee Enterprises, is a collection of limited anthology style episodes exploring true stories as told by journalists from regional newspapers around America.