In the 1920s, the Osage Indians were said to be the richest people per capita on earth. Many of them lived in Oklahoma’s Osage County, an area larger than the state of Delaware and doubly blessed by nature. Above ground, there were vast empty prairies of bluestem tallgrass perfect for grazing cattle. Below ground, there was oil.

The tribe collectively owned the oil through headrights, individual shares allocated to members in 1906. The head-rights could not be sold or transferred, but they could be inherited—which is what put the Osages in peril. Tycoons like Frank Phillips and J. Paul Getty bid millions of dollars for oil leases in Osage County. Boomtowns and oil camps spread across the landscape in a frenzied rush of Wild West lawlessness. The sudden wealth attracted all manner of criminals and disreputable characters, some there to prey on the Osages.

Most accounts of what came to be known as the Osage Reign of Terror start with the killing of Anna Brown, whose body was discovered in late May 1921 down a ravine outside the town of Gray Horse. Brown had been shot in the head execution-style with a .32-caliber pistol. When it began assembling evidence in 1923, the Bureau of Investigation of the US Department of Justice (not yet called the FBI) focused on one particular pattern of murders and suspicious deaths linked back to Brown. By 1923 the killings were becoming so blatant that even distant out-of-state newspapers like the Washington Post were raising alarms. The most spectacular happened on the night of March 10, 1923, when the home of William and Rita Smith of Fairfax, Oklahoma, was destroyed by a nitroglycerin bomb. The explosion killed Rita and her housekeeper instantly, and William Smith died several days later.

Rita Smith was the sister of Anna Brown. Their mother and one other sister had also died of mysterious illnesses. By the time that the Bureau arrived on the scene in Pawhuska, the Osage capital, only one sister from this family survived— Mollie Burkhart. She was married to a white man named Ernest Burkhart. Mollie herself was in questionable health, reportedly suffering from something like diabetes.

Federal investigators were told by locals at the outset who the culprits were and what their motives must be. Yet it was still necessary to gather evidence and make a case. Their attention focused on the uncle of Ernest Burkhart, a wealthy rancher, banker, and self-styled minister named William K. Hale, who came to be known as the “King of the Osage Hills.” According to investigators, Hale was the mastermind of a murder plot that was years in the making; his accomplices were his two nephews, Ernest and his brother Bryan, along with various hired killers. The key to the scheme was the marriage of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart. In the words of a later FBI report, “Mollie appears to have been the intended means of drawing to Hale, through the Burkharts, the assets of the entire family.”

As the masquerade of the Burkhart marriage showed, Hale’s methods included not only murder but some degree of betrayal. The victims were befriended or otherwise in a relationship with their killers before the deed was done. On May 21, 1921, Hale sent Bryan Burkhart and an ex-convict, Kelsey Morrison, along with Morrison’s wife, to entice Anna Brown into a night of drinking. (Before his full involvement in the crime was uncovered, Kelsey Morrison also served as a Bureau informant.) After getting Brown very drunk, the group drove her to Hale’s ranch house, where Hale handed Morrison a .32-caliber automatic. They took Brown, unsuspecting, to the ravine where Morrison shot her. For his efforts he was given $1,000 and a new car. Hale capped the deception by serving as a pallbearer at Brown’s funeral.

A similar pattern was manifested in a side job commissioned by Hale that targeted another one of Mollie Burkhart’s relatives, Henry Roan. On February 6, 1923, Roan’s frozen body was found northwest of Fairfax, a bullet hole through his head. Hale’s hitman, John Ramsey, befriended Roan and took him out drinking several times, until finally the two drove out to a canyon, but only one of them came back. Later it emerged that Hale had taken out a $25,000 insurance policy on Roan, and again he appeared as a pallbearer.

As the Smith bombing showed, Hale could also resort to more dastardly means to achieve his ends. The mysterious illnesses that claimed so many lives were likely the result of poison, in many instances mixed with moonshine. Journalist David Grann even suggests that Mollie Burkhart’s injections for diabetes may well have been something more sinister— fortunately for her, the Hale case broke before this part of the plot reached fruition.

Throughout the investigation, Hale was essentially acting as a mob boss, and that MO included obstruction of justice—by any means necessary. The Bureau had deployed several undercover operatives in Osage County, including a Native American agent, who worked their way into the Hale gang’s confidence (or at least thought they had). Hale hired his own private detectives to tamper with potential witnesses, destroy evidence, and lay down false leads. He also took more drastic steps to cover his trail. One of the perpetrators paid to do the Smith bombing was lured into a fake burglary scheme and killed. And in late 1926, soon after Hale was first convicted in the Osage murders, one of the Bureau’s operatives, state lawman Luther Bishop, was gunned down at his own home in Oklahoma City (though Bishop’s wife was later charged—and acquitted—of the crime).

Hale had believed himself to be untouchable, but with the Henry Roan murder he had made a critical mistake: Roan was killed on a piece of Osage land that was under federal jurisdiction. This circumstance allowed the Bureau of Investigation to enter the case, as opposed to local law enforcement that may have been compromised by Hale’s powerful influence. It also meant that the case could be tried in federal court, again avoiding Hale’s friends in high places.

Hale, Ramsey, and Ernest Burkhart were arrested during the first week of January 1926. Hale and Ramsey were tried together for the Roan murder in a trial held at Guthrie, which resulted in a hung jury. (Jury tampering may have occurred.) A second trial was convened at Oklahoma City, and on October 29, Hale and Ramsey were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment at Leavenworth Penitentiary. Both were put behind bars, yet the legal saga continued. The verdict was reversed on appeal in 1928—Hale claimed to have bribed the appeals court—but in separate retrials, both men were convicted once again. While awaiting his third trial in the Pawhuska jail, Hale allegedly plotted to have Ernest Burkhart killed. Burkhart, like his brother Bryan and John Ramsey, had all turned evidence against their former boss. Kelsey Morrison was himself convicted for the murder of Anna Brown.

By the 1930s, the bloodlust for money that had driven the Osage Reign of Terror gradually subsided as the oil boom receded. Most scholars of the episode come away from it with a chilling conclusion—that beyond Hale and his accomplices, there were many other perpetrators who were never investigated. The string of suspicious deaths may have begun as early as 1918 and lasted as late as 1931. The official death-toll was twenty-four—of which only a handful resulted in prosecutions—but some observers have put the actual total as high as sixty, if not higher. Future generations of the Osage people were left with the trauma and the mystery.

CLARA LUPER

Clara Shepard Luper (1923–2011) was born in rural Okfuskee County and raised in Hoffman, Oklahoma. She graduated from Langston University in 1944, and she was among the first African -American students who pushed open the door to equal higher education after it had been unlocked by the Sipuel and McLaurin Supreme Court decisions. In 1951 she became the first black person to earn a graduate degree in history from the University of Oklahoma. She went on to teach history for forty-three years at Roscoe Dunjee High School and other schools in the Oklahoma City area. She married twice and had three children.

In 1957, Luper and her students were invited to New York City to present a play that she had written about Martin Luther King Jr. On their trip north they found that they were able to eat in restaurants alongside white customers. With this inspiration and King’s own example, Luper and a group of students from the local NAACP Youth Council, ages six to seventeen, went to a Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City on August 19, 1958, sat at the counter, and ordered Coca-Colas. After they were refused service, they remained seated; they were cursed, pushed, and bumped by the white clientele. A swarm of policemen arrived. But as the sit-in continued, the bad publicity grew. Katz finally agreed to desegregate its lunch counters in Oklahoma and other states.

Luper and the students continued their crusade against discrimination in public accommodations for several more years. In the process, Luper was arrested a total of twenty-six times, a record that she wore as a badge of honor. At the time of her death in 2011, she was recognized nationally as one of the pioneers of the sit-in movement and America’s civil rights struggle.