25   THE LOST MANUSCRIPT

You must go out there and see what is happening,” Kathryn Red Corn told me when I visited the Osage Nation again, in June 2015. And so following her directions, I drove through Pawhuska and headed west across the prairie, through the tall grasses, until I saw what she’d vividly described to me: scores of metallic towers invading the sky. Each one stood 420 feet tall, the equivalent of a thirty-story skyscraper, and had three whirring blades. A single blade was as long as the wings of an airliner. The towers were part of a windmill farm, which spanned more than eight thousand acres and was expected to eventually supply electricity to some forty-five thousand homes in Oklahoma.

More than a hundred years after oil was discovered in Osage territory, a new revolutionary source of energy was transforming the region. But this time the Osage viewed it as a threat to their underground reservation. “Did you see them?” Red Corn said of the turbines, when I returned. “This company came in here and put them up without our permission.” The federal government, representing the Osage Nation, had filed a lawsuit against Enel, the Italian energy conglomerate that owned the wind farm. Citing the terms of the 1906 Allotment Act, the suit alleged that because the company had excavated limestone and other minerals while building the foundations for the turbines, it needed the Osage’s approval to continue operations. Otherwise, Enel was violating the Osage’s sovereignty over their underground reservation. The company insisted that it wasn’t in the mining business, and thus did not need a lease from the Osage. “We don’t disturb the mineral estate,” a representative of the project told the press.

On July 10, 2015, at dawn, a chief and two dozen members of the Osage Nation gathered beneath the windmills for a prayer to Wah’Kon-Tah. As the first sunlight burned through the thin, blue mist and radiated off the blades, a prayer leader said that the Osage were a “humble people, asking for your help.”

Not long after, a court sided with Enel, saying that though the government’s interpretation of the Allotment Act would no doubt benefit the Osage, the “defendants have not marketed or sold minerals or otherwise engaged in mineral development. As a result, they are not required to obtain a lease.” Plans were already under way for a second wind farm in the county.

New government environmental regulations for oil drilling were having an even more profound effect on the Osage’s underground reservation. The regulations, issued in 2014, were costly to satisfy, and as a consequence oilmen had virtually stopped drilling new wells, given that they produced only marginal returns. An oil producer told a reporter, “For the first time in a hundred years, there’s no drilling in Osage County.”

I continued researching the murders, but there were fewer archives to examine, fewer documents to find. Then one day at the public library in Pawhuska I noticed, tucked amid volumes of Osage history, a spiral-bound manuscript titled “The Murder of Mary DeNoya-Bellieu-Lewis.” It appeared to have been assembled by hand, its pages printed on a computer. According to an introductory note, dated January 1998, the manuscript was compiled by Anna Marie Jefferson, the great-great-grandniece of Mary Lewis. “My great-grandmother…first told me the story about Mary,” Jefferson wrote. “I first heard about this around 1975.” Jefferson began to gather, from relatives and newspaper clippings and other records, bits of information about the murder—an endeavor that spanned two decades. She must have left a copy of the manuscript with the library, determined that the story not fall into the chasm of history.

I sat down and began to read. Mary Lewis, who was born in 1861, was an allotted member of the tribe. “With this money she was able to enjoy a prosperous life,” Jefferson wrote. Lewis had two marriages that ended in divorce, and in 1918, in her mid-fifties, she was raising a ten-year-old adopted child. That summer, Lewis took her daughter on a trip to Liberty, Texas, a small city about forty miles from Houston, on the banks of the Trinity River. Lewis was accompanied by two white men: Thomas Middleton, who was a friend, and a companion of his. With Lewis’s money, they bought a houseboat and stayed on the river. Then, on August 18, Lewis vanished. After authorities failed to investigate—“They never would have done anything,” one of Lewis’s relatives said—her family hired a private detective. He discovered that after Lewis’s disappearance Middleton had pretended to be her adopted son in order to cash several of her checks. In January 1919, after the police detained Middleton and his companion, the private detective interrogated them. He told Middleton that he would “one hundred times rather find the old lady alive than dead,” adding, “If you can give any information to locate her, that will help you.”

Middleton insisted that he didn’t know where she had gone. “I am not a bit afraid,” he said.

He and his friend didn’t divulge anything. But two witnesses revealed that on the day Lewis disappeared, they had seen, a few miles from her houseboat, a car heading toward a snake-infested swamp. On January 18, 1919, investigators, with their pant legs rolled up, began to comb the thicket of vegetation. A reporter said that one of the lawmen had “scarcely stepped in the water of the bayou when his feet struggled for freedom. When he reached to the bottom to disengage them he brought up a thick growth of woman’s hair.” Leg bones were dredged up next. Then came a human trunk and a skull, which looked as if it had been beaten with a heavy metal object. GREWSOME FIND ENDS QUEST FOR MARY LEWIS, a headline in a local newspaper said.

Middleton’s companion confessed to beating Lewis over the head with a hammer. The plot was conceived by Middleton: after Lewis was killed, the plan was to use a female associate to impersonate her so that the friends could collect the headright payments. (This strategy was not unique—bogus heirs were a common problem. After Bill Smith died in the house explosion, the government initially feared that a relative claiming to be his heir was an impostor.) In 1919, Middleton was convicted of murder and condemned to die. “There was a point in Mary’s family that they were relieved the ordeal was over,” Jefferson wrote. “However, the feeling of satisfaction would be followed by disbelief and anger.” Middleton’s sentence was commuted to life. Then, after he had served only six and a half years, he was pardoned by the governor of Texas; Middleton had a girlfriend, and Lewis’s family believed that she had bribed authorities. “The murderer had gotten only a slap on the hand,” Jefferson wrote.

After I finished reading the manuscript documenting Lewis’s murder, I kept returning to one detail: she had been killed for her headright in 1918. According to most historical accounts, the Osage Reign of Terror spanned from the spring of 1921, when Hale had Anna Brown murdered, to January 1926, when Hale was arrested. So Lewis’s murder meant that the killings over headrights had begun at least three years earlier than was widely assumed, and if Red Corn’s grandfather was poisoned in 1931, then the killings also continued long after Hale’s arrest. These cases underscored that the murders of the Osage for their headrights were not the result of a single conspiracy orchestrated by Hale. He might have led the bloodiest and longest killing spree. But there were countless other killings—killings that were not included in official estimates and that, unlike the cases of Lewis or Mollie Burkhart’s family members, were never investigated or even classified as homicides.