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 Tim Stanley, to discuss the motives for the murders and detail some of the crimes and the environment of fear that the Reign of Terror caused in the Osage community.
More coverage
- Read all of the coverage of the film Killers of the Flower Moon and related stories here.
- All episodes from this series can be found here.
- Also, for more on the movie, listen to the latest episode of Streamed & Screened: Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' might be the best film you see this year.
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's taking some well-deserved time off. If you haven't listened to the last episode introducing our latest topic, The Osage Reign of Terror. Go check it out before listening to this one.
Today, we're continuing our look at the series of suspicious deaths in the 1920s of members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the early 1900s.
Oil was found on the land that the Osage is had purchased, but the Tulsa World's Randy Krehbiel explains more.
The story is that for a long, long time, Indians had known that there were these oil seeps. You know, we're seeing oil would seep out of the ground and it'd be in springs and things like that. But through most of the 1800s, there wasn't really a lot of use for that. Well, they they actually they would use it for like rim remedies and things like that.
It was considered medicinal. And so, of course, it wasn't until the invention of things like kerosene lamps and the internal combustion engine that that oil became more valuable. And so the first the first commercial oil well in Oklahoma or what became Oklahoma, this was completed in 1897, just outside the Osage Reservation, just on the eastern edge of it.
And a couple of years later, the first well then was drilled in Oklahoma and about that time. And so this was around, you know, around 1900. And that was about the time we were starting to see motor vehicles and and again, kerosene was already pretty popular. People tend to forget that the first use of oil as as we think of it today, was actually kerosene and to use in lamps and things like that.
So anyway, that was in the early 1900s, around 1900. And by O 1905 or 1906, they knew they had, you know, quite a bit right around the time of World War One is when it really picked up from like about, you know, about the mid 19 teens through around 1929 was kind of the height of the oil boom.
And the Osage nation, the Osage is actually had relative little control over their own affairs. Almost all of that was handled by what now is the Bureau of Indian Affairs or or by the guardians that were appointed. You know, a lot of a lot of them had somebody who was appointed to handle their business affairs because they were not thought to be competent to handle their business affairs.
So a lot of that was out of their hands. And also, I think a lot of them, especially the older ones, probably didn't even really completely understand what was going on. But when they first moved there, they probably mainly wanted to just be left alone and and it pretty became pretty soon became apparent that they were not going to be able to do that.
When did the Osage reign of terror really begin?
There's not really a definite date. So the killers of the Flower Moon, basically the book follow the is a period from about 1921 to about 1929. But there were probably people dying as early as 1912, 1910 or something like that. And interestingly enough, I mean, similar type things were going on in the adjoining Muskogee Creek Nation. The Cherokees had some of that going on.
It was a different situation because with the Osage, as they all
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