The Osage’s story is one of passage from defiant warriors to dispossessed wanderers who finally settled upon Indian Territory in an area that would become Oklahoma. He tells the Osage story to this point and describes the aftermath. Grann uses the unexplained execution-style shooting of Molly’s sister, Anne, as a central point in his book. Despite the efforts of local law enforcement officers and hired private detectives, the deaths mount. Two, Rita and Bill Smith, are destroyed in an explosion so powerful it reduces their substantial home to splinters and rubble. Grann tells this compelling story through the eyes of Molly Burkhart, an Indian woman who witnesses her sisters, friends and supporters die around her. Inexplicably, in ever increasing numbers, Osage Indians disappear or die. By the 1920s, murder and mayhem is visited upon their community.

However, this story is different because the Osage become both blessed with unimaginable wealth, and cursed by it. Here it is the Osage Indians of America’s Great Plains who were beaten by cavalry, overwhelmed by settlers and subjected to unfamiliar governance. David Grann’s book is terrific, telling its grim, true story beautifully.Īt its core is the sad old story of Indigenous people dispossessed of identity and land by powerful new arrivals. Killers of the Flower Moon turned out to be anything but the ‘passed-on paperback’. This is a habit that so often results in a paperback that tours with me, before being passed on, half-read. Travelling somewhere to appear in something, I made a last-minute purchase from an airport bookshop.

Sisters of the Moon by Molly Burkhart