James William Burkhart, better known to his family as “Cowboy,” had an earache. The 2-year-old toddler always seemed to be suffering from an ear-related ailment. On March 9, 1923, his condition worsened so much that his mother, Mollie Burkhart, decided to take him to a physician instead of spending the night at her sister’s house as planned.
Around 3 a.m. the following morning, an explosion shook their town. “It seemed that the night would never stop trembling,” a local recalled. A bomb had reduced the house to rubble, killing Mollie’s sister and her servant. Mollie’s brother-in-law was seriously wounded, and he died of his injuries four days later.
The murders were simply the latest in a string of suspicious deaths to strike Mollie’s family. Another sister had died of a “peculiar wasting illness” in 1918. Three years later, Mollie’s oldest sister was found murdered in a field. The siblings’ mother, Lizzie, died a few months after that, the victim of a suspected poisoning.
Mollie had every reason to believe she’d be next on the killer’s (or killers’) list. She now held her family’s oil headrights, an inheritance worth an inflation-adjusted hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. “It was just fate” that she and her children had escaped the explosion, Mollie’s granddaughter, Margie Burkhart, later told journalist David Grann.
A century after the bombing, Killers of the Flower Moon, the newest film from legendary director Martin Scorsese, is bringing renewed attention to the Reign of Terror, a spate of murders that devastated both Mollie’s family and the broader Osage Nation in the early 20th century. Following the discovery of oil on their lands in and around Pawhuska, Oklahoma, in the late 1800s, the Osage became the richest people in the world per capita, amassing great wealth that white settlers quickly plotted to claim as their own. In the span of just a few years, at least 24 Osage Indians, and perhaps even as many as 150, died under violent or suspicious circumstances.
“It was a really unsettling time in our history because of what was being done to us,” says Tara Damron, a member of the Osage Nation and a project director at the Oklahoma Historical Society. “The irony is that it was Osage money and Osage land, and it was never [the white conspirators’] to begin with.”
Based on Grann’s 2017 book of the same name, Killers of the Flower Moon, which arrives in theaters Friday, stars Blackfeet actor Lily Gladstone as Mollie and Leonardo DiCaprio as Mollie’s husband Ernest Burkhart. Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemons round out the cast as Ernest’s uncle, a cattle rancher-turned-political boss named William Hale, and federal agent Tom White, respectively. Though an examination of the case by the Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor to the FBI, suggested that Hale was the mastermind behind the murders, Grann’s research and Osage oral histories point to a more sweeping conspiracy involving the Osages’ white neighbors and their supposed friends.
