Real story behind Killers of the Flower Moon exposes chilling reign of terror
Tara Damron’s great-grandparents never forgot the almighty blast that suddenly woke them as a bomb packed with dynamite exploded under a local family’s house.
Rita and Bill Smith, along with their housekeeper Nettie Brookshire, died instantly when their wooden home was blown to smithereens on March 10, 1923, in Fairfax,
. Debris – along with the victims’ mutilated body parts – was scattered all over the small, close-knit community of Osage native Americans.
But this was just one tragedy out of many that befell the Osage Tribe on their lands in the southern United States in the 1920s in what became known as the Osage Reign of Terror. The shocking tale of murder, poison, jealousy and greed as white settlers seized the wealth of the Osage tribe after oil was found on their land is told in Martin Scorsese’s new film Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
It looks set to be a blockbuster, but 41-year-old Tara, an Osage tribal citizen, reminds us the film is based on true-life events that still affect real people today. The night Bill and Rita Smith’s home was blown up was seared into the memories of those alive back then, but Tara says it was so traumatic most never talked of it again, or told their children.
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William K. Hale (Bettmann Archive)
Henry Roan (DAILY MIRROR)She says: “It just wasn’t ever talked about. My mom first heard about it when she was at the house of great-grandparents Rosemary and Anthony Daniels and they started talking about the house that was blown up. It was the only time she remembered it being mentioned by the generation who lived through it.
“They remembered how loud that explosion was, there was so much dynamite. It was jarring for the whole town of Fairfax. It was so loud it shook every house and there were pieces of the house and the poor individuals who had been murdered scattered everywhere. My mum remembers hearing it and feeling so scared because she knew it could so easily have happened to them. We are all related so those people, and everyone who was murdered during the Reign of Terror, were our relatives too.”
For months before the blast, many other Osage community members had mysteriously died. From 1921 to 1925, at least 60 Osage people were murdered or disappeared – for the most despicable reason. Huge oil reserves found under Osage land in the late 1890s had made the Osage people super-rich. For thousands of years, the Osage Nation had lived on a vast stretch of territory that stretched across the southern US.
But as white settlers encroached on their land, the US government began a series of forced relocations, moving them to Oklahoma’s worst farmland, not realising the riches that lay underneath. The discovery of oil led to a rush of white fortune hunters on their land. Outsiders could still obtain leases to drill the land for a share of the profits, and they could also marry into Osage families and access the tribe’s money.
An oil pump in Osage County (Houston Chronicle via Getty Imag)They were aided and abetted by racism. The view that the tribe did not know how to deal with such wealth led the Bureau of Indian Affairs to mandate Osage members have white “guardians” to manage their money. As a result, more than eight million dollars was syphoned off by 600 guardians over the years.
The rules also decreed if a member of the Osage Nation died, their headright – the land given to each family – would pass on to their legal heir, which could be their white spouse, or a relative whose white guardian had complete control over their accounts. For this reason, the Osage Reign of Terror began in May 1921, when Osage members Anna Brown and her cousin Charles Whiteborn were murdered on the same day in different parts of the US, a bullet to the back of their heads.
Two months later, Anna’s mother Lizzie Kyle was killed by poisoning. All three had headrights to their land. Others died in suspicious circumstances – poisonings or supposed suicides. Those trying to investigate the murders met a gruesome end. One policeman was drugged and pushed down a flight of stairs, another was shot, and a local prosecutor was thrown from a train.
In February 1923, Lizzie’s nephew Henry Roan was shot dead, then two months later her daughter and son-in-law, Rita and Bill Smith, were blown up in their Fairfax home. With all but one of the Kyle family dead, their headrights and all their wealth passed to Mollie Kyle, Lizzie’s last surviving daughter, and her new white husband, Ernest Burkhardt - played by DiCaprio in the movie.
William E 'Bill' Smith's home before it was destroyed in blast (Bettmann Archive)But the bombing of the Fairfax house was a turning point that prompted an FBI intervention. Led by Tom White, it took the investigators only three months to find the man behind many of the murders – William K. Hale. Played by De Niro in the film, Hale was a cattleman who also owned the local bank, general store, funeral home and even served as a reserve sheriff.
He was also Burkhardt’s uncle, and had been pressuring his nephew to kill his wife Mollie by poisoning so he would inherit the Kyle family’s fortune. Hale and two accomplices were eventually sentenced to life in prison. Tara, who is Osage on her mother’s side, remembers finding out about the murders, aged six, from her teacher.
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She says: “It was the first time I’d heard about it. I was shocked. I went home to may parents and said, ‘How come you never told me about that?’. Many families don’t talk about it to their children, it was such a painful and a traumatic time. Hearing about the murders made me angry. There’s a long history of the US government being unfair to indigenous people, trying to kill us or make us disappear. This added fuel to the fire.”
The new generation of Osage have taken up the fight for her community. In 2011, the US government paid the Osage £312million for historical losses to its trust funds, but Tara says there are still many other wrongs to be righted. She says: “There are around 25% of our headrights that were either stolen or sold and are still out of Osage hands, and organisations, institutions and individuals that continue to receive quarterly tariffs from our Osage mineral estate.”
Tara believes there is still time to get justice for her ancestors. She says: “It will be hard, but we have seen that through dedication people can find out what really happened. Those who were killed were daughters and sons and wives and mothers, so you have a generation of loss. At least for some of them, I don’t think it’s too late for justice.."
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