Chapter 8 | Section 3
Osage Oil and Headrights
The attack on Black Tulsa remains among the worst race massacres in the history of the United States, but it was far from being the only instance of racial violence in 1920s Oklahoma. Indigenous people continued to face corrupt court-appointed guardians and other non-Indigenous people who sought to steal their land or profit from their resources. It is important to remember that the wealth built in Tulsa, both Black and white, was built on Muscogee (Creek) land. While some white guardians, like Sarah Rector’s, were trustworthy and acted in the best interest of their wards (meaning those they were supposed to protect), far more continued to use corrupt tactics to take control of Indigenous wealth. As we will see with the experiences of Osages, some whites also sought to gain control over Indigenous resources through marriage.
Following the discovery of large amounts of oil on Osage land not long after statehood, members of the tribe became extraordinarily wealthy. In 1923 alone, for example, the oil on Osage land generated $30 million profit for the tribe. The Osage Allotment Act of 1906 stated that each tribal member had one equal share in the revenue that came from surface minerals, including oil. Upon the death of a tribal member, their headright (a grant of land or resources) was passed to next of kin. This meant that someone could inherit a headright without being a member of the tribe if they had married into the family and through that marriage became the next of kin. The discovery of oil led to numerous white men marrying Osage women. This was far from the first time that non-Native men married into a tribe to access Native-controlled resources or to cement relations between the two peoples. For example, as we learned in chapter 2, family kinship among Osage and French families like the Chouteaus led to important ties to the Three Forks region and the fur trade. But in this early-twentieth-century version, we see especially extreme measures used to control Osage resources.
Gas plant in the Osage oil fields, about 1927. Many such fields existed on Osage land. The drilling of oil on their land made some tribal members very wealthy.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Osage Murders
By the early 1920s, the Osage Nation was widely recognized as the wealthiest Indigenous nation in the country, and its citizens were among the wealthiest people in America. And then Osages began disappearing. Some of the murders took place prior to the 1920s, but the most dangerous period, known as the “Reign of Terror,” lasted from 1921 to 1926. At least two dozen Osages were murdered by white men in plots to gain control over their headrights. Just a week before the Tulsa Race Massacre, the body of Anna Brown, an Osage woman, was found in a ravine in northern Oklahoma. She had been shot in the back of the head. There were no leads, no suspects, and seemingly no motive. Anna’s Osage headrights passed to her mother, Lizzie Kyle, who had already inherited headrights from Anna’s father and two of her sisters who had died before her. Two months later, Lizzie also died. She had been murdered by poison. Two years after that, in 1923, Anna’s sister, Rita, and Rita’s husband, William Smith, died when their home was bombed.
Anna’s cousin, Henry Roan, was also murdered. This left Anna’s other sister, Mollie, and her white husband, Ernest Burkhart, as the inheritors of the family’s headrights. Similar things happened in other Osage families, but this was perhaps the most sinister and wide-ranging of the plots. After local investigations failed to go anywhere, the Osage Tribal Council requested a federal investigation.
FBI Investigation of the Osage Murders
The investigation of the Osage murders became the first major case for the US Bureau of Investigation, which later became the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
It took several undercover agents to eventually piece together what had happened. Not all the murders were solved, but the FBI did learn who was behind the murder of Anna Brown and her family. It turned out that Ernest Burkhart’s uncle, William Hale, was behind the whole thing. He had convinced his nephew to marry Mollie and then hired people to kill her family members one by one to ensure that the headrights would eventually land in his hands.
Roy St. Lewis, US attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma during the 1920s, was appointed special assistant to the US attorney general to prosecute W. K. Hale and John Ramsey in the Osage murders case. In this photograph Lewis is reviewing records from the case.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Newspaper clipping from the Daily Oklahoman, 1929. The story contains images of all the people involved in the Osage murders, both the victims and the perpetrators. It also contains a chart showing the inheritors of each victim’s headrights, and the amounts of money that went along with those inheritances.
Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Mollie had already begun showing signs of illness from poisoning when the FBI realized what was happening. If not for their investigation, Mollie would have died then, likely followed by her husband so that Hale could claim the headrights from all of the murdered Kyle family members. Hale called himself the “King of the Osage Hills.” He was as powerful as he was corrupt, which is why local investigations never went anywhere. People were afraid to talk to investigators out of fear that Hale and his cronies would take revenge on them.
When Anna’s cousin Henry died and his life insurance policy went to Hale, the federal government had grounds to launch an investigation. The important work of the federal agents ended the so-called Reign of Terror and led to the conviction and imprisonment of several men, including Hale. In response to the murders, the US government passed a law in 1925 to limit the inheritance of Osage headrights to tribal members. While this law did not bring an end to unscrupulous efforts to steal Indigenous land, it did provide some measure of protection.
Indian Citizenship Act of 1924
The Reign of Terror in the early 1920s served as an extreme reminder that Indigenous people often struggled to gain even the most basic protection. Prior to 1924, Indigenous citizenship was complicated. Members of federally recognized tribes had tribal citizenship, but not necessarily US citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment, which was added to the US Constitution in 1868 during Reconstruction, allowed citizenship for anyone born in the United States. However, Native nations had treaties with the US government and determined citizenship in their own nations. This led to the widely accepted notion that Native Americans were not US citizens. A provision in the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act provided a way for Native Americans to become US citizens, but citizenship was not always clear or desirable.
Confusion and controversy surrounding Native citizenship continued into the early 1920s. Some thought it was important for Indigenous people to become US citizens while others worried that US citizenship would decrease tribal citizenship rights and sovereignty for Native nations. The issue was finally resolved when President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. The act recognized Indigenous people of the United States as US citizens but allowed them to retain their tribal citizenship. This meant that members of federally recognized tribes now had dual citizenship. Many Native Americans in Oklahoma still faced challenges in trying to make sure their rights were protected, but the Indian Citizenship Act marked a significant change in how non-Native citizens viewed and treated Indigenous people. While the recognition of dual citizenship provided clarification, other challenges persisted. The loss of land and governing rights in the previous decades led to ongoing problems for Native Americans. A survey published in 1928, called the Meriam Report, provided a comprehensive study of the status of Indigenous people throughout the United States, including Oklahoma. This report strongly criticized the federal government’s policies toward Native Americans and its treatment of them. The report became even more important in the following decades because it supported greater self-governing for Native nations.