David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction work, Killers of the Flower Moon, recounts the changes that the Osage Nation in the United States experiences around the turn of the 20th century. The book shows how United States government policies and practices come to dominate the Osage way of life. Elements of Osage culture such as food, clothing, and hair styles become forcibly replaced by American food, clothing, and hair styles. Sounds in the Osage environment also begin to change, as the voices of the Osage people and the animals in Osage territory are overpowered, and the sounds of white America prevail. The United States government even affects the scent of the Osage land, Grann illustrates. Grann’s vivid language to describe sights, sounds, and smells, brings to life the changes that the Osage Nation endures under the United States.

Sights

David Grann describes how the U.S. government causes visible changes in Osage Nation members. Grann writes that by 1877, there were almost no American buffalo left for the Osage to hunt. He explains, “Unaccustomed to the white man’s agricultural methods and deprived of the buffalo, the Osage began to go hungry; their bones soon looked as if they might break through their skin” (p. 42). Grann tries to communicate exactly what a starving Osage person looks like. He describes the image of a body that appears to be only skin stretched across sharp bones, with little muscle or fat in between. In 1894, the United States government forces seven-year-old Mollie Burkhart, an Osage girl, to attend a Catholic boarding school. Like other Osage school girls, Mollie stays at the boarding school eight months of the year. When Mollie returns to her hometown, Gray Horse, she notices that, “…more and more girls had stopped wearing their blankets and moccasins and that the young men had exchanged their breechcloths for trousers and their scalp locks for broad-brimmed hats” (p. 48). Grann mentions specific articles of dress typical for Osage men and women: blankets, moccasins, breechcloths, and scalp locks. Grann explains how, after so much time at boarding schools meant to acculturate Osage children to white America, the traditional clothes begin to disappear. Grann replaces the Osage clothing with images of pants and hats. Grann highlights one Osage man specifically. He says of Henry Roan: “[Henry Roan] once worn his hair in two long braids before being forced to cut them off at boarding school, just as he’d been made to change his name from Roan Horse” (p. 82). Grann describes the traditional way Henry Roan wears his hair, and then explains why Henry Roan’s braids disappear. Unlike the change of his name, the hair serves as a tangible change in Henry Roan’s appearance. Grann communicates the deliberate changes that the U.S. government forces on the Osage people through concrete images of their undernourished bodies, and their change of clothes and hair styles.

Sounds

Throughout Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann describes how the sounds of the natural environment familiar to the Osage people begin to disappear with the advent of Americans. Grann says of Mollie Burkhart: “She was accustomed to the chorus of meadowlarks and sandpipers and prairie chickens, now overlaid with the pock-pocking of drills pounding the earth” (p. 8) The author mentions three specific birds. He claims the birds’ combined, repeated songs are a familiar sound to Mollie Burkhart in her North American homeland. He also claims that a new layer of sound dominates the environment. The sound does not come from the other local fauna. Instead, the sound comes from the man-made machinery that extracts oil from the ground. Grann uses the onomatopoeic term “pock-pocking” to reproduce the repetitive pounding of the earth. Grann portrays another natural scene disturbed by modern machinery when he writes: “The agents sped past the old trails that cowboys had once followed - trails that were now supplanted by cattle cars pulled by shrieking locomotives’’ (p. 128). Grann explains that the rough paths in the wilderness, once for men and animals, are no longer relevant. U.S. government agents now travel along train tracks, not trails. Noisy engines carry train cars across the land. Just as the songs of birds, and the footfalls of men and beasts fade, so do the voices of the Osage people. In 1921, Mollie Burkhart’s oldest sister, Anna Brown, becomes the family’s first murder victim. While at the funeral of Mollie’s sister, Anna: “Mollie watched the glistening white coffin sink into the ground until the long, haunting wails were replaced by the sound of earth clapping against the lid” (p. 24). At Anna’s funeral, the Osage funerary prayers become silenced by the sound of dirt hitting what Grann explains is an overpriced coffin. The sounds of the people and animals in the Osage area slowly fade, and the new sounds of modern American technology fill the air.

Smells

Grann explains how the scents in the Osage town of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, change as more people and regulations arrive. He writes: “Automobiles sped along paved horse trails, the smell of fuel overwhelming the scent of the prairies” (p. 7). Gran highlights an environment where people travel by horse, and the air smells like the grassland. He juxtaposes the former scene with the modern environment of car travel and the smell of fuel. With the arrival of cars, the natural smell disappears. When people discover Anna Brown’s body, “…one of the lawmen noticed a bottle on the ground, which was partially filled with a clear liquid. It smelled like moonshine. The lawmen surmised that Anna had been sitting on the rock, drinking, when someone came up behind her and shot her at close range, causing her to topple over” (p. 20). Any smell of the living woman, Anna, is gone. The smell of moonshine dominates the murder scene, as the United States government dominates the lives of the Osage people. Moonshine is present because the clandestinely made and illegally distributed alcohol becomes prevalent during the U.S. government’s Prohibition era in the United States. Towards the end of the book, Grann visits Margie Burkhart, the granddaughter of Mollie Burkhart and her husband Ernest. Margie Burkhart takes David Grann to downtown Fairfax, where she points out the largest store, the Big Hill Trading Company. Margie Burkhart says, “‘When I was growing up, it was still in business. It was huge and had these great wooden banisters and old wood floors. Everything smelled of wood’”…a few of the old mansions remained, but they were deserted and decaying; some were completely imprisoned in vines” (p. 255). When the discovery of oil on Osage land brings money to the area, businesses momentarily thrive. Grann portrays the short lived splendor with the scent of expensive hard wood interiors. The United States government takes advantage of the oil money, however, and local Osage people struggle to invest their own money wisely into their towns. The government assigns local white people to manage the bank accounts of wealthy Osage people, and people squander the money. As Grann shows, all the temporary grandeur soon begins to decay. Grann highlights the scents of fuel, alcohol and decay, to illustrate the effect of “modernization” in Osage territory.

David Grann’s use of imagery communicates the traditional Osage way of life, as well as the tribe’s reality under the tight control of the United States government. Grann describes how the influence of the United States government damages Osage people’s bodies, and erases their traditional dress and hair. He shows how the presence of outsiders robs the Osage Nation of its bird songs, tranquility, and Osage voices. He explains how the Osage people lose the fresh air, their identities, and their wealth. For all of these aspects of life come undesirable replacements. With the domination of the U.S. government comes starved Osage bodies and white American fashion, drills, trains, and American goods, fuel, alcohol, and decay. David Grann uses imagery to depict sights, sounds, and smells of the Osage Nation before and after American influence.

References

Grann, D. (2017). Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Doubleday.