I haven’t read a history book in a while, and I am glad that I chose this one because it was interesting, informative, but most of all, it was horrid in the most heinous of ways.
The events of this novel started taking place a little over a hundred years ago. It feels like such a short period of time when you consider the existence of humans. I have a hard time imagining how at the time caucasian people treated native american indians as though they were barely human, as though the color of their skin meant they were not equals of white men. The native americans were pushed from their lands almost as soon as european immigrants started to colonize north america, they were still doing it up until around a hundred years ago. It was because of the greed of white men, the forcing of native americans off of their ancestral land that was the starting point of this great tragedy that was referred to as the Reign of Terror.
When the Osage tribe was told that they had to leave their land and move to a dry, rocky, seemingly useless pittance given to them by the United States government, they did so. Being a people of the land they knew how to survive anywhere. But the government didn’t realize that the land they gifted to the Osage people was rich in oil. Soon after the discovery of the oil, white men started to flock to that very land and drill into it, trying to get every drop of that black gold. Because the land was owned by the Osage, they became some of the wealthiest people in the country. As you can imagine, prejudiced white men didn’t like that there were native american indians becoming more wealthy than they were, more wealthy than they could even imagine. Thus began a huge scandal of false marriages, poisonings, murders, and other cruelties that I can’t believe were possible.
This story was absolutely wild. I can’t believe that the officers of the law were able to finally untangle the web that was the plot to rob the Osage tribe of all their wealth, essentially actively sending all these people into poverty as they made themselves wealthy beyond imagination. Now that I know the real story, I am eager to see how the movie portrays these events. I imagine there will be that Hollywood flair added, but I am mostly keen to see if the writers and directors were able to portray just what a gruesome moment in history this was, something that should not have happened and should never happen again. I would like to offer the highest of praise to the author of this book for taking the time to go through thousands of pages of documents that were at least a century old, and piecing together everything the way he did to make it such an informative and enlightening read.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 