By unearthing buried narratives, bestselling author David Grann ’89 resurrects larger than life characters.
Members of the Osage Nation stand beside local white businessmen and leaders during a ceremony in Pawhuska, Oklahoma in 1924.
Capturing the voices of forgotten Osage tribal members like Mollie and her sisters guided Grann as he delved into five years of research. “[Mollie is] an Osage woman at a time where the power structure is white and quite male, and they’re discounting her point of view,” Grann explains. “And yet she’s steadfast in trying to pursue justice, trying to get these crimes accounted for. She’s hiring private detectives; she’s putting out rewards. And every time she’s doing this, she’s putting a bullseye on her. “She was a target. [Seeking justice for her sisters’ deaths] took a great deal of courage, and goodness and determination.” Grann interviewed descendants of both the victims and the murderers to form the book’s core. “All the people I wrote about I thought of as transitional figures. Mollie Burkhart was born in the 1880s, she grew up in a lodge, she didn’t speak any English and she dressed traditionally. Within three decades she’s living in a mansion with white servants; she’s married to a white husband; she’s speaking English; and she’s really straddling not only two centuries, but two civilizations.” To assemble the pieces of the story, Grann pored over documents at the National Archives at Fort Worth, Texas. The end product is a gripping murder mystery with compelling characters: Burkhart, the wealthy Osage woman who watched
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with increasing terror and desperation as her loved ones died or were murdered. Tom White, the former Texas Ranger who assembled a covert crew to investigate the murders through the new Bureau of Investigation, which helped launch the modern FBI. And Hale. The devil himself. “You would spend days [at the archives] pulling documents trying to find materials and often you were just crying because you didn’t find relevant information and your eyes are watering because you’re so tired,” Grann says. “And then every once in awhile, you’d open a box or folder and there would be a secret grand jury testimony from the trial, that to the best of my knowledge hasn’t been made public before, and revealed so much about the people involved. You could hear their voices.” LOST CITY OF Z The adventurous archaeologist Indiana Jones, the fictional hero of Raiders of the Lost Ark, is believed to be modeled after reallife British explorer Percy Fawcett, the main subject of Grann’s The Lost City of Z. While Killers of the Flower Moon took Grann to Oklahoma, and to the National Archives in Texas, his work piecing together the narrative for The Lost City of Z drew him to the Brazilian jungle.
S U M M E R 2 0 1 7 | The Storyteller
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5/2/17 3:56 PM