In the early eighteen-seventies, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. It also meant that they possessed a fortune. Like their parents, Mollie and her sisters had their names inscribed on the Osage Roll, which meant that they were among the registered members of the tribe. Her death had come with shocking speed, and though doctors had attributed it to a “peculiar wasting illness,” Mollie harbored doubts: Minnie had been only twenty-seven and had always been in perfect health. Mollie had already lost her sister Minnie nearly three years earlier.

Instead, there was a silence as still as the plains. When Anna came inside, she liked to slip off her shoes, and Mollie missed the comforting sound of her moving, unhurried, through the house. But this time one night had passed, and then another, and Anna had not shown up on Mollie’s front stoop as she usually did, with her long black hair slightly frayed and her dark eyes shining like glass. She had often gone on “sprees,” as her family disparagingly called them: dancing and drinking with friends until dawn. Thirty-four, and less than a year older than Mollie, Anna had disappeared three days earlier. On May 24, 1921, Mollie Burkhart, a resident of the Osage settlement town of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, began to fear that something had happened to one of her three sisters, Anna Brown. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.” In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. This exclusive excerpt, the book's first chapter, introduces the Osage woman and her family who became prime targets of the conspiracy. In his new book, “ Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.,” which is being published by Doubleday, in April, he shows that the breadth of the killings was far greater than the Bureau ever exposed.

David Grann, a staff writer at the magazine, has spent nearly half a decade researching this submerged and sinister history.

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