Just finished reading: Killers of the Flower Moon
I just finished reading Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. This has been on my shelf for a while and on my must-read list even longer. I needed a book that I won’t doodle. One good but not so good as to pull me away from working on my History Camp presentation. And light enough to carry it in my bag if I’m not done by the time I leave for my conference. Well, it’s light enough. But it was so good that I couldn’t stop reading it (much of the time with my mouth wide open in disbelief). And it made me want to both collect doodles and create new ones.
You win some, you lose some.
This book is fabulous and eye-opening and awful and all the things. These doodles don’t give anything away because you need to just read it yourself. (There’s a movie, too, but I haven’t watched it yet.)
I loved Little House on the Prairie
When I was little, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder.
It was devastating to learn that in real life the government kicked the Osage people out to make room for the settlers. (To be fair, it’s not at all shocking. But I watched as a child, it just seemed wholesome.) Pa said to Laura “that’s why we’re here Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and we take our pick.”
To simplify it quite a bit — the Ingalls family left because they were going to be removed by soldiers. Not all settlers left though. Some of the more “impatient” ones killed members of the Osage in ways so horrific it lead an Indian agent to ask “the question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?”
Senator Charles Curtis was mentioned!
He’s in the presentation I’m working on, so I was hoping for some great nuggets of info to include. Unfortunately, it was just a brief appearance. John Palmer wrote to him to try to get help from the Justice Department. The “demons” were committing the “most foul series of crimes ever committed in this country.”
Seriously. Very foul. Trust me. Read this book.
Presidential Grave Hunter: One Kid’s Quest to Visit the Tombs of Every President and Vice President, by Kurt Deion
29-year-old-still-living-with-his-mom J. Edgar Hoover…
… was put in charge of the bureau. Temporarily, but it ended up being permanent. Over his just-about 50 years there, he committed “egregious abuses of power.” It was not news to me that this guy was something else. A few new things though:
Sensitive about his height, he made sure (for the most part) that taller agents didn’t work at headquarters.
He also had raised dais in his office to stand on, which I’m sure is totally normal and not at all ridiculous.
A reporter once referred to him as that “slender bundle of high-charged electric wire.”
An aide said that “if he didn’t like you, he destroyed you.”
He has an IMDb page, which is where I learned that he was 5’ 8”. When not standing on the dais, of course.
Here’s a couple of J. Edgar doodles from other books:
At 24 years old, he was put in charge of anti-radical general intelligence division, where he made a card catalog that contained 200,000 radicals
1920: The Year of the Six Presidents, by David Pietrusza
Eleanor Roosevelt was on his radar. Her FBI file was massive — one of the biggest gathered on a single person.
“Every dead buffalo is an Indian gone.”
… according to an army officer. Yikes.
This is particularly gross, and made me think of how Theodore Roosevelt was concerned that buffalo would die out before he had a chance to help one die out.
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris
Screaming owls
This book described an Osage woman, “surrounded by the forces of night, heard but unseen: the gibbering of coyotes and the howling of wolves and the screaming of owls, which were said to carry an evil spirit.”
This made me think of a doodle from when I read about Theodore Roosevelt. The author included a very ominous and foreshadowy sentence: “He may have heard the rumors that the white Arctic owl had been in Montana, but only the [Native Americans] knew what that sign portended”… which seems like a weird thing to include because:
The book written in 1979, since nobody had access to the internet to look up what the symbolism meant.
As far as I could tell, this reference refers to … nothing? No death followed the seemingly unnecessary reference.
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris
Teapot Dome Scandal
Reading a few paragraphs about the Teapot Dome Scandal made me realize I want to know more about it. Here are two semi-related doodles:
The story goes that when Albert Bacon Fall told the ailing Woodrow Wilson that they’d all been praying for him, Wilson asked “Which way, senator?”
1920: The Year of the Six Presidents, by David Pietrusza
Eleanor Roosevelt campaigned for Al Smith when he ran for New York governor against her cousin Ted Roosevelt III. She eve had a “teapot” with steam on her car … a dig at her cousin’s alleged involvement in the Teapot Dome Scandal.
1920: The Year of the Six Presidents, by David Pietrusza
“My children, I have heard bad news.”
All this weird daddy business is very unnerving. Apparently, it started in Europe in the 1600s. In the case of this doodle of a very young William Henry Harrison, it is a veiled threat. A condescending veiled threat.
Killers of the Flower Moon includes a quote from “The Great Father” himself, President Thomas Jefferson: “On your return tell your people that I take them all by the hand; that I become their father hereafter, that they shall know our nation only as friends and benefactors.” Lies!
Dang it.
When cleaning my book darts out of this book, I discovered a quote I meant to doodle. I didn’t leave any room on the page, so I’ll share it sans-doodle:
“Every school boy in Texas cuts his eye teeth on stories about the Texas Rangers. I wasn’t any exception.” - LBJ
… which made me think of how George W. Bush was part owner of the Texas Rangers and how I’d never thought about where that name came from and how I have a doodle of a Texas Ranger pennant but I didn’t scan it in and I need to wrap up this post because I have other things to do.
On that rambling note, I’m wrapping up this post. But you should definitely check out Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.
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The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI