Killers of the Flower Moon

The murder investigation now fell into the hands of the Bureau of Investigation (an early name for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI). The Bureau was created in 1908, during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, but had limited powers due to Americans’ distrust of a national police force. During the presidency of Warren Harding, the Justice Department entered a shameful period of corruption. Famed investigator and Bureau head William Burns “bent laws and hired crooked agents” (106). Soon after, the Teapot Dome scandal erupted: After Harding’s secretary of the interior accepted bribes from an oil company to drill in one of the Navy’s petroleum reserves, Burns and the attorney general sought to obstruct congressional investigations into the matter.

When J. Edgar Hoover was appointed head of the Bureau in 1924, under a new administration, the mandate was to clean house and avoid controversy. The year before, the Bureau had sent agents to Oklahoma in response to the Osage Tribal Council’s plea for help. They were unsuccessful in turning up anything, and Hoover was getting ready to return the case to state authorities to avoid association with failure. Then, an outlaw working undercover for the Bureau had gone rogue, robbing a bank and killing a police officer, so Hoover needed to resolve the case to avoid tarnishing the Bureau’s—and his own—reputation.