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In the early days, their job seemed clear-cut

All our book group attendees agreed on one thing...the Osage really weren't as luck as everyone thought they were. Instant riches lead to big problems, and the injustices that came with government interference made life for the Indians less than ideal. And people started dying…slowly at first. The murders continued to pile up, and it took years to bring the guilty to justice. Many tribes have their own courts and justice systems, they educate their children, and the work together to make life more rewarding for everyone. But in the early 1920’s, the time period the book covers, children were treated with more respect and dignity than the Osage. They could not be in charge of their own finances, having to have  sponsor to regulate how they spent the vast amounts of money that were coming in as more and more oil was discovered. Many of the Osage lost everything, because they believed their sponsors were looking out for their best interests. Greed and bigotry killed the Osage…men just helped it along.

 

The book was a real eye-opener into the life of Native Americans during the 1920’s, and the Osage undoubtedly had it better that some other tribes. The Civil War wasn’t a far-distant memory, and the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, just 50-some years earlier. The F.B.I seemed clumsy and crude back then, not the sleek power it is today. But the men who were agents worked for the good of all men, and tried to stamp out crime wherever they found it. Things were definitely moving in the right direction.

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