Killers of the Flower Moon: Setting 1 key example

The setting is key to understanding this book because the string of murders the book centers on are directly tied to the history of the land where they took place. Osage County was the tiny piece of traditional Osage land to which the Osage were confined under the United States' Indian Removal policy. The U.S. government's goal in moving all of the Osage to this region was transparently sinister. The fertile land where many of them had been living would now belong to the U.S., and the Osage would be forced to make do with leftover land that no one could farm. However, what later became clear was that the rocky land sat atop huge oil deposits. The Osage had legal claim to the oil deposits, which quickly made them richer than the U.S. ever intended them to be. Obsessed with gaining the wealth for themselves, white Oklahomans began marrying and murdering the Osage to gain legal rights to the oil.

Grann includes photos of the region in the book to demonstrate the immense changes it has undergone over the years. Once sparsely populated and rural, Osage County saw rapid urban development in the years around the oil rush. Following the Great Depression, the fall of oil prices, and the murders of many important community members, the county turned from a booming population center into the site of many ghost towns. People still live there today, but there is little sign of the grand houses Mollie Burkhart and other wealthy Osage people once owned.