Savage Wars And Sinister Crimes

My reading pile is growing like Jack’s Beanstalk and will surely burst through my ceiling and pierce the clouds. I’m going to have to be disciplined here. Flock-shooting will drive me nuts and break the bank. One book at a time. Maybe two. Or three…

Deuce Richardson scouted up a dark tale from the Heartland, due for release next month. From The New Yorker:

In the early twentieth century, the members of the Osage Nation became the richest people per capita in the world, after oil was discovered under their reservation, in Oklahoma. Then they began to be mysteriously murdered off. In 1923, after the death toll reached more than two dozen, the case was taken up by the Bureau of Investigation, then an obscure branch of the Justice Department, which was later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The case was among the F.B.I.’s first major homicide investigations. After J. Edgar Hoover was appointed the bureau’s director, in 1924, he sent a team of undercover operatives, including a Native American agent, to the Osage reservation.

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

Click on the link to the magazine for an excerpt.

I’ve been studying partisan warfare in the American Civil War lately, for a couple of purposes. I’m developing another post in my series “Natural Born Killers” on the Kentucky confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson. Thomas Mays, the author of one of a couple of strong biographies of that benighted bastard has a new book coming out in April — American Guerrillas: From the French and Indian Wars to Iraq and Afghanistan—How Americans Fight Unconventional Wars.

American Guerrillas is a compelling narrative history of how Americans have fought unconventional warfare from the French and Indian Wars and the Revolution through the anti-insurgent campaigns of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A timely volume, the author provides the reader with a concise and engaging story of how the American approach to guerrilla warfare has been molded and executed, and how these small scale engagements have been integral to the success of our nation’s larger battles.

I’m promising myself to hold off on that one. I’m — obviously — already dialed in on its thesis. Oh, but it’s hard…