In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land.Narration
Good lasts, it’s the evil that dies,Old Osage Saying
There had been signs of a world outside, intruding on the last vestiges of the frontier: a telephone pole in the distance, a whiff of exhaust from an occasional motor car.Narration
What is family but a chain of stories, each interlinked with the next?Narration
A photograph is a secret about a secret.Narration
If this mystery is solvable, we will solve it.Tom White
There are so many suspicious deaths, aren’t there?Narration
Who are we? That is the question that will not go away.Mollie Burkhart, remembering an Osage elder
Those who forget the past, stay in the past.Osage saying
The discovery had been made not by a divining rod or a psychic vision but by a standard tool of an emerging age: a drill.Narration
The people would live through the winter, and in the spring the flowers would rise out of the plains again.Narration
I’m not a good man, but I’m not a bad man, either.Tom White
I don’t want to know. Some secrets are too terrible to bear.Ernest Burkhart
And because it was a headline, it was as if it had been staged for everyone to see, a taunt stenciled on the moon.Narration
They had drawn first blood which, under the Apache and Comanche norms that still prevailed in the Southwest, meant that the enemy had been warned.Narration