Thursday, September 14, 2017

the last book I ever read (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, excerpt two)

from Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann:

Mollie pressed the authorities to investigate Anna’s murder, but most officials seemed to have little concern for what they deemed a “dead Injun.” So Mollie turned to Ernest’s uncle, William Hale. His business interests now dominated the county, and he had become a powerful local advocate for law and order—for the protection of what he called “God-fearing souls.”

Hale, who had an owlish face, stiff black hair, and small, alert eyes set in shaded hollows, had settled on the reservation nearly two decades earlier. Like a real-life version of Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen, he seemed to have come out of nowhere—a man with no known past. Arriving in the territory with little more than the clothes on his back and a word Old Testament, he embarked on what a person who knew him well called a “fight for life and fortune” in a “raw state of civilization.”



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