WOW. This is a period of American history I bet you’ve never heard of. The Osage Nation narrowly survived a series of targeted murders against their people. It took the will of early FBI investigators to uncover the gruesome truth beneath never-ending layers of corruption in the region.
“Over the sixteen-year period from 1907 to 1923, 605 Osages died, averaging about 38 per year, an annual death rate of about 19 per 1,000. The national death rate now is about 8.5 per 1,000; in the 1920s, when counting methods were not so precise and the statistics were segregated into white and black racial categories, it averaged almost 12 per 1,000 for white. By all rights, their higher standard of living should have brought the Osages a lower death rate than America’s white. Yet Osages were dying at more than one-and-a-half times the national rate…”
Carissa W Tomas, PhD 