AN ACT OF GOD OR MAN?

A coroner’s inquest, composed of jurors and led by a justice of the peace, was hastily convened at the ravine. Inquests were a remnant of a time when ordinary citizens largely assumed the burden of investigating crimes and maintaining order. For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression. Instead, citizens responded to a hue and cry by chasing after suspects. Benjamin N. Cardozo, the future Supreme Court justice, once noted that these pursuits were made “not faintly and with lagging steps, but honestly and bravely and with whatever implements and facilities are convenient and at hand.”

Only in the mid-nineteenth century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots—after dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state—did police departments emerge in the United States. By the time of Anna’s death, the informal system of citizen policing had been displaced, but vestiges of it remained, especially in places that still seemed to exist on the periphery of geography and history.

The justice of the peace selected the jurors from among the white men at the ravine, including Mathis. They were charged with determining whether Anna had died by an act of God or man, and if it had been a felony, then they were tasked with trying to identify the principals and the accessories to the crime. Two doctors, the brothers James and David Shoun, who cared for Mollie’s family, had been summoned to perform an autopsy. Leaning over the body, with members of the inquest huddled around them, they began to diagnose the dead.

Each corpse tells its own story. A fractured hyoid—a bone in the neck that supports the tongue—can indicate that a person has been strangled. Marks on the neck can further reveal whether the killer used his bare hands or a cord. Even a victim’s torn fingernail can speak of a fateful struggle. An influential nineteenth-century manual on medical jurisprudence cited the saying “A medical man, when he sees a dead body, should notice everything.”

The Shoun brothers set up a plank as a makeshift table. From a medical bag, they removed a few primitive instruments, including a saw. The heat slithered into the shade. Flies swarmed. The doctors examined the clothes Anna wore—her bloomers, her skirt—searching for unusual tears or stains. Finding nothing, they tried to determine the time of death. This is more difficult than generally presumed, particularly after a person has been dead for several days. In the nineteenth century, scientists believed that they had solved the riddle by studying the phases a body passes through after death: the stiffening of the limbs (rigor mortis), the corpse’s changing temperature (algor mortis), and the discoloring of the skin from stagnant blood (livor mortis). But pathologists soon realized that too many variables—from the humidity in the air to the type of clothing on the corpse—affect the rate of decomposition to allow a precise calculation. Still, a rough estimate of the time of death can be made, and the Shouns determined that Anna had been deceased between five and seven days.

The doctors shifted Anna’s head slightly in the wooden box. Part of her scalp slipped off, revealing a perfectly round hole in the back of her skull. “She’s been shot!” one of the Shouns exclaimed.

There was a stirring among the men. Looking closer, they saw that the hole’s circumference was barely that of a pencil. Mathis thought that a .32-caliber bullet had caused the wound. As the men traced the path of the bullet—it had entered just below the crown, on a downward trajectory—there was no longer any doubt: Anna’s death had been cold-blooded murder.

Lawmen were then still largely amateurs. They rarely attended training academies or steeped themselves in the emerging scientific methods of detection, such as the analysis of fingerprints and blood patterns. Frontier lawmen, in particular, were primarily gunfighters and trackers; they were expected to deter crimes and to apprehend a known gunman alive if possible, dead if necessary. “An officer was then literally the law and nothing but his judgment and his trigger finger stood between him and extermination,” the Tulsa Daily World said in 1928, after the death of a veteran lawman who’d worked in the Osage territory. “It was often a case of a lone man against a pack of cunning devils.” Because these enforcers received pitiful salaries and were prized for being quick draws, it’s not surprising that the boundary between good lawmen and bad lawmen was porous. The leader of the Dalton Gang, an infamous nineteenth-century band of outlaws, once served as the main lawman on the Osage reservation.

At the time of Anna’s murder, the Osage County sheriff, who carried the bulk of responsibility for maintaining law and order in the area, was a fifty-eight-year-old, three-hundred-pound frontiersman named Harve M. Freas. A 1916 book about the history of Oklahoma described Freas as a “terror to evil doers.” But there were also murmurings that he was cozy with criminal elements—that he gave free rein to gamblers and to bootleggers like Kelsie Morrison and Henry Grammer, a rodeo champion who had once served time for murder and who controlled the local distribution of moonshine. One of Grammer’s workers later admitted to authorities, “I had the assurance that if I was ever arrested…I would be turned out in five minutes.” A group of citizens from Osage County had previously issued a resolution—on behalf of “religion, law enforcement, home decency and morality”—stating, “That the people who believe a sworn officer of the Law should enforce the Law are hereby urged to see or write Sheriff Freas, at once, and urge upon him to do his sworn duty.”

When Sheriff Freas was informed about Anna’s murder, he was already preoccupied with Whitehorn’s slaying, and he initially sent one of his deputies to collect evidence. Fairfax had a town marshal, the equivalent of a police chief, who joined the deputy at the ravine while the Shoun brothers were still conducting the autopsy. To identify the murder weapon, the lawmen needed to extract the bullet that was apparently lodged in Anna’s skull. Using their saw, the Shouns cut through her cranium, then carefully lifted her brain and placed it on the plank. “The brains were in such a bad shape,” David Shoun recalled. “You couldn’t trace the bullet at all.” He picked up a stick and probed the brain. The bullet, he announced, was nowhere to be found.

The lawmen went down to the creek, scouring the murder scene. By a rock on the bank were smears of blood, marking where Anna’s body had lain. There was no sign of the bullet, but one of the lawmen noticed a bottle on the ground, which was partially filled with a clear liquid. It smelled like moonshine. The lawmen surmised that Anna had been sitting on the rock, drinking, when someone came up behind her and shot her at close range, causing her to topple over.

The marshal spotted two distinct sets of car tracks running between the road and the gulch. He called out, and the deputy sheriff and the inquest members rushed over. It looked as though both cars had come into the gulch from the southeast, then circled back.

No other evidence was collected. The lawmen were untrained in forensic methods and didn’t make a cast impression of the tire marks, or dust the bottle for fingerprints, or check Anna’s body for gunpowder residue. They didn’t even photograph the crime scene, which, in any case, had already been contaminated by the many observers.

Someone, though, retrieved one of Anna’s earrings from her body and brought it to Mollie’s mother, who was too ill to venture to the creek. Lizzie instantly recognized it. Anna was dead. As with all Osage, the birth of her children had been the greatest blessing of Wah’Kon-Tah, the mysterious life force that pervades the sun and the moon and the earth and the stars; the force around which the Osage had structured their lives for centuries, hoping to bring some order out of the chaos and confusion on earth; the force that was there but not there—invisible, remote, giving, awesome, unanswering. Many Osage had given up their traditional beliefs, but Lizzie had held on to them. (A U.S. government official had once complained that women like Lizzie “keep up the old superstitions and laugh down modern ideas and customs.”) Now someone, something, had taken Lizzie’s oldest and most favored daughter before her allotted time—a sign, perhaps, that Wah’Kon-Tah had withdrawn his blessings and that the world was slipping into even greater chaos. Lizzie’s health grew even worse, as if grief were its own disease.

Mollie relied on Ernest for support. A lawyer who knew them both noted that his “devotion to his Indian wife and his children is unusual…and striking.” He comforted Mollie as she threw herself into organizing Anna’s funeral. There were flowers to be purchased, along with a white metal coffin and a marble tombstone. Undertakers charged the Osage exorbitant rates for a funeral, trying to gouge them, and this was no exception. The undertaker demanded $1,450 for the casket, $100 for preparing and embalming the body, and $25 for the rental of a hearse. By the time he was done tallying the accessories, including gloves for the grave digger, the total cost was astronomical. As a lawyer in town said, “It was getting so that you could not bury an Osage Indian at a cost of under $6,000”—a sum that, adjusted for inflation, is the equivalent of nearly $80,000 today.

The funeral was arranged to reflect the family’s Osage and Catholic traditions. Mollie, who had gone to a missionary school in Pawhuska, regularly attended Mass. She liked to sit in the pews as the Sunday morning light came through the windows and listen to the sermon of the priest. She also liked to socialize among friends, and there was plenty of that on Sundays.

The funeral service for Anna began at the church. William Hale, Ernest’s uncle, was very close to Anna and Mollie’s family, and he served as one of the pallbearers. The priest chanted the rhythmic thirteenth-century hymn “Dies Irae,” which culminates with a supplication:

SWEET JESUS LORD MOST BLEST,

GRANT THE DEAD ETERNAL REST.

After the priest sprinkled holy water over Anna’s casket, Mollie guided her family and the other mourners to a cemetery in Gray Horse, a quiet, isolated spot overlooking the endless prairie. Mollie’s father and her sister Minnie were buried there in adjoining plots, and beside them was a freshly dug pit, damp and dark, awaiting Anna’s casket, which had been transported to the edge of the grave site. Her tombstone bore the inscription “Meet Me in Heaven.” Ordinarily at the cemetery the lid of a coffin was lifted a final time before interment, allowing loved ones to say good-bye, but the condition of Anna’s body made that impossible. More troubling, her face couldn’t be painted to signal her tribe and clan—a tradition at Osage funerals. If this ritual of ornamentation didn’t occur, Mollie feared Anna’s spirit might be lost. Still, Mollie and her family placed enough food in the casket for Anna’s three-day journey to what the Osage refer to as the Happy Hunting Ground.

The older mourners, like Mollie’s mother, began to recite Osage prayer-songs, hoping that Wah’Kon-Tah would hear them. The great historian and writer John Joseph Mathews (1894–1979), who was part Osage, documented many of the tribe’s traditions. Describing a typical prayer, he wrote, “It filled my little boy’s soul with fear and bittersweetness, and exotic yearning, and when it had ended and I lay there in my exultant fear-trance, I hoped fervently that there would be more of it, and yet I was afraid that there might be. It seemed to me later, after I had begun to reason, that this prayer-song, this chant, this soul-stirring petition, always ended before it was finished, in a sob of frustration.”

At the grave site, standing with Ernest, Mollie could hear the old people’s song of death, their chants interspersed with weeping. Oda Brown, Anna’s ex-husband, was so distraught that he stepped away. Precisely at noon—as the sun, the greatest manifestation of the Great Mystery, reached its zenith—men took hold of the casket and began to lower it into the hole. Mollie watched the glistening white coffin sink into the ground until the long, haunting wails were replaced by the sound of earth clapping against the lid.