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Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises Podcast. I'm Ambre Moton, the producer and editor of the show, filling in for Nat Cardona who's taking some well-deserved time off. If you haven't listened to the last episode introducing our latest topic, The Osage Reign of Terror. Go check it out before listening to this one.
It was considered medicinal. And so, of course, it wasn't until the invention of things like kerosene lamps and the internal combustion engine that that oil became more valuable. And so the first the first commercial oil well in Oklahoma or what became Oklahoma, this was completed in 1897, just outside the Osage Reservation, just on the eastern edge of it.
So a lot of that was out of their hands. And also, I think a lot of them, especially the older ones, probably didn't even really completely understand what was going on. But when they first moved there, they probably mainly wanted to just be left alone and and it pretty became pretty soon became apparent that they were not going to be able to do that.There's not really a definite date.
A very quick reminder about the Osage as mineral rights, the original allotments of the mineral rights were divided into over 2200 shares, which were called head rates as people died, had babies, got married, etc. those rights began moving around and you had some people with multiple rights and some with fractional rights. Making things even more complicated was the ability to pass had rights to non-tribal areas.
But the murders were, you know, committed by I mean, there was a conspiracy involved. But at the same time, there were a lot of people just individually taking the opportunity they saw to to cheat and exploit and white people taking the opportunity to cheat and exploit their Osage neighbors there in Osage County.
Many of the murders, as it turns out, were committed very sadly by people They trusted, people they knew, family members, close family members, spouses, people who who would then have access to their oil wealth, which was really the motive behind it all.Officially, this is this is where it's interesting, the number that has been tossed around, you know, for years, even before the grand book was was 24. And where that.