Kalani Queypo - The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: Oil, Greed, and Murder on the Osage Reservation

Originally published as The Deaths of Sybil Bolton by Times Books,

A division of Random House, Inc.

1994, 1999 by Dennis McAuliffe, Jr.

Foreword 2021 by David Grann

Council Oak Books paperback edition of Bloodland published in 1999

This edition published in 2021 by Council Oak Books

An imprint of Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-64160-416-1

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

The Pawhuska Journal-Capital: Excerpt from article dated June 6, 1923, regarding the wedding of Sybil and Harry Bolton; excerpt from Despondent Takes Life by Shooting: Death Came Quick from November 8, 1925; excerpt from Bolton Funeral Was Held Today; Large Body of Friends in Attendance from November 12, 1925. Reprinted by permission of The Pawhuska Journal-Capital.

The Topeka Capital-Journal: Excerpts from Barber, 91, Cutting Since He Was a Little Shaver. Reprinted by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

Cover design: Sadie Teper

Cover photo of Sybil Bolton and her daughter, Kathleen Bolton McAuliffe, courtesy of the family

Interior design: Jonathan Hahn

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

To the real hero of this story,

My beautiful wife,

Fleur,

Who set me on this journey,

Then held us all together as it unfolded.

They plucked our fruit,

They cut our branches,

They burned our trunk,

But they could not kill our roots.

MAYAN INDIAN SAYING

BY DAVID GRANN

Author of Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

On May 21, 1921, a thirty-four-year-old Osage woman named Anna Brown disappeared from her home in Oklahoma. Like other members of the Osage Nation, she possessed a fortune. In the early 1870s, the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties. In one year alone, the two thousand or so registered members of the Osage Nation took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million. The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world.

After Brown disappeared, her family searched everywhere for her. A week later, her body was found in a ravine. She had been shot in the back of the head. Soon after, Annas mother, Lizzie, died of suspected poisoning. Then Annas younger sister, Rita, and Ritas husband were killedtheir house blown up while they were sleeping. And it wasnt only this family that was being targeted; other Osage were being systematically slaughtered for their oil money. Although the FBI solved a few of these murders, many were never properly investigated.

In 1991, Dennis McAuliffe Jr., an award-winning journalist and editor at the Washington Post, began to look into one of these suspicious deathsthat of his Osage grandmother, Sybil Bolton. Growing up, McAuliffe had known little about his grandmother, whom a local reporter had described as one of the most beautiful girls ever reared in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. In 1925, she was found dead, at the age of only twenty-one. McAuliffe had been told the cause was kidney disease, and so he believed until, one day, he stumbled upon evidence that this was a lie.

Drawing on his well-honed abilities as a reporter, he set out to uncover what really happened to her. He spent years tracking down lost relatives and searching through cluttered archives. His quest led him into an even deeper thicket of lies, one that cloaked the breadth of the Osage Reign of Terror.

Through his remarkable research and compassion, he has shed an essential light on this past. His exquisitely written account, The Deaths of Sybil Bolton, was first published in 1994, and now has thankfully been reprinted in this new edition by Chicago Review Press. The work contains a moving autobiography along with a true whodunit. And it serves as powerful testimonytestimony of one of the most sinister crimes in American history, which for too long has been erased from official accounts, like the death of Sybil Bolton. McAuliffe has helped to embed this history where it belongsin our conscience.

Sometimes when I look at my infant son, I see in him America in miniature. His tiny body holds an immense history, not only of the young, immigrant nation that grew to greatness but also of the ancient, indigenous people for whom the American Dream was a nightmare, and still is.

To the eyes of his father, he is a beautiful baby. But not all that long ago, the U.S. government would have referred to him in official documentsas it did to one of his great-grandfathersas a half-breed, breed for short. Members of polite, even religious, society would have called him a savage. Now, in keeping with the socially correct sensitivity toward ethnic groups (foreigners, they used to be called)in the same spirit that substituted the words African American and Black for Negro, and other namesmy son and I are considered mixed-blood Native Americans.

Names have changed, but not attitudes toward Indians. Like his father, my son will one day abruptly halt conversations by saying he is an Osage Indian. He will hear inherently racist remarks that his strawberry-blond hair and fair skin do not look Indian, but perhaps that accounts for his brown eyes. He will be asked what degree of Indian blood he has. I will teach him to answer the way I do now (I didnt always): dont ask me how much Indian blood I have until you ask a Black what his blood quantum is. My appearance may not be Indian, but my heart isand it is what is in your heart, not what pumps through it, that makes you an Indian.

My sons heritage has placed upon small shoulders a burden so great that a mighty nation has been unable to carry it, or chooses not to. He must find a way to balance the two sides of himself, to find a place in his life for the Indian part of him, which continues to have no place, or part, in his society. That is his challenge, and his curse. That is my gift to him.

As much as a father can, I will see to it that my son does not shirk from his responsibility by ignoring his true identityas I did. If he does, I fear, he will be doomed to repeat the upheaval that shook me, literally, to my roots. That was my grandmothers gift to me.

My life, and my mothers, are testament that you cannot ignore who you are, and that the shunned side of you will one day rise up to be recognized. The truth about oneself, I learned painfully, is like one of my sons new teeth cutting through his flesh as it pushes to the surface: It originates seemingly out of nothing, with which it crafts the material that makes it nearly indestructible; it proceeds to fill a space where, once, a void had been; the experience is excruciating, especially whensuddenly, unexpectedly, out of nowhereit surfaces to correct a lifelong lie. Once it appears, you are never the same again, but you get used to it. While it may be ugly, it is not nearly as ugly as the lie it pierced.