Transcript

1.23.26 · History Hour

0:02
Speaker 1: Hello to you and welcome. This is a radioized history
0:07
show and I'm your reader and host today, Joseph Bolt,
0:13
so happy to be with you for this time and
0:17
as we always need to do, I just want to
0:20
remind you that RADIOI is listener driven, so that means
0:26
you and we welcome any of your comments or suggestions
0:31
about our programming. So if you have any of those,
0:35
please call us at A five nine four two two
0:39
six three nine zero and let us know what you're thinking.
0:45
As you know, RADIOI is a reading service that's intended
0:49
for people who are blind or have other disabilities to
0:52
make it difficult to read printed material. I'll cite the
0:57
sources for today's reading as we go along. So this
1:05
is November, and as I was doing my research for
1:11
something to present to you this week, I came across
1:15
the fact that in nineteen ninety Congress passed, along with
1:22
President George Bush, a law into the books that the
1:31
month of November from then on would be a National
1:38
American Indian Heritage Month, also known as Native American Indian Month.
1:48
So with that, I thought, well, let's do some stories
1:52
on our indigenous people, the Native Americans. And the first
2:00
one that I'd like to talk about is from a
2:05
recent movie that you may have seen, The Killers of
2:10
the Flyer Moon, which Killers of the Flyer Moon rather,
2:17
and it was a book first and then a movie
2:22
informing us of a great tragedy in the oce Age
2:27
Indian tribe. So let me read this story to you,
2:34
an abridged version, but it will give you an idea
2:38
if you don't know already know the story, it will
2:40
give you an idea of how things went badly for them.
2:46
And then I have a couple other Native Americans that
2:51
I want to end with. In nineteen ninety, Congress passed
2:57
and President George HW. Bush signed into law joint resolution
3:03
designating the month of November as the first National American
3:06
Indian Heritage Month, which we just talked about now. In
3:10
the nineteen twenties, a woman by the name of Molly
3:15
Burkhardt and her family seemed to have an especially horrific
3:21
run of bad luck. In a matter of months. In
3:26
nineteen twenty one, her sister, cousin, mother all died under
3:31
sinister circumstances, and then Molly herself started to feel strangely ill.
3:39
Their family's misfortune was not a coincidence. But part of
3:42
the Osage Indian murders, which again were recently depicted in
3:48
the nineteen or rather twenty twenty three Martin Scorsoni movie
3:53
Killers of the Flower Moon. Far from random, the o
3:58
Sage Indian murder were a concerted effort by Molly's husband's
4:04
uncle to steal the profits that her family made from
4:10
oil on their land in Oklahoma. He and other powerful
4:15
local men were willing to go to great links to
4:18
take the Osage Native Americans wealth, and dozens of innocent
4:23
people would be killed by the time the murders ended.
4:28
So who was Molly Burkhart and what happened to her
4:33
in real life? Though the film Hymn's close to the truth,
4:41
it does leave out some parts of Burkhardt's life. This
4:46
is the full story of Molly Burkhart, from her doomed
4:50
marriage to Ernest Burkhart to her life after the Osage Murders.
4:59
Born on the December one, eighteen eighty six, Molly Burkhart
5:04
grew up on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma. Like
5:10
other indigenous tribes, the Osage have been forced out of
5:14
their native land in Kansas by white settlers, but unlike
5:20
most other tribes. The Osage happened to settle on the
5:24
oil rich lands of the Osage Hills, and in the
5:31
Osage Allotment Act of nineteen o six, they ensured they
5:38
had the right to own any sub surface materials and
5:44
minerals found in their and on their land. As such,
5:51
o Sage tribal members who owned oil rich land were
5:55
awarded a head right to their profits. Though these head
6:02
rights were hereditary, Osage people didn't have free reign with
6:06
the prophets. The U S Government assigned white guardians who
6:11
often withheld or even stole money. Still, many Osage people
6:16
became millionaires. Molly Burkhardt's family was also very well off.
6:24
Molly attended Catholic school, learned English, and could afford small
6:31
luxuries like hiring a driver. In fact, that's how Molly
6:36
met her white husband, Ernest Burkhardt. But Ernest was not
6:43
what he seemed to be. He was the nephew of
6:48
William King Hale, a greedy local man who orchestrated the
6:55
Osage Indian murders to get to their head rights. Hale
7:01
encouraged Ernest romance with Molly, and the two were married
7:08
in nineteen seventeen. They had three children together, one of
7:13
whom died during childhood. After a few years of their marriage,
7:20
the Osage Indian murders began. Not long after Molly Burkhardt's wedding.
7:28
Her family members started to die. In nineteen eighteen, her
7:35
sister Minnie died of a mysterious wasting illness, and in
7:41
nineteen twenty one, three years later, another one of her sisters,
7:46
Anna Brown, was found shot to death in a ravine.
7:52
Molly's cousin, Charles Whitehorn, was also killed that same year,
7:57
as was her mother, Lizzie q Q Kyle. Another cousin, Henry Rohan,
8:05
was killed in nineteen twenty three, as was another one
8:09
of Molly's sisters, Rita Smith, who died alongside her husband
8:15
and their housekeeper when their house was bombed. In the
8:21
early nineteen twenties, over two dozen members of the Osage
8:24
tribe were shot, stabbed, beaten, and bombed during the so
8:30
called Reign of Terror, and including the people who died
8:36
under mysterious circumstances, the Osage Indian murders included over sixty
8:43
victims total, all of them had connections to the Osage
8:48
head Rights and Molly Burkhardt feared she'd be next. According
8:57
to Killers of the Flower Moon by David Graham, Molly
9:02
told her priests that she feared her life was in danger.
9:06
The Office of Indian Affairs also began to suspect that Molly,
9:11
a diabetic, was being poisoned by injections of what was
9:15
supposed to be insolent. Molly and other Osage people used
9:23
their wealth to hire private detectives, but no one seemed
9:28
to be able to figure out what was going on.
9:32
In fact, a few white men who tried to help
9:34
the tribe ended up dead themselves. A white friend of
9:40
the Osage tribe named Barney McBride was fatally stabbed in
9:45
nineteen twenty two after he traveled to Washington, d c.
9:51
To seek help, and another tribal ally named W. W. Vaughn,
9:57
died in nineteen twenty three after he had he was
10:00
apparently thrown from a train. What's more, the evidence Vaughan
10:08
had collected had vanished. In nineteen twenty five, the Bureau
10:14
of Investigation, the precursor to the FBI, finally got involved.
10:23
They sent special Agent Tom White to Oklahoma to investigate
10:28
the murders, and White's investigation quickly began to focus on
10:33
Earnest Burkhart and William King Hale. By following the money,
10:41
the investigators realized that the head rights of many of
10:44
the victims had passed on to Molly Burkhart and her husband,
10:49
and if Molly died, the money would then go to
10:52
her husband Earnest. With investigators drawing closer to the truth,
10:59
Ernest decided to confess. Ultimately, Ernest, Hale and two others
11:07
were convicted for their involvement in the Osage Indian murders
11:11
and sentenced to life in prison. However, Ernest and Hale
11:17
were later paroled and one man's conviction was overturned as
11:22
he promised immunity for testifying, or rather he was promised
11:27
immunity for testifying for the prosecution. So whatever happened to
11:35
Molly Burkhart after Ernest Burkhardt confessed to his role in
11:42
the Osage Indian murders, Molly divorced him. That said, it's
11:49
still unclear if Ernest played a direct role in Molly's poisoning.
11:57
Though he gave her a whiskey laced with he may
12:01
not have known what was in it. There's some suggestion
12:06
that Hale thought his nephew was too weak willed to
12:11
murder his own wife, and Molly and Ernest's granddaughter, Margie,
12:18
stated that she believed that her grandparents loved each other
12:23
in spite of everything. They couldn't understand why she loved Ernest,
12:29
and Ernest loved her, and they couldn't understand that relationship,
12:36
a quote from Margie Burkhardt in People Magazine in twenty
12:42
twenty three. But once Molly Burkhard divorced her husband, she
12:49
didn't look back. Whenever her husband was mentioned after that,
12:55
authors wrote, Molly recoiled in horror, and she never spoke
13:03
his name again. She did remarry a man named John
13:10
Cobb in nineteen twenty eight, and was eventually restored to competency,
13:16
which meant that she could control her own money without
13:19
an appointed guardian. Molly Berkhardt's fortune eventually passed on to
13:27
the children she had had with Earnest, but as time passed,
13:34
the osage head writes became less valuable. The Great Depression
13:42
took its toll, as did the steady shrinking of the
13:45
oil industry in the region. By the time Molly Burkhardt
13:51
died in nineteen thirty seven at the age of fifty.
13:55
She lived a life of incredible contrasts. She'd been born
14:01
in a wigwam, but grew up to live in a mansion.
14:07
She started her life speaking only Osage, but became fluent
14:13
in English. She experienced great love, but also terrible tragedy,
14:20
heartbreak and loss, and an almost unthinkable betrayal. That story
14:36
came from all That's Interesting dot com. The Real story
14:42
of Molly Burkhart that helped inspire Killers of the Flower
14:45
Moon written by Collina Fraga, edited by John Keouroski in
14:52
February of twenty twenty five, and from the website history
14:57
dot Com. The FBI's first big case, the Osage Murders,
15:04
and that was written by Christopher Kleine in May of
15:08
twenty twenty five. Well, here is another story about an
15:16
inspiring Native American woman overlooked in the history books. When
15:26
twenty one year old Susan Laflesch first stepped off the
15:33
train in Philadelphia in early October of eighteen eighty six,
15:41
nearly thirteen hundred miles from her Missouri home, she'd already
15:50
far surpassed the country's wildest expectations for a member of
15:57
the so called Vanishing race. Born during the Omaha's summer
16:08
buffalo hunt in June of eighteen sixty five. The Flesh
16:15
graduated second in her class from the Hampton Normal and
16:22
Agricultural Institute in Virginia now Hampton University. She was fluent
16:33
in English and her native tongue, and she could speak
16:38
French in Otto as well. She quoted Scripture and Shakespeare,
16:49
spent her free time learning to paint and play the piano.
16:55
She was driven by her father's warning to his young daughters,
17:03
do you always want to be simply called those Indians?
17:09
Or do you want to go to school and be
17:12
somebody in the world. La Flesh grew up in a
17:20
world of fracturing travel traditions. Her father led one faction
17:27
of the tribe, which believed that the Omaha needed to
17:32
start accepting some white customs. The other faction, led by
17:39
medicinemen and traditionalists, called their rivals log Cabins the village
17:47
of make believe white men. Omaha means against the current,
17:58
and few members of the tribe I have embodied the
18:01
name better than La Flesh. The Flesh saw the need
18:05
for some modernization, and she saw the need for a
18:10
Native American to lead it. As a child, she remembered
18:16
sitting with an old, sick woman who was waiting for
18:21
a white doctor to treat her. Four times a messenger
18:26
was sent. Four times. The doctor said he'd be there soon.
18:34
Not long before sunrise, the woman died. The doctor never came.
18:42
The episode would haunt La Flesh for years to come,
18:46
but it would also steal her. It was only an Indian,
18:52
she would later recall, and it did not matter well.
19:01
Determined to make a difference, the Flesh enrolled in the
19:05
Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, the first medical school in
19:11
the country established for women, in eighteen eighty six. At
19:18
the age of twenty one, she took the train across
19:22
the country so that she could become a doctor. Few
19:28
women of any race in the late nineteenth century took
19:33
such a step. At the time, male doctors had claimed
19:38
that academic stress could make women infertile. Undeterred, La Flesh
19:48
graduated first in her class and became the first Native
19:54
American woman to earn a medical degree. She could suit
20:00
her wounds, deliver babies, and treat tuberculosis, but as a woman,
20:07
she could not vote, and as an Indian, she could
20:13
not call herself a citizen under American law. Though she
20:21
was encouraged to practice on the East Coast, she chose
20:25
to return home to the Omaha Reservation. None of the
20:31
challenges of her education could fully prepare LaFlesche for what
20:36
she encountered upon her return to the reservation as a
20:42
physician for the Omaha Agency, which was operated by the
20:47
Office of Indian Affairs. Soon after she opened the doors
20:53
to her new office in the government boarding school, the
20:58
tribe began to file in. Many of them were sick
21:02
with tuberculosis or cholera. Others simply looked for a clean
21:07
place to rest. She became their doctor, but in many
21:12
ways their lawyer, their accountant, their priest in political liaison.
21:18
So many of the sick insisted on Doctor Susan, as
21:23
they called her, that her white counterpart suddenly quit, making
21:30
her the only physician on a reservation stretching nearly thirteen
21:34
hundred and fifty miles, or rather square miles. She dreamed
21:42
of one day building a hospital for her tribe, but
21:46
for now, she made house calls on foot, walking miles
21:50
through wind and snow on horseback, and later in her buggy,
21:54
traveling for hours to reach a single patient. But even
22:00
after risking her own life to reach a distant patient,
22:04
she would often often encounter Omaha's who rejected her diagnosis
22:09
and questioned everything she'd learned in a school so far away.
22:16
Over the next quarter century, the Flesh fought a daily
22:20
battle with the ills of her people. She led temperance
22:25
campaigns on the reservation, remembering a childhood when white whiskey
22:30
peddlers didn't loiter around the reservation, and clothing wasn't pawned
22:35
and land wasn't sold for more drink. She advocated proper
22:41
hygiene and the use of screen doors to keep out
22:45
disease carrying flies. The Flesh again shattered stereotypes by continuing
22:55
to work after her eighteen ninety four marriage to Henry Peacock,
23:03
a sue from South Dakota, and the birth of their
23:08
two boys at a time when women were expected to
23:10
be full time mothers and homemakers. If you're looking for
23:15
someone who was leaning in a century before that term
23:20
was coined, you need to look no further than Susan
23:24
La Flesh, says Joy Joe cirita, author of A Warrior
23:30
of the People. How Susan La Flesh overcame racial and
23:35
gender inequality to become America's first Indian doctor. Storta goes
23:43
on to say she faced a constant struggle to serve
23:46
her people and serve her husband and children. She was
23:49
haunted that she was spreading herself so thin that she
23:53
wasn't the doctor, mother and wife she knew she could be.
24:00
The very fears haunting her as a woman in this
24:03
closing years of the nineteenth century, or those still haunting
24:06
women in the opening years of the twenty first century.
24:12
The evils of alcohol that Lafleche railed against came into
24:16
her own home as her husband struggled with the bottle.
24:22
He contracted the tuberculosis exacerbated by his alcoholism and died
24:29
in nineteen o five, leaving La Fleche a widow with
24:33
two small boys. By this point, the physician needed some
24:37
healing herself, as her long hours led to chronic pain
24:42
and respiratory issues. She pressed on, however, and in nineteen
24:47
thirteen had raised enough money to open a hospital near
24:51
Walt Hill, Nebraska, the first such facility to be built
24:56
on reservation land without any support from the federal government.
25:02
Her hospital was open to anyone who was ill, no
25:04
matter their age, gender or skin color. On September eighteenth,
25:12
nineteen fifteen, the flesh passed away at the age of
25:17
fifty and was eulogized by both local priests and members
25:21
of the Omaha Stata. Says quote. When I got into
25:27
the research, I was stunned by how deeply entrenched gender
25:32
bias was. In the Victorian age, white women were largely
25:37
expected to just raise children and maintain a safe Christian home.
25:43
Only one can imagine where that bar was set for
25:47
a Native American woman. One more quick story about an
25:54
inspiring Native American woman by the name of Eliza Laida
25:59
Burton Conley, who realized that white developers wanted to snatch
26:03
up her tribes ancestral burial ground, and she resolved to
26:08
defend it. Conley got a law degree no small Feet
26:12
for Omen in nineteen o two and physically guarded the
26:15
cemetery's entrance with her musket. I'll go to Washington and
26:19
personally defend the cemetery, Conley avowed. No lawyer could plead
26:24
for the grave of my mother as I could. No
26:26
lawyer could have the heart interest in the case that
26:29
I have born to a mother from the Windot tribe
26:33
and an English farmer around eighteen sixty eight. Conley grew
26:37
up in Kansas. She later learned that some developers wanted
26:41
to repurpose the Huron Indian Cemetery located in Kansas City.
26:45
As a city grew, it had become a valuable piece
26:48
of land. Conley had a personal stake in the matter.
26:51
Her family had buried her mother and one of her
26:54
sisters in the cemetery. But Conley also believed that in
26:57
eighteen fifty five federal treaty would the Wandot protected the
27:01
land from development. So Conley got her law degree, and
27:05
when Congress approved legislation to sell the land and move
27:08
the bodies buried there, Conley was ready to fight. She
27:12
filed an injunction against the U. S Secretary of Interior
27:15
and Indian Commissioners. Then Conley and one of her sisters
27:19
set up camp in front of the cemetery. Armed with
27:21
a gun, they built a shack called Fort Conley to
27:25
discourage any potential trespassers. The battle went all the way
27:28
to the Supreme Court, where Conley became the first Native
27:32
American woman to argue a case before the justices. They
27:36
listened to her, but they ultimately sided with the developers. Nevertheless,
27:40
Conley continued to fight. She spent most of her time
27:43
at the cemetery until she was murdered during a robbery
27:47
in nineteen forty six. After that, others picked up the baton.
27:52
In nineteen seventy one, the Huron Indian Cemetery was added
27:56
to the National Register of Historic Places, and in twenty
27:59
seventeen was designated a National Historic Landmark, preventing any further development.
28:06
Let it, Let it. Conley didn't live to see it,
28:10
but the cemetery, where she too was buried, was saved.
28:16
Those stories came from all That's Interesting dot Com, Smithsonian
28:21
mag dot com and History dot com, written by Christopher Klein,
28:27
Carson Vaughan, and Colleena Fragga in January of twenty twenty five,
28:34
twenty seventeen, and again twenty twenty five. Well that about
28:39
does it for this chapter of RADIOI History. I'm your host,
28:43
Joseph Bolt, so happy to be with you today, and
28:47
I'll see you next time with another chapter of RADIOI History.
28:52
Until then, happy trails.