Madi > Recent Status Updates

Which accounted for the fact that white people lived on the rich valley floor in that little river town in Ohio, and the blacks populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks.

The name he was born with wasn’t Cassidy Thinks Twice, even though that’s what he’s doing now—Where’s my gun, where’s my gun?—but Cassidy Sees Elk. Names are stupid, though. Pretty soon he won’t even need his.

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Spread out behind him, just down the slope from the camper, are probably eighty, ninety elk. Maybe a hundred. They’re all looking right back at him, not a single tail flicking, not one eye blinking. Cassidy swallows hard, wishing more than anything for his rifle.

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You’re thinking crazy,” he tells himself, just to hear it out loud. He’s right, though. These are the kind of wrong thoughts people have who are spending too much time alone. They start unpacking vast cosmic bullshit from gum wrappers, and then they chew it up, blow a bubble, ride that bubble up into some even stupider place.

I have to be careful in writing about my husband Joe DiMaggio because he winces easily. Many of the things that seem normal or even desirable to me are very annoying to him.
He dislikes being photographed or interviewed. If he is even so much as asked to participate in some publicity stunt he registers a big explosion.

Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.

I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jean from the orphanage who belonged to nobody. The other was someone whose name I didn’t know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.

As I grew older I knew I was different from other children [...]. I often felt lonely and wanted to die. I would try to cheer myself up with daydreams. I never dreamed of anyone loving me as I saw other children loved. That was too big a stretch for my imagination. I compromised by dreaming of my attracting someone’s attention (besides God), of having people look at me and say my name.

I had found out that people always ordered me to stop doing anything I like to do.

The murder plots depended upon doctors who falsified death certificates and upon undertakers who quickly and quietly buried bodies.

By all rights, their higher standard of living should have brought the Osages a lower death rate than America’s whites. Yet Osages were dying at more than one-and-a-half times the national rate—and those numbers do not include Osages born after 1907 and not listed on the roll.

Margie then mentioned something that I had not seen in any of the FBI records. [...] “My dad had to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him,” Margie said.

There was another layer to the case—a deeper, darker, even more terrifying conspiracy, which the bureau had never exposed.

The Osage Tribal Council was the only governing body to publicly single out and praise White and his team, including the undercover operatives.

Though Hoover privately commended White and his men for capturing Hale and his gang and gave the agents a slight pay increase [...] he never mentioned them by name as he promoted the case. They did not quite fit the profile of college-educated recruits that became part of Hoover’s mythology. Plus, Hoover never wanted his men to overshadow him.

White realized that the conspirators were not only erasing evidence—they were manufacturing it.

In December 1924, Stone gave Hoover the job he longed for. Hoover would rapidly reshape the bureau into a monolithic force—one that, during his nearly five-decade reign as director, he would deploy not only to combat crime but also to commit egregious abuses of power.

An agent from the Office of Indian Affairs soon picked up another report: Mollie wasn’t dying of diabetes at all; she, too, was being poisoned.

The world’s richest people per capita were becoming the world’s most murdered. The press later described the killings as being as “dark and sordid as any murder story of the century” and the “bloodiest chapter in American crime history."

The official death toll of the Osage Reign of Terror had climbed to at least twenty-four members of the tribe.

On March 14, four days after the bombing, Bill Smith died—another victim of what had become known as the Osage Reign of Terror.

The accounts rarely, if ever, mentioned that numerous Osage had skillfully invested their money or that some of the spending by the Osage might have reflected ancestral customs that linked grand displays of generosity with tribal stature.

A letter to the editor in the Independent [...] referring to the typical Osage as a good-for-nothing who had attained wealth “merely because the Government unfortunately located him upon oil land which we white folks have developed for him.” John Joseph Mathews bitterly recalled reporters “enjoying the bizarre impact of wealth on the Neolithic men, with the usual smugness and wisdom of the unlearned.

Theodore Roosevelt had already warned what would befall an Indian who refused his allotment: “Let him, like these whites, who will not work, perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers."

The leader of the Dalton Gang, an infamous nineteenth-century band of outlaws, once served as the main lawman on the Osage reservation.

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.

In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants, such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.

Yet, no matter which story prevailed, the trial would surely expose how the officers and seamen—part of that vanguard of the British Empire—had descended into anarchy and savagery. The sad spectacle might even supplant the glorious tale of Anson’s capturing the galleon.

Because of the sheer number of accounts—including those of dubious provenance—perceptions of the Wager affair varied from reader to reader. Bulkeley, whose journal kept being pilfered by hacks, was incensed when he realized that it was increasingly being regarded with suspicion, as if it, too, might be fake.

Amid all the hoopla, the scandalous Wager affair seemed to blissfully fade away. But almost two years later, on a March day in 1746, a boat arrived in Dover, carrying a thin, stern man with eyes fixed like bayonets. It was the long-lost Captain David Cheap, and accompanying him were the marine lieutenant, Thomas Hamilton, and the midshipman John Byron.