Jari Fowler trudged across a patch of land north of the town of Pahuska. Pahuska was the

capital of the Osage Nation and the community center for the people who were thought to

be the richest on earth. Their wealth came from oil and companies were pulling it out of the

ground in Osage County in staggering amounts. Twenty-four years earlier in 1897, the first well was

drilled on Osage land. Now in 1921, there were nearly 6,000 wells in operation. That number would only

climb over the next few years and the Osage people received money for every well that was drilled.

Nearly overnight, they went from being desperately poor to unimaginably wealthy, but with money came

greed and corruption and worse. Less than a mile north of downtown Pahuska, Jari Fowler walked

across the oil drilling operation of the Garland Oil Company. It was 9 o'clock in the morning on

May 28th, 1921, and the heat was already heavy. A blazing sun warned everyone in the hills of

northeast Oklahoma that summer was just a couple days away. Eventually, the heat would become

oppressive and it would thicken with humidity as the summer dragged on. Right now, the saving

grace was that the evenings were still relatively cool and rainstorm swept in and knocked back the

heat for a little while. That had happened last week to everyone's relief, but now the sun was back

and it beat down on Jari as he approached an oil derrick. Derrick's all over the land, wind,

and churned and thudded, their drills shook the ground under Jari's feet as he walked,

and the volume of noise likely drowned out any other sound in the area.

Jari was in a wooded area on a hill when he spotted something in a tangled mass of brush.

It was about a hundred feet from the nearest oil derrick and he tried to inspect the thing that

caught his eye. He was likely horrified and probably sick to his stomach. More people gathered

around and examined Jari's discovery. It was a badly decomposing human body.

At the time, there was no telling how long it had been there. It was certainly long enough

...