73 pages • 2 hours read
David GrannKillers of the Flower Moon
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Flower-Killing Moon
The opening paragraph of the book describes how small flowers spring up in April in Osage territory, only to be eclipsed by larger plants in May, when a large moon appears in the sky:
[T]aller 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 (5).
This ominous-sounding natural phenomenon becomes a symbol for Grann. Its meaning is sometimes literal—Anna Burkhart was killed in May, so the term gives Grann a way of keeping time based on Osage traditions rather than white ones. At the same time, he uses the flower replacement process as a metaphor for what happened to the Osage people at the hands of their white neighbors: Under the light of the flower-killing moon, Osage resources were stolen by the more powerful white citizens of Oklahoma, who killed the first residents of the continent to get access to their wealth.
Clothes
Throughout the text, Grann focuses on what people wear, often describing the clothing of the historical figures he chronicles to highlight racial differences or disparities in wealth or class, and sometimes to indicate irony.
In contemporary accounts of the Osage, the blankets they wore were seen as a symbol of their “primitive” nature. When Mollie was sent to the white St. Louis School as a child set up to rip Indigenous children from their culture and traditions, she was forbidden to wear Osage apparel and forced to wear European dress—seen then as a sign of civilization.
Grann is also interested in the way clothes represent the development of William Hale. When he arrived in Oklahoma, he was a virtually penniless cowboy. However, when he became rich, he “replaced his ragged trousers and cowboy hat with a dandified suit and a bow tie and a felt hat, his eyes peering out through distinguished round-rimmed glasses,” becoming, in the words of showman Pawnee Bill, a “high-class gentleman” (27). This appearance of respectability and high social standing is in stark contrast to Hale’s identity as the mastermind behind a number of murders.
Finally, clothes can symbolize small differences in identity as well. Grann compares Tom White with J. Edgar Hoover, noting that they represented different kinds of lawmen: White was an old-school Cowboy and former Texas Ranger, whose clothing indicated his comfort with being outdoors; meanwhile, Hoover cultivated a new image for the Bureau, hiring clean-cut, suit-wearing college men to replace figures like White. When Grann explains that White changed a bit to fit the new image of Bureau investigators, he describes him swapping his cowboy hat for a fedora.
Related Titles
By David Grann
