1924 Osage ceremonial panorama photograph

The 1924 Osage ceremonial panorama photograph is both a record of a gathering and a record of how its history has been handled. Its broad view brought Osage members and prominent white local businessmen and leaders into one frame; a section later cut from the displayed image concealed William K. Hale. When Kathryn Red Corn produced a small print of the missing panel, the absence became legible as an act of remembrance rather than erasure.

The panorama at the museum

During a 2012 visit to the Osage Nation Museum, the book’s narrator saw the panorama displayed across an entire side of a room. Taken at a ceremony in 1924, it showed members of the tribe alongside prominent local white businessmen and leaders. The scale invited a viewer to scan the gathering, but the image was visibly incomplete: one section was missing, as if someone had cut it out with scissors.

The photograph thus offered two kinds of evidence at once. Its surviving expanse preserved a collective scene, while the blank space drew attention to someone no longer shown. Rather than treating the gap as damage with no explanation, the narrator asked Red Corn what had happened to that part of the picture.

The missing panel and Hale

Red Corn first answered, “It’s too painful to show.” Pointing to the blank space, she added, “The devil was standing right there.” She then left briefly and returned with a small, slightly blurred print of the excised panel. It showed William K. Hale staring coldly at the camera.

The book identifies Hale at the far left of the panorama, dressed in a suit and cap and wearing glasses. The Osage had removed his image from the version displayed in the museum. The book makes the reason explicit: they did not remove it in order to forget the murders, as most Americans had; they removed it because they could not forget. The alteration did not make Hale’s presence disappear from the historical record. Instead, the blank panel marked that presence and the pain attached to it, while Red Corn’s recovered print restored the missing likeness to view.

An image kept in public memory

The photograph’s meaning depends on the contrast between what it shows and what its absence reveals. In its original breadth, it joined Osage people with prominent white figures at a ceremony; in its museum display, the cut panel turned a communal image into a visible trace of violence and remembrance. The recovered print and the full panorama reproduced at the beginning of the book preserve both states of the image: the version from which Hale had been removed and the wider view in which he remains at the far left.

Red Corn’s explanation also places the photograph within a living community’s memory, rather than treating it as a self-explanatory archive. She told the narrator that it was difficult for Osage people to speak about the Reign of Terror because so many had lost close relatives, and that the pain did not go away. At the museum, the missing panel made that difficulty visible: the image was still present, but its display had been changed by what the community could not forget.

The book sets this encounter alongside later family recollections. Margie Burkhart, Mollie Burkhart’s granddaughter, said her parents told her as a child what Ernest Burkhart and Hale had done; she recalled worrying that she might be a “bad seed” and watching The FBI Story with her family as they cried. Her account does not identify her as a witness to the 1924 photograph, but it shows how knowledge of the crimes continued to pass through families. The panorama’s excision and recovery belong to that wider persistence of memory: the past is neither simply displayed nor put away.