Margie Burkhart

Margie Burkhart is the granddaughter of Mollie and Ernest Burkhart and a living link between the Osage Reign of Terror and its consequences for the next generation. In conversations about her father, James “Cowboy” Burkhart, and her aunt Elizabeth, she describes both the care Mollie gave her children and the lasting damage caused by Ernest’s crimes. Her recollection of the night of the Smith house bombing adds a devastating family detail: Cowboy, Elizabeth, and Mollie had planned to be at the Smiths’ house, but an earache kept Cowboy at home. Margie’s testimony makes survival and family memory part of the history of the murders, not merely what followed them.

Identity and family

Margie was introduced at an Osage dance pavilion, where she came over to the narrator in a powder-blue dress and glasses, her long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had driven with her husband, Andrew Lowe, from Tahlequah, seventy miles southeast of Tulsa. Lowe is described as a Creek Seminole. Margie serves on a board directing health-care services for the Osage, giving her a public role in the community alongside her place within a family whose history is inseparable from the murders.

At the pavilion, she and the narrator sat together on a wooden bench and spoke while watching the dancers. The setting placed their family conversation amid a present-day Osage gathering, rather than in an archive or courtroom. Margie’s account brings the past into that communal space through personal memories inherited from her father and through her own experience of the family’s aftermath.

Her father was James “Cowboy” Burkhart, the son of Mollie and Ernest. His sister Elizabeth, also deceased by the time of the conversation, had shared his childhood inside a household shaped by secrets. Both had witnessed the Reign of Terror from within their father’s home. Margie’s knowledge of that history came not only from public accounts of the murders but also from what her father lived with and later told her.

Mollie in family memory

Margie recalled a sharp contrast between Ernest’s actions and the affection her father felt for Mollie. Speaking of Ernest’s effect on Cowboy, she said, “He took away everything from my dad—his aunts, his cousins, his trust.” Yet her father “always spoke fondly of her.” One childhood memory made that tenderness concrete: when Cowboy had severe earaches, Mollie would blow into his ears to ease the pain. In Margie’s telling, Mollie appears not only as a victim of the violence but also as a caring mother remembered by her son.

After divorcing Ernest, Mollie lived on the reservation with her new husband, John Cobb. Margie had been told that the marriage was a good one and that it brought her grandmother a period of happiness. Mollie died on June 16, 1937, after being ill for some time; her death was not considered suspicious and received little press attention. The brief public notice contrasts with the family history Margie preserves: a life containing both violent loss and a later, reportedly happy marriage.

The bombing and the family’s escape

Margie’s account of the Smith house bombing supplied a detail absent from the FBI records described in the book. Her father had told her that, on the night of the explosion, he, Elizabeth, and Mollie had intended to spend the night at the Smiths’ house. Cowboy’s earache changed their plans, and they stayed home. Margie summarized the narrow escape simply: “That’s why they escaped,” she said. “It was just fate.”

The circumstance makes a childhood pain, recalled elsewhere as something Mollie soothed, the reason Cowboy was not at the house when it exploded. But survival did not free him from the event. Margie explained the consequence that mattered most to her father: “My dad had to live knowing that his father had tried to kill him.” The family’s escape therefore carried its own enduring burden. The narrator and Margie sat together in the car in darkness after she shared this, before she suggested returning to the dances. Her movement back toward the gathering leaves the revelation unresolved rather than offering an easy response to it.

Ernest’s return and the cost to his children

Margie saw Ernest after he was released from prison again in 1959, when she had just become a teenager. He had initially been barred from returning to Oklahoma and worked on a sheep farm in New Mexico for $75 a month. When he did return to Osage County, he stayed first with his brother Bryan. Margie remembered his slight build, thinning and graying hair, and kind-looking eyes. “I was very surprised he looked so grandfatherly,” she said, before recalling how difficult it was to reconcile that appearance with what he had done.

Ernest’s return came after his 1966 pardon, granted despite intense Osage protests. The review board had voted three to two in favor, and the governor then issued the pardon. Margie’s recollections place that public decision within a family’s experience of reunion with a man responsible for profound harm. The gentle, grandfatherly impression she described did not erase the crimes; it sharpened the distance between the person she encountered and the history she struggled to comprehend.

That history also fell on Cowboy and Elizabeth. Margie said they were ostracized by the tribe and that they needed family and support but did not have it. Her husband observed that Elizabeth was deeply affected and “kind of paranoid.” Margie described her aunt as unable to settle: “Aunt Liz couldn’t stay in one place and was always changing her address and phone number.” Cowboy, meanwhile, became angry at the world. These details show the violence continuing through isolation, distress, and damaged family relationships long after the murders themselves.

Bearing memory into public view

Margie also participated in a ballet about Osage history, appearing briefly without dancing as the mother of a departing soldier. The ballet moved through the Osage past, the oil rush, and the Reign of Terror before depicting Osage contributions to U.S. military service, including Clarence Leonard Tinker, who died when his plane was lost during World War II. Wearing a shawl, Margie crossed the stage in a gesture that recalled the way Mollie had worn her Indian blanket. Her role joined family remembrance to a larger public account of Osage history.

Margie later said that the ballet’s depiction of the Reign of Terror had affected her more strongly than she expected: “it hit me in the stomach.” She described the experience as deeply emotional. Her response underscores the difference between knowing a family history and encountering its representation in performance: the events were not remote to her, even when rendered onstage. Across her recollections, she gives the history a descendant’s perspective—one that preserves Mollie’s tenderness, names the harm done by Ernest, and records what his children and grandchildren had to carry.