Pawhuska, Oklahoma, appears as more than a backdrop to the history of the Osage and the oil wealth that transformed their lives. In the account, its theater, library, and civic institutions hold different layers of that history: the social world of the oil boom, the violence of the Reign of Terror, and the later work of remembering losses that official investigations left unresolved. The town is where historical evidence and public memory repeatedly meet, sometimes in buildings that had already witnessed the events being recalled.

A Theater Reclaimed

The Constantine Theater brings the town’s oil-era past into the present. Mollie Burkhart and Ernest Burkhart had once sat in its velvet chairs, while oil barons used the theater for auctions when bad weather interfered with other arrangements. The building therefore carries the history of both everyday entertainment and the wealth that made the auctions consequential.

By the early 1980s, the theater was close to demolition. Local volunteers instead worked to restore it: they cleared spiderwebs and vermin, polished the brass plates on the front door, and stripped accumulated grime from the lobby floor until a star-shaped mosaic emerged. The restoration did not erase the building’s earlier associations. It made a surviving historic space available for new acts of cultural remembrance.

In May 2013, the Constantine Theater screened a recording of Wahzhazhe, an Osage ballet whose name means “Osage.” The work traced Osage history from life on the plains through encounters with European explorers and missionaries to the rush for oil. Its treatment of the Reign of Terror made the theater’s past especially immediate: the dancers appeared as flappers, moving to jazz, before an explosion interrupted the scene and the dancing turned mournful. A succession of funereal dances conveyed the killings, while a figure representing William K. Hale wore a mask that concealed his face.

The ballet also placed Osage history within a larger account of the nation. It depicted the military service of Clarence Leonard Tinker, the first Native American to attain the rank of major general, who died when his plane was lost during World War II. Margie Burkhart appeared briefly, not as a dancer but as the mother of a departing soldier, crossing the stage in a shawl that recalled the way Mollie had worn her blanket. Margie later said the ballet’s depiction of the Reign of Terror had affected her with unexpected force. The performance turned a historical account into a public encounter with inherited grief.

A Place for Recovered Records

Pawhuska’s public library became another site of historical recovery. There, among volumes on Osage history, the researcher found a handmade, spiral-bound manuscript titled “The Murder of Mary DeNoya-Bellieu-Lewis.” Anna Marie Jefferson, Mary Lewis’s great-great-grandniece, had compiled it from family accounts, newspaper clippings, and other records over roughly two decades. Her introductory note traced her knowledge of the story to a relative who had first told it to her around 1975. Leaving the manuscript in the library helped keep the account from disappearing into the gaps left by official investigation.

The manuscript described Lewis as an allotted member of the tribe, born in 1861, whose income enabled a prosperous life. After two marriages ended in divorce, she was raising an adopted daughter. In 1918, she traveled with the child to Liberty, Texas, accompanied by Thomas Middleton and another white man. They bought a houseboat with Lewis’s money and stayed on the river. On August 18, Lewis vanished. When authorities failed to investigate, her family hired a private detective. The manuscript recorded how Middleton later pretended to be her adopted son. The discovery in Pawhuska thus opened onto a case whose story had been carried forward by relatives and preserved outside the channels that had failed to pursue it.

Memory Beyond the Stage

The 2013 screening also connected the theater to continuing research into the killings. After the performance, the researcher spoke with Osage Nation Museum director Kathryn Red Corn and mentioned the suspected involvement of H. G. Burt, a figure not publicly linked to the killings. Red Corn showed little surprise and invited the researcher to the museum the next morning. There, she produced a brittle letter Hale had sent from prison to a member of the tribe in 1931. Its buoyant claims of good health and hope of returning to Gray Horse stood in stark contrast to the history of violence surrounding him. The encounter shows how cultural institutions and family-held records could bring overlooked evidence back into view.

The record of violence was not confined to famous cases. In an Office of Indian Affairs guardianship log, the researcher found H. G. Burt listed as guardian to George Bigheart’s daughter and four other Osage; one ward was marked dead. The same log named Scott Mathis, owner of the Big Hill Trading Company, as guardian to nine people, including Anna Brown and her mother, Lizzie. Seven of Mathis’s nine listed wards had died, and at least two deaths were known to be murders. Other guardians’ lists showed similarly alarming numbers of deaths, though the absence of investigations made it impossible to determine precisely how many were suspicious. Pawhuska’s role as a place of research is bound up with that wider problem: the surviving records can reveal patterns while leaving many individual deaths unresolved.

Justice and Continuing History

During a visit to the Osage Nation Court in June 2015, the researcher encountered a present-day institution in which Osage people mete out justice in many criminal cases. An Osage lawyer described the Reign of Terror as not being the end of Osage history, emphasizing that families had been victims of the conspiracy without being defined as victims. That distinction gives the town’s acts of preservation a civic dimension: remembrance is not only the recovery of past injuries but also part of a continuing life and authority.

The court visit brought one family’s history into the present through Marvin Stepson, its chief trial court judge and grandson of William Stepson. William, a steer-roping champion, died of suspected poisoning in 1922. Authorities never prosecuted anyone for his death, but they came to believe that Kelsie Morrison was responsible. After marrying William’s widow, Tillie, Morrison became guardian of her two children. An associate told the Bureau that Morrison admitted killing William to marry Tillie and control her estate.

The story continued after William’s death. Tillie grew suspicious of Morrison, particularly after hearing him discuss strychnine. She told her lawyer she wanted to keep him from inheriting her estate and to end his guardianship of her children. Before she could act, she died of suspected poisoning in July 1923. Morrison took much of her fortune, and letters indicated that he planned to sell part of the estate to H. G. Burt. Tillie’s death was never investigated. Recounted in the setting of an Osage court, this history makes Pawhuska a place where the consequences of the Reign of Terror remain legible—not as a completed chapter, but as a record of losses, unanswered questions, and Osage efforts to shape what comes after.