Felix Clary
ICT + Tulsa World
TULSA, Okla. – Henry Roan was a character in Martin Scorcese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” but he was a real-life Osage Nation citizen too. How does his life story compare to his portrayal in the film adaptation of David Grann’s historical book?
In the film, Roan was Molly Burkhart’s (Lily Gladstone) first husband, who struggled with alcoholism and “melancholy,” as the film described it. During the Osage reign of terror, he was murdered by John Ramsey, a man hired by Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) to stage Roan’s suicide.
In real life, Roan married Molly Burkhart, Molly Kyle at the time, when he was 15 years old, while he was on a short break from his time at the Carlisle Indian Boarding school in Pennsylvania. His great-granddaughter Margo Gray said Carlisle was like the “torture chamber” of boarding schools. She attributes his alcoholism and depression to the trauma he faced as a child and young adult.
Sky meets earth
Gray thought Roan and Molly were cousins until David Grann approached her while writing his book and told her they were not cousins by blood and were actually married in a traditional Osage wedding.
In studying his role as Ernest, Leonardo DiCaprio sat down with Gray and asked her about traditional Osage marriage. She pulled out a piece of paper and drew a line with 29 tick marks on it. Above the line, she wrote “sky” and below the line she wrote “earth.”
She told him that there are 29 Osage clans, and that they fit into two categories, the sky clans, like the eagle clan or suncarrier clan, and the earth clans, like the deer clan, of which Gray is a part. She said in order to avoid incest, marriages were arranged between one person from an earth clan and another person from a sky clan. She said Molly was from a sky clan in Gray Horse and Roan was from an earth clan in Hominy, so their marriage was arranged.
In the film, Ernest asks Molly if they are “sky people,” likely referencing her clanship.
The young married couple’s time together was short. Roan was sent back to Carlisle, and Molly was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Pawhuska.
Innocence lost
The U.S. Department of the Interior recently released its final half of the federal Indian boarding school report, which lists 417 federally operated Indian boarding schools across the country.
The report states 973 children who died at these schools. The Native children that were coerced into the schools suffered mental, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of church leaders and government-assigned school staff.
The reports did not include any mention of the Osage Nation.
Gray said her family didn’t want to talk about Roan much because of his alcoholism, so she turned to archives from Carlisle to learn what she could about his time there.
According to archives from Dickinson College in Carlisle Pennsylvania, Roan went to Carlisle at age 15. He was 5’4” and 115 pounds when he first arrived, and according to Gray, he was 6′ 7” when he died.
Before the school changed his name to Henry, his Osage name was E-Stah-mo-sah. His school term was from Sept. 21, 1899 to June 21, 1904. The documents show he entered the school with a fourth-grade education and left at age 20 with a seventh-grade education.
There is a photo of Roan with two other boys, who Gray believes were his friends in school, named Raymond B. Meat, a Cheyenne boy from KingFisher, Okla., who enrolled at age 17, and Thomas Perrier, as Osage farmer from Ochelata, Okla., who entered the school at 15.
160 acres for $1
A few years after leaving Carlisle, administration sent worksheets to alumni asking about what land and money they had.
“I have nothing to say of my home,” he wrote. “I have very little property. I have nothing whatever to say of my life, or connected with my life to interest you. I have wife and child, little girl, four years old, and a home of my own.”
Gray said Roan actually had multiple plots of land, each 160-acres, with a gas line running through them. She said his home and land was sought after by buyers because of the profit that could be made off the minerals.
Gray found land sale documents from May 1910. In a 48-hour period, Roan was recorded to have sold his allotment sections. One of the 160-acre plots was sold for one dollar. The first land sale was to Roharley Martin and John C. Freeman, with whom Gray is not familiar.
The last sections were sold to Fred. G. Drummond, Roan’s federally assigned guardian. The government would assign financial guardians to Osage people as they were deemed incompetent. This is why Molly introduces herself in the film as “Molly Kyle, incompetent.”
Slaying of Henry Roan
Roan’s background is not explored much in the film, aside from his marriage to Molly, which was actually spent states apart from each other. As soon as he graduated from Carlisle, he returned home to divorce Molly and marry Gray’s great-grandmother Addie James. When Addie died of tuberculosis, Roan married his final wife, the woman he was with in the film, Mary Bunch.
When Ernest’s uncle William Hale tells him Roan was Molly’s first husband, he gets upset that Molly never told him.
Gray said the film was accurate in depicting Roan’s murder.
Ernest hired Ramsey to stage Roan’s suicide, which he failed to do by shooting Roan in the back of the head instead of the front. This ultimately led to the downfall of Ernest, Ramsey and other conspirators.
Gray found a 1929 article in The Osage Journal where the real Ramsey speculated that Ernest had Roan murdered out of jealousy. Ramsey told a reporter that Ernest was afraid Roan would divorce his wife, Mary Bunch, and “take Molly away from him.”
She expresses her feelings about her great-grandfather in an emotional letter she penned to him. Although he might not be able to read it, she wanted him to know how his story changed her life.
This story is co-published by the Tulsa World and ICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Oklahoma area.
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