Montrose man learns about family's painful past during Osage Reign of Terror: 'This trauma's ending'

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- For most of Randall Morton's life, he's yearned for answers about his identity, culture, and heritage. When he was 6 years old, he found out that his father was a member of the Osage tribe.

But even then, there wasn't very much information to help him understand his family's history.

"One reason we don't know about the Osages and much of Native American history is because that history was hidden. It was never taught," Morton said.

The land of the Osage people was dramatically reduced after the Louisiana Purchase. They were forced to migrate in 1872 to their final reservation in what is now Osage County, Oklahoma.

However, when valuable oil was found on their land in 1897, the Osage became the richest group of people in the world at that time. The wealth, however, attracted white Americans to the area, some of whom were only interested in getting their hands on that fortune, no matter the price.

"The only way white people could get a headright was by inheriting them. So they married into the families and then slowly poisoned many of them and knocked them off in different ways," Morton explained.

Dozens of Osage people began dying at an alarming rate in the 1920s, an era now known as the "Osage Reign of Terror." It marked a period when white murderers went unprosecuted for their crimes, a dark cloud of injustice that haunted Morton's family for generations.

Morton shared that his grandparents were killed by their next-door neighbor, a white man who shot them over a petty dispute about the use of a garage. His father, only 15 years old at the time, witnessed the whole thing. It was the beginning of a cycle of intergenerational trauma in his family.

"My father just was not able to manage vulnerable or intimate emotions. The world he grew up in was actually dangerous for him," Morton said.

Morton only discovered these details about his grandparents' murder last spring when a childhood friend sent over a newspaper clipping from the 1920s about the crime scene.

Around the same time, he began following the production of "Killers of the Flower Moon," a 1920s-based historical film that focuses on the Osage Reign of Terror. The movie, released back in October, is up for 10 Oscar nominations.

Both of these events provided closure after decades of unanswered questions for Morton, who now lives in Houston's Montrose neighborhood, and helped him heal from his own trauma. He hopes this painful part of history won't ever be forgotten and teaches our future generations about the impact of power, greed, and racism.

"A hundred years of all this trauma is ending," Morton said. "I hope that social studies can pick up on the movie and explain this better, and it becomes a great enduring lesson of the movie."

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