The Legend of John Joseph Mathews

There’s a story that crops up on the margins of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon that’s fascinated me for years. It’s the story of the Osage writer John Joseph Mathews, who, in the 1920s and ’30s, became one of a hauntingly small number of American Indian authors to receive national attention for their work. Decades before modern culture rediscovered the so-called Osage murders—first through Grann’s mega-bestselling book, then through Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation, opening this week to radiant reviews—Mathews wrote about them. And not only did he write about them, he lived through the time when they happened; observed their effects; was shaped by them, to a degree. Mathews in turn played a significant role in shaping the future course of Native American literature. It would be fitting if the popularity of Killers of the Flower Moon led more people to rediscover the work of this important, and semi-forgotten, American writer.

Mathews was a strange, brilliant, phenomenally contradictory figure. American literature has a way of lifting up writers whose psyches don’t entirely cohere, as if they’re assembled—like the United States itself—from mismatched parts. Think of Emily Dickinson: the titanic ambition of the work, the mundane anonymity of the life. Or Ernest Hemingway: the bullying strength layered atop weakness, the rejection of sentimentality shapeshifting into a new form of sentimentality in and of itself.

Welcome to Scorsese Week

One of the masters of American cinema is back in theaters this Friday. In celebration of the release of Killers of the Flower Moon, The Ringer welcomes you to Scorsese Week. 

• The 20th Century, as Told by Martin Scorsese
• Martin Scorsese’s 81 Greatest Movie Characters, Ranked
• The Story of Martin Scorsese’s Most Forgotten Film
• The Subtle Art of the Scorsese Cameo
• Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio: An Essential Pairing
• Martin Scorsese’s Great Crossroads
• The Legend of John Joseph Mathews

Mathews belongs to this lineage. Whatever you picture when you hear “early 20th-century American Indian writer” almost certainly isn’t him. For one thing, he was only one-eighth Osage, from his father’s grandmother; the rest of his ancestors were white. He was the son of a rich banker, yet he chose to live alone for long stretches of his life in a solitary stone cabin, which he called “The Blackjacks,” in Osage territory in northern Oklahoma. He spent his early life on a series of globetrotting adventures—he flew planes during World War I, studied at Oxford, hunted big game in Africa, got married in Switzerland—yet he settled down while still in his 30s to a withdrawn and quiet writing life. He was a lifelong Anglophile, and his manners were often compared to those of an English gentleman, yet he spent decades collecting and preserving tribal legends and tales. Above all, perhaps, he was alive to the modernist currents roiling the literature of his day, yet he turned his sensibility away from cities and the future and embraced nature, tradition, and the past.

Mathews was born in Pawhuska, the capital of the Osage Nation, in 1894. Oklahoma wasn’t a state yet. When Mathews was a toddler in 1897, a gargantuan reserve of oil was discovered beneath Osage land. Members of the tribe held what are called headrights, which entitled them to a share of the lease money oil companies paid to gain access to the land; this resulted in a massive influx of wealth into the territory. As if overnight, everyone got rich. (It’s this massive influx of wealth, and the horrific violence some white people unleashed in order to gain control of the headrights, that forms the central narrative of Killers of the Flower Moon.) As one of the most esteemed banking families in Pawhuska, the Mathewses benefitted directly from the boom, via headrights, and also indirectly via the surge in new business. They hired an Italian architect to build them a splendid house, complete with archways, European furniture, and a fountain. They held elegant parties. They took trips around the world.

The Mathewses lived between two worlds. They were proud of their Osage heritage, and in some ways were seen as leaders in the tribe. Mathews’s father served on the Tribal Council, as Mathews would later do himself. At the same time, many among the Osage didn’t see the Mathewses as Indians at all.

The Mathews family tree is simply an astounding document; you could build an academic course around it. Bloody and beautiful strands of American history run down the page. John Joseph’s great-grandfather, William Sherley Williams, was the child of Welsh immigrants who moved to North Carolina in the 18th century. He became a missionary, went west, and encountered the Osage tribe; this was in the early 1810s, just a few years after Lewis and Clark—before “the West” as we think of it was invented. Williams learned the Osage language and worked on an Osage Bible, but rather than converting the tribe to his religion, he seems to have been converted himself. He adopted their way of life, married an Osage woman called A-Ci’n-Ga, and had two half-Osage daughters, one of whom would become Mathews’s grandmother. A-Ci’n-Ga died sometime around 1820, and Williams drifted away from the tribe. In the 1830s and ’40s he became legendary as a mountain man. People told stories about “Old Bill Williams,” the drunken trapper and inveterate horse thief, a sort of vulgar ghost in the wilderness. He’d sometimes come down from the hills to guide an expedition, including some that killed dozens of Native Americans without provocation. The man who’d loved and lived among Indians now became known for abetting, perhaps even participating in, the murder of Indians. He was killed himself in 1849, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, by a Ute war party in Southern Colorado.

The two daughters of Old Bill and A-Ci’n-Ga, Mary Ann and Sarah, each married the same man, a Kansas businessman and trader named John A. Mathews. Sarah married him after Mary Ann died. John A. Mathews was admired by the Osage for dealing with them fairly, unlike most of the other white traders in their territory. He was also a slaveholder and passionate advocate of the pro-enslavement side during the Bleeding Kansas struggle in the 1850s. He led raids against abolitionists. He burned barns. Burned crops. Looted. Kidnapped. During the Civil War he tried to convince the Osage to join the Confederate side. His son, William—that’s our Mathews’s father, the future banker—once raced on horseback to warn a Jesuit mission that a guerrilla band led by his own father was coming to kill one of their priests. William was about 12 at the time. To reach that mission he had to ford a flooded river. The priest escaped.

John A. Mathews was tracked down by Union cavalry in 1861 and killed by a shotgun blast. The soldier who shot him was named Pleasant Smith. You think you’ve reached the upper limit of strangeness in American history; American history is just getting warmed up.

John Joseph Mathews’s mother came from a family of French Catholics. Mathews grew up, in his own telling, as a sort of “princeling,” spoiled and caressed. Everything came easily to him. In high school he was an athlete. His father loved going to his basketball games in the years before World War I. When I first encountered that detail in Michael Snyder’s invaluable biography of Mathews, John Joseph Mathews: Life of an Osage Writer, I had to put the book down and walk around the room in a sort of momentary daze. Because there it is—there’s history. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of the pages turning. A missionary sets out into the wilderness in the Napoleonic era, and a handful of generations later, barely a blink of the cosmic eye, that same missionary’s grandson is sitting in a high school gym cheering at a basketball game.

Mathews studied at the University of Oklahoma. When the Great War broke out, he left college and enlisted as a pilot. He loved flying: the danger of it, the remoteness, the beauty of the world from the air. He wanted to fly in combat, but he was made an instructor instead. He taught night-bombing. After the war, he went back to college, where a writing mentor urged him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship. He didn’t apply for the scholarship—his grades weren’t good enough—instead, he decided to go to Oxford and pay for it himself. His father had died by this point, and the family business was now in decline, but Mathews had plenty of money from the Osage headrights. For a semester he put off leaving for England because he wanted to hunt bighorn sheep. He went to Wyoming, mixed with cowboys, drank in saloons, camped in the snow. Then he went to Oxford and transitioned to a life of punting on the Cherwell and debating philosophy over tea.

He traveled widely. Paris, Lausanne, Algiers. In Algeria, he hunted gazelles and leopards. With a guide named Ahmed, he traveled into the Sahara. One day, en route to view the Timgad Roman ruins, his party was surprised by a group of Kabyle tribesmen galloping toward them on horseback, firing Winchester rifles. The men weren’t hostile—they were goofing around, more or less. The vision of tribal warriors engaged in an ecstatic charge filled Mathews with a sudden longing to be back among the Osage. He recalled the joy he’d felt seeing Osage riders speeding across the prairie when he was a little boy. Decades later, in 1972, he described the moment for an interviewer: “What am I doing over here?” He remembered asking himself. “Why don’t I go back and take some interest in my people? Why not go back to the Osage. They’ve got a culture. So, I came back, then I started talking with the old men.”

He didn’t, though; at least not right away. In Switzerland he met a young socialite named Virginia Hopper, the granddaughter of a former president of the Singer sewing machine company. They got married and moved to California, where Mathews tried unsuccessfully to establish a real estate business. Mathews and Virginia had two children, but the marriage didn’t last. After five years, Mathews walked out. He went back to Oklahoma. With a startling callousness, he seems to have given his family very little thought from then on. He didn’t write to his children. He sent money infrequently, and never very much. His son became a child actor, which supported the family for a while. After that, Virginia had to pay the bills by having affairs with wealthy married men.

Spend enough time with Mathews and you’ll run into this strange coldness in him. He was popular, charismatic, easy to be around. But he was also self-sufficient. He liked to be alone. Why should he worry about other people? It’s another of his contradictions. Back in Osage country, he got elected to the Tribal Council and spent years working for the interests of the tribe. Consider that, along with his dedication to preserving the Osage oral tradition. What does that suggest? That he valued community, right? But look a little closer and you see a different Mathews.

“The Indian,” he wrote, “is a poet. He is very religious, and he appreciates beauty. Being so very close to nature, he is filled with the rhythm and harmony of nature, yet he is cruel, as nature is cruel.” Maybe he really believed he was writing about all Indians here—who knows. He was surely writing about himself.

He backed into writing. Didn’t know what else to do with himself. He’d left California, returned to Oklahoma, moved into a run-down cabin. What was he going to do there? He had a friend who was working on a biography of Sitting Bull. Why not try something similar? Around the same time, he’d been given a priceless gift: the journals of a Quaker Indian agent, Laban Miles, who’d lived among the Osage for 50 years and meticulously recorded their history. Many people had sought those journals, including the hugely popular novelist Edna Ferber, who’d written about the Osage in her blockbuster bestseller, Cimarron. Now Mathews had them. On July 4, 1931, he sat down and started typing. Everything had always come easily for him. A book poured out.

Mathews’s first book, a history of the Osage called Wah’Kon-tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road, took Miles’s diaries as the basis for a lyrical history of the tribe, a history less concerned with chronology and analysis than with impressionistic sweep. The book covered 1878 to 1931; Mathews immersed himself so deeply in the writing of it that he all but cut himself off from the outside world. The cabin didn’t have a telephone. The shower was a bucket. “I wrote that book just like a wood thrush would sing,” Mathews said. “He’s not conscious of it, he just sings. I didn’t have any idea that people would read it.”

People did. The book was chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection in 1932, and this was a time when the Book of the Month Club had Oprah-level clout. Wah’Kon-tah, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, became an unlikely national bestseller. Mathews grudgingly traveled to New York City on a press tour. The cosmopolitan globetrotter was now so reluctant to leave his cabin that he forgot to bring the publicity posters his publisher had printed for him. In New York, publishers approached him about writing a novel. He agreed, with similar reluctance. The novel, written quickly and without much enthusiasm, appeared in 1934. It’s called Sundown. It’s the story of a mixed-race war veteran who comes home to Osage territory during the upheaval of the oil boom—that is, during the time of Killers of the Flower Moon. More than 80 years before David Grann brought the story to a national audience in 2017, Mathews had tried to do the same thing—or a version of it.

The differences between Killers of the Flower Moon and Sundown act as a concise index of the changes in American publishing between the 1930s and the 2010s. Killers of the Flower Moon is a taut, gripping nonfiction book, written in a mode that’s at least adjacent to true crime. Sundown is an evocative, challenging novel about a young man’s existential alienation. Mathews’s voice appears here and there in Grann’s novel—he’s quoted in the epigraph, and sporadically throughout the book—but Sundown is too weird and personal, too prone to spiraling around its repressed 1930s sexuality, too focused on the struggle of a single human soul to have been a major source for Grann’s work. Mathews himself didn’t like it. He didn’t look at it again for years after he finished it, and when he did finally pick it up, he was surprised to find it “not in the least bad.”

In later decades, however, it was Sundown that became Mathews’s most studied work. It established a template—Snyder describes it as “the homecoming of an alienated Native veteran who struggles with his identity”—that would be followed by numerous Native writers in the decades to come. It helped to bring about the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s and ’70s. It influenced Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday. It may not quite be a great book, but it brought a new perspective into American fiction. It was a book about Indians that didn’t exoticize them or make them quaint for a white audience. It opened the door a crack and let a little more light in.

After Sundown, Mathews went more than a decade without publishing another book. Perhaps he still didn’t quite think of himself as an author. He was a hunter, a loner, and—way over on the other hand—a tribal advocate with a wide and varied network of friends all over the world. He got married again. Eventually he got back to writing books. Talking to the Moon, from 1945, describes the decade living in his cabin, amid the rhythm and harmony and cruelty of nature. In 1951 he published a biography, Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E.W. Marland, about the 1920s Oklahoma oil baron. Ten years after that, he published The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters, which represents the culmination of his work “talking to the old men” and writing down their old tales before they passed away.

I grew up in Ponca City, Oklahoma, not far from Mathews’s cabin, not far from where the events of Killers of the Flower Moon took place. Mathews wrote about my hometown. Knew it well. Was still alive, even, when I was born. And if you need a reason to check out his work, I’ll give you this: When I was growing up, I had no idea he’d existed. I had no idea about the murders, either. We weren’t taught about it. I’ll leave you to guess why. It wasn’t until years after I’d left Oklahoma that I discovered Mathews’s work, and that this history was made known to me. These things are so easily forgotten. Old people die, the page turns, the eye blinks, and then: oblivion. It’s the message Mathews spent his whole career trying to persuade his readers to see. Our stories—I mean humanity’s—are fragile. We should remember them while we can.