Ghosts of Crook County: An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land

— PROLOGUE —

IT WAS DOUBTFUL IF SUCH A PERSON HAD EVER EXISTED

Igrew up in Tulsa, where, on the west side of the Arkansas River, oil refineries hug the riverbank. A breeze occasionally carries notes of sulfur through the leafy neighborhood of Maple Ridge on the east side of the river. In the summer, there’s a sweet putridity to the odor. Nobody seems to mind: it is the smell of money.

Tulsa was once known as the Oil Capital of the World, and although it ceased to have a legitimate claim on that title generations ago, oil continues to be the touchstone of life in the city. The most recognizable icon is a seventy-six-foot-high statue of a stern-faced roughneck astride an oil derrick—the Golden Driller. It is the fifth-tallest statue in the United States and the official state monument of Oklahoma.

In the 1920s, my great-grandfather, Russell Cobb Sr., drilled for oil west of Tulsa in Creek County. For a brief time, the county was the world’s most important source of light sweet petroleum. This stretch of the Mid-Continent oil field, from Tulsa to Glenpool to Cushing, could be considered the foundational land for the modern American oil industry. The oil here powered the Allies to victory in World War I. It made Cushing the nexus of a web of oil pipelines still operating today. The benchmark price for a barrel of oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange refers to the cost for delivery in Cushing, Oklahoma. It is known as the Pipeline Crossroads of the World and holds around 10 percent of the nation’s petroleum reserves at any given time. Creek County also got its nickname—Crook County—during the boom years. It is an apt description.

My great-grandfather named his business Cobra Oil Company. Cobb was a New Yorker and a Harvard man with an aristocratic Russian wife named Elena. Her father had been assassinated by Bolsheviks. Cobb’s best friend and business partner, Olney Flynn, spoke glowingly about Tulsa—the last, best frontier in America. Flynn got himself elected mayor and Cobb, the city’s police and fire commissioner. They were both rich. For the duo, Tulsa was a blank urban canvas to be colored in with golf and tennis clubs, graceful yet subdued white churches, private schools, and housing designs that mimicked the Cape Cods, Dutch Colonials, and Tudor Revivals from back East. The names of the original Muscogee landowners and dusty origins of the place as a cow town were erased. Tulsa’s neighborhoods now had names like Bryn Mawr, Maple Ridge, and Forest Hills.

For a while, the money came easy, and Cobb Sr.’s son, Russell Cobb Jr., began to buy oil leases with other people’s money, promising spectacular returns and tax write-offs to Hollywood types. Easy money in the Oklahoma oil patch attracted celebrities like Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli to invest millions in the Tulsa-based Home-Stake Production Company.¹ The promised tax write-offs turned out to be scams and the returns on investment were based on a Ponzi scheme. Russell Jr. was not the architect of the swindle, but he was a player in this world. He chartered flights to Las Vegas with his friend, hotelier Conrad Nicky Hilton. In one stunt, Cobb landed a helicopter on the first hole of a golf green during a PGA event.

In the early 1960s, he went broke just like the famous Hemingway quote: slowly at first, then all at once.² Russell Cobb Sr. shot himself in a bathtub in the Hotel Tulsa in 1962. Russell Cobb Jr. died owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the IRS in 1968. By the time the entire swindle became known to the world, my father, Candler Cobb, was trying to restart the family business in Houston of the 1970s. He was bringing the company back to prosperity without any improprieties when he fell ill with a serious heart disease in 1975. He was a charming young tennis player with a baby boy, me. By the time I was six, he was dead. His twin brother, Russell Cobb III, tried to avert a similar fate by becoming a born-again Christian with the help of the televangelist Richard Roberts. It was no use.

His grieving wife told me there was some sort of curse upon us. She called in Roberts to lift it through prayer. He prayed over us, but Roberts had his own demons. Some Tulsans shook their heads. The Cobbs were good men—we just had bad timing and terrible luck. When people around town ask me if I’m related to that third Russell, I’m always afraid they’re going tell me how much money he owes them.

THE OIL CURSE AND THE QUESTION OF LAND OWNERSHIP

The reversals of oil fortunes have touched American families much more prominent than my own—the Gettys and the Rockefellers have their own versions of the oil curse. There is an empirical basis for what might seem like punishment from an angry and capricious god. Called the natural resource curse, or the Dutch disease, it is an explanation for why the general well-being of a people often declines with the discovery of natural resource wealth. Investors chase after riches from nonrenewable resources without investing in basic goods and services.

In Oklahoma, the natural resource curse might be deemed as an intergenerational comeuppance for what historian Angie Debo called an orgy of exploitation almost beyond belief during the state’s first boom.³ Only a few years before the likes of Cobra Oil Co. came into possession of petroleum-rich minerals in the 1900s, the land had been owned outright by Native Americans. These Native Americans were the citizens of the Five Civilized Tribes, as they were called—the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—who had been forcibly moved from their traditional homes in the Southeast and relocated to a series of reservations designated by the federal government as Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma.* The federal government gave tribal citizens patents to the land there—tens of millions of acres. Citizens of these tribes held title in fee simple—the closest thing in the common law tradition to absolute ownership. But in the years between 1907 and 1922, those lands were passed from Native hands to the portfolios of white oilmen and their companies. Today, only 2 percent of that land remains with Native families. How, exactly, did this happen?

When the US government granted 160-acre land allotments to the members of the Five Tribes, it was part of a sweeping experiment to privatize tribal land and grant it to individual tribal citizens. Private land ownership was not part of the Five Tribes’ belief system, but these allotments extended a lucrative invitation for Indians to partake in the American capitalist system.* Like many such projects, it began with a census. Beginning in 1893, the Dawes Commission—a quasi-judicial body appointed by Congress and named after Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts—worked to document every single citizen of the Five Tribes. Every citizen enrolled by the commission would be entitled to 160 acres of their choosing. Tribal citizens would be able to farm their allotments, drill on them, or even rent them out to sharecroppers or tenant farmers. In exchange, the tribes agreed to the termination of their governments.

But how would a group of white men from outside Indian Country define who was a member of a tribe? The Dawes Commission imposed a European notion of blood quantum on the tribes, creating a mathematics for belonging based on a government agent’s perception of someone’s race. In creating what came to be known as the Dawes Rolls, commissioners often made arbitrary determinations about how much Indian blood a person had. Despite their dubious nature, these determinations had direct consequences for land ownership. Full-bloods were considered incompetent under the law and were barred from selling their land. Persons who were less than one-half-blood quantum had almost no restrictions on the sale of land. Race was not just a construct imposed on the Oklahoma tribes; it was also a legal tool for determining who owned what land, and how they were able to control it.

The decisions made by the Dawes Commission and the rolls it created remain a legal basis for citizenship in the Five Tribes today. When people claim Cherokee heritage, professional researchers turn not to genetics but to the Dawes Rolls. The Dawes Commission enrolled people of European, Indigenous, and African descent—and all possible mixtures therein. These rolls reflected raw political power—the power to issue land deeds to individuals. Many of the allottees may not have been Native American at all, but rather opportunistic settlers who saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own land. Adding to the confusion is the fact that many traditionalist Native Americans wanted nothing to do with Dawes or private landownership. In the case of the Muscogee, a leader named Chitto (Crazy Snake) Harjo rebelled against the entire enterprise, defying federal troops and some mixed-blood members of his nation.

Much of this complicated history is woefully misunderstood, even in eastern Oklahoma, where this history courses through everyday life. Even though I have Cherokee and Choctaw family members, while I was growing up I had no understanding of who, precisely, in our family was Native American and who was not.

My half brother’s wife was Choctaw; did that make my brother Choctaw by marriage? Russell Cobb III’s first wife was Cherokee, but were my cousins also Cherokee? They certainly didn’t look like what popular culture deemed Native. Some of them have blond hair and blue eyes. My grandmother proudly traced her family’s history back to Indian Territory days in the town of Checotah. My grandmother’s common law spouse was a famous Choctaw artist named Saint Clair Homer, and to him I owe my middle name. Homer was a supporter of the American Indian Movement in the 1970s. Given all these interconnections, I assumed I was part Choctaw for a long time. No one disabused me of this notion. But proximity is not the same as belonging. White Oklahomans—especially in the eastern half of the state—are unique in that they live and work on federally recognized Indian reservations, and not just those pertaining to the Five Tribes. There are thirty-nine sovereign Indigenous nations in the state. And yet whites outnumber tribal citizens by seven or eight to one. This peculiar arrangement leads to misunderstandings running from the mundane (Can Tulsa Police enforce a parking ticket on a tribal citizen on tribal land?) to the existential (What is race anyway? Who holds sovereignty over the riches of the earth?).

Dawes saw Indian Territory as the most promising place to bring about the end to what white settlers saw as the intractable Indian problem. That is, the continued assertion by Indigenous people of their rights to govern themselves according to their own traditions, and to assert their treaty rights. By the standards of his day, Dawes was a liberal. He argued against the policies of people like Andrew Jackson, saying that his commission would treat Native Americans not as savages but as individual citizens, not as an insoluble substance that the civilization of this country has been unable, hitherto, to digest, but to take him as an individual, the human being, and treat him as you find him, according to the necessities of his case.⁴ As the commission turned Native Americans into private landowners, tribal citizens would wear civilized clothes, cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property.⁵

In fact, the Dawes Commission ended up being a continuation of the Indian Wars by other means. Tribes’ sovereignty over education, public safety, land management, and government was destroyed. Native American languages, spiritualities, and customs came under attack in boarding schools modeled on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Schools that had been run collaboratively by white missionaries and Native governments came under pressure to assimilate their students. There were eighty-three Indian boarding schools in Oklahoma, more than any other state. The fate of one such school, Tullahassee, is vital for understanding the story I am going to tell here. It is a complicated story that defies stereotypes and highlights the push and pull between federal Indian policy and tribal nations and individual citizens doing their best to survive in the face of what some call the paper genocide of the Dawes era and the birth of Oklahoma.

BLACK GOLD AND DEAD INDIANS IN THE TITLE

The discovery of oil in what would become northeastern Oklahoma, first at Red Fork in 1901, then at Glenn Pool in 1905, changed everything, not just in the region but in the global economy. Oklahoma was the nation’s leading oil producer by 1907. The Dawes enrollees whose land was located over the petroleum-rich domes and anticlines should have become immensely wealthy, as they were entitled to subsurface royalties from oil and gas production. And indeed, a few did. Just south of Drumright, in Creek County, is the land of a Muscogee citizen, Jackson Barnett, called the World’s Richest Indian. Barnett built a Georgian Revival mansion in Beverly Hills in 1926 that became a must-see tourist attraction during the Golden Age of Hollywood. He had little interest in material possessions, but his wife, Anna Laura Lowe, an adventuress from Kansas City, persuaded him to build the mansion and acquire various automobiles. Jackson, evidently bored, spent his time wearing white gloves and directing traffic at the intersection of Rossmore Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard. A whitewashed version of Barnett’s story may have been part of the source material for The Beverly Hillbillies. (Although the series creator placed the origins of the Clampett family in the Missouri Ozarks, Jed once stated that his family had been in America before the Mayflower. Jed and Jackson sported similar facial hair and well-worn hats.)

Lucinda Pittman, another oil-rich Muscogee citizen, famously went to a Cadillac dealership in the town of Muskogee in 1925, was unimpressed by the cars on offer, and designed her own—complete with a blue racing stripe, red plush interior, silver cigar holders, and perfume bottles. A Muskogee newspaper described it as Pittman’s palace on wheels, a car whose luxury could not be rivaled by a millionaire’s yacht or the private car of a railroad magnate. When the vehicle was delivered, Cadillac announced that Pittman’s was the most expensive car they had ever produced.⁶ And then there was Thomas Gilcrease, who used his oil money to amass one of the most prestigious collections of art about the American West, now housed at the Gilcrease Museum, one of Tulsa’s major cultural institutions.

Even rich Muscogees like Barnett, Pittman, and Gilcrease, however, were used as pawns in a larger game involving the build-out of American oil infrastructure. Newspaper clippings of the era tell stories of fabulous estates reduced to ruin, of rich Indians disappearing under mysterious circumstances. They involved swindles, kidnappings, intimidation, and murder. The plunder of Osage mineral wealth through violence, long suppressed in the mainstream story of Oklahoma, is now familiar to everyone thanks to the 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon. But that story did not occur in a vacuum. The Osage Nation borders the Muscogee Nation to the south and the Cherokee Nation to the east. The Mid-Continent oil field runs underneath them all, and all three converge on West Edison Street, near downtown Tulsa.

Muscogee allottees may have had wealth, but the power over their assets was increasingly consolidated in the hands of oil and gas companies, many of which still operate today. Later, Oklahoma oilmen like J. Paul Getty found oil reserves in Saudi Arabia that made the Cushing-Drumright Field seem like a warm-up match to the ultimate prize—mastery of the world’s oil markets. As the Oklahoma oil fields dwindled in significance, the stories of the original allottees were forgotten.

The stories of these original owners have been thoroughly erased from the mainstream stories Oklahoma tells about itself. In Tulsa, in particular, allottees have little to no presence in the public memory, despite the now-common practice of Indigenous land acknowledgments. There is something unsettling about knowing that the land belonged to a particular person, to a specific family, that makes the history of dispossession much harder to ignore. I wanted to know specific details behind what seemed like stranger-than-fiction stories. I wanted to uncover the complexities of the lives of people I only knew as dead Indians, inconvenient obstacles to real estate deals in eastern Oklahoma. In 2019, I set about trying to tell one story—just one story of one original landowner—that might reveal a larger truth.*

A BOY NAMED TOMMY

Angie Debo, working in the 1930s, was a laconic, studious woman with a small-town Oklahoma background and impeccable academic credentials (she earned an MA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from the University of Oklahoma). She compiled a manuscript documenting how millions of acres allotted to tribal citizens quickly wound up as vast landholdings controlled by powerful Oklahoma men. The research led to threats against her life. But an Oxford-educated editor of the University of Oklahoma Press, Joseph Brandt, contracted with Debo to publish her work And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes. Before the book could go to press, however, the president of the university, William Bizzell, realized that Debo’s work could threaten not only the press but the whole university, as it depended on donations and political support from oilmen. Debo’s book named names, some of whom were still living, like Senator Robert L. Owen, who Brandt thought might sue for libel. Debo could not understand; she had found his name on warranty deeds in county courthouses removing restrictions on allottees. It was right out there in the public. Either no one had noticed it, or they downplayed Owen’s role in removing what were supposed to be guarantees against land swindling. Brandt fought for the publication of a watered-down version of the book, wherein Debo replaced many names with vague allusions to key players, but Debo refused to censor the names of Owen, and Charles Haskell, Oklahoma’s first governor. President Bizzell thought the book was still too explosive. Brandt resigned from the University of Oklahoma Press and took over the editorship of Princeton University Press, which was happy to publish Debo’s book in 1940.⁷ This classic work was reissued in paperback in 2022.⁸

However, there were some people too powerful even for Debo to dare name. One was the Tulsa philanthropist Charles Page, who throughout the 1910s and ’20s cultivated an image of himself as the state’s most generous oilman. Debo barely mentioned Page at all, except to say that much of his wealth and philanthropy was derived from his victorious legal battles to possess the lands belonging to one Muscogee allottee, a boy named Tommy Atkins.⁹ Page was a singular figure, even among the eccentric class of Oklahoma wildcatters. He directed all of his oil profits to a philanthropy called the Sand Springs Home, which funded an orphanage Page had built out in the wilderness west of Tulsa, a thick forest that once served as a boundary between the Osages and Muscogees. The orphans at the Sand Springs Home called the great philanthropist Daddy Page, and he often spoke about the children as if they were his own. He also provided homes for widows, who were housed in a sprawling community of cottages and given a daily supply of milk. The widows also had jobs at Page’s industrial facilities—the cotton gin, the water bottling plant, the steel mill. In sum, Page created a place some called the Magic Empire: the town of Sand Springs, where the oilman’s industries housed, fed, and employed thousands of Oklahomans.

I was curious about this boy, Tommy Atkins. It had been common practice among swindlers of the time to put child allottees into orphanages and then plunder their estates.¹⁰ Was Tommy one of the Sand Springs orphans, or was he something else entirely?

Angie Debo reported the story of Tommy as Charles Page wanted it known for posterity. One of Page’s orphans, Opal Bennefield Clark, published a biography of the man titled A Fool’s Enterprise (1988).¹¹ As Clark told the story, Tommy Atkins had been a little Mvskoke boy allotted land in western Creek County. His mother, Minnie Atkins, had given birth to him in a barn behind a brothel in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1885. Minnie left Tommy behind to follow her soldier boyfriend off to the Spanish-American War. She never came back for her son. Tommy grew up as an orphan near the federal penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth, fostered by Mollie Letcher, a Black brothel owner known as Granny.

When Tommy was a teenager, he disappeared during a flood. He was presumed dead, but not before the Dawes Commission put his name down on the Dawes Rolls. Minnie, who had settled down near Seattle, had assumed a new identity as a white woman from Texas. Tommy’s enrollment worked its way through government bureaucracy until he was finally granted an allotment in 1903.

In 1912, ten years after Tommy’s supposed death, a wildcatting Pennsylvania oilman named Tom Slick hit a gusher on white-owned land in western Creek County, only a few miles from Tommy’s allotment. Slick’s gusher brought forth light sweet crude, the most refinable and desirable petroleum on the market. And the timing could not have been better. By this time, it was clear that the automobile would be powered by gasoline in the future, not by steam or electricity. Even the British Navy was converting its fleet to petroleum-based fuel. The Southern Plains states of Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma were the ultimate prize: at the time, the majority of the world’s petroleum came out of this area—the Mid-Continent oil field—and, with the exception of tribal land in Oklahoma, most of it was in the hands of white Americans.

The area around Slick’s gusher was likely to be oil-rich as well, but most of it was owned by full-blood Mvskoke allottees, a people whom Slick did not understand. They spoke no English, had little interest in paper money, and, perhaps most important, were subjected to a tangle of federal restrictions on land transactions that depended on Dawes Commission blood quantum determinations. Leases to drill on Muscogee land could be obtained, but only by those willing to take risks that their transactions might be voided by some federal agent. Tom Slick became known as the king of the wildcatters, one of the richest men in the country. But he steered clear of lots whose ownership was unclear.

Charles Page was willing to take those risks. He believed that, of all the allottees whose land lay near Slick’s gusher, one belonging to a dead Indian boy—Tommy Atkins—could be had with relatively the most ease. In Page’s official version, the oilman then set off on a long clandestine trip to find Minnie Atkins, mother to Tommy, inheritor of his allotment. Page told the superintendent of the Sand Springs Home to deflect any questions about his absence. Page said he was going on a fishing vacation. Using skills acquired as a Pinkerton agent, Page combed the continent. He bought himself a ten-dollar Stetson, of which he was particularly proud. Page followed a tip to a mining camp in California. Pinkerton agents had few qualms about what we consider ethical standards in law enforcement today. Pinkertons lied, bribed (and took bribes), flipped sides for the right price, harassed and intimidated workers. They were also incredibly successful at finding their targets and solving crimes.

In California, he found the elusive Minnie Atkins cooking for cowboys and miners. Page told Minnie that her forgotten son, Tommy, was now going to make her rich beyond her wildest dreams. Minnie followed Page back to Oklahoma on a train. Minnie testified to Page’s lawyers that she was the only living heir of Tommy Atkins, and then signed Tommy’s oil lease over to Page’s oil company, Gem Oil, which he ran with a Texas oilman named R. A. Josey. Page bought Minnie an eclectic, Mediterranean-style house with a wraparound porch, right across the street from Page’s own mansion. There she lived happily ever after, a rich Indian heiress who made for good newspaper copy. It seemed like a rags-to-riches story straight out of Hollywood.

Even though Angie Debo had kind words for Page, she noted something quite peculiar about Page’s involvement in cases involving missing Mvskoke children. In 1915, the federal government, with the support of the Muscogee Nation, had accused several oilmen of engaging in a fraud to create fictional Muscogee citizens whose land just happened to be sitting on oil deposits. Some of these cases involved missing persons and stranger-than-fiction appearances from beyond the grave. In one case, a Muscogee man named Barney Thlocco was assumed to have died from smallpox in Indian Territory in 1899, only to resurface as an ex–circus performer and Mexican revolutionary two decades later. He had not died at all, Thlocco claimed. He had run away to Mexico with a faction of Chitto Harjo’s rebels. Now he wanted his land back. After some interrogation, it appeared that this Mexican Thlocco might have been an impersonator of the dead man. Debo alluded to the idea that Charles Page’s Tommy Atkins might also have been one of these frauds: It was doubtful if such a person had ever existed, she wrote in passing.¹²

In 1917, the Supreme Court took up the Thlocco case in US v. Wildcat. The court did not answer the question that truly lay at the heart of the matter—whether the man claiming to be Thlocco was a genuine Muscogee citizen from Oklahoma or a Mexican impersonating a Native American to get land. Instead, the court focused on the validity of the Dawes Rolls on which Thlocco’s name was recorded. The Muscogee Nation argued that Thlocco had died before the important date of April 1, 1899—the cutoff date established by the Dawes Commission, after which deceased citizens could no longer be given allotments. They argued that Thlocco’s entire allotment should be canceled and the wealth of the land returned to the tribe. In the end, the Supreme Court decided that reexamining Thlocco’s case would reopen so many questions and disturb so many titles that the Dawes Rolls should stand.

The Supreme Court, like the leaders of the petroleum industry, had no appetite to reexamine Dawes’s work. The oil boom was transforming the world’s economy—a few mistakes in some bureaucratic paperwork were inevitable, but not a reason to stand in the way of progress.

I found it disturbing that the court had brushed off the real question: Had Thlocco been cheated out of his land? Or, if he had died before the cutoff date, why had the Muscogee Nation not been able to recover the millions of dollars in royalties that had been redirected to the oilmen? I heard a Muscogee man muse on the question at an Oklahoma history conference in 2022.

We could have been a mini Saudi Arabia! he said as I talked about Atkins and Thlocco. That prospect raised another host of questions I don’t think anyone was ready to answer.

I turned back to Debo’s throwaway observation that Tommy Atkins was most likely a fiction. This seemed a little too far-fetched. I found a book on the work of the Dawes Commission that contained a footnote regarding Tommy Atkins. It only furthered the enigma. Thomas Atkins was enrolled as Creek-by-Blood 7913, it said. His case . . . contains hundreds of pages of testimony and exhibits.¹³ Now it seemed that the case of Tommy Atkins, far from being the simple rags-to-riches story that Clark had put down in the Charles Page biography, had in fact been complicated and hotly contested.

Where were these testimonies and exhibits? It was hard to figure out. A Google search yielded little except a reference to several court cases involving Atkins and the Sand Springs Home. The cases had gone from the Creek County Court in Sapulpa all the way to the United States Supreme Court. They involved not only Minnie Atkins but also two other Atkins women. Tommy became known in the press as the boy with three mothers: Minnie, Nancy, and Sally* Atkins all at various points claimed to be the one true mother of the missing millionaire boy. Each woman was backed by powerful oilmen and companies ready to claim this valuable allotment. The Tommy Atkins case had been treated like a footnote in history, when in reality it was a legal Pandora’s box containing vital questions about landownership, racial identity, and oil wealth.

LOOKING FOR A PHANTOM CHILD

The Tommy Atkins case was in fact four separate court cases that came to trial. Each had plot twists and eccentric characters worthy of a noirish detective novel. Each one deserves its own chapter, and, indeed, receives one in this book. The first trial saw Nancy Atkins challenge a Sapulpa man named H. U. Bartlett over Tommy’s heirship in Creek County Court in 1913. Nancy Atkins, the plaintiff, sued Bartlett, claiming that Bartlett’s oil lease had been forged by an imposter of Nancy’s sister, Minnie Atkins.

The second trial, also in the Creek County Court, began in 1914 and involved a second woman claiming to be Minnie Atkins, the woman who had signed Tommy Atkins’s allotment over to Page’s Gem Oil Company that same year. This caught the attention of the Department of Justice, which, together with the national attorney of the Muscogee Nation, sued Minnie and Page for fraud.

Thus began the trial of a third case (United States v. Atkins et al., Equity 2131) in 1915 on a much bigger stage—the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma in Muskogee. At the time this trial was considered the most voluminous and expensive trial in Oklahoma history. It dragged on for three years and generated thousands of pages of trial transcripts and documents.

Just when the public thought it was all over, in 1919, a fourth trial began, shortly after the death of Minnie Atkins. A relative of Minnie’s, a Black woman named Sally Atkins, came back from her refuge in Canada to sue the Sand Springs Home for illegally possessing her son Tommy’s land in Creek County. This fourth case roiled the entire political foundations of Oklahoma, leading to claims of bribery, attempted assassinations, and the temporary imprisonment of a judge. By 1922, the Tommy Atkins case wound up in the US Supreme Court as Page v. Atkins. There were sideshows as well, as shadowy men came out of the woodwork to claim they were, in fact, the actual Tommy Atkins. My head continues to spin.

In 2020, I called Apollonia Piña, my research assistant and a Muscogee Nation citizen, to help me sort it out. We had met in 2018 while trying to figure out how a valuable piece of Tulsa real estate had been transferred from a famous allottee to a company that had created the subdivision where I grew up, Sunset Terrace.

Our working relationship had gotten off to a rocky start. Apollonia saw an article I published in the Tulsa World about this early-twentieth-century swindle. She sent me a Facebook message saying that the research would have landed better if it came from a Mvskoke perspective. I thought she was out to cancel me. To her surprise, I wrote back saying I agreed—the story should have an Indigenous point of view. I told her about Tommy Atkins. She seemed perplexed. At the time, Apollonia was working at a Tulsa public library branch and had connections at her tribe’s Cultural and Historic Preservation Department. (She is now an emergency room nurse at a Creek County hospital, of all places.)

We eventually formed an unlikely research team that included a volunteer from the Maple Ridge Garden Club named Gina Covington and an Indigenous radio journalist named Allison Herrera. Gina turned the basement of her elegant home on Black Gold Row