Ghosts of Crook County
An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The true—and unsolved—story of unabashedly greedy men, their exploitation of Muscogee land, and the hunt for the ghost of a boy who may never have existed
For readers of David Grann’s award-winning Killers of the Flower Moon
In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the “American Century,” few knew the intoxicating power of greed better than white men on the forefront of the black gold rush. When oil was discovered in Oklahoma, these counterfeit tycoons impersonated, defrauded, and murdered Native property owners to snatch up hundreds of acres of oil-rich land.
Writer and fourth-generation Oklahoman Russell Cobb sets the stage for one such oilman’s chicanery: Tulsa entrepreneur Charles Page’s campaign for a young Muscogee boy’s land in Creek County. Problem was, “Tommy Atkins,” the boy in question, had died years prior—if he ever lived at all.
Ghosts of Crook County traces Tommy’s mythologized life through Page’s relentless pursuit of his land. We meet Minnie Atkins and the two other women who claimed to be Tommy’s “real” mother. Minnie would testify a story of her son’s life and death that fulfilled the legal requirements for his land to be transferred to Page. And we meet Tommy himself—or the men who proclaimed themselves to be him, alive and well in court.
Through evocative storytelling, Cobb chronicles with unflinching precision the lasting effects of land-grabbing white men on Indigenous peoples. What emerges are the interconnected stories of unabashedly greedy men, the exploitation of Indigenous land, and the legacy of a boy who may never have existed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This riveting legal thriller from historian Cobb (The Great Oklahoma Swindle) opens up a "Pandora's box containing vital questions about land ownership... and oil wealth" in modern-day Oklahoma. Cobb tracks a series of turn-of-the-20th-century court cases involving a Muscogee boy named Tommy Atkins, showing that three different women claimed to be the deceased Tommy's mother—each clandestinely supported, as demonstrated via Cobb's superb historical sleuthing, by different oilmen hoping to gain drilling rights over Tommy's inherited, oil-rich allotment. Cobb's investigation ends up shedding disturbing light on the legacy of Tulsa founding father Charles Page, the progenitor of what is today "one of Oklahoma's most renowned philanthropies," who made his fortune by backing the "mother" who finally won out. But the path to victory wasn't simple; that "mother" was investigated by the U.S. government for fraudulent impersonation. While the case grew in complexity (several other impersonators emerged), the Justice Department concluded behind the scenes, as detailed in records uncovered by Cobb, that Tommy was an invention of Page's; this internal revelation of outsized fraud so rocked the country's burgeoning oil industry, Cobb discovers, that it led to what he explosively describes as a 1915 kidnapping of the Muscogee chief by shadowy federal agents, likely working for President Woodrow Wilson, who forced him to sign documents supporting Page's claim. Cobb's narrative is propelled by a wide-eyed sense of the enormity of the scandal ("You've stepped in some deep shit," one fellow researcher tells him). It's an astonishing exposé.
