Professor’s family intrigue sparks examination of Oklahoma’s fraudulent past

In “Ghosts of Crook County,” Russell Cobb recounts the exploitation of Indigenous people that figures prominently in the history of the Sooner State.

Russell Cobb

In his latest book, Ghosts of Crook County, U of A professor Russell Cobb delves into the history of Oklahoma men who chased easy money during the “black gold rush” of the early 1900s, robbing thousands of Indigenous people of their land rights. (Photo: Supplied)

Russell Cobb’s family saga is the stuff of Hollywood film.

Cobb’s great-grandfather was among those who chased easy money during the “black gold rush” of the early 1900s. During that period, thousands of Indigenous people were swindled of their land rights, and some were even murdered for the oil under the soil, as depicted in David Grann's nonfiction book (and Martin Scorcese’s film), Killers of the Flower Moon.

Just how Cobb’s ancestors were involved in what historian Angie Debo calls “an orgy of exploitation almost beyond belief” is murky, says the professor in the Faculty of Arts. They were likely not as culpable as some in that dark chapter of American history.

What he does know is that his great-grandfather chased a fever dream of oil wealth from New York to Oklahoma, settling and drilling on land once promised to the Muscogee Nation in perpetuity by the U.S. federal government. 

Russell Cobb Sr. eventually went broke and shot himself in the Hotel Tulsa in 1962. His son Russell Cobb Jr. died in 1968 owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the IRS.

Cobb’s father Candler was dead by the time Cobb was six, after attempting to revive the family business in Houston. Candler’s twin brother, Russell Cobb III, tried to avoid the family curse by turning born-again Christian and joining televangelist Richard (son of Oral) Roberts’ flock. 

Based on Cobb’s research into Roberts’ movement, a Netflix movie called Come Sunday starring Martin Sheen as Oral Roberts was released in 2018, recounting the fall of one of Roberts’ disciples, Carlton Pearson, often referred to as Roberts’ “black son.”

Mixed into Cobb’s complicated family tree are Cherokee and Choctaw relations on both sides. It is therefore no wonder that Cobb (the fourth Russell) is irresistibly drawn to this dark chapter of American history, with a fervent desire to set the record straight.

His first foray into his homeland’s history —The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America’s Weirdest State — was described by Publishers Weekly as an “unflinching look at Oklahoma’s singular past.” In that 2020 book, Cobb argues that Oklahoma’s state-building project, including massive legalized theft of Native land, was “founded and maintained on false information and broken promises from its very beginning.”

His latest non-fiction release, Ghosts of Crook County, examines through exhaustive research just how the perpetrators carried out that ruthless, fraudulent theft. Killers of the Flower Moon — based on the 2017 non-fiction book by American journalist David Grann — also examines that history through the Osage murders, delivering a measure of justice in its conclusion. Ghosts of Crook County leaves the reader with no such easy resolution.

Ghosts took years to complete, says Cobb, because records were not always accurately kept and much of the history of that era is either suspect or suppressed. Unlike Killers, in which the villain gets his just deserts, the antagonist of Crook County is cast in a bronze statue in a town square. The book reads like a tangled detective yarn, one that cost Cobb countless restless nights of rumination.

A tangled web of deception

The story centres on Tommy Atkins, a Muscogee (Creek) boy who is assigned a plot of land in accordance with U.S. Congress’s Dawes Commission mandate of the 1890s to turn Indian Territory into the State of Oklahoma. The commission ended tribal ownership and allocated individual plots of land to each member of the “Five Civilized Tribes” — the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles.

The problem was, no one could actually find Atkins, says Cobb. “A certificate of allotment was filed with the Department of the Interior sometime after his birth, then they just waited for somebody to come get it. Nobody did.”

The Dawes Commission assumed Tommy’s mother was a woman named Minnie. But Minnie moved to California, turning her back on the past. Whenever she was sent a letter by the government regarding the land allotment, “she just threw it in the fire,” says Cobb.

Enter Charles Page, officially a prominent philanthropist who had built an orphanage in Tulsa, but unofficially an unscrupulous scoundrel. Page assumed the land of a dead Indian boy would be relatively easy to procure, so he sent agents to track her down. At first, she denied that Tommy was her child. Page’s promise of riches convinced her that if she returned to claim Tommy’s land, all of her problems would be solved. 

“Minnie followed Page back to Oklahoma on a train,” writes Cobb. “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.”

Page bought Minnie an opulent mansion across the street from his own residence, and “there she lived as a ‘rich Indian heiress’ who made for good newspaper copy. It seemed like a rags-to-riches story straight out of Hollywood.”

By 1915, the federal government’s recently established Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the FBI) started catching up with a number of oilmen who had created fictional Muscogee citizens to seize land rights. Meanwhile, two other women showed up also claiming to be Tommy Atkins’ mother.

One of them, Sallie Atkins, had been living near Leduc in an all-Black settlement called Keystone. Through social media, Cobb connected with Sallie’s great-granddaughter, who still lives in Alberta.

Sallie made a claim on the fortune in 1919. “That’s where it gets very dark,” says Cobb. Minnie admitted to the Bureau that she had been coerced into lying about Tommy’s existence and forced to sign over the lease under threat of being kidnapped.

“As soon as she admits this to the government agents, she turns up dead,” says Cobb. “By the time the Atkins case reaches the Supreme Court in 1922, she has willed the land to her two sons who quickly turn around and sell it to Charles Page.”

“There was never any justice,” says Cobb. “Page gets away with his crime, and the story (at that point) is written out of history.”

Bringing injustice to light

More than a decade later, in the 1930s, historian Angie Debo completed her own investigation of the Atkins case for the University of Oklahoma Press, revealing how “millions of acres allotted to tribal citizens quickly wound up as vast land holdings controlled by powerful Oklahoma men,” says Cobb.

Debo received death threats for her research, and the project was spiked by the president of the University of Oklahoma, which depended on the financial and political support of the state’s oilmen. Eventually, Debo’s book was picked up by Princeton University Press and published in 1940 under the title, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes — reissued in 2022.

But even by the 1940s, Page was still too powerful a figure for Debo to out.

“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,” says Cobb.

It is only now, thanks to Debo and Cobb, that the true story of the stolen land is coming to light. In Cobb’s estimation, revisiting it now could not be more timely. 

For one thing, he says, Oklahoma serves as a microcosm of American history. Debo wrote that “the one who can interpret Oklahoma can grasp the meaning of America in the modern world.”

That modern world, Cobb says, is grappling with the double-edged legacy of oil, a natural resource that brings prosperity and social mobility while also giving rise to greed, land swindling and environmental damage. 

Oklahoma’s fraudulent legacy also reveals the enduring deception at the heart of the American dream.

“Rather than seeing fake news as a contemporary media problem, I see it as the touchstone for our political culture,” says Cobb. “The state of Oklahoma was built and is still maintained on a bedrock of lies.”