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

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. (Oct.)