Ghosts of crook county An oil fortune, a phantom child, and the fight for Indigenous land

In Creek County, Oklahoma, the presence of light sweet crude oil underneath the earth led to speculation and drilling. Those fortunate enough to own the land where oil was discovered stood to reap the gains. In early 20th century Oklahoma, many of these landowners were members of Native American tribes such as the Muscogee Indians. These men and women had previously been displaced from their homes by the U.S. Government often in the name of "progress;" the Dawes Commission of 1896 allotted land to several tribes in exchange for the members ceding their sovereignty. Now, the allotments proved more and more lucrative with each oil discovery. But some miscreants sought to seize these allotments through any means necessary. The amoral pursuit of profit and the further fleecing of Indigenous people form the crux of Cobb's (The Great Oklahoma Swindle, 2020) intriguing narrative. This powerful work is equal parts history and true crime. The result is a historical record illuminating a failure of law and policy.

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.)

The great-grandson of an Oklahoma oilman interrogates a legal conundrum that lays bare the corruption beneath the creation of his home state. The "Crook County" of Cobb's title is in actuality Creek County, just southwest of Tulsa, where two 80-acre parcels were allotted in 1903 to a Muscogee boy who may never have existed. It was also in 1903 that one of the area's most prominent white philanthropists, Charles Page, began to exploit the oil that lay beneath the soil of the Muscogee Nation. Cobb's task here is not an easy one. He must explain the displacement of the Five Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole) to Indian Territory, U.S. Indian law, U.S. mineral rights as they relate to landownership, and the complexity of race and identity in both the Five Tribes and the United States. And that's before he tackles the case of Tommy Atkins, "a fictional boy with three mothers," which spawned four separate trials between 1913 and 1922. Cobb gamely wades into what one interlocutor describes as "some deep shit," introducing readers to Page, the three claimant mothers, and a dizzying host of supporting characters ranging from a Black Kansas madam to President Woodrow Wilson. Many of the characters overlap from trial to trial, making it hard for both readers and author to follow the winding threads, and the need to continually retreat in time to fill in each trial's backstory further unmoors readers. "My head continues to spin," Cobb confesses at the outset, and readers' will frequently do likewise. If his narrative is at times incoherent, it's largely because "the mainstream stories Oklahoma tells about itself" are incoherent, and white residents' desperation to hold on to them in any way possible becomes painfully clear. A worthy, if at times befuddling, attempt to wrangle truth from history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.