Publishers Weekly
★ 08/05/2024
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.)
From the Publisher
[A] riveting legal thriller . . . superb historical sleuthing . . . It’s an astonishing exposé.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“The great-grandson of an Oklahoma oilman interrogates a legal conundrum that lays bare the corruption beneath the creation of his home state.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This powerful work is equal parts history and true crime. The result is a historical record illuminating a failure of law and policy.”
—Booklist
“With page-turning flair, Russell Cobb pursues the hidden truth about Indian oil allotments, white politics, and Black people who dreamed of a better life in early Oklahoma. The result is a suspenseful story of corruption, power, and malice that you will never forget!”
—Donald L. Fixico (Muscogee, Seminole, Shawnee, and Sac and Fox), author of The State of Sequoyah: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Quest for an Indian State
“Russell Cobb is a master storyteller, as well as being prolific. He is dedicated to digging out and revealing the corruption and crookedness of his and my home state. Ghosts of Crook County is his best yet.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, American Book Award-winning author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“Russell Cobb has delivered a bombshell of a book. Ghosts of Crook County isn’t just a deeply researched, gripping historical detective story. It is also a compelling meditation on wealth and power. Highly recommended.”
—Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City’s Search for Justice
“Weaving autobiography and investigative journalism, deep history and pointed critique, together in an enthralling must-read story of Oklahoma oil, Russell Cobb reminds us, in searing fashion, how crude exacts a heavy price for those communities caught up in its false dreams...This is a masterful book that reveals Oklahoma’s past (hidden) encounters with crude with an eye to its enduring potential for violence and injustice today.”
—Darren Dochuk, author of Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America
“With the poetic writing of a literary savant, Cobb brings together Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous children, and the unique capitalist exploitation that happened when oil was discovered in Indian Territory, leading to further forms of Indigenous dispossession. If you’ve read Killers of the Flower Moon and were enraged but engrossed in the story, Ghosts of Crook County is also the book for you—and you’ll likely enjoy it more!”
—Kyle T. Mays (Saginaw Chippewa), author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States
“Like some bastard son of Angie Debo and David Grann, in Ghosts of Crook County Russell Cobb blends the archival acuity of the former with the reliable readability of the latter.”
—Jeff Martin, owner, Magic City Books
Kirkus Reviews
2024-08-02
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.
