Stolen land. Seized oil. An inexplicable death. And a boy who may have never existed. These are just a few of the mysteries at the heart of Russell Cobb’s newest nonfiction book, Ghosts of Crook County.
No stranger to the state’s past and a fourth-generation Oklahoman himself, Cobb also wrote The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America’s Weirdest State. But while his previous text took a broader look at the forces that made — and corrupted — the state, Crook County hones in on a specific mystery that nonetheless speaks to Oklahoma’s often problematic past.
To celebrate Crook County’s release, Cobb spoke with Adrienne Lalli Hills, the Director of Learning and Community Engagement for the First Americans Museum. In his conversation at the Ronald J. Norick Downtown Library and a separate interview with Oklahoma Gazette, Cobb shed light on what draws him to Oklahoma and the crimes and tragedies that scar the state.
Weirder than fiction
Cobb is the grandson of an oil man, also named Russell Cobb, who lost his fortune before the author was born to see it. And while Cobb still heard plenty of stories, it wasn’t until he returned home as an adult to care for his mother that he discovered how little he actually knew.
“I had all these deep roots from rural McIntosh County to wealthy, oil-rich Tulsa,” Cobb said. “I thought I should’ve known this place.”
But coming to terms with what he thought he knew didn’t dissuade him. In fact, it drove him to dig deeper and illuminate the connections that seemed lost to time.
“Most assume Oklahoma is flyover state for test marketing,” Cobb said. “Yet it’s actually one of the most fascinating and contradictory places you could ever visit. For a writer who’s interesting in story and history, it’s a great gift.”
After he left the state, Cobb attended the University of Texas for Latin American studies. Cobb was interested in how revolutions formed and how nations grapple with social upheaval. However, his return to Oklahoma revealed that the “flyover state” has its own legacy of exploitation and near-sighted coverups.
“I realized there’s a lot here that needs serious study,” Cobb said. “I began rethinking the foundational stories of Oklahoma. That’s when it changed for me.”
Bottomless greed
With Crook County, Cobb examines an elaborate hoax worth $10 million in the early 20th century — roughly $270 million today.
Fans of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon may be familiar with how land owned by indigenous people was often “transferred” to white entrepreneurs. Fraud, deception and a specter of death were their currency, but Charles Page, an oilman from Tulsa, didn’t just kill someone. He fabricated the death of a boy, Tommy Atkins, who likely never existed.
Cobb soon learned that this wasn’t just the machinations of a crooked man with bad intentions. For the hoax to work, Page needed assistance, including some from members of the Creek nation. Because even Page’s ruse at least required someone who might’ve existed. The closest approximation to Tommy Atkins that Cobb found was the descendant of freedman, or slaves who once belonged to one of the five big tribes.
Unlike aspects of Killers, the reality of Cobb’s book doesn’t lend itself to clear “good” and “bad” guys. Even so, for Cobb, certain moral ambiguity shouldn’t keep a story from being told.
“It has to be nuanced, truthful and acknowledge the complexities,” said Cobb. “And when I discovered the agency of powerful people in the Muscogee Nation, it got really complicated really fast. At the same time, you have to remember that people were trying to survive.”
In other words, complicity in certain schemes doesn’t replace the fact that any indigenous person with a claim to oil was likely targeted for it.
“Guardianship scandals occurred across all of the big five tribes, and not just in Tulsa,” Cobb said. “But it happened most specifically and most dramatically in the land that has oil.”
A complex tangle of players also doesn’t change that these atrocities were amplified when the state formally took shape.
Whitewashing red dirt
“Statehood was the beginning of the end,” Cobb said. “Oklahoma was founded on one lie or fraud after another. There’s no denying it. It’s documented.”
Cobb doesn’t mean that the state is irreparably broken or tainted, but it does carry a problematic history that — until very recently — hasn’t been widely addressed.
“There have always been historians and activists calling for a more truthful history,” Cobb said. “But whitewashing can only go on for so long. You can’t just continue to lie and lie when the paper trail is there. It’s like in psychology: When you try to repress trauma, it finds a way to come out.”
For Cobb, how the implications of our past emerge depend on how ready we are to confront it. Doing it half-heartedly can result in initiatives that, while visible, make little progress toward reconciliation. Ignoring it outright can lead to something far worse.
“We have to deal with our past in an honest and forthright way,” Cobb said. “Or we wait for it to explode like with lynchings or the Tulsa Race Massacre.” Russell Cobb’s Ghosts of Crook County is available now through Penguin Random House. The hardcover edition of the book is $32.95. Visit penguinrandomhouse.com.
This article appears in Queen of Oklahoma.