GHOSTS OF CROOK COUNTY

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.