Land, Oil, and Indigenous Identity: On the Disappearance of Tommy Atkins

Angie Debo, working in the 1930s, was a laconic, studious woman with a small-town Oklahoma background and impeccable academic credentials (she earned an MA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from the University of Oklahoma). She compiled a manuscript documenting how millions of acres allotted to tribal citizens quickly wound up as vast landholdings controlled by powerful Oklahoma men. The research led to threats against her life. But an Oxford-educated editor of the University of Oklahoma Press, Joseph Brandt, contracted with Debo to publish her work And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes. Before the book could go to press, however, the president of the university, William Bizzell, realized that Debo’s work could threaten not only the press but the whole university, as it depended on donations and political support from oilmen. Debo’s book named names, some of whom were still living, like Senator Robert L. Owen, who Brandt thought might sue for libel. Debo could not understand; she had found his name on warranty deeds in county courthouses removing restrictions on allottees. It was right out there in the public. Either no one had noticed it, or they downplayed Owen’s role in removing what were supposed to be guarantees against land swindling. Brandt fought for the publication of a watered-down version of the book, wherein Debo replaced many names with vague allusions to key players, but Debo refused to censor the names of Owen, and Charles Haskell, Oklahoma’s first governor. President Bizzell thought the book was still too explosive. Brandt resigned from the University of Oklahoma Press and took over the editorship of Princeton University Press, which was happy to publish Debo’s book in 1940. This classic work was reissued in paperback in 2022.

However, there were some people too powerful even for Debo to dare name. One was the Tulsa philanthropist Charles Page, who throughout the 1910s and ’20s cultivated an image of himself as the state’s most generous oilman. Debo barely mentioned Page at all, except to say that much of his wealth and philanthropy was derived from his victorious legal battles to possess the lands belonging to one Muscogee allottee, a boy named Tommy Atkins. Page was a singular figure, even among the eccentric class of Oklahoma wildcatters. He directed all of his oil profits to a philanthropy called the Sand Springs Home, which funded an orphanage Page had built out in the wilderness west of Tulsa, a thick forest that once served as a boundary between the Osages and Muscogees. The orphans at the Sand Springs Home called the great philanthropist Daddy Page, and he often spoke about the children as if they were his own. He also provided homes for widows, who were housed in a sprawling community of cottages and given a daily supply of milk. The widows also had jobs at Page’s industrial facilities—the cotton gin, the water bottling plant, the steel mill. In sum, Page created a place some called the Magic Empire: the town of Sand Springs, where the oilman’s industries housed, fed, and employed thousands of Oklahomans.

I was curious about this boy, Tommy Atkins. It had been common practice among swindlers of the time to put child allottees into orphanages and then plunder their estates. Was Tommy one of the Sand Springs orphans, or was he something else entirely?

Angie Debo reported the story of Tommy as Charles Page wanted it known for posterity. One of Page’s orphans, Opal Bennefield Clark, published a biography of the man titled A Fool’s Enterprise (1988). As Clark told the story, Tommy Atkins had been a little Mvskoke boy allotted land in western Creek County. His mother, Minnie Atkins, had given birth to him in a barn behind a brothel in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1885. Minnie left Tommy behind to follow her soldier boyfriend off to the Spanish-American War. She never came back for her son. Tommy grew up as an orphan near the federal penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth, fostered by Mollie Letcher, a Black brothel owner known as Granny.

When Tommy was a teenager, he disappeared during a flood. He was presumed dead, but not before the Dawes Commission put his name down on the Dawes Rolls. Minnie, who had settled down near Seattle, had assumed a new identity as a white woman from Texas. Tommy’s enrollment worked its way through government bureaucracy until he was finally granted an allotment in 1903.

In 1912, ten years after Tommy’s supposed death, a wildcatting Pennsylvania oilman named Tom Slick hit a gusher on white-owned land in western Creek County, only a few miles from Tommy’s allotment. Slick’s gusher brought forth light sweet crude, the most refinable and desirable petroleum on the market. And the timing could not have been better. By this time, it was clear that the automobile would be powered by gasoline in the future, not by steam or electricity. Even the British Navy was converting its fleet to petroleum-based fuel. The Southern Plains states of Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma were the ultimate prize: at the time, the majority of the world’s petroleum came out of this area—the Mid-Continent oil field—and, with the exception of tribal land in Oklahoma, most of it was in the hands of white Americans.

The area around Slick’s gusher was likely to be oil-rich as well, but most of it was owned by “full-blood” Mvskoke allottees, a people whom Slick did not understand. They spoke no English, had little interest in paper money, and, perhaps most important, were subjected to a tangle of federal restrictions on land transactions that depended on Dawes Commission blood quantum determinations. Leases to drill on Muscogee land could be obtained, but only by those willing to take risks that their transactions might be voided by some federal agent. Tom Slick became known as “the king of the wildcatters,” one of the richest men in the country. But he steered clear of lots whose ownership was unclear.

Charles Page was willing to take those risks. He believed that, of all the allottees whose land lay near Slick’s gusher, one belonging to a dead Indian boy—Tommy Atkins—could be had with relatively the most ease. In Page’s official version, the oilman then set off on a long clandestine trip to find Minnie Atkins, mother to Tommy, inheritor of his allotment. Page told the superintendent of the Sand Springs Home to deflect any questions about his absence. Page said he was going on a fishing vacation. Using skills acquired as a Pinkerton agent, Page combed the continent. He bought himself a ten-dollar Stetson, of which he was particularly proud. Page followed a tip to a mining camp in California. Pinkerton agents had few qualms about what we consider ethical standards in law enforcement today. Pinkertons lied, bribed (and took bribes), flipped sides for the right price, harassed and intimidated workers. They were also incredibly successful at finding their targets and solving crimes.

In California, he found the elusive Minnie Atkins cooking for cowboys and miners. Page told Minnie that her forgotten son, Tommy, was now going to make her rich beyond her wildest dreams. Minnie followed Page back to Oklahoma on a train. Minnie testified to Page’s lawyers that she was the only living heir of Tommy Atkins, and then signed Tommy’s oil lease over to Page’s oil company, Gem Oil, which he ran with a Texas oilman named R. A. Josey. Page bought Minnie an eclectic, Mediterranean-style house with a wraparound porch, right across the street from Page’s own mansion. There she lived happily ever after, a “rich Indian heiress” who made for good newspaper copy. It seemed like a rags-to-riches story straight out of Hollywood.

Even though Angie Debo had kind words for Page, she noted something quite peculiar about Page’s involvement in cases involving missing Mvskoke children. In 1915, the federal government, with the support of the Muscogee Nation, had accused several oilmen of engaging in a fraud to create fictional Muscogee citizens whose land just happened to be sitting on oil deposits. Some of these cases involved missing persons and stranger-than-fiction appearances from beyond the grave. In one case, a Muscogee man named Barney Thlocco was assumed to have died from smallpox in Indian Territory in 1899, only to resurface as an ex–circus performer and Mexican revolutionary two decades later. He had not died at all, Thlocco claimed. He had run away to Mexico with a faction of Chitto Harjo’s rebels. Now he wanted his land back. After some interrogation, it appeared that this Mexican Thlocco might have been an impersonator of the dead man. Debo alluded to the idea that Charles Page’s Tommy Atkins might also have been one of these frauds: “It was doubtful if such a person had ever existed,” she wrote in passing.

In 1917, the Supreme Court took up the Thlocco case in US v. Wildcat. The court did not answer the question that truly lay at the heart of the matter—whether the man claiming to be Thlocco was a genuine Muscogee citizen from Oklahoma or a Mexican impersonating a Native American to get land. Instead, the court focused on the validity of the Dawes Rolls on which Thlocco’s name was recorded. The Muscogee Nation argued that Thlocco had died before the important date of April 1, 1899—the cutoff date established by the Dawes Commission, after which deceased citizens could no longer be given allotments. They argued that Thlocco’s entire allotment should be canceled and the wealth of the land returned to the tribe. In the end, the Supreme Court decided that reexamining Thlocco’s case “would reopen so many questions and disturb so many titles that the Dawes Rolls should stand.”

The Supreme Court, like the leaders of the petroleum industry, had no appetite to reexamine Dawes’s work. The oil boom was transforming the world’s economy—a few mistakes in some bureaucratic paperwork were inevitable, but not a reason to stand in the way of progress.

I found it disturbing that the court had brushed off the real question: Had Thlocco been cheated out of his land? Or, if he had died before the cutoff date, why had the Muscogee Nation not been able to recover the millions of dollars in royalties that had been redirected to the oilmen? I heard a Muscogee man muse on the question at an Oklahoma history conference in 2022.

“We could have been a mini Saudi Arabia!” he said as I talked about Atkins and Thlocco. That prospect raised another host of questions I don’t think anyone was ready to answer.

I turned back to Debo’s throwaway observation that Tommy Atkins was most likely a fiction. This seemed a little too far-fetched. I found a book on the work of the Dawes Commission that contained a footnote regarding Tommy Atkins. It only furthered the enigma. “Thomas Atkins was enrolled as Creek-by-Blood 7913,” it said. “His case . . . contains hundreds of pages of testimony and exhibits.” Now it seemed that the case of Tommy Atkins, far from being the simple rags-to-riches story that Clark had put down in the Charles Page biography, had in fact been complicated and hotly contested.

Where were these testimonies and exhibits? It was hard to figure out. A Google search yielded little except a reference to several court cases involving Atkins and the Sand Springs Home. The cases had gone from the Creek County Court in Sapulpa all the way to the United States Supreme Court. They involved not only Minnie Atkins but also two other Atkins women. Tommy became known in the press as “the boy with three mothers”: Minnie, Nancy, and Sally Atkins all at various points claimed to be the one true mother of the missing millionaire boy. Each woman was backed by powerful oilmen and companies ready to claim this valuable allotment. The Tommy Atkins case had been treated like a footnote in history, when in reality it was a legal Pandora’s box containing vital questions about landownership, racial identity, and oil wealth.

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Excerpted from Russell Cobb’s Ghosts of Crook County: An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land by Russell Cobb (Beacon Press, 2024). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.