by Portlyn Houghton-Harjo I’m reading Joe’s piece, “Back in Tulsa Again” because I am back in Tulsa again after living in Brooklyn for a few years. Brainard writes that “the sky is higher in Tulsa. The sky is higher in Tulsa than in New York.” This line reminds me of a quote that I think Ed Ruscha said, but I can never find the source. “I am a victim of the horizon.” Maybe that's Tulsa vs. OKC, though. The lateral plane is more evident in OKC. The vertical constantly above you in Tulsa. It makes you wanna strain your neck and look up. You can still see the stars at night. There’s something very Tulsan about Brainard’s art. The altering, the recreating, the collaging, and the layers of it all remind me of the artists and writers I know here. There’s an undeniable energy and originality to Brainard’s visual and written work—”I Remember” was considered one of the most original poems of its time. Alternative literary legends like Edmund White and Paul Auster, among many other friends of Brainard, recognized his particular and fresh voice as necessary, with Auster saying that “ the so-called important books of our time will be forgotten, but Joe Brainard's modest little gem will endure .” His constant use and reuse of the comic strip character, Nancy, is a tongue-in-cheek presentation of Nancy through his absurdist prompts. Brainard had icons. Cigarette butts, pansies, and Nancy. All common insults to gay men, which I have to believe is why Brainard repurposed them in his art. He took these images and distorted them again and again. His poetry takes his life and the people in it and serves it back to us, all with a wink. He looks up at the sky, finds the poetry, and writes it all down. When I first read Joe Brainard, I was 14 and had just started writing poetry. I did not know what made Tulsa special (yet), but people were always trying to show me. Around this time, my dad and Lee Roy Chapman were hanging out a lot. I’d see him pull up in that old van to hand out a new batch of shirts and immediately loved the drama of it all. It was during one of these drop-ins when my dad and Lee Roy told me about the Tulsa faction of the New York School. A few months before he passed, Lee Roy gave me two copies of the Evergreen Review, which blew up my poetry for the better. Eventually, I left and studied poetry in Brooklyn, where I saw the consequences of these Tulsans. I guess I thought that interest in Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, etc., was reserved for Tulsa freaks. Our reach feels so small sometimes, which is how I like it. In Brooklyn, I was meeting devotees to the New York School, and by extension, to Tulsa’s influence. Of course, often, they weren’t interested in Tulsa. Maybe Joe or Ron’s Tulsa, but not the Tulsa that I brought to them. The good ones cared because they could see the mark this city leaves on people who grew up here—askew and uncomfortably in the middle of extremes.  In “Back in Tulsa Again,” when Joe, Pat, and Ron enter Tulsa, they sing “Oklahoma.” Once, at a small party, my friends and I sang Oklahoma. In the middle of it all, tornado sirens went off. We were mocking our state, and the skies answered us, saying, “Take cover and take me seriously.” It was a ridiculous moment, almost as Oklahoman as seeing Wayne Coyne walk into the Muskogee Ren Faire with an opened Sonic hard seltzer (yes, I saw it!). Through all Brainard’s works, even as he mocks, his affection is evident. He had a love for the world around him. I think, as Okies, we make fun of the things we love as a way to pay respect to it. The Center for Public Secrets will host "Doves All The Way Down: Remembering Joe Brainard" a poetry reading and exhibition of the work of Joe Brainard, on March 9th, 2025, from 6-8 pm at 573 S Peoria Ave in Tulsa. RSVP now on the Events Page.

By Lee Roy Chapman This photo is among those in the collection of Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett. The collection of negatives was salvaged some years ago from the Howard Hopkins photo studio by Bartlett and consists of found negatives from 1966 to 1979, including rare images of Hargis’ Christian Crusade. Originally published in This Land . Republished here with permission. Little Rock was shell-shocked. It was July of 1960, and in the past year, five bombings had terrorized the city’s public school system. The state legislature of Arkansas attempted to thwart desegregation by shutting down Little Rock’s public high schools, but the bombings sent a far more violent message to the city’s pioneering civil rights community. Similar incidents throughout the South grabbed the country’s attention, forcing the Federal government to intervene. In Arkansas, the government put a zealous Army general in command of the military district to ensure safety and integration. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents combed Arkansas for suspects in the bombings, and they were looking for one man in particular: a high-profile segregationist preacher from Oklahoma named Billy James Hargis. According to FBI special agent Joe Casper, Hargis was planning to bomb the Philander Smith College in Little Rock soon. The preacher had recently met with two other bombing suspects at a Memphis restaurant. “We ought to get a permissive search warrant from him [Hargis] to search his home, car, and any outbuildings at his residence,” Casper suggested. “We have evidence that these people we have arrested in Little Rock have been in contact with him.” The FBI had cause to be concerned. Hargis’ tirades mirrored those from any number of early 20th century Ku Klux Klan pamphlets. He was anti-communist, anti-union, pro-segregation, and he preached those values on a 15-minute daily radio show that aired on stations throughout North America. Based in Tulsa, The Christian Crusade was the public name of Hargis’ media empire, one that included a magazine, the daily radio program, Christian Crusade Publications, and a pioneering direct mail operation that expertly distributed Hargis’ propaganda throughout the world. By 1960, Hargis had the ability to martial sizeable crowds and stir them with his incendiary speeches. In the eyes of the FBI, he was a serious threat; in the minds of many Cold War Americans, though, Hargis was a new kind of patriot. Crusading for Purity and Essence Before anyone heard Rush Limbaugh infiltrating AM radio, before televangelists like Pat Robertson and James Dobson organized the Christian Right, before Tea Party favorites Rand Paul and Paul Ryan began their campaigns, there was Billy James Hargis. Born in Texarkana, Texas, in 1925, Hargis was raised in poverty during the Great Depression and at an early age decided to commit his life to Christianity. Clean-cut, chubby, and baby-faced, he looked like a Kip’s Big Boy statue come to life. By the age of 22, Hargis had become a religious renegade. After a brief stint as a pastor in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, he married a woman named Betty Jane and in 1948 started his own religious non-profit, Christian Echoes Ministry, where he began preaching against communism. Anti-communism wasn’t a new message in Oklahoma; as early as 1917, with the start of the Bolshevik Revolution, civic organizations like the Tulsa Councils of Defense, [1] in conjunction with local publications like the Tulsa World and Tulsa Tribune , contributed to an atmosphere of repression and paranoia, now known as the Red Scare. But it was the strong presence of the Invisible Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma that made anti-communism an integral part of the Protestant faith—the Klan opposed Catholicism and Judaism as much as it railed against communism. [2] The KKK took their symbolic cues from the Christian crusades of Medieval Europe—knights, white robes, and fiery crosses—and they borrowed the terminology of the period. They called themselves the Invisible Empire, Knights, Dragons, and Wizards. By the time Hargis was a young man in the late 1940s, the Klan was in its decline in Oklahoma—but its potent mix of segregationist ideology, Evangelical Protestantism, and anti-communism found a champion in the gifted young evangelist. During the early part of the 1950s, Hargis traveled the country, lecturing on the many conspiracies facing Americans, like communist infiltration and fluoridated water. Hargis’ Christian Crusade floundered at first, until Hargis came up with a flamboyant plan in 1953: He would take Bible verses, tie them to tens of thousands of hydrogen-filled balloons, and launch them from Chalms, Germany, with hopes that the balloons would land over the Iron Curtain. His idea managed to attract the support of the International Council of Christian Churches, [3] which helped fund and realize the project. The ICC’s support of Hargis brought him onto the world stage of an emerging post-war phenomenon, right-wing evangelism. Hargis was now poised to become the spokesman for a new movement that fused American politics with fundamentalist Christianity. No Fighting in the War Room Hargis’ crusade found many allies, but it was his collaboration with one man that proved to be a catalyst for the formation of America’s religious right. A West Point graduate, Major General Edwin “Ted” Walker was a WWII army hero and leader in the Korean War. In 1957, Walker found himself in command of the Arkansas Military District in Little Rock, just as the city’s civil rights tensions were escalating. As President Eisenhower prepared to use Federal troops to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock’s public schools, Walker was protesting the matter directly to Eisenhower; he opposed racial integration.  Nevertheless, Walker followed Ike’s orders and ended up receiving national praise for helping to integrate Little Rock; a 1957 cover of Time magazine portrayed him as a hero. Walker would later state that he led forces for the wrong side in Little Rock—he believed black students had no business attending white schools. Before the integration of Little Rock, Walker was a garden-variety anti-communist, but when the incident at Little Rock propelled him into the political spotlight, he became radicalized. The same year, both Billy James Hargis and Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt were bombarding Arkansas radio waves with their rightist sermons—programs that aligned completely with the position of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who believed communists had infiltrated the U.S. government. [4] Hargis, however, advanced McCarthy’s views even further, and preached that the civil rights movement was itself a godless communist plot. In 1959, when Walker was still in command in Little Rock, he met with a conservative publisher named Robert Welch, who had recently founded the John Birch Society on the premise that Eisenhower was in reality a communist. [5] Walker, primed for years by Hargis’s radio rants, joined the society and turned against the government. He attempted to resign from the Army citing concerns over communist encroachment in the U.S., but Eisenhower refused Walker’s resignation and instead promoted him to the position of Commanding General of the 24th Infantry Division. Convinced that his commander-in-chief was a dreaded communist, Walker nevertheless agreed to accept Eisenhower’s offer. In October of 1959, Walker took command of 10,000 troops in Augsburg, Germany. Now at the height of his military career, Walker devised a plan to propagate his views to U.S. servicemen who trusted his leadership—views that came directly from the teachings of the John Birch Society and the Christian Crusade. While Walker was commanding his troops in Europe, the political landscape in America was changing drastically. John F. Kennedy was the embodiment of everything Walker hated and feared: he was Catholic, he was liberal, and he was sympathetic to the United Nations. Camelot—as Kennedy’s presidency came to be known—was, in Walker’s eyes, evidence that the U.S government had succumbed to communism. Kennedy was sworn into the office of the presidency on January 20, 1961, just as Walker was establishing the guidelines for the strict regime that would govern his troops. “Within my authority and within the requirements of training necessity, I devised an anti-communist training program second to none—called ‘Pro Blue,’ ” Walker wrote in a memoir. “Equally important—I organized a Psychological Warfare section with the Division to extend the Pro Blue Program through six echelons, to include every officer and soldier—chaplain, medic and rifleman. Established as an official U.S. Army project in January of 1961, the Pro Blue Program was the result of Walker’s fear and paranoia about communism; the official plan was turgid with reprogramming techniques. Under the Pro Blue Program, troops of the 24th Division were required to participate in a series of indoctrination methods that included publications from the John Birch Society and supplied by Hargis. Service members and their families were required to participate in 11 different special activities, including a six-hour training session involving “communist techniques,” the Freedom vs. Communism program, the Freedom Speaks program which offered lectures from Pro Blue writings, and the Ladies Club and NCO Wives Club, which were discussion groups featuring guest lectures on anti-communism. In 1961, the threat of communism came within 90 miles of America. Publicly, the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro insisted that he was not a communist, but Cubans themselves began revolting against his socialist reforms. That spring, Communist countries came to Cuba’s aid and squelched a U.S.-backed attempt to overthrow Castro’s regime. The incident, known as the Bay of Pigs, cemented America’s fear of Soviet encroachment, and that fear was promulgated through the upper echelons of the Department of Defense. Walker’s Pro-Blue program confronted the threat of communism directly and aimed to “produce tough, aggressive, disciplined and spiritually motivated fighters for freedom.” The Pentagon admired Walker’s program and planned to promote him to Lieutenant General in command of the 8th Corp in Texas. “Dear Ted,” wrote the Pentagon’s Major General William Quinn, “One of our basic philosophies is that Commanders should tailor their troop information to their own ideas and needs. That is why we have followed the progress of your Pro-Blue with interest and with pleasure.” The intended promotion, however, never arrived. In April of 1961, a military-themed magazine The Overseas Weekly published an investigative report that detailed Walker’s distribution of John Birch Society literature to the troops—readings that contained inflammatory material questioning the presidency and U.S. government policies. A media controversy ensued. [6] Some outlets criticized Walker for his extreme views and suggested that military commanders had no business plying their troops with political propaganda; conservative outlets balked that politicians were muzzling the military. Finally, President John F. Kennedy himself weighed in on the matter: “The discordant voices of extremism are heard once again in the land—men who are unwilling to face up to the danger from without are convinced that the real danger comes from within. They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. [7] They find treason in our finest churches, in our highest court, and even in the treatment of our water. [8] They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, and socialism with communism. They object quite rightly to politics intruding on the military—but they are anxious for the military to engage in politics.” The Pentagon responded to political pressure by relieving Walker of his command and transferring him to Germany. It would not be the last time a Kennedy angered General Walker. “When the administrators of federal government serve a higher world government or a doctrine not provided by the people and the Congress, there is no Constitutional President,” Walker later reflected in a small booklet. “With no President, there is no Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces. I resigned.” [9] Walker left the Army on November 4, 1961. Instead of seeing it as the end of his career, he sensed America was ripe for a political insurgency, and that he could help bring about a revolution of his own, one that did not include communists or atheists. While in the military, Walker enjoyed the support of countless personnel to help disseminate his ideas. Now, with political aspirations in mind, he sought the support of an organization that aligned with his sense of Americanism and anti-communism. He needed the Christian Crusade. The Christian Crusade Gets on the Hump In 1951, the Harvard Business Review published a quiet yet peculiar essay by a business executive for James Grey Incorporated. In “Direct Mail Advertising,” Edward Mayer outlined a persuasive argument for bombarding the American public with mail solicitations—a predecessor of email spam techniques. It was an early day manifesto that would eventually become a cornerstone of the Billy James Hargis empire. Using direct mail marketing, Hargis began asking for small donations to be sent to his ministry in Tulsa. Throughout 1950s and early ‘60s, Hargis’ Christian Crusade built momentum. During that period, Hargis hired a promising young Texan named Richard Viguerie. Armed with a keen understanding of databases, Viguerie devised mass mailings targeting donors who were likely to be fundamentalist separatists—the kind of people who would respond to antics like Hargis’ balloon drops. With Viguerie’s genius, Hargis reached a widening audience, but the Christian Crusade still needed an overall strategy that would propel it toward success. It was around this same time that Hargis met a publicist named Pete White, who had once helped the televangelist Oral Roberts build a successful ministry through the manipulation of mass media. By using the same strategies used by Roberts, combined with Viguerie’s direct mail ingenuity, Hargis’ Christian Crusade rocketed from a small operation to a ministry that had “billings from $400 to $500K a year in 1963.” [10] During this time period, Christian Echoes Ministry mailed an average of 2,000 letters every day—many of those letters returning with a dollar or two stuffed in the envelope. “Ours is purely an educational program,” Hargis told the Tulsa Tribune from his Boston Avenue office decorated with gold-sprayed Joan of Arc statues. “We have the most extensive files anywhere on this matter of communism and we are trying to get that word to the people.” Hargis became more adept in rightist political rhetoric, which began earning him a national reputation as a conservative leader. In 1959, a Chicago-based organization called We, the People, designated Billy James Hargis as its president. Founded by Henry T. Everingham to support conservative politicians, We, the People produced pamphlets promoting anti-communism and criticizing integration. In 1962, the organization held its first “T-Party” rally which aimed to end the “taxes, treason, and tyranny” of the political left. At that time, Hargis stepped down as president, ceding the position to Mormon leader Ezra Taft Benson, who referred to America’s South as a “Negro Soviet Republic.” Benson later served as president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. [11] Today, We, the People stands as one of the earliest collusions in conservative politics between Christians and Mormons. As the Christian Crusade ministry increasingly reached into mailboxes and across airwaves, its message became more threatening to the civil rights movement. The FBI questioned Hargis over his involvement in the Arkansas school bombing plot and continued to monitor his activities. Hargis told his followers that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was a communist plot; he published a book called The Negro Question: Communist Civil War Policy, in which the author warned that “communists are deliberately maneuvering among the American Negroes to create a situation for the outbreak of racial violence”; he believed segregation was “one of God’s natural laws”; he called Martin Luther King, Jr. a communist-educated traitor and an “Uncle Tom for special interests.” Despite the patronizing attitudes that Hargis held against African Americans, he publicly asserted he was not a racist. It wasn’t until Hargis joined forces with former Major General Edwin Walker, however, that racial bigotry became a common characteristic of the religious right. Operation Midnight Ride: Too Important to be Left to the Generals Shortly after his resignation from the military, Edwin Walker began forging a friendship with fellow John Birch Society member Billy James Hargis. They agreed to go on a speaking tour of the U.S. together; Hargis would sermonize on the perils of communism at the national level and Walker would expound on the international threat. Walker parlayed these early lectures into political gain. He soon decided to run for governor of Texas and enjoyed the support of Dallas oilman H.L. Hunt. Walker ran under the Southern Democratic (Dixiecrat) ticket, though, and ended up in last place in the Democratic primary of February 1962. Later that year, in September, Walker caught wind that the federal government planned to force the integration of an African American man, James Meredith, into the University of Mississippi. This was Walker’s chance to retaliate against the government that had forced him to integrate Little Rock back in 1957. Walker took to the airwaves to instigate an insurrection against governmental control. “I call for a national protest against the conspiracy from within,” Walker declared. “Rally to the cause of freedom in righteous indignation, violent vocal protest, and bitter silence under the flag of Mississippi at the use of Federal troops.” The next day, September 30, 1962, riots broke out on the university campus, resulting in hundreds being injured and two dead. Six federal marshals had been shot. Walker was immediately arrested and charged with sedition and insurrection against the United States. Behind the closed doors of the FBI, however, government officials worried about Walker’s mental health. Informants whispered that he appeared irrational during his public talks. The rumors were enough to compel U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to order Walker placed under a 90-day psychiatric evaluation at a forensic center in Springfield, Missouri. Both the American Civil Liberties Union and prominent psychiatrist Thomas Szasz protested the hospitalization. Walker’s attorney in Oklahoma City, Clyde Watts, fought the order of detention and was able to get Walker freed after only five days. The detention radicalized Walker even further, but by siding with the racists during the Ole Miss riot, he began to cause concern amongst his allies. “Walker has also been listening to advice from another source and refusing to pay attention to those who have tried to caution him,” wrote Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, adding that Walker could cause “very serious embarrassment to conservatives and the conservative cause in general.” In November of 1962, Walker stood before a grand jury regarding his role in the Ole Miss riot. His mental health was called into question and his role in the riot scrutinized, yet one of the most important black witnesses, Reverend Duncan Grey, Jr., was never called to testify. The all-white Mississippi grand jury chose not to indict Walker. Energized by the perceived escape from governmental injustice, Walker teamed up once again with Billy James Hargis. This time, they planned a 12-week 29-city speaking tour starting in Memphis, Tennessee, in late February of 1963. They called their series “Operation Midnight Ride,” and planned to use the talks to create a larger support base. At this point, Hargis’ Christian Crusade had grown to a monthly budget of $75,000—but that money wasn’t necessarily representative of a large audience. Hargis told the New York Times that most of his funding came from oil companies. [12] While Hargis and Walker were trying to push the general population to the right, they were also galvanizing the extreme fringes of conservatism with their neo-confederate message. According to Walker’s FBI files, the Ku Klux Klan sponsored Operation Midnight Ride in both South Carolina and Arkansas. [13] Throughout America, Hargis and Walker preached against the evils of communism and invited popular right-wing speakers like Benjamin Gitlow, former Army chief of intelligence General Charles Willoughby, and Congressman John Rousselot to join them. The FBI reported that in Washington, D.C., there were about 100 attendees of Operation Midnight Ride and all of them were white. [14] While many inflammatory statements were made at the meetings, the FBI seemed most alarmed by Walker’s rhetoric. In their files, the FBI deemed Walker a presidential threat probably due to Walker’s proclivity to charge presidents as communist leaders and deny them allegiance; there may have been more serious reasons. [15] More than four thousand people attended the last stop of Operation Midnight Ride in Los Angeles in early April of 1963. [16] Members of the John Birch Society, which had taken over the Young Republicans organization, welcomed the speakers. They presented Walker with a plaque calling him the “greatest living American,” and they listened patiently while Hargis delivered an almost two-hour long talk. The entire operation was a smashing success, or in the recent words of conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly, “a Paul Revere-like barnstorming tour.” As Hargis and Walker fomented fears of communism, they could not have anticipated their agitation of one particularly troubled man in Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine, had recently purchased a 6.5mm Mannlicher Carcano Model 91/38 rifle by mail order. Oswald had been following Walkerclosely enough to formulate an opinion that Walker was a fascist. He had also cased Walker’s Dallas residence at 4011 East Turtle Creek Boulevard and took photos of the house. According to the FBI’s questioning of Oswald’s wife Marina, Oswald took a bus to Walker’s house on April 10, 1963, just days after the first leg of Operation Midnight Ride ended. Hidden in bushes about a hundred feet away, Oswald waited until the moment was right and fired a shot through Walker’s window, barely missing his head. Walker glanced around, thinking at first that a firecracker had been tossed into the room. Oswald claimed to Marina that he fled the scene on foot and took a bus home, but other records suggest that he may have acted with two other accomplices. [17] [18] “Nothing in my 50 year career of standing up for Christ and fighting Satanic communism equals the success of that undertaking,” Hargis would later reminisce about the tour. With Operation Midnight Ride behind them, Walker and Hargis turned their aspirations to the national political races, making it clear that their choice for president was the libertarian senator Barry Goldwater. In August of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his momentous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C.; its hopeful message of peace and unity was in direct opposition to Walker and Hargis’ aggressive calls for civil uprising. Two months later, in October of 1963, Walker attended a conference in Dallas in which he once again bashed President Kennedy and his policies. He was probably unaware that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the audience listening. Hargis and Walker reunited for another tour of Operation Midnight Ride, this time throughout Texas during the month of November. On November 17th in Dallas, they were joined by Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, who opposed Kennedy’s plan to run on a Democratic ticket. It was well known to many that Kennedy would soon be in Texas campaigning for the ’64 election. “There were concerns among people close to Kennedy about his traveling to Dallas,” says historian Robert Dallek. “Because the city had a reputation for being the bastion of the right wing.” With the bulk of their energies devoted to vitriolic political speeches and publications, both Hargis and Walker fostered an environment where an assassination could occur. According to Warren Commission reports, Walker was involved in two controversial printings criticizing Kennedy in November of 1963: an advertisement in Dallas Morning News which stated “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” that accused Kennedy of communist sympathies, and “Wanted for Treason,” a handbill that mimicked FBI wanted posters, with front and profile views of Kennedy. Prior to Kennedy’s arrival in Dallas, Walker made the extravagant gesture of flying three flags upside down in front of his house—the international distress signal. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. [19]Following ten months of investigation, the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot and killed the president. [20] “Our hearts, as a Christian people, go out to Mrs. Kennedy and her family, as well as to our new president,” Hargis wrote in December of ‘63. “We stand as one man in disbelief that an enemy of our country could be so brazen in our midst.” Soon after Kennedy’s assassination, Walker flew his flags right side up and at full mast, in defiance of the traditional half-mast position declared during times of national mourning. Before All the Facts Are In Throughout the ‘60s, Hargis’ Christian Crusade enjoyed tremendous success, but not without its challenges. The Internal Revenue Service began its battle with Hargis, alleging that the Christian Crusade overstepped the political boundaries of a religious organization. [21] Undeterred, Hargis continued building his empire and publishing tracts, pamphlets and books. He started a foundation for missionaries, and created an anti-abortion organization. In 1971, Hargis founded American Christian College and changed the mission of The Christian Crusade. No longer would it focus on external problems (anti-communism) but instead “internal moral problems” like drug use, the sexual revolution, and “Satan worship.” He remained incredibly productive and financially successful, and rightfully referred to Tulsa as the Christian “Fundamentalist Capital of the World.” That world met its Doomsday when, in 1974, Time magazine accused Hargis of sexual misconduct with several of his Bible college students, both female and male. The incident forced Hargis’ resignation from the college. “It was a really challenging time for our family,” recalls Hargis’ daughter, Becky Frank, who now serves as the president of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce.“I think Mom and Dad did a really beautiful job working through all of those things.” As an owner of a Tulsa-based public relations firm, Frank helps religious organizations manage crises through their faith-based consulting services. Among the firm’s more conservative clients are Oral Roberts University, which faced a major financial scandal, and Victory Christian Center, a Tulsa megachurch currently embroiled in a child rape investigation. “Several of our team members have first-hand experience in working for faith-based universities and organizations, both inside and as a consultant,” boasts the firm’s website. “The team understands the culture and knows the challenges. Not only do they understand where you are—chances are, they’ve been in your shoes.” Not long after Hargis’ scandal, General Walker fondled an undercover policeman in the restroom of a public park in Dallas and was arrested for public lewdness. Twice. Walker pleaded no contest and paid a fine; Hargis denied the allegations of sexual misconduct yet told a reporter that he was “guilty of a sin but not the sin I was accused of.” [22] The American Christian College closes its doors in 1977. The allegations of Walker’s attempted assassination by Oswald remains one of the most fascinating and obfuscated subplots related to the Kennedy assassination. That connection haunted Walker his entire life; his personal papers are replete with Freedom of Information Act requests that petition for the release of government files surrounding the assassination. Walker died of lung cancer on Halloween day, 1993. “My heart is sad today. I lost one of my best friends Sunday,” Hargis said in a televised tribute, adding “I never had a greater friend than General Edwin A. Walker; I never knew a greater patriot.” The many political and religious figures who associated with Hargis continue to shape America’s conservative landscape today. Hargis’ mail-order apprentice Richard Viguerie helped establish the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative activism program for youth. Viguerie later became a pioneer of direct mail politics and one of the GOP’s most successful fundraisers. [23] Conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beckall borrow—knowingly or not— from Hargis’ pioneering speaking style and old South ideology. Former American Christian College president David Noebel, a fellow “Bircher,” authored numerous books that argued against perceived evils such as rock music, homosexuality, and most recently, communism. Hargis continued his ministry until his death from complications related to Alzheimer’s disease in 2004. His son, Billy James Hargis II, continues The Christian Crusade online, though publications are somewhat irregular. Note: Research for this article was conducted with the help of Special Collections at the University of Arkansas Libraries in Fayetteville, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, and the Eagle Forum Archives and Library in St. Louis, Missouri. Special thanks to independent researchers Ernie Lazar and Paul Trejo for their assistance. Endnotes: 1. In 1917, the National Council of Defense organized a national propaganda system in each state. In Oklahoma, the councils functioned primarily to identify anyone who did not approve of America and its presence in the war. The Tulsa County Council of Defense was organized through the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and was a particularly enthusiastic participant in extralegal vigilante activities. 2. Following the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, the Ku Klux Klan in Tulsa owned a large temple or “klavern” called Beno Hall: “The Tulsa Benevolent Association [KKK] sold the storied building to the Temple Baptist Church in 1930. During the Depression, the building housed a speak-easy, then a skating rink, then a lumberyard, and finally a dance hall before radio evangelist Steve Pringle turned it into the Evangelistic Temple of the First Pentecostal Church. In his first revival meeting, Pringle introduced a little-known Enid preacher by the name of Oral Roberts, who worked his animated, faith-healing magic on the bare lot next door. Roberts impressed in the tent atmosphere and preached with his cohort inside the vast auditorium.” Excerpted from “Beno Hall: Tulsa’s Den of Terror,” by Steve Gerkin, published in This Land Volume 2, Issue 11, September 15, 2011. 3.The International Council of Christian Churches was founded by Carl McIntire, a fundamentalist radio broadcaster from Durant, Oklahoma. 4. Hargis claimed that he had ghostwritten a number of speeches for Senator McCarthy. 5. The John Birch Society is a conservative political advocacy organization. One of its founders was Fred Koch, who also founded Koch Industries. Koch advised JBS president Robert Welch on numerous issues. He believed many U.S. companies had been infiltrated by communism, as evidenced by the presence of labor unions. Today, two of Koch’s sons, David and Charles, are one of the largest contributors to conservative political campaigns and causes in America. 6. Hargis would later claim that a plot to smear Walker was hatched by the Kremlin because they feared what might happen if Walker gained more power in the military. 7. The Texas Minutemen were an extreme right-wing paramilitary group that supplied weapons to Cuban exile groups in Dallas and New Orleans. Walker has been often cited as its leader, though he denied being involved before the Warren Commission. 8. General Jack Ripper in the film Dr. Strangelove cites the fluoridation of America’s water supply was evidence that communist had infiltrated the highest powers of government and were trying to destroy America’s “precious bodily fluids.” The character Ripper was based on General Curtis LeMay and Major General Edwin Walker. On November 22, 1963, Dr. Strangelove was set for its first screening. When news of PresidentKennedy’s assassination reached Kubrick in California, he cancelled the screenings and rescheduled the screenings for the following January. While waiting for the shock of the assassination to pass, Kubrick edited out a reference to “Dallas” in the film and changed it to “Vegas.” The John Birch Society opposed the fluoridation of water, arguing that it was part of a communist plot to poison Americans. By 1960, about 50 million Americans were drinking fluoridated water, resulting in an estimate reduction of tooth cavities by 40%. Today, about 66% of of the U.S. population drinks received fluoridated water through their public water system. Hargis kept a file on fluoridation. 9. Since Walker resigned instead of retired from the military, he relinquished his pension and military benefits. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan returned Walker to an active role status in the Army, allowing Walker to enjoy full benefits. 10. Hendershot, Heather. What’s Fair on the Air: Cold War Right Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. Pg 183. 11. Marion Romney, a cousin to the father of politician Mitt Romney, was supposed to succeed BENSON as president of the Church of Latter Day Saints but his health prevented him from doing so. 12. It should be noted that at the Washington, D.C. stop for Operation Midnight Ride, Hargis stated that he had never received a penny from Texas oilman H.L. Hunt. 13. Walker’s ties to the Klan ran deep. In 1964, he was the main speaker for Americans for the Preservation of the White Race in Brookhaven, Mississippi. A year later, in 1965, the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America offered Walker the position of Grand Dragon of the UKA of Texas. Walker turned the offer down. 14. According to Hargis’ recollection 30 years later, 2,000 people attended the first evening of Operation Midnight Ride in Washington, D.C. He also stated that he and Walker had toured 100 cities and that their rallies were attended by over a hundred thousand people. 15. The FBI kept Walker under regular surveillance following his resignation from the Army. Please refer to footnote 17 & 20 for additional motives the FBI had to monitor Walker’s activities. 16. One week prior to the finale of Operation Midnight Ride in Los Angeles, a bombing destroyed the offices of the American Association for the United Nations in nearby Encino. The executive director blamed the bombing on the incitement of UN fear-mongering by extremists; it was no secret that Walker and Hargis vehemently opposed the UN. 17. Walker’s conflicting testimonies, actions, and activities surrounding the Kennedy assassination have created a number of challenges for researchers and historians. Here’s what we do know: according to FBI records, Walker was informed shortly after his assassination attempt that the shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald, and that Oswald was likely not alone—yet before the Warren Commission, Walker denied knowing any of this prior to the Kennedy assassination. Not long after the attempt on his life, Walker hired two detectives from Oklahoma City to pose as men seeking to kill Walker. The detectives attempted to entrap a man named William Duff, a former live-in friend of Walker’s (there were several). Duff accepted the hit, but then turned around and called the FBI. Duff also passed a polygraph test denying that he tried to shoot Walker, and the case against Duff was dropped. 18. Hargis believed that Fidel Castro ordered Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot Walker. 19. At the exact time of Kennedy’s assassination, both Hargis and Walker were passengers in different airplanes. Hargis was en route from Los Angeles to San Diego; Walker was between New Orleans and Shreveport. 20. In 1962, a former Castro sympathizer turned CIA informant named Harry Dean infiltrated the John Birch Society. He claimed that society members Walker and John Rousselot hired two gunmen to kill John F. Kennedy, and that they planned to frame Lee Harvey Oswald. Dean, however, could not produce any evidence to substantiate his claim. 21. The tenth circuit court of appeals eventually upheld a ruling in 1972 that caused Hargis’ Christian Crusade to lose its tax exempt status. Other churches have since lost their tax exempt status for participating in political campaigns. 22. During much of the Red Scare, homosexuality was often conflated with communism. David Johnson, author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecutions of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, says “The politicians behind the Lavender Scare asserted that homosexuals were susceptible to blackmail by enemy agents and so could be coerced into revealing government secrets. In other words, the official rationale wasn’t that homosexuals were communists but that they could be used by communists.” 23. In 2004, Viguerie commented to the New York Times that Karl Rove was one of his direct mail marketing competitors in Austin. Rove employed the same strategies that Viguerie pioneered in order to help mobilize the religious right in George W. Bush’s favor. Author's Note: Research for this article was conducted with the help of Special Collections at the University of Arkansas Libraries in Fayetteville, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, and the Eagle Forum Archives and Library in St. Louis, Missouri. Special thanks to independent researchers Ernie Lazar and Paul Trejo for their assistance. Originally published in This Land, Vol. 3, Issue 21. Nov. 1, 2012.

by Lee Roy Chapman The Sex Pistols performing at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa on January 11, 1978. Photo by Tom Dutton. This story was originally published in the January 1st, 2012, edition of This Land and is republished here with permission. No one took credit for the bomb threat that January night. Though no device was found in the women’s restroom of Cain’s Ballroom, a bomb of a different sort was about to drop in Tulsa. The Sex Pistols’ American tour, arguably the most notorious musical roadshow in history, was scheduled to launch on December 17, 1977, in New York City with a live television performance on Saturday Night Live. The U.S. Embassy in London initially declined permission for the British punk band’s visas to enter the U.S., but then approved the visas, delaying the trip until December 31, which cut the total number of tour stops by half. The Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, booked the majority of the dates in the deep South, intending to hit America’s most conservative and reactionary nerve. On January 5, 1978, the Pistols kicked off the beginning of the end at the Great South East Music Hall in Atlanta, Georgia. Next stop was Memphis, then San Antonio, on to Baton Rouge, and back to Dallas. By the time the Pistols arrived in ice-covered Tulsa on January 11, the frayed nerves of anarchy’s traveling freakshow weren’t so much worn thin as they were festering, unstitched wounds, dripping with puss and blood. By the time the Pistols arrived in Tulsa, some of the bandmates weren’t on speaking terms; they had endured fistfights, hospital visits, and even a SWAT invasion of their show in Memphis. Tulsans knew anarchy was coming to OK. Local press alerted the public to the chaos about to ensue north of the tracks. A group of 30 or so, calling themselves the “Jesus People,” showed up at Cain’s to warn the few fans and numerous spectators that they would go to hell if they entered the building. One protester carried a sign that read, “There is a Johnny Rotten inside each of us, and he doesn’t need to be liberated, he needs to be crucified.” Larry Shaeffer, owner of the Cain’s and promoter of the show, saw an opportunity in the mayhem. Admission was changed just prior to the show from $2.50 to $3.50 on every ticket with a rubber stamp or a felt-tip pen. A local band, Bliss, opened the show. The Wednesday night regulars at the Cain’s, who were used to scooting their boots to country music, showed up anyway (perhaps to kick some shit). Crowd estimates ranged from 600 to 800, which is a little over half the total capacity of the legendary ballroom. “All you rednecks came to see a circus?” Rotten yelled to the crowd, launching the evening. Debris began to fly. The Pistols played their full set and then vanished into the icy night, taking a couple of groupies and at least one Cain’s stage hand with them. The only traces of the historic spectacle left behind were a fist-sized hole in the wall and a scrawled signature on a glossy 8x10, both compliments of Sid Vicious. Three days later—at Winterland in San Francisco—the band played their last gig. The Pistols’ mayhem devoured whatever had bound them together. They remain a singular icon in the annals of 20th-century music, inspiring untold numbers of punks and others to rebel against whatever the status quo accepts—a position unimaginable to at least one Tulsa establishment. A review of the show in the Tulsa World said, “But, in the end, the Sex Pistols were simply a novelty, not a trend-setting act. Several Tulsans, after an initial curiosity-seeking glance, left the ballroom. Those who stayed cheered, but it is doubtful punk rock is here to stay.”

By Lee Roy Chapman and Josh Kline This story was originally published in the April 15th, 2012 edition of This Land and is republished here with permission. Bad men are drawn to the City of God. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it the meeting ground for America’s most sinister extremists. Many Oklahomans regard it as the most dangerous and mysterious place in the state. For 30-plus years, a small, isolated community in Northeastern Oklahoma has been the subject of endless scrutiny. Law enforcement agencies and conspiracy theorists insist that Elohim City is a breeding ground for neo-Nazis and anti-government militias hell-bent on overthrowing the “Zionist Occupied Government” (ZOG) of the United States. The most damning accusation suggests Elohim City played a central role in the planning and execution of the Oklahoma City bombing. When asked if she’d ever had the chance to visit Elohim, a woman with the Stilwell Democrat Journal deadpanned, “No, we like to breathe.” “I find them to be quite upstanding citizens of my community,” says Adair County Sheriff Austin Young. A sharp, stern man with a military presence, Young has the towering, no-bullshit persona of a Clint Eastwood character. His white hair is neatly cropped, his eyes maintain contact, and rarely blink. “What I read in the papers, I never experienced that with them,” he says. Young says that, as game warden of Sequoyah County (just south of Adair) in the early ‘80s, he once received a report of poaching that ultimately led him to Elohim City, where the suspect resided. As he approached the entrance of the community, he was met by Elohim City founder Robert Millar and several armed guards. Young politely told Millar that the weapons made him a little nervous. “Robert said to me, ‘Well, you have a firearm, don’t you think that makes us nervous?,” the Sheriff remembers. “So I unholstered my weapon and placed it in my vehicle. And then he sent the armed guards away.” This encounter began a 30-year rapport between Young and Elohim City. Young ran for sheriff in the mid–‘90s, when neo-Nazis, a German Nationalist, the Midwest bank robbers, and Timothy McVeigh were supposedly frequenting the compound. “I campaigned in all parts of the county, including Elohim, and as far as I know, they supported me,” Young says. Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, a rumor spread that members of Elohim were planning a terrorist attack in Stilwell during the town’s annual strawberry festival. Young called and asked him point-blank if the rumor was true. Millar answered, “Of course not. We would never do that.” The strawberry festival went off without incident. After offering his opinions (“they’re not violent, not resistant, not how the media paints them”), Young suggests we go straight to the horse’s mouth. He dials up John Millar, the pastor and de facto leader of Elohim, and son of the community’s late founder. When Millar picks up, he explains that he has a couple of journalists from Tulsa who wish to visit Elohim. But instead of waiting for Millar to respond, Young offers the receiver to us. “You’re not interested in repeating all those lies that were told about us?” Millar asks. And then he invites us for a visit. Stephen Jones is a towering figure in Oklahoma’s legal community. Over his 46-year career as a defense attorney, the Enid native has represented a slew of high-profile pariahs and controversial characters, including anarchist Abbie Hoffman, serial killer Bobby Wayne Collins, suspected SLA radical Harawese Moore [1] and, most recently, indicted Tulsa Police Officer Jeff Henderson. But it was his work as Timothy McVeigh’s court-appointed defender for which he’s best remembered. “When the Oklahoma City bombing happened, it didn’t surprise me at all,” Jones tells us one Saturday afternoon in his Enid office. “I was shocked that it was Oklahoma City. But that somebody would blow up a building and kill a lot of federal employees? That wasn’t a surprise at all. I had sensed for some period of time that there was a significant alienation of people in the Great Plains. There was a genuine hatred of the federal government, a hatred of the Clintons. I had not seen anything like it since I worked for the republican state committee in Texas when the Kennedys were in office in the early ‘60s.” Jones believes that this anti-government sentiment reached a tipping point on April 19, 1993, when ATF and FBI agents assaulted another eccentric religious community: the Branch-Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. When the siege was over, 81 men, women, and children were dead. “You have the primitive evangelical community,” Jones says. “And the defining moment for a lot of those people—and this narrows down to Elohim City—was the assault on the Branch-Davidians … Tim McVeigh told me that he sat in a Bradley tank; he knew what those tanks could do. And those images of that tank punching holes in that building, for several million people, probably more than 10 million people, that was a Biblical prophecy come true.” McVeigh watched closely, first on television and then in person, as the nightmare at Waco unfolded. This proved to be his breaking point. Disturbed by what he witnessed, McVeigh began to plot his revenge on behalf of the Branch-Davidians. Two years later, his vengeance became a reality when 168 people, including 19 children, died in the Oklahoma City bombing. It’s well documented that Jones did not buy the government’s conclusion (reinforced by McVeigh himself) that McVeigh conceived and executed the bombing almost entirely alone, with only the most minimal assistance from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier. Jones believes the government was desperate for swift, quantifiable justice and chose to focus only on developing an airtight case against McVeigh and Nichols rather than fog the issue of their guilt by fully exploring the possibility of a broader conspiracy. Jones does not believe the evidence against Elohim City provides a sufficient answer. “There is no smoking gun that shows involvement of any of the people in Elohim City,” he says. “There is certainly, in two or three instances, against the backdrop of this, a pretty convincing case that some people in Elohim City may have been involved.” For the man who spent years studying every tiny pebble of the mountainous evidence, Elohim City is just another “what if?” scenario, doomed to float in the ether, a question mark whose answer is forever unknowable. He agrees, though, that Adair County is a poetic fit for the community. “Throughout the history of (Eastern Oklahoma), there has been more chicanery, isolationism, parochialism, xenophobic attitudes, distrust of outsiders, ‘We settle things our way,’ ” he explains. “So, Elohim City, yes, is comfortably located. Very comfortably. Historically, it blends in.” You won’t find Elohim City on any map. The FBI has dedicated an incredible amount of time, money, and manpower to investigating and monitoring the town’s activities. Yet, this idyllic hamlet (known to its residents as “God’s City,” the Hebrew translation of Elohim) remains well hidden, impossible to find without the assistance of one of the few people in the world who’ve actually been there. Some reports reference Fort Smith as the nearest town, others Sallisaw, Muldrow, or Stilwell. They’re all more or less right, but also dead wrong: Elohim City is not “near” any town; its 400 acres are situated as far as possible from nearby civilization. The western edge of the Ozarks begins here in Adair County, a sparsely populated spread of bucolic communities with a mere 22,000 residents (43 percent of whom claim Native American blood) over 577 square miles. The pastoral beauty of the majestic, unpredictable terrain stands in stark contrast to the rural poverty that plagues much of its population. Roadsides are often littered with garbage—discarded, empty cans of Busch beer, cast-off plastic grocery bags, cigarette butts—and road signs are peppered with bullet holes. Gutted shotgun shacks and ramshackle houses with landfill front yards rest precariously next to forests of resilient pines and dead, twisted post oaks. Multitudes of modest white churches adorned with hand-painted signage offer a point of communion for residents to congregate and socialize. Underneath the surface malaise and natural wonder of Adair lies an explosive history, one that informs Elohim’s existence. This is the heart of the Cherokee Nation, the last stop on the Trail of Tears, where 11,000 Cherokee Indians were forcibly relocated. The area’s history is America’s history, fraught with instances of revolt and rebellion, of fierce individualism repeatedly clashing with a government status quo. This is the territory where Cherokee General Stand Watie held out against Union troops, making him the last Confederate general to surrender at the end of the Civil War, thus ending the South’s campaign for secession. It’s the home of Ned Christie, a Keetowah Cherokee traditionalist falsely accused of killing a federal marshal. When he wouldn’t surrender, a posse of hired guns from Fort Smith pushed a burning wagon into Christie’s fortified home. The James Gang hid out here, as did Belle Starr and her bunch, the Dalton Boys, and Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd. In 1977, Gene Leroy Hart, a Cherokee, was accused of the brutal rape and murder of three girl scouts in Mayes County. Hart was a violent local fugitive who’d previously been convicted of raping two Tulsa women. Despite the public outcry, a Mayes County jury acquitted Hart. Today, the Cherokee Nation is humble home to small-town Oklahomans, many of whom are largely untouched by 21st century development. The landscape is wild and primitive, and self-governance is necessary for day-to-day survival. And the area’s legacy of isolationism and individualism continues, carried on in large part by Elohim City. For five miles, a dirt path snakes alongside a mountain. Then suddenly you see it: a poster featuring the Ten Commandments tacked to the silver gate of a barbed wire fence. Nearby, a mangled, abandoned mailbox limply hangs, begging to be put out of its misery. Several hundred yards later, the incline abruptly levels as the trail penetrates the outskirts of Elohim City. Serenity permeates the village. The day is bright and sunny, and the view of the Ozarks is breathtaking. For all the violence and racism assigned by outsiders, the town feels more like a spiritual oasis than a terrorist compound. No armed guards are waiting. A small terrier roams free while children play in the road. A quirky collection of huts, trailers, and cottages spread across the property intermingled with several hulking, alien-like stone structures whose bubbled, dome roofs betray the off-kilter eccentricity of their builders and inhabitants. A modest cottage rests on the side of the town’s only artery, its Main Street. A tattered, faded American flag waves in the front yard not far from a child’s jungle gym. The portly, white-haired man on the porch is John Millar. “Y’all get lost?” he asks, smiling, in a country drawl. His tone is relaxed and friendly. He invites us in. Millar’s home could be a model showroom for Pottery Barn— simple, clean, and elegant, with hardwood floors and a modern kitchen furnished with contemporary appliances. The décor is exact and unobtrusive. On one wall hangs a large digital clock, on another a faux-rustic bronze piece etched with the phrase “The Destination is the Journey.” Framed photographs of family on coffee and end tables are given ample room to breathe. You could mistake the locale for middle-class suburbia. Millar settles into his chair. “So, what do y’all wanna know?” In 1973, an ex-Mennonite pastor from Canada named Robert Millar, acting on what he believed was a vision from God, moved his family from rural Maryland to a large patch of land nestled high in the Ozarks, a mere stone’s throw from the Oklahoma-Arkansas border. Elohim City was conceived as a spiritual city of refuge for followers of an obscure offshoot of Protestantism called Christian Identity, which teaches a racialist, Eurocentric take on Old Testament fire-and-brimstone piety. Though the elder Millar’s vision that prompted the move could be called “apocalyptic”—he claimed to see future wars, natural disasters, and civil unrest—John Millar maintains that Elohim was not created to be a spiritual bomb shelter. “We didn’t come out here to escape like some people do,” Millar tells us. “They think the world’s going to explode or fly away or something, and that’s their right to believe that. But that’s not our vision. Armageddon is not our vision. We came out here to express what we feel the Holy One, or God, is wanting to express through us. And so our hearts are turned towards the heavenly spiritual realm.” The pastor insists that his community is focused on heaven alone. Not the government, not a race war, just peaceful communion with the Creator. He cited factoids—“None of us have ever been convicted of a felony”—and repeatedly renounced the idea that they’re a hate group. “People think that because we believe in Christian Identity that we hate other races. We don’t teach hate. We don’t put up with that.” Millar is polite, generous, and accommodating throughout the interview, never once taking the hardline on any issue. The idea of a “white separatist compound” conjures images of a completely autonomous community forbidden from interacting with mainstream society; this is not Elohim City. When Millar speaks of politics and morality, his ideas have a surprisingly Libertarian, live-and-let-live bent to them. Many of Elohim’s residents, for instance, hold jobs in town. The children are homeschooled in communal fashion—most of the parents take an active role in the education of not just their own kids, but in their neighbors’ as well; it’s Hillary Clinton’s “It takes a village” concept realized in the most literal sense. Weekly trips to town to eat at local restaurants, visit the library or see a movie are not uncommon. The homes even have Wi-Fi. There’s little difference in living conditions between Elohim and your typical Edmond or Moore outliers. Millar does acknowledge that Christian Identity’s racially charged theology is at odds with modern notions of equality and color blindness. “We teach that the scripture is against intermarriage with other races,” he confesses. According to the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, 26.3 percent of marriages occurring between 2008 and 2010 were between two people of different races, ranking Oklahoma second in the nation for interracial couples. “[Intermarriage] is a big issue; most of your churches want to promote that. We think that’s totally unscriptural. That doesn’t mean we hate them, not at all. We think you destroy both races when you marry in.” The core philosophy of Christian Identity is an uncomfortable mixture of traditional Judeo-Christian mythology and a passive form of modern white supremacy. Elohim residents observe the Sabbath on Saturday, and many adhere to the ancient dietary restrictions of the Old Testament, though Millar is careful to point out that it’s not a requirement. According to Identity, when ancient Israel fragmented, the tribe of Judah, “God’s chosen people,” migrated to northern Europe and eventually the U.S. In other words, the true Jews, according to Millar and Identity followers, are Caucasians. [2] “That might sound really strange to you,” says Millar. “But we believe that your Scandinavian, your Germanic, your Anglo-Saxon, your Celtic people, are different waves of immigration that came through. They’re really all cousins, and they’re part of the same people from ancient Israel.” Since the OKC bombing, three things fueled suspicion about Elohim’s complicity: the company Elohim founder Robert Millar chose to keep, the testimony of a government informant named Carol Howe who infiltrated the community, and circumstantial evidence suggesting that Timothy McVeigh may have been in contact with Elohim residents in the months leading up to the bombing. “For over a year, we were scrutinized by the FBI,” Millar tells us. “We didn’t like it, but we thought it was the duty of the federal government to chase down whoever did that. So we were scrutinized sideways, every which way you could think.” Millar maintains that the residents of Elohim never held a violent agenda against the government, nor any desire to participate in some apocalyptic religious battle. But according to Mark Hamm, a professor of criminology at Indiana University, in the early ‘80s, the peaceful residents and elders of Elohim became radicalized as they developed a rapport with a similar white Separatist group from the northern Ozarks called The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA). Unlike the benign Elohim City, the members of CSA didn’t just passively distrust the U.S. government—they were stockpiling weapons and conducting rigorous military training in order to overthrow it. Furthermore, CSA had close ties to the Order of the Silent Brotherhood, a shadowy organization of bloodthirsty neo-Nazis who fashioned themselves as Aryan Warriors in the tradition of the Phineas Priesthood. [3] From Hamm’s 2001 book In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground: Originally a pacifist community, Elohim City began a long, slow tilt toward militancy following Millar’s 1982 address before another far-right group’s gathering—the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord’s national convocation at CSA headquarters in nearby Bull Shoals Lake, Arkansas. It was there that Millar met CSA founder James Ellison, a militant neo-Nazi who would later join forces with Robert Mathews’s Order in what was to become what is called the War of ’84—a campaign of terror against ZOG including a series of assassinations, fire-bombings, and robberies. “Millar taught CSA about God, and they taught Millar about guns,” said a former CSA member to a reporter. The FBI considered the CSA to be the “best-trained civilian paramilitary group in America” and was closely monitoring its activity. On April 19, 1985, exactly ten years before the Oklahoma City Bombing, the FBI surrounded CSA and demanded the surrender of Ellison, who was wanted for conspiring to acquire automatic weapons. For four days, a tense cold war ensued as Ellison refused to surrender. Robert Millar traveled to the compound under the guise of a negotiator, but according to Ellison’s right-hand man Kerry Noble (who ultimately renounced the CSA and now writes and speaks on the dangers of right-wing extremism), Millar was actually there as a witness in the event that the government drew first blood. Later, the newly militant Millar bemoaned the fact that Ellison ultimately surrendered peacefully. “Jim was wrong to surrender,” Millar told Noble while visiting him in prison. “He should’ve shot it out with the feds.” Millar also served as spiritual adviser to Richard Wayne Snell, one of CSA’s most violent members, who was put to death for the murders of a black state trooper and a pawn shop owner whom he believed to be Jewish. [4] During the trial, Millar testified as a character witness on Snell’s behalf. Snell was executed on April 19, 1995, in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, twelve hours after the Oklahoma City Bombing and ten years to the day after the FBI’s siege of CSA. Millar and his son John later retrieved Snell’s remains from the state and ultimately buried him in Elohim City. When asked about his father’s relationship with Snell, Millar’s tone becomes sharp. “Snell’s body is here,” he says. “I went to pick it up with my dad, his remains, at the request of his wife, okay?” By forging a relationship with Ellison, Snell, and the CSA, Elohim City effectively laid the foundation for the scrutiny, suspicion, and rumors that would plague the community in the years to come, reaching a fever pitch in the mid-‘90s. “We didn’t know Timothy McVeigh,” Millar insists. “Never heard of him until the bombing. No connection whatsoever.” In the grand jury indictment of McVeigh, the government alleged that the plotting of the bombing began in early September of 1994, while McVeigh was staying at a motel in Vian, Oklahoma, less than an hour away from Elohim City. “It is true that Tim McVeigh was there that day, that’s what the hotel registration shows, and it is true that that’s off the beaten path for him,” Jones acknowledges. “Tim McVeigh almost never went to Eastern Oklahoma via Western Oklahoma.” It’s believed that during this time, McVeigh was in contact with members of the Aryan Republican Army (ARA), a ragtag group of white supremacists who executed a series of bank robberies in order to fund anti-government activities (earning the media nickname “the Midwest bank bandits”). Evidence suggests the ARA was in Elohim City at the same time McVeigh was in Vian. The exact nature of McVeigh’s relationship with these men (Pete Langan,[5] Richard Guthrie, Scott Stedeford, Kevin McCarthy, and Michael Brescia) and, by proxy, Elohim City, is foggy. People like Mark Hamm hypothesize that the ARA helped to fund the bombing with their loot and used Elohim as a sort of safe house, an idea known as the “theory of multiple John Does.” In Hamm’s book, ARA leader Pete Langan, who is currently serving a life sentence plus 35 years for his role in the robberies, is interviewed extensively and appears to be honest and forthcoming about his criminal activities. But he denies any connection to the bombing, and he minimizes Elohim’s significance as anything other than a spiritual refuge. McVeigh denied the existence of accomplices to his dying breath. It’s argued that there are a multitude of potential reasons for both men to lie, but the fact remains that nothing has been proven. In March of 1995, the government had planned to raid Elohim City based on ATF informant Carol Howe’s allegations. Howe, a 24-year-old Tulsa debutante-turned-skinhead trophy queen, was brought to Elohim City by her boyfriend, white supremacist and would-be celebrity of the militia movement, Dennis Mahon. A former Imperial Dragon of the KKK, Mahon was now the leader of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) in Tulsa. [6] Jones calls Mahon a “freakshow,” a “burlesque figure of comedy,” a man prone to “making extreme statements and engaging in extreme acts of self-promotion.” John Millar calls him a friend. “I don’t know what he’s done in his life,” Millar demurs when asked about Elohim’s relationship with Mahon. “He seemed like a decent man to me. I agree with some of his thoughts. Not all of them, not by a long shot, but I do agree with some of his thoughts.” Mahon had plucked Howe from her privileged existence and taken her as a lover and protégé. He delivered her to his friends at Elohim for spiritual indoctrination, but she’d already been contacted by the ATF and turned into an informant. Upon her arrival, she began reporting her findings. She claimed Millar and company were stockpiling weapons, preaching increasingly aggressive anti-government rhetoric, and, most importantly, discussing plans for an attack of some sort. This seemed to confirm the government’s worst fears: Elohim City was a powder keg of anti-government rage, a place where, in Hamm’s words, “every resident down to the smallest child was armed and dangerous” and “underground bunkers held vast stores of ammunition, grenades, and explosives, even chemical and biological weapons.” Howe’s was one of the more sensational puzzle pieces of the bombing case. When investigative reporter J.D. Cash broke her story in the McCurtain Daily Gazette during the Terry Nichols trial, a national media feeding frenzy ensued. She was profiled in numerous magazines and newspapers, interviewed by Diane Sawyer, frequently referred to by reporters as “glamorous” and “beautiful.” In linking Elohim to Oklahoma City, many conspiracy theorists point to Howe’s testimony in the Nichols trial, in which she claims to have witnessed Timothy McVeigh’s presence at the compound. From the court transcript: Q. Now, are you familiar with what Timothy McVeigh looks like, Ms. Howe? A. Yes, sir. Q. Have you seen photographs of Timothy McVeigh? A. Yes, I have. Q. Did you ever see Timothy McVeigh at the Elohim City compound. A: I believe I did. Q. All right. When did you see him? A. It was in July of 1994. Q. Okay. And where did you see him? A. He was walking across a lawn near the church building. But Howe was problematic. She had a history of lying. Her stories were inconsistent and contradictory, and with more attention, each story grew more elaborate. “Like many former Soviet spies that come to the United States, Howe’s story tended to get better over a period of time,” Jones says now. “And then there’s always new revelations as [informants] think they’ve been abandoned or forgotten or they want to increase their stipend or whatever. They remember something new.” Jones says he discounted everything Carol Howe said after she acquired an attorney and was thrust into the spotlight. The FBI’s March 1995 planned raid against Elohim never materialized due to growing doubt on the government’s part over Howe’s credibility. Furthermore, Howe was ultimately deemed unreliable, and her testimony in the Nichols trial was thrown out, making it unavailable for consideration to the jury. Mention her name to Millar, and you can almost see the blood boiling beneath his skin. “They wouldn’t even use her testimony,” he says with incredulity. “She’s so unstable they wouldn’t even use her testimony. That’s one of the things we don’t appreciate about our government. They use unstable people, give them money, and finance them to do unethical things. And that’s what they found—she was so unethical they wouldn’t even use her as a witness, okay?” Another difficult question regarding Elohim’s connection to the bombing centers around Timothy McVeigh’s relationship with a German Nationalist named Andreas Strassmeier. Strassmeier wore fatigues and a swastika, was obsessed with firearms, and lived in Elohim City. McVeigh met Strassmeier at a Tulsa gun show in 1993. “There was a lot of speculation on how they made contact,” Millar says. “We don’t know. We have a little over a hundred residents, and if they go to a gun show or a movie or a restaurant, I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I’m not interested. But I don’t want them doing anything illegal, okay? And we make that very clear.” In Kingman, Arizona, shortly after he’d rented the Ryder truck he would eventually convert into a weapon of mass destruction, McVeigh used a calling card to dial Elohim City. McVeigh asked the woman who answered if he could speak with “Andi the German.” According to Howe, Strassmeier was the community’s head of security, though Millar vehemently denies this. “Never—he was here, but he wasn’t head of Elohim City security,” says Millar. “He liked playing with guns, so maybe he thought he was head of security and wanted to walk around with that. We let people think what they want; we believe in freedom. But we never gave him that position of authority.” The question of plausible deniability looms large over Elohim. The racialist ideology of Christian Identity and the geographic seclusion of Millar’s community no doubt attracted men with agendas, but are the community’s elders responsible for the behavior of every guest that passes through? For his part, Robert Millar quickly expelled Andreas Strassmeier from Elohim City soon after he became aware that the FBI was looking at Strassmeier for possible ties to McVeigh and the bombing. Strassmeier ultimately fled to Germany and was never prosecuted. “I have a niece who’s going to a local college,” Millar tells us. “She wants to be a lawyer. Her criminal justice professor was talking about terrorists and the Arabs and the Muslims, and then he said, ‘Well, we have [terrorists] right up our hill from here, and if you go up there, they hate other races and they’re liable to just shoot you for anything.’ And my niece raised her hand and said, ‘I live up there! That doesn’t happen!’ ” Millar is clearly vexed by this judgment. He points out that in the 38 years of Elohim’s existence, nobody’s ever been shot on its property, unlike the surrounding communities. “But because of the stigma and because of us not being politically correct in the eyes of the media, we have a professor in the Criminal Justice class who throws us in with the terrorists. I don’t appreciate that, and he will hear from me. That just happened two weeks ago, okay?” He pauses, then adds: “You can write that: ‘We’ve never had anyone killed here.’ ” Before we depart, Millar gives us a tour of Elohim’s new sanctuary, still under construction. The Reverend leads us into the beautiful, cavernous chapel, built by the hands of the residents. He apologetically explains that he would normally show us their current church, but the community has no doubt already congregated, and reporters aren’t allowed to sit in on their services. Outsiders still make the community uncomfortable. After the tour, we say our goodbyes and Millar leaves us to find our own way out. With its residents all gathered for service, Elohim City is a ghost town. The air is still and peaceful. The warmth of the sun, the soothing hum of the natural ambience, the majestic view of the Arkansas wilderness—in this moment, it’s obvious why these people are here. On the way out, we notice a primitive, white sign mounted on the side of the road, adorned with a bright red spray-painted phrase: “Jesus Saves.” After decades of scrutiny and mountains of circumstantial evidence, the government has still found no cause to take action against Elohim City. A second Grand Jury investigation of the bombing, convened by State Representative Charles Key to examine loose ends Key and others believed the government did not address to satisfaction in its initial investigation, came up empty-handed on the community. “We have made every effort to try to identify any plausible connection between [Elohim City] and the bombing,” it concluded. “In spite of a possible telephone call from Timothy McVeigh to Elohim City in April 1995, we have been unable to find such a connection.” Does God’s City deserve to be granted peace? The questions raised by its proximity to violent right-wing extremism will likely continue to haunt the town for the span of its existence. Image rehabilitation is hardly an option, considering the endless documentation devoted to impeaching the community’s collective character. It doesn’t help that Millar’s own sympathies to violent men ensure that Elohim City will continue to attract them. Then again, Millar and his community aren’t seeking social acceptance; they want the right to exist peacefully, outside the parameters of mainstream society. Whether or not society allows that is another matter. Endnotes: 1. Coincidentally, like Jones’s most famous client, Moore was also accused of bombing the Murrah building. In 1998’s controversial tome on the OKC bombing, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, author David Hoffman writes, “In the mid-‘70s, Oklahoma resident Harawese Moore was convicted of planting an incendiary explosive device outside both the federal courthouse and the Alfred P. Murrah Building.” 2. References to the Christian Identity belief can be traced as far back as The Declara- tion of Arbroath on April 6, 1320 in which 37 Scottish Chieftains wrote the Pope asking for assistance in Scotland’s battle against England. 3. In the book of Numbers, upon discovering an Israelite man and a Midianite woman copulating, the Jewish warrior Phinehas bludgeoned the couple with a spear as punishment for the interracial relationship (race-mixing was expressly forbidden by God). For the execution, Phinehas was rewarded by God with “an everlasting priesthood.” Many militant white supremacists believe that they are called by God to carry on this legacy and it’s been speculated that historical figures such as John Wilkes Booth and Jesse James considered themselves to be Phineas Priests. Robert Mathews and his organization, the Order of the Silent Brotherhood, are among the most violent recent examples of men committing heinous acts of murder and mayhem under the banner of the Phineas Priesthood. 4. In 1983, Snell, Ellison, and Noble traveled to Oklahoma City to case the Murrah Federal building as the potential target of a CSA attack. However, during preparations, the men interpreted a weapons malfunction as a sign from God, and the plan for attack was canceled. There’s been some conjecture that the Murrah building may have been chosen as the target of the April 19 schedule for execution, the same day. 5. Langan was the ARA’s unofficial leader and a self-proclaimed member of the Phineas Priesthood. Upon Langan’s arrest in 1996, authorities discovered that his toenails were painted pink and his entire body was devoid of hair. It later came out that Langan was a pre-op transsexual who, when not robbing banks, cross-dressed and lived as a woman named Donna. 6. In February 2012, Mahon was convicted in federal court of a 2004 bombing in Scottsdale, Arizona that injured Donald Logan, a black city official. Mahon’s sentencing hearing is May 22; he could face up to 100 years in prison. Evidence against Mahon was produced in large part through information provided by Rebecca Willams, a government informant who met Mahon and his twin brother Daniel (who was also tried but acquitted) at a Catoosa, Oklahoma trailer park in 2005.

by Lee Roy Chapman Myron Boyle, editor of the Indian Republican, from Notable Men of Indian Territory , 1905. Dr. S.G. Kennedy was furious. He had put his trust and money in a young man, who seemed to be making a name for himself in Tulsa, a former Wichita newspaper reporter who had once served as a private secretary to Congressman Bird McGuire of Oklahoma. Myron Boyle was the editor of the Indian Republican, one of Tulsa’s earliest weekly newspapers, which had been founded in 1891.   [1]  But by late 1906, Boyle found himself in a tough spot—a man named J.R. Brady (no relation to Tulsa founder W. Tate Brady ) had moved down from Lawrence, Kansas, the year prior and purchased the Republican, becoming its new owner. Boyle, it seemed, was out of a job. In December of 1906, Boyle convinced Dr. Kennedy to loan him $500 (nearly $12,000 in today’s money)  [2]  so that he could pay off debts to local businessmen; Boyle then promptly disappeared from Tulsa. Nine months later, however, he resurfaced. The Daily Oklahoman i nformed readers that Kennedy had tracked down Myron Boyle to Eureka Springs, where he had recently married the daughter of a prominent Tulsa druggist. Kennedy telegraphed the authorities in Arkansas to petition for an arrest, but Boyle had already skipped town. Boyle was wanted on a charge of flim-flammery, an early term used for con artists. It was a rather ignoble moment for the man whose newspaper would someday evolve into the Tulsa World. Unlike Boyle, J.R. Brady seemed to have a knack for the newspaper business. In 1905, while he was publishing the weekly Indian Republican, Brady also began publishing the Tulsa Daily World, and, for a brief period, perhaps to take advantage of the upcoming announcement of statehood, the Oklahoma World.  [3] It became a successful enough venture to lure the interests of George Bayne, a mine owner from Missouri. Bayne and his brother-in-law Charles Dent, managed the World for five years before a young man showed up who would forever change the paper’s course. [4] Eugene Lorton was a printer’s devil from Missouri. He had managed newspapers in the Washington state area, where he was also heavily involved in Republican politics. He successfully managed political campaigns for a governor and a senator. Lorton was lambasted and celebrated in Washington papers, at times being accused of shady transactions, criminal behavior, and being a dictator; at other times being called a sagacious and clever politician and a talented newspaperman worthy of the state’s gratitude. Although he enjoyed tremendous success in Walla Walla, Lorton felt there was more opportunity for him in Tulsa. “Business is picking up all over the country,” Lorton explained to the Seattle Republican in 1911, soon after he sold his newspaper stake for a healthy sum. “For some persons, you bet your sweet life business is picking up.” In 1911, Lorton moved to Tulsa and bought a third interest in the Tulsa Daily World, and then a half-interest in 1913. By 1917, Lorton had teamed up with Harry Sinclair, an oil tycoon who also ran Tulsa’s banking industry. With Sinclair’s money, Lorton established himself as the paper’s sole publisher. Big oil and the GOP became major influences that shaped the growth of the paper that would become Northeast Oklahoma’s legacy paper, the Tulsa World. Today, the Tulsa World remains a family paper. Since Eugene Lorton’s ascension in 1917, the Lorton family has maintained publishing and editorial control of the paper. Its current publisher is Eugene Lorton’s grandson, Robert Lorton, and its editor is Robert “Bobby” Lorton III. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations September 2011 report, it had an average circulation of 97,580 daily subscribers (it had 101,000 the year before), making it roughly 75% the readership size of The Daily Oklahoman. “We believe in quality journalism and continue to feel that we are the best at producing news and information in our region,” Lorton III said in an April 2011 article in Tulsa World. “My family and I have always been committed to Oklahoma, to Tulsa, and to each of the communities in our circulation area.” Endnotes: 1. The Indian Chief, Tulsa’s first newspaper, was established in 1884 by a soldier named J.L. Winnegar. The Indian Chief’s reputation for yellow journalism was supported by a 2004 interview with Tulsa historian/collector Beryl Ford. 2. Kennedy had already loaned Boyle $500 previously,y and Boyle had been unable to pay it back, so this second loan constituted a total debt of $1,000 to Dr. Kennedy. 3. According to historian L. Edward Carter, author of The Story of Oklahoma Newspapers (Oklahoma Heritage Association, 1984), J.R. Brady funded the Indian Republican with the assumption that Republican leaders would shield him from financial troubles. The Tulsa Daily World reportedly suffered financial challenges in its early years as well. 4. It’s worth noting that Tulsa World reporter Randy Krehbiel’s account differs from that of this article. In his book Tulsa’s Daily World: The Story of a Newspaper and Its Town (World Pub. Co. 2007), Krehbiel writes, “Some sources indicate the World and the Republican were affiliated, but the contemporary record suggests they were in fact competitors.” Special thanks to Cecil Cloud for sharing his Beryl Ford interview notes.

The Original Thomas Atkins & the Question of Slavery in Indian Territory by Russell Cobb "Thomas Atkins was a pretty wild sort of fellow” —Principal Chief Pleasant Porter All Crooks at Tulsa: An Investigation, is a reader-supported project. To receive early access to new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to the "All Crooks at Tulsa" Substack page here. Click here to pre-order the forthcoming book "Ghosts of Crook County" from Beacon Press now , or find it in bookstores on October 8th, 2024. Thomas Atkins belonged to Coweta Town, an ancient tribal town that was relocated to Indian Territory when he was a young child. The Muscogee Nation rebuilt its society in the 1840s and 1850s in Indian Territory, which included rekindling of the the ceremonial fires of their towns. While there are no known photos of Thomas Atkins, we know he was a large and imposing man. The citizens of Coweta Town elected him as the Captain of the Lighthorse Police, an agency called upon to not only enforce the laws of the Nation but also to keep out white outlaws— mainly whiskey bootleggers and Christian preachers. Another part of Atkins’ job: rounding up runaway slaves. Thomas Atkins was married to Millie Marshall, the daughter of one of the richest men in Indian Territory, “Chief” Benjamin Marshall. Marshall, whose status as Principal Chief was hotly contested by abolitionists in the Nation, was one of the largest slave owners in the entire Indian Territory. Creeks opposed to the Confederacy recognized Opotholeyahola as Principal Chief. Shortly before the Civil War, Marshall owned 109 slaves, and he constantly complained that he could not keep them on his plantation. The outbreak of the Civil War led the entire Marshall family to flee southward to Texas. Thomas Atkins enlisted with the first Creek Mounted Regiment of the Confederate States of America and served as a lieutenant. The Slave Schedule for Benjamin Marshall in 1860. Let’s look at this document carefully. One of the categories is “fugitive from the state.” There are 8 people listed on this first page alone. The schedule continues, with more fugitives reported. Another interesting category here is “Color.” Most are listed as B for “black” but there are others who are M, for “mulatto.” Those of mixed race were the fugitives. Why? In slavery lore, better treatment was reserved for those of lighter skin color. Benjamin Marshall's wealth was the stuff of legend. No bank in the South would ensure his deposits, but the money flowing from his cotton fields was turned into gold bars which he buried in coffee pots along the Texas Road (what is today Highway 75). The previously wealthy Marshall family fell apart during and after the War. Benjamin Marshall and two of his daughters died before the end of the war in Stonewall, Oklahoma– today part of the Chickasaw Nation. How did Marshall become so rich? His son, Richard Adkins (the alternative spelling of Atkins is intentional and will be discussed later) said that he had his own fortune as well as the Treasury of the Creek Nation. Excerpt from an oral history of Richard Adkins from the Indian Pioneer Papers done by WPA workers during the Great Depression. Marshall, as the leader of the Confederate faction of the Creek Nation, takes his fortune southward, along with as many slaves as he can manage. Many run away despite the threat of death. Considering that his son-in-law, Thomas, is a Confederate officer and a Lighthorse officer, it’s reasonable to assume Thomas is on the trail with them, trying to keep them on the task of hiding Marshall’s loot. Many did run away—all the way to Kansas, where they signed up to fight for the Union. After the war, a mixed-race man named Richard Atkins surfaces in Missouri. He is a young man, and formerly enslaved. His mother tells him that his father was none other than the Indian Thomas Atkins, Captain of the Lighthorse for Coweta Town. This Richard—he goes by Dick Atkins—lights out for Indian Territory sometime in the 1870s, hoping to establish his citizenship in the Creek Nation. Who does Dick Atkins meet? Thomas’s son, Richard Adkins, who has grown up as a cow boss in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Their father—old Thomas Atkins—is now dead. Two Richard Atkinses—both of mixed descent. One part white, and related to Chief Benjamin Marshall. The other part Black, with a mother who was enslaved by the same Chief. These two Richards are half-brothers, but the part-white one disavows his namesake sibling. From this point on, he will spell his name Adkins. And he’ll insist on that spelling to the Dawes Commission, the official Federal record keepers of who is, and who is not, an Indian. A-D-K-I-N-S. This will differentiate him from Richard Atkins, the former slave and son to Thomas Atkins. Richard Atkins persisted in trying to enroll in the Creek Nation. He would be thwarted and pushed aside many times, but he would not go away.  Stay tuned for episode 4... All Crooks at Tulsa: An Investigation, is a reader-supported project. To receive early access to new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to the "All Crooks at Tulsa" Substack page here. Click here to pre-order the forthcoming book "Ghosts of Crook County" from Beacon Press now , or find it in bookstores on October 8th, 2024.

The Origin Story of Minnie Atkins and Charles Page by Russell Cobb All Crooks at Tulsa: An Investigation, is a reader-supported project. To receive early access to new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to the "All Crooks at Tulsa" Substack page here. Click here to pre-order the forthcoming book "Ghosts of Crook County" from Beacon Press now,  or find it in bookstores on October 8th, 2024. In January 1881, a new student named Minnie Atkins arrived at Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Dr. C.H. Hepburn, a physician from the U.S. Indian Service prepared an examination . Atkins said she was 16, but the doctor believed she was already an adult. Hepburn weighed and measured Atkins; she was the largest in the cohort of Muscogee girls sent to the Pennsylvania school by a missionary named Alice Robertson. She was also, contrary to the doctor’s estimation, 16 years old. Alice Mary Robertson, affectionately known as Miss Alice, was a walking contradiction. A white woman fluent in written and spoken Mvskoke, she was becoming a instrumental part of a school that aimed to “kill the Indian; save the man.” Robertson defended Native American pupils from abuse, but allowed for a system of assimilation to take root. She would later—not to spoil too much here—get elected as only the second woman in Congress, all while espousing her opposition to women’s suffrage. Minnie had been Miss Alice’s pet student back at the Tullahassee Indian School in Indian Territory until 1880 when the school burned to the ground. Minnie’s parents died shortly before the fire. Her father, Thomas Atkins, was a legendary character in Indian Territory and a veteran of the Civil War. He served as Chief of the Lighthorse Police for Coweta Town after the war. He had five—maybe six—wives. So, in 1883, when she has her student portrait taken, she Minnie has faced hardships. But she also has a protector and mentor that will go on to be a member of Congress and the founder of the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls, which later became Henry Kendall College in Muskogee. That college then moved to Tulsa and became the University of Tulsa. Robertson, then, was a sort of godmother of TU. While Minnie Atkins sat for her photo in 1883, she knew nothing of what awaited her at Carlisle, at Tulsa, and beyond. She certainly had no inkling of the fact that in 1922, she would seem poised to become one of the richest—if not the richest—Indigenous woman in the United States. Late in 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Minnie had a son who was allotted land in one of the richest oil fields in the nation– the Cushing-Drumright Oilfield in eastern Oklahoma. Many oilmen had vied to control this child’s land, including the art collector Thomas Gilcrease, a rancher named H.U. Bartlett, and Tulsa philanthropist Charles Page. A legal fight dragged on for eight years involving these and many other parties, but now the highest court in the land had ruled in favor of Minnie Atkins.The ruling meant that land valued at $4,000,000 (around $73 million in 2024) was hers. Minnie would collect oil royalties from this land and become one of the wealthiest Native Americans in the nation. Newspapers around the country reported this extraordinary news, along with a feel-good story about Minnie’s benefactor, Charles Page. Not only would he end Minnie’s struggle to have her boy Tommy recognized as her son, but Mr. Page would take his share of the oil royalties and give them to charity. Page’s oil company—Gem Oil Co.—had taken a major risk in drilling on Tommy’s land while simultaneously fending off all of the other claimants. According to the story, Page had done this not to enrich himself, but to add to the endowment of the Sand Springs Home, an institution that still provides food and shelter to widows and orphans in the Tulsa area to this day. It was the kind of feel-good story that provided a positive antidote to the grim news out of Oklahoma, where the infamous Race Massacre had taken place on Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa the previous year in 1921, and where many Osage people were being killed for headrights to the Osage Nation’s ownership of oil reserves. For once, Oklahoma had a true hero: “Daddy Page.” Alas, there were major problems with this narrative. By the end of 1922, Minnie Atkins was not a “rich Indian heiress.” She was buried in a cemetery in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. Her son, Tommy, may not have been her child at all, but part of an elaborate hoax concocted, in part, by Charles Page himself. How an oilman managed to convince the highest court in the land that a mythical boy belonged to a dead woman who had given her wealth to a widows and orphans colony has to be one of the stranger episodes from the oil patch. And, up until now, it has been thoroughly erased from mainstream history. Before we get to the coverup behind the crime, we have to go back to Indian Territory during the Civil War. That's next in Episode 3. All Crooks at Tulsa: An Investigation is a reader-supported project. To receive early access to new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to the "All Crooks at Tulsa" Substack page HERE. Click here to pre-order the forthcoming book "Ghosts of Crook County" from Beacon Press,  or find it in bookstores on October 8th, 2024.

Digging Into Where That Tulsa Oil Money Really Comes From by Russell Cobb All Crooks at Tulsa: An Investigation, is a reader-supported project. To receive early access to new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to the "All Crooks at Tulsa" Substack page HERE. Click here to pre-order the forthcoming book "Ghosts of Crook County" from Beacon Press now, or find it in bookstores on October 8th, 2024. The author in the heady days of the mid-1980s when Tulsa faced its worst economic crisis since the Depression. A few years ago I was cleaning out my mom's old documents from the basement of her Maple Ridge cottage in Tulsa. I found my father's will, which included a detailed list of all of his financial assets. “Estate” sounds way too grandiose, but there was something odd in there. My father died of heart disease in 1980 at the age of 37. An experimental heart transplant had resulted in a mountain of medical debt. His father— Russell Cobb II—had gone from riches to rags before I was born. Russell Cobb III? Let us not speak of him for now. He may come into play in this story later. Here I am, Russell Cobb IV, in that old Maple Ridge cottage around the year 1984, blissfully unaware of the turmoil around me. Tens of thousands of Oklahomans were losing everything in a perfect storm of fraud, deception, and low oil prices. So I was not expecting to find lost treasure as I shifted through a pile of paperwork. But there was one thing that caught my eye: a series of mineral royalties in some Oklahoma counties. This meant money, specifically oil money. There was one big name among the companies listed: Sun Oil Company (today, Sunoco: “The Official Fuel of NASCAR”). My dad owned a portion of oil royalties somewhere out in Creek County, Oklahoma. I knew enough about the history of the oil industry to know that Creek County was once the epicenter of the North American oil industry and that nearby Cushing was still the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World.” I was shocked to learn I had inherited a share of mineral royalties in the heart of Creek County. Then I noticed the share: .00546688% Pipelines from all over North America converge in Cushing, a small town of vape stores, storefront churches, marijuana dispensaries and a decent-sized prison. Cushing may not mean anything to you, but this relatively small town is the symbolic heart of the American petroleum industry. When you hear about the price per barrel of oil settling on the New York Mercantile Exchange, that actually refers to the price set for delivery at Cushing, a place that can hold close to 100,000,000 barrels of oil at any time. I became sort of obsessed with Cushing for a while. The city where I live in Alberta, Canada has a pipeline that terminates at Cushing. Cushing has about 10% of all reserves of petroleum in the United States stored in tanks around the town. If you fly to the southwest out of Tulsa, you will probably see these massive white circular structures outside a small town. That’s Cushing. Up to 90 million barrels of oil can be stored in Cushing tank farms. Photo taken from the air in 2022 by the author. But then I saw the fraction. My father owned exactly 1/4 of .0054% of one small section on the western edge of Creek County. As I looked further in my mom's files, there were dozens if not hundreds of checks from oil companies. 0.06 cents. 0.12 cents. 0.81 cents. There was one from Koch Industries (yeah, those Koch brothers) as well. Add them all up, and maybe there was $80 total after years of checks issued from companies like Sun Oil to my father, Chandler Cobb. Even though my dad never made it rich, a lot of people did. The oil money generated from this particular patch of the Mid-Continent oil field created fortunes that are household names: Getty, Sinclair, Skelly, and others. If you combined the money made out in Creek County with the fortunes made in the Glen Pool, the Osage Nation, Bartlesville, and Red Fork, it was not hyperbole to say that Tulsa really was the “Oil Capital of the World” at some point. Everywhere you look in Tulsa, you see monuments to these fortunes. The Golden Driller. The art deco tours of skyscrapers built during the oil capital heyday. The oil mansions turned into museums built by Phillips and Gilcrease. What is the history of Tulsa but the history of oil? But what is the history of oil? How did ancient, decomposed carbon molecules come to be the lifeblood of our society? And how did the commodification of those hydrocarbons lead to almost unthinkable amounts of wealth in a land that was—despite what the leadership of the city and state want to believe—still an Indian Reservation? It’s even crazier than you think. Over-drilling in the Cushing Field led to a collapse in prices. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Everywhere you look in Tulsa, you see monuments to these fortunes. The Golden Driller. The art deco tours of skyscrapers built during the oil capital heyday. The oil mansions turned into museums built by Phillips and Gilcrease. What is the history of Tulsa but the history of oil? But what is the history of oil? How did ancient, decomposed carbon molecules come to be the lifeblood of our society? And how did the commodification of those hydrocarbons lead to almost unthinkable amounts of wealth in a land that was—despite what the leadership of the city and state want to believe—still an Indian Reservation? It’s even crazier than you think. This story started when I innocently looked to find out why I owned this small fraction of an oil well in Creek County. My dad inherited the land from his dad who in turn inherited it from his father, a man named Russell Cobb I. This first Russell Cobb came to Tulsa in 1923 during the city's heyday. I knew all that– but how did that Russell Cobb get the land? Who owned it before him? This is where I ran into the story of allotment, and specifically the allotment of registered citizens of the Creek Nation Tribe of Indians in the run-up to Oklahoma statehood in 1907. You might think you understand what happened during this time. I thought I did. The Five Tribes of Oklahoma were forced to concede their commonly held land and have it allotted in 160-acre parcels to their citizens. The surplus land was then opened up for white settlement. You probably know that part. Entry No. 1 on an abstract of a house in Maple Ridge, Tulsa, giving the land to the Creek Tribe of Indians “so long as they shall exist as a nation.” What I did not understand was the utter chaos and confusion that accompanied allotment and the discovery of oil in Oklahoma. The book and film Killers of the Flower Moon portray one chapter of the saga in the Osage Nation. But what happened in Tulsa? I decided to follow the story of one allottee to make sense of it all. It was supposed to be a micro-history out in Creek County, where my dad owned a tiny fraction of oil land. If Creek County was the center of the oil boom, I decided to focus on one allottee who attracted a lot of attention in the area. This kid—Tommy Atkins—seemed to be incredibly well-documented. There were hundreds of newspaper articles about him and the millions of dollars in oil royalties his land held. Because all the oilmen who went before me were dead, I thought Tommy’s story could help me understand why we would end up owning a small fraction of an oil well. I kept tripping over his name. But there was really nothing in any history book about Tommy Atkins, just a bunch of old newspaper clippings that seemed like some sort of crazy magical realist tale. Tommy was the boy with three mothers. He was a black man raised as an orphan in Kansas. She was a World War I veteran who had resettled in Los Angeles. He was a ghost, a nobody, an everybody. An oil well on the allotment of Tommy Atkins in Creek County, Winter 2021. The other thing that was certain was who owned that money. The fortune had gone to the Sand Springs Home, a charity organized by the philanthropist and oilman Charles Page. How Page got that money, and how he proved the existence of his Tommy Atkins, is quite the story. Like almost every good American story it starts around the time of the Civil War. Come along for Episode 2… All Crooks at Tulsa: An Investigation is a reader-supported project. To receive early access to new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to the "All Crooks at Tulsa" Substack page HERE. Click here to pre-order the forthcoming book "Ghosts of Crook County" from Beacon Press, or find it in bookstores on October 8th, 2024.

By Russell Cob Destroyed in 1973 to make way for the Performing Arts Center, the Hotel Tulsa was once known as "The Buckingham Palace of Oil." Multi-million dollar oil deals were struck in the lobby over a handshake, while Harry Sinclair sponsored all-night poker games in his private rooms. In 1923, the Hotel Tulsa served as headquarters for Gov. Jack Walton's prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan. An earlier version of this story appeared in The Chronicles of Oklahoma: Vol C, No. 1, 2022, a publication of the Oklahoma Historical Society. The stories whispered about Tommy Atkins in the lobby of the Hotel Tulsa grew wilder and wilder with every telling. Tommy was a Muscogee boy whose land was worth many millions of dollars in 1914. Dozens of oil wells drew thousands of barrels of light sweet crude from Tommy’s land every day, even though the child had disappeared. Was Tommy dead? Perhaps he was living under an alias in Kansas– or even Mexico. It was also possible that Tommy was a fictional being, the product of an elaborate hoax, involving one of Oklahoma’s most recognizable philanthropists. As the theories multiplied in the poker rooms and brothels of downtown Tulsa, there was only one thing everyone could be certain of: this Creek boy’s land lay in the middle of one of the richest oilfields in North America, the Cushing-Drumright Oilfield, a place that helped make Tulsa the “Oil Capital of the World.” Everything else about Tommy’s life was inscrutable. One theory held that he had been stillborn to a homeless Muscogee woman on the streets of Wagoner, Oklahoma. Another story had him dying as a teenager in a flood in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he had been born in a barn behind a brothel. Other people insisted that he was alive and well, living as a Black man named Henry Carter. There was a Tommy Atkins in Philadelphia and another on a farm in Kansas. All of them claimed to be the one and only Creek Indian Thomas Atkins, certified as a Muscogee citizen under Dawes Roll #7913. The Philadelphia Tommy Atkins, NARA Classified Files “But Insists He Never Died”– the Kansas Tommy Atkins The most compelling theory, however, held that Tommy never existed in the first place. He was born as a clerical error by the Dawes Commission, and then framed into existence by an oilman who concocted an elaborate fraud that even conned a United States federal judge. People foolish enough to whisper this last theory in the lobby of the Hotel Tulsa would soon find themselves tailed by Pinkerton Agents or other hired thugs. Some of Oklahoma’s most ambitious oilmen had angles on the Tommy Atkins lands. At some point, ex-Governor Charles Haskell, the philanthropist Charles Page, and the art collector Thomas Gilcrease, had all sought to control Tommy’s land. There were many more who would move mountains to prove they had a valid lease to drill. The Sapulpa oilman and rancher H.U. Bartlett, as well as the Tulsa politician C.J. Wrightsman, worked an angle to secure the oil on his land. The idea that the boy was nothing more than an elaborate hoax (a theory put forth by The Department of Justice, the Muscogee Nation, and the Attorney General of the United States, among others) posed a serious problem to the business model of the Tulsa oil establishment. If the federal government got its way with Tommy, his allotment would be canceled and his millions would be returned to the Muscogee Nation. The idea that the Tribe would control the wealth of the "Oil Capital of the World" was anathema to these men, a new class of people who often openly boasted of being “grafters." The stakes could not have been higher. On the eve of World War I, it had become apparent that Tommy’s allotment sat in the middle of the Cushing-Drumright Field, a place that would prove invaluable to the U.S. war effort. That war represented the final stage in a global transition from coal-powered to petroleum-powered transportation. By 1917, the world had passed definitively into the era of Hydrocarbon Man, and one-fifth of the entire global supply of petroleum was coming out of this one Oklahoma field by the end of the war. For most of its history, the northwestern portion of the Muscogee Nation, in current Creek County, seemed like an inauspicious place for any kind of human development. This was the Cross Timbers, a place Washington Irving described as a “forest of cast iron.” The trees were stunted, the soil was a red clay, and the waterways ran crimson with soot. There was no space for bison hunts, no room for farms. It was no man’s land. Many Muscogee citizens chose allotments further east where the soil was rich and black. Muscogee citizens who did not show up to select parcels of land were allotted the worst land in Indian Territory. Among this group were the anti-assimilationist leader Chitto Harjo (Crazy Snake) and members of his “Snake Faction,” who fought allotment in armed rebellion into statehood in 1907. Exchange National Bank Building under construction, March 1928 (2012.201.B1299.0022, Oklahoma Publishing Company Photography Collection, OHS) During the first years of statehood, Oklahoma established itself as a center of the nascent American oil industry. Discoveries at Bartlesville, Glenn Pool, and Red Fork replaced Spindletop, Texas, as the new American El Dorado. Nearby Tulsa emerged as the financial center, even though it had no oil itself. Until 1928, Oklahoma led the nation in oil production. In Tulsa, oilmen built ornate mansions on land that had been allotted to Muscogee citizens only a decade prior. Eastern money flowed into the booming city, which proclaimed itself as “The Oil Capital of the World,” a title that still has a nostalgic pull on the hearts of Tulsans. Tulsa’s first skyscraper, Exchange National Bank, acquired a reputation as the “Oil Bank of America,” and the bank’s president, Harry Sinclair, made his influence felt in Washington, DC. If oil was the business that built Tulsa, it also became the commodity that shaped the city’s culture and society. The explosion of the oil economy in Tulsa fundamentally altered the identity of the people who lived in the area, especially the Muscogee Indians trying to hold on to their allotments. Intense speculation about potential riches under the soil led to complicated battles among families, in courtrooms, and in the media. No case, however, was as convoluted and explosive as the fight for Tommy Atkins’s allotment. By the time it was finally resolved by the US Supreme Court in 1922, it was the most litigated court battle in the state’s history. Harry Sinclair, March 1925 (2012.201.B1177.0290, Oklahoma Publishing Company Photography Collection, OHS). Tom Slick, c. 1920s (2012.201.B1268.0092, Oklahoma Publishing Company Photography Collection, OHS) The Cushing-Drumright oil boom started with a whimper. In the early 1910s, a wildcatter from Pennsylvania named Tom Slick had been testing the Cross Timbers for oil and coming up empty. Despite earning the nickname “Dry Hole Slick,” he managed to convince his financial backers to give him one more shot near the town of Drumright. There he drilled a discovery well on land owned by a farmer named Frank B. Wheeler. When the oil came in, Slick cut the phone lines to Wheeler’s house, hired private guards to run off any curiosity-seekers, and built a tall privacy fence around his well. Slick tried to control the entire operation but, as an independent oilman, it became clear that he did not have the means to control the rumors about a new oilfield. Slick’s first oil well turned out to be a harbinger of a transformational event in energy history. Jackson and Anna Barnett, c. 1920 (20604.2, Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS) Geologists soon discovered that the whole area sat atop an anticline, a ridge-shaped fold of rock holding massive deposits of oil and gas. The entire Cushing-Drumright Field takes up only about thirty square miles on the surface of northeastern Oklahoma, but the quality of the light, sweet crude oil below the surface proved to be a major catalyst for the development of refineries and pipelines throughout the mid-continent. Although the oil field lay about forty miles west of town, Tulsa was the urban center that supplied the labor, the financial capital, and the hotels for deal-making. Boomtowns like Drumright and Oilton grew up in the midst of the oil field, but the money flowed back to Tulsa companies and the Exchange National Bank downtown. One of the first major players in the area, Gypsy Oil Company, was headquartered in Tulsa. Cushing-Drumright Field, c. 1920 (17679, Oklahoma Historical Society Photography Collection, OHS) Gypsy drilled the Jackson Barnett No. 11, which shattered the state’s record for barrels produced per day and turned Barnett, an allottee, into “the world’s richest Indian.” At one point, two-thirds of all light sweet crude in the Western Hemisphere was coming out of this one oil field, and one-fifth of the world’s entire oil output originated from the Cushing-Drumright Field. The area functioned as the hub of the North American oil industry until discoveries in east Texas in the 1930s displaced Oklahoma as the new center of exploration and innovation. Even as the nation and the world moved on to bigger discoveries, the infrastructure built around the Cushing-Drumright Field still holds a vital importance to the industry. The area around the oil field holds a storage capacity of thirty million barrels of oil, and the industry, despite generating myriad environmental problems, remains the symbol of economic prosperity in the region. Cushing proclaims itself as the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World.” Tom Slick made a fortune from his discoveries and relocated to San Antonio, Texas, where he was no longer known as “Dry Hole Slick,” but the “King of the Wildcatters.” As Slick moved out, major oil companies like Sinclair and Texaco moved in, crowding the banks of the Cimarron River with derricks. The cost of an oil lease spiked, and the town of Drumright sprang up in 1913. Drumright was a wild and wooly place with saloons such as The Hump, where police discovered human skeletons after finally closing it down during Prohibition. Previous American oil booms in Pennsylvania, Texas, and California had made poor farmers into rich men, as they leased their land to speculators and harvested a cut of the profits. In the area of Oklahoma, until 1907 known as Indian Territory, it was a different story. Most of the oil-rich land here belonged to Native Americans whose tribes had been forced to dissolve their collective ownership of land. In exchange for forfeiting sovereignty, individual tribal citizens had been granted allotments in fee simple. This had been part of a grand federal experiment to instill capitalist virtues in Native Americans, a so-called “progressive” reform intended to save Indigenous people from the land hunger of Western expansionists. Different tribes had different regimes regarding ownership of minerals underneath the soil, but most—the notable exception being the Osage Nation—went along with the federal government’s desire to make subsoil minerals private property. When it became clear that white speculators known as “grafters'' were swooping in to steal the land from Indigenous people, a haphazard set of restrictions was placed on the sale of land. These restrictions were based on the degree of Indigenous blood quantum in a given allottee, a foreign concept to the tribes. In general, the more Indigenous blood a person had, the more restrictions were placed upon the sale of their land. The law also differentiated between a person’s “homestead” (the 40 acres around a home) and a person’s “surplus land” (the 120 acres one farmed). In the eyes of the government, most full-blood Native Americans were considered “incompetents” and required court-appointed guardians to sell or buy land. Guardians were supposed to be upstanding members of the community who made decisions in the best interests of their wards. They were pastors and bankers, lawyers and missionaries. They upheld the dominant paradigm of paternalism—the belief that they, as white men, understood what was in the best interest of women and people of color, and they reserved the right to act on those beliefs. In doing so, they facilitated one of the most consequential wealth transfers in US American history. Dawes Commission staff at Tishomingo, Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory, c. 1904 (20288.76.41.42, Chickasaw Council House Museum Collection, OHS) While guardianship and restrictions were enacted as legal tools to protect against land swindling, the former only enabled the swindlers, while the latter posed a legal hurdle to be overcome by hook or by crook. “Full bloods'' and their heirs were restricted from selling their land for twenty-five years, except by an act of Congress. In the years following Slick’s discovery, however, the names of hundreds of Native Americans were attached as riders to bills passed by Congress, thus lifting restrictions, and small-town Oklahoma newspapers printed their names. Guardianship of minors’ property lay in the hands of their parents but, on their eighteenth birthdays, the legal means of transferring property went to the deed owner. Historian Angie Debo wrote that “grafters carried around birthday books of allottees. Weeks ahead of their birthdays, allottees were kidnapped and driven across state lines, where courts were less familiar with the large-scale swindling in Oklahoma. Blood quantum has always been as much a social construction as a biological reality, so many allottees’ fractions of Native blood were nothing more than the reflection of a Dawes commissioner’s imagination. Dawes commissioners, faced with hundreds of thousands of people who thought about identity in terms of kinship instead of race, often simply guessed at blood quantum based on skin color and dress. In sum, the “protections” afforded by guardians and the hurdles of restrictions on the alienation of lands did virtually nothing to prevent land theft. A year after statehood, most restrictions on those less than one half-blood were lifted in a piece of legislation informally known as “the Crime of 1908.” Allottees who resisted the grafters were bribed, intimidated, and kidnapped. Sometimes, as in the case of Jackson Barnett, an allottee would become incredibly wealthy. It was much harder for grafters to lift restrictions on “full bloods,” and a small industry of middlemen endeavored to connect full bloods to oilmen. Rich Muscogees like Barnett were the source material for legends about Native Americans who drove new cars until they ran out of gas and then bought another new car rather than gassing up the old one. A Muscogee woman named Lucinda Pittman was said to have demanded that the headquarters of Cadillac in Detroit make her a car that was not black. Cadillac, as the tale goes, then started manufacturing its cars in different colors after Pittman’s demand. Like many folktales, these stories had a degree of truth, but the larger picture was one of exploitation and dispossession. It was clear that the region was beset by chaos, and each allottee could tell their own particular story of the unintended consequences of guardianship and restrictions. But no one case better illustrates the depth of deceit, double-dealing, and mystery than that of Tommy Atkins. The Dawes Commission first came across Tommy’s name in an 1895 census executed by the Town King of the Euchee band of Muscogee Indians. This census served as the starting point for the Dawes Rolls of the Muscogee Nation. The census taker wrote that a certain Thomas Atkins was living with Minnie Atkins at the time, but someone annotated the census with the phrase “error of one,” next to the Atkinses. Minnie and her sister, Nancy, were living together with two children and another relative named Ed Scrimsher. The Atkins sisters had been very close, but Nancy often complained of receiving none of the attention and privileges that Minnie received. Minnie had attended the Tullahassee Manual Labor School after the death of their parents, while Nancy was passed around from one relative to the next. Minnie had gone away to Carlisle Indian Industrial School, while Nancy had stayed behind to work as a laundry woman in a Wagoner hotel. Before the discovery of oil, however, no one took much of an interest in the contradictory nature of Tommy’s existence. By the summer of 1902, when he was enrolled, the commission was under pressure to wrap up its work and prepare Indian Territory for statehood. Had the commissioners looked into the error on the census, they would have noticed that Nancy and Minnie shared duties raising the children and that the name Tommy might have referred to a nephew of theirs, not a child. Her living children, Charley and Harvey Harrison, also were enrolled as one-fourth Muscogee Indians fathered by a white man named George Harrison from Colorado. While the enrollment of Harvey and Charley Harrison was fairly straightforward, the case of Tommy was riddled with questions, beginning with his mother. While Minnie made the first legal claim to be Tommy’s mother, Nancy won a Creek County lawsuit against her sister with dubious evidence suggesting that she was the mother. Tullahassee Manual Labor School located in Wagoner County, April 1891 (1553, Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS) The only Thomas Atkins people knew of had been dead for twenty years. The federal government owed Muscogee citizens money dating back to the end of the Civil War when a newly resurgent Union seized the western half of the Muscogee Nation as punishment for the tribe’s support of the Confederacy. As part of a new treaty, every Muscogee citizen was due an annuity payment of $14.40 in 1895, which would settle accounts between the tribe and the federal government. Student portrait of Minnie Atkins from Carlisle Indian Industrial School,1885 (Image courtesy of the author) By this time, whites outnumbered citizens of the Five Tribes in Indian Territory by a four-to-one margin. Chief Pleasant Porter of the Muscogee Nation wrote that his people were on the “road to disappearance.” With the discovery of oil in Oklahoma and a federal law ordering the dismantling of tribal sovereignty, Indian Territory was in the midst of an invasion. The Muscogee Nation, along with the other four southern tribes, held out against allotment until the Curtis Act of 1898 forced their hand. Some, like Crazy Snake, chose to fight the invasion. Chief Porter urged assimilation. Meanwhile, opportunists saw a chance to exploit the confusion around who, exactly, was a citizen of the Five Tribes. White swindlers bribed their way onto the rolls, and some enrolled citizens collected money twice. More common than fraud among the Muscogees, however, was a refusal among traditionalists to enroll with yet another federal agency. To the Dawes agents on the ground, it was clear that the legitimacy of the entire project was suspect. Many non-Indians were finding their way onto official rolls while many Indigenous people were being excluded. The Indian agent cutting checks for the Atkins family gave Minnie three payments, including one for Thomas Atkins. It could have been an oversight, an accounting error, or a blatant act of fraud. Muscogee Chief Pleasant Porter (9199, Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS) Almost as soon as she took the extra payment, Minnie Atkins knew she was in trouble. Minnie left her children, Charley and Harvey behind in the care of Nancy and traveled out west, where her boyfriend, a Pennsyvania farmer, played in the US Army band. The soldier, Harry Folk, was soon redeployed to Fort Vancouver, Washington. It was there, in 1909, Minnie Atkins became Minnie Folk. Minnie Folk is listed on her marriage certificate as a white woman from El Paso, Texas, with the occupation of cook. The Folks took up residence in a tidy colonial revival cottage at the fort. She adapted to her new life and never mentioned her maiden name or former life to anyone. In the mid-1880s, Atkins spent some time living and working in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In Fort Leavenworth, Atkins had been known as “Indian Minnie,” an itinerant woman with several soldier boyfriends. She worked as a domestic in several households around the fort and struggled to find a stable home. Life around Fort Leavenworth in the 1880s was rough, as the fort attracted all manner of gamblers, swindlers, and prostitutes. To make matters worse for Atkins, employers spoke in openly racist terms against her as a Native American. Running away with Folk gave her an opportunity to reinvent herself. In Washington, she was Minnie Folk, a dutiful wife and white woman from Texas who lived an ordinary domestic life. Chitto Harjo (Crazy Snake), c. 1900 (3905, W. P. Campbell Collection, OHS). The question of who Tommy was, and whether he even existed, would have remained a compelling mystery even without the discovery of oil on his land. The explosion of Tom Slick’s oil well near Drumright, however, raised the stakes of the mystery. Slick’s discovery was only six miles south of Tommy’s land. It was clear the oil deposit extended north; Tommy’s allotment was squeezed in between Sarah Rector’s, a young freedwoman proclaimed the “richest Black girl in America” by the NAACP, and Luther Manuel’s, the so-called “richest Negro boy in the world.” Fire at the Glenn Pool Field after an electrical storm, c.1906 (18827.016.B, Albertype Collection, OHS). The drama around Rector and Manuel had caught the attention of W. E. B. DuBois, who helped secure legal protection for Rector and move her to a safe location in Kansas City, Missouri. The oil around Drumright—even more than the fabled Glenn Pool— would cement Tulsa’s reputation as the Oil Capital of the World. In their rush to capture oil, many wildcatters were willing to drill first and sign the legal paperwork later. The dubious dealings went both ways, as some allottees signed multiple leases for the same piece of land. Guardians fought over allottees, many of whom simply wanted to be left alone. On Tommy’s land, a rancher-turned-oil-baron from Sapulpa named H. U. Bartlett drilled several discovery wells. When Bartlett struck oil in 1912, he claimed to have obtained a valid lease from Minnie Atkins. Bartlett’s wells were bringing in so much oil that large quantities of it were wasting away in open pits near the Cimarron River. With money flowing in, Bartlett was making plans to expand his reach into glass manufacturing in Sapulpa. As news of the gusher spread, Minnie Atkins’s sister, Nancy, appeared in the Creek County Courthouse with evidence that Tommy was her son. A former Oklahoma judge, N. B. Maxey, represented Nancy’s claim that Tommy had been born and died as a young man in Wagoner, Oklahoma. Maxey had witnesses from Wagoner who said they knew the kid, but the real bombshell was Maxey’s evidence that the Minnie Atkins on Bartlett’s lease was an imposter. The woman claiming to be Atkins was a Muscogee woman named Betty Mann who had known Atkins from their days at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Bartlett and Mann looked for Atkins, but concluded that she had most likely died. If Tommy and his mother died intestate and without an heir, then the royalties the oil lease would revert back to the Muscogee Nation. Rather than notify the tribe of this, Mann stepped in to impersonate her old friend and collect a small payment. Mann had a notorious reputation around town, and she went on to face prosecution for perjury. Bartlett claimed he had been duped, but it was entirely possible that he was the author of the scheme and Mann was his willing pawn. Mann would come back to play an important role in tracking down Minnie Akins and seems to have been willing to commit a series of frauds. Maxey’s allegations convinced Judge Stanford at the Creek County court to award the Tommy Atkins lease to Nancy Atkins. Oklahoma judges were notorious for facilitating graft, and they were under enormous pressure from Washington to clean up their act. Agents from the Department of the Interior understood that Oklahoma was playing by its own rules when it came to managing the affairs of Native Americans. H. U. Bartlett vowed to find the real Minnie Atkins. He sent out private investigators to pursue leads from Mexico to Pennsylvania, where Atkins had attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Since collecting the extra annuity payment and moving to Washington, Minnie Atkins had cut ties with everyone back in Oklahoma. Her tribe had written her letters, warning that she would eventually be struck from their official rolls if she did not file paperwork with the Dawes Commission. Even though it meant forgoing 160 acres of land in Oklahoma, Atkins refused to answer any of the letters. Almost everyone who knew her assumed she was dead. Charley and Harvey Harrison had received their allotments, and, through them, it was known that their father was a man from Colorado named Harris or Harrison. Minnie had been given a provisional enrollment in the Muscogee Nation as Minnie Harris, but no one could even confirm that she was alive. In 1915, someone in the Interior Department drew a red line through Minnie Harris’s name on her enrollment card. She was then stricken from the Muscogee Nation and assumed dead. Muscogee authorities were meanwhile becoming increasingly suspicious of Bartlett’s maneuvers. Muscogee National Attorney R. C. Allen pleaded with federal investigators to look at the tribe’s own 1895 census, which noted the error in counting all the members of the Atkins family. Allen concluded that Minnie Atkins passed her dead father off as a living relative to collect an extra payment. If true, that would make Atkins guilty of the federal crime of making false statements. It was clear that this affair was too much for a county judge in Sapulpa to handle. The Interior Department was in the midst of enacting a bigger agenda: to wind down all tribal governments and get on with the business of civilizing this wild pocket of America. The Muscogees still had a skeleton government and a few friends in federal agencies who were incensed by what was happening in Oklahoma. The Muscogee Nation would need all the help it could get because a much savvier and richer man than H. U. Bartlett would soon aim to wrest control of the Tommy Atkins fortune. A statue of Charles Page that stands in front of Sand Springs' Page Memorial Library. (Photo courtesy of the author.) This man had built up an entire town out from nothing but a small Muscogee village on the banks of the Arkansas. He transliterated the Mvskoke named of the village into English--Sand Springs. After making a small fortune in the Glenn Pool, he slowly built Sand Springs into an industrial powerhouse, a place that supplied Tulsa's bottled water and ran its most important passenger rail service. Tommy Atkins became an obsession to this man. He would eventually risk almost everything, including an orphans and widows colony known as the Sand Springs Home, to prove what many people assumed to be a fiction: that Tommy Atkins was indeed a Creek boy and that he--Charles Page--held the only valid title to drill for oil on his land. In 1917, Charles Page's case looked dubious at best. A federal judge put the majority of his operations under a court-appointed receiver. The Tulsa World called him "a fraud." The whispers around the Hotel Tulsa were that the government would cancel the allotment and Page would go broke. But behind Page's homespun, folksy demeanor was a cunning businessman with a background in espionage in the Pinkerton Agency. And Charles Page was determined to forge a Tommy Atkins into existence, no matter what the cost and who opposed him. To be continued in Part 2.... Dr. Russell Cobb is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta and the author of The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America’s Weirdest State (Lincoln: Bison Books, 2020). The author would like to thank researcher Gina Covington and Apollonia Piña for their research contributions to this article.

By Randy Hopkins Courtesy of Tulsa Booker T. Washington High School. In the fall of 1921, students began returning to Tulsa, Oklahoma's Booker T. Washington High School, one of the few Greenwood structures to survive the Tulsa Race Massacre. The arrival of students also meant, then as now, that high school football would soon follow. In honor of Black History Month, this is the story of the 1921 Tulsa Booker T. Washington High School Hornets' football season, a season conducted in the shadows of ruins. The Hornets' 1921 season marked the birth of “modern” football at the school in that it was the first year that eligibility requirements of the Oklahoma High School Athletic Association were followed. While teams had been fielded since 1918, non-students, including teachers, had been allowed to play in the less formal games. (i) Booker T’s 1921 season was also notable for the return of J. W. (James) Jones. Jones is pictured in the middle of the front row on the team photo holding a football. Jones is commonly believed to have been none other than the historical character “Diamond Dick” Rowland, whose arrest created a trigger for the Massacre. Rowland resided in the Tulsa County Jail until September 28, when charges against him were dropped, just in time to get back to school for James Jones’ junior year. (ii) Surviving news coverage of the Hornets' 1921 season is sparse, with little focus on individual players. The Tulsa Star was no longer around and the copies of the Oklahoma Eagle from 1921 have not survived. White newspapers did not report on the “colored” high school football teams, save for the Claremore Progress, which covered the Claremore Lincoln Giants. (iii) According to Heywood W. James, sports editor of Oklahoma City’s The Black Dispatch, it cost $750.00 to equip a team for the season, not counting balls, advertising, and injury supplies. The money was hard to come by and the teams relied on financing by school teachers. Even a big city team like Oklahoma City Douglass lacked adequate practice grounds. (iv) In the case of the Hornets, the school provided only jerseys and pants. There were no shoulder pads and a cobbler tacked cleats onto ankle-boots for the shoes. Only three Tulsa players could afford helmets, one of whom was Jones. (v) In contrast, Tulsa’s other high school, located south of the railroad tracks, funded five football teams. In addition to the Tulsa Central High varsity, there was a team for each of the school’s classes, freshmen to senior. All five traveled and played away games. The goal was to funnel experienced players into future varsity teams. (vi) The plan soon paid dividends, as the Central High Braves claimed the 1922 White state football championship. (vii) Back then, Black high schools were only permitted to compete against other Black schools. The same segregation, however, did not exist in the crowds that attended games. The Claremore Progress reported that, “many white people attended in addition to the colored population.” (viii Courtesy of Tulsa Booker T. Washington High School. The Black Dispatch made a point of inviting “all Oklahoma City” to the opening game of the season between the Oklahoma City Douglass Trojans and Tulsa Washington. The game was played on Thursday, October 20 at Oklahoma City’s minor league baseball stadium, Western League Park. Douglass was permitted to play their games at the baseball field “when the whites don’t want it.” The Hornets won 24-0, “outplaying Douglas in every stage of the game.” (ix) The following Thursday, October 27, brought the return of organized football to Greenwood. The Hornets celebrated the occasion by drubbing the visiting Okmulgee Dunbar Tigers 96-0. The Hornets’ B-team took over early and “Little Mitchell,” Tulsa’s one hundred pound back-up quarterback, plunged through the line for the final score. The most spectacular play of the day was an 85-yard kickoff return by Elmer Pitts. (x) It must have been an exciting day for a community that had suffered so much. The Hornets played a second home game on Thursday, November 4 against the more formidable Giants of Claremore Lincoln. The 1963 Booker T. Yearbook claims a 14-0 Hornets victory, but The Black Dispatch and the Claremore Progress reported the Hornets prevailing by 14-7. Tulsa scored the winning touchdown in the last three minutes of play, having been set up on the Claremore ten-yard line by a thirty-yard pass interference penalty. (xi) The defending state champions, the Red Devils of Nowata Lincoln, fell to the Hornets 7-6, though the date, location, and details of the game are presently unknown. (xii) Courtesy of Princetta R. Newman Collection, NMAAHC.* Armed with an undefeated record, the Hornets prepared for the final game of the season — a Thanksgiving Day trip to face the Muskogee Manual Bulldogs. The teams had last played on Thanksgiving Day 1920, when the Bulldogs broke a late scoreless tie with a blocked punt in the Hornets’ end zone, winning 7-0. (xiii) Muskogee’s 1921 record is unknown, but the Bulldogs had beaten Claremore by a much wider margin than had Tulsa. (xiv) The Black Dispatch described the Tulsa-Muskogee tilt as a “classic for the supremacy of the Negro high schools of Oklahoma.” The Black Dispatch also provided a scintillating description of the game and its controversial outcome. Leaving no doubt as to its opinion of the affair, the Dispatch titled its article “Muskogee Attempts to Beat Tulsa Through Newspapers, But It Was Tulsa’s Game All The Way.” The Dispatch decried the “effort of certain individuals in Muskogee to obtain the championship by means fair or foul,” an effort “surpassed in crookedness only by a like attempt to twist newspaper reports so as conceal the facts from the public.” The reference to the Muskogee Cimeter newspaper was clear. Unfortunately, the pertinent issue of the Muskogee Cimeter has not surfaced. (xv) There was no attendance reported, but the game must have been packed, with fans crowding up against the playing field. Muskogee won the toss, but their offense stalled. The Bulldogs made no first downs in the first quarter. On Tulsa’s opening possession, the Hornets sliced through the Muskogee defense, only to be foiled by a fumble inside Muskogee’s ten yard line. The Bulldogs punted out of danger and Tulsa took over on the fifty. The first quarter ended 0-0. Fake plays and end runs carried Tulsa to Muskogee’s 8 yard line, when the first controversial call occurred. The head referee, a man named Kenyon, halted the game to warn fans to leave the end zone. He then inexplicably moved the ball back to the Muskogee 10 yard line. The Hornets could only gain 8 and 1/2 yards before turning the ball over on downs. The referee had “clearly robbed Tulsa of a touchdown” in the words of The Black Dispatch. Disaster struck on the Hornets’ next possession, when a Bulldog defender returned an interception fifty-six yards for a touchdown. The extra point failed and the half ended Tulsa 0, Muskogee 6. During the second quarter the head linesman, a man named White, was reported to have “became active” and penalized Tulsa three times for off-sides. The Hornets “came back in the third quarter with a vengeance,” marching down the field for a touchdown. The successful extra point made it Tulsa 7, Muskogee 6. The Bulldogs appeared to turn the ball over on downs on their next possession, only to be saved by another offsides call by White. Muskogee “seemed to take on new life” from this favorable turn and the third quarter ended with the home team on the Hornets’ forty-yard line. Four more plays by the Bulldogs failed to gain a first down, but White assessed another offsides, placing the ball at the Tulsa 27. Muskogee could only gain seven yards on the next four plays, but White threw yet another fourth-down off-sides flag. The ball was now at the Hornets’ 15, first down. This is how The Black Dispatch described White’s behavior: Head linesman White MAY HAVE meant to be fair but his fairness was terribly one-sided or his eyesight very poor. When an official waits until a play has been completed, then walks back to the line and compares the distance gained with the distance required, and then assesses a penalty, something is wrong. Why Mr. White failed to call off-sides plays on Muskogee is unknown—especially when we remember that they were constantly off-side on one of their shift plays—but rather than contribute it to unfairness we will say he is subject to fits of blindness. (emphasis in the original). At this point, Hornet head coach Seymour Williams “attempted to report to the head linesman so that he might take the matter up with the referee. This could not be done and he was warned to leave the field.” Pandemonium suddenly broke loose, as the crowd stormed onto the playing field. The field was said to be “so thick with people that bees could not have swarmed thicker.” The bees left no room for Hornets. In response to the chaos, Williams withdrew his players from the field, rather than let them be engulfed in another mob. The officials ordered the Hornets to return, but made no attempt to clear the field of play. Instead, head referee Kenyon focused on his watch and, after exactly three minutes, declared the game forfeit to Muskogee, 1-0. The Black Dispatch quoted the offending Muskogee Cimeter article as reporting only that “the Tulsa bunch became incensed at a penalty…and took their team from the game.”  The Dispatch castigated the paper for failing to mention the pitch invasion which had driven the visiting team from the field and which created “the utter impossibility of playing football.” Protests and petitions to replay the game with different officials ensued, but Muskogee was unmoved. The Hornets claimed a 7-6 victory and Muskogee no doubt claimed it 1-0. According to the Oklahoman, the 1921 Black High School football championship was instead bestowed on defending champion Nowata Lincoln, the Red Devils' defeat at the Hornets’ hands notwithstanding. (xvi) Tulsa Washington only had to wait one year to gain its first undisputed state football championship. Fulfilling Seymour Williams’ promise to take on all high school competitors, the Hornets’ season expanded to twelve games. The 1922 Hornets won them all. (xvii) Twenty-seven more state football titles have followed, nine of those after the integration of Oklahoma high school football in 1955. (xviii) No team roster for the 1922 state championship season has yet surfaced, but it would have been James W. Jones’ senior year. Endnotes: *The football practice photo with caption is provided courtesy of the Princetta R. Newman Collection of Family Photographs housed at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC). The Newman Collection is online and can be accessed at https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/search-collection/tulsa-objects-nmaahc-collection.” i. The 1963 Booker T. Washington Yearbook includes a year-by-year football record beginning with 1921 and a write-up of the 1921 football season. See pages 74-5. The 1963 Yearbook is available online at classmates.com (registration required). ii. For Jones’ classification, see the 1920-21 Washington Yearbook covering his sophomore year here: https://thislandpress.com/2013/05/09/the-pages-of-the-1921-booker-t-washington-high-school-yearbook/ iii. The Progress dropped its coverage of Lincoln in 1922, possibly related to the rise of the KKK in Claremore. “Ku Klux Have Public Initiation,” Claremore Progress, Nov. 23, 1922, 1. iv. “Sports World,” The Black Dispatch, Oct. 20, 1921, 5. v. 1963 Booker T. Washington Yearbook, 75. vi. “Four Tulsa High Elevens in Fray,” Tulsa Daily World, Oct. 27, 1921, 10; “ High School Results,” Tulsa Daily World, Nov. 5, 1921, 10. vii. “Central Highs (sic) Trim Champs for State Flag,” Tulsa Tribune, Nov. 26, 1921, 12. viii. “Lincoln Giants Win By One-Sided Score,” Claremore Progress, Nov. 17, 1921, 2. ix. “Sports World,” The Black Dispatch, Oct. 20, 1921, 5; “Big Game Thursday,” The Black Dispatch, Oct. 20, 1921, 5; “Washington High Smothers Douglas,” The Black Dispatch, Oct. 27, 1921, 5 (Washington wins 26-0). x. “Tulsa Wallops Okmulgee,” The Black Dispatch, Nov. 10, 1921, 2. xi. “Lincoln High School Is Defeated,” Claremore Progress, Nov. 10, 1921, 7; “Claremore Clippings,” The Black Dispatch, Nov. 10, 1921, 5. xii. For Nowata’s 1920 championship, “Oklahoma Black School Champions,” The Oklahoman, July 21, 2002 at https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2002/07/21/oklahoma-black-school-champions/62087033007/ xiii. 1921 Booker T. Washington Yearbook. xiv. “Claremore Clatter,” The Black Dispatch, Oct. 20, 1921, 6 (Muskogee 21, Claremore 0). xv. “Sports World,” The Black Dispatch, Dec. 15, 1921, 8. xvi. For Nowata’s 1921 championship, “Oklahoma Black School Champions,” The Oklahoman, July 21, 2002 at https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2002/07/21/oklahoma-black-school-champions/62087033007/. xvii. 1963 Booker T. Washington Yearbook, 74. xviii. According to the Tulsa World, Washington won nineteen Black state football championships. “Black History Month,” Tulsa World, Feb. 1, 2020. The Oklahoman only lists sixteen Black titles, including 1922, but some of the years are missing. https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2002/07/21/oklahoma-black-school-champions/62087033007/. For nine state titles after integration, https://ossaaillustrated.com/state-champions.