Russell Cobb Book Launch: Ghosts of Crook County
Tulsa Historical Society
October 21, 2024
Russell Cobb’s newest history, Ghosts of Crook County, traces the life—and the alleged fraud—of Charles Page, that scion of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, whose name graces a statue and street signs along the Arkansas River. In front of an eager crowd at the Tulsa Historical Society, Cobb fielded questions from Magic City Books founder Jeff Martin about a life many have likely never considered. Charles Page, Cobb suggested, may have fabricated a child out of whole cloth in order to manipulate an oil-land holding at the turn of the 20th century.
To many, Page is a kind benefactor who saved children from orphan fates and brought a whole generation of Oklahomans in from poverty. That’s the official story. But to Cobb, the story of Tommy Atkins—the dead child whose Mvskoke allotment Charles Page bought in order to fund his own beneficence—complicates it.
“All evidence seems to point to the fact that Tommy didn’t exist, and that all the people that Charles Page mustered to create him were either paid off, intimidated, harassed, or kidnapped,” Cobb told us, explaining the genesis of his obsession with the case. “And then I thought: None of this is in Fool’s Enterprise,” he said, referring to the 1988 biography of Page. In four different court cases, he explained, not only did different women claim to be Tommy Atkins’ mother; different men claimed to be Tommy Atkins himself.
Cobb himself grew up in Tulsa’s Maple Ridge neighborhood and now lives in Alberta, Canada, where he teaches Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. His distance, he pointed out, made it a strange proposition to comment on Tulsa history. How do you expose the life of someone who brought a place into being, he wondered, and not destroy the character—not to mention the morale—of such a place?
It’s a question that Cobb faces over and over in his work, which tends to stare a little more closely at Oklahoma than some are comfortable with. His previous book, The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America’s Weirdest State, brought out the paradoxes inherent in Oklahoma’s existence, exploring its socialism, its conservatism, its complicated racial politics, and its failures.
The crowd seemed to be one full of Cobb stalwarts: Nearly everyone in the building had a purchased book in hand, and when the event ended and Cobb set up to sign books, just about every buyer jumped into the line with questions to ask and ephemera to tell. Cobb’s Alberta is a long way from Oklahoma, but it seems that this Tulsa boy will always find his heart and his mind set on his hometown. The exact character of that hometown, it seems, is still unclear.
