Russell Cobb Book Launch: Ghosts of Crook County
October 21, 2024
Tulsa Historical Society
Russell Cobb’s newest history, Ghosts of Crook County, traces the life—and the alleged fraud—of Charles Page, that scion of Sand Springs whose name graces a statue and street signs along the Arkansas River. In front of an eager crowd at the Tulsa Historical Society last week, 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?