"In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the 'American Century,' the United States had all but completed its takeover of Indigenous lands. Tribes had been forced onto reservations, many of them in Oklahoma. The US Congress, through its Dawes Commission, was assimilating Native Americans into white society by turning them into capitalist landowners, carving the tribes' collectively owned reservations into 160-acre tracts allotted to individual tribe members. All was going according to plan--until oil was discovered on some of the allottments. Unscrupulous white oilmen poured into Indian Territory, snatching up the oil-rich land by hook or (more often) by crook: impersonating, defrauding, and murdering Native allottees. One especially valuable allotment had been assigned to a young Muscogee boy, Tommy Atkins, who seemed to have disappeared with no known next of kin. Undaunted, an oilman named Charles Page found a woman in Seattle claiming to be Tommy's mother. But then two other women came forward, each insisting that she was Tommy's true mother. Moreover, a Muscogee freedman named Henry Carter claimed to be Tommy Atkins himself. All had executed oil leases or deeds to oil companies. But the Muscogee Nation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Department of Justice countered that Tommy Atkins was 'a lie, pure and simple.' At the center of that lie, they alleged, was Charles Page, and a virtual army of fraudsters. In its day, the saga of Tommy Atkins dominated newspaper headlines and led to three court cases, one of which went all the way to the Supreme Court. Yet today this story is all but forgotten ... Writer and fourth-generation Oklahoman Russell Cobb draws on historical archives, Native American boarding school records, interviews with surviving Atkins family members, and thousands of pages of court documents to tell the whole, true story, all in one place, for the first time"-- Provided by publisher.
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