The Origin Story of Minnie Atkins and Charles Page by Russell Cobb
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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.
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