I’ve listened to dozens of oral histories, read testimonies and news reports from the perspective of white witnesses, and the scenes of terror are oddly devoid of names. The victims have names, they have stories: A.C. Jackson, A.J. Smitherman, Mary Jones Parrish. Some were killed in cold blood, others managed to flee with nothing but the shirts on their backs. There are books and documentaries to tell these stories—all as it should be.

But what about the perpetrators? Who were they?

I just got back from Paris where there’s a strong attachment to the myth of the Résistance. There are plaques to the heroic fighters who resisted Nazi occupation, but less awareness about the reality, which is that most people did not resist. They watched in silence or actively helped Nazis deport 75,000 French Jewish citizens to concentration camps.

Ordinary French citizens allowed Nazis to pillage Jewish houses, take furniture and art, and install it in their own homes. The hard truth is that many Parisians actually benefited from Nazi occupation. This story is told in painful detail at the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris.

It often comes as a shock white Tulsans to learn that Greenwood once extended well into what is today the Arts District. There are oral histories of black servants finding jewelry looted from Greenwood in the houses of well-to-do white Tulsans. But this is oral history. There was no trial, no commission to restore property to those who were victimized.

In France, the myth of widespread Résistance among the population has been thoroughly debunked. In fact, it has its own term: “résistancialisme.” After the War, Charles de Gaulle need to reassure citizens of their righteousness. France was ready for its collective memory of the Occupation to be gerrymandered so that the pockets of résistance became the mainstream.

Now, what happened in Tulsa in 1921 was on a completely different scale from Nazi occupation of France, where national complicity led to 75,000 deaths. Tulsa was shamed in the national press for what happened in 1921, and whites engaged in their own version of “résistancialisme” on a local scale.

Hence, the hiding of black people in basements. White Tulsans’ collective memory oriented itself around protecting its innocence and deflecting responsibility for the crimes. That continues to this day, and I want no part of it. We need to know the unvarnished truth, as John Hope Franklin used to say.

All of this leads me to a man named George H. Blaine, a friend of Russell Cobb I, former Police and Fire Commissioner of Tulsa, and my great-grandfather.

With a chiseled jaw and piercing blue eyes, Blaine looked every bit the dynamo he was on the job. Blaine was the sort of person who ran toward trouble, and in his early years as a cop, he often arrived on a motorcycle while in plainclothes. There is some anecdotal evidence that he was one of the hooded vigilantes from the Knights of Liberty involved in the kidnapping and torture session of the Tulsa Outrage, and the event’s date--1917--corresponds with his entry on the police force at the age of 21.

He was only in his mid-20s when he was made a Captain in 1920. Tulsa had developed a reputation as a place where anything could be had for the right price: booze, prostitution, and gambling flourished even in the city’s finest establishments like the Hotel Tulsa. Blaine took it all on.

Blaine took risks that got noticed by the press. He got into high speed car chases that turned into running gun battles. He destroyed liquor operations by smashing beer bottles and chopping up stills. In July, 1920, his daring almost cost him his life. He pursued a bootlegger down Admiral Boulevard, and found 30 gallons of corn whiskey in his car. When he went to arrest the bootlegger, his runner--the man in charge of delivering the goods to customers--fired on Blaine, striking a $20 gold piece on his trouser pocket. Another bullet hit Blaine’s coat, barely missing him. Blaine pulled out his revolver and hit the runner four times in the chest.

After this incident, Blaine became something of a celebrity cop, and the Tulsa Tribune sent him a $25 payment as part of an award for bravery for the battle with the bootleggers. During the Great Depression, Blaine probably met Russell Cobb in his espionage work for oil companies. Blaine was at the Mid-Continent Refinery Company when the west Tulsa strike broke out, and helped coordinate police and company counter-strike measures. When he later ran for Tulsa County Sheriff, west Tulsans bitterly opposed him, associating him with the dirty tricks of the strike breakers. Russ, on the other hand, thought he was just the kind dynamo Tulsa needed. Blaine was Russ’s first choice for Police Chief in 1940.

“I like this bird, Blaine,” Russ said. “He looks a lot like Lincoln and talks simple and straight. He would be my choice for chief except a lot of folks would say the Mid-Continent folks named the chief. I don’t want anyone to think any company or group is running me.”

It was Blaine’s activities in 1921, however, that most caught my attention. Without a doubt, Blaine was a major protagonist of the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921. He was on the frontlines of the initial skirmish between armed blacks and a white mob at the courthouse, and was later in an airplane surveying the large-scale battle. Given Russ’s friendship and political support for Blaine in the following years, I wanted to know more about Blaine’s role. The truth was maddeningly difficult to ascertain but the preponderance of evidence suggested a man who, at the very least, tolerated a collective barbarity to take hold.

During a grand jury testimony following the tragedy, Blaine gave an hour-long description of his experience. He stated that he was a police Captain under the orders of Chief Gustafson, and their first duty was to make sure the young black man accused of assault--Dick Rowland--was not taken from the jail and lynched on May 31. Blaine and Gustafson confronted a white mob that wanted to kidnap Rowland, but police officers held the mob back.

As a carload of armed black men arrived, Captain Blaine flew into action. He jumped on the running board of one of the cars and started arguing with the men, ordering them to go back to Greenwood. He wrestled one man and “we both fell off the car, and I finally got the other fellow’s gun.”

Blaine estimated there were some 60 armed black men, but the white mob had grown to about two thousand people whose attention was now on the Black men, not on the suspect in custody. A white man from the crowd tried to wrestle a gun away from a black man and a shot went off, setting off a confusing battle that left several people--white and black--dead in downtown Tulsa. That part of the story has been well-documented and recounted many times.

What is still unclear is what Captain Blaine did next, as whites were organizing for a full-scale armed invasion of Greenwood in the early morning of June 1. We know that there was widespread looting in downtown stores, as young white men looked for weapons. To hear Blaine tell it, he tried to stop the looting and urged calm, pushing whites away from a zone where black snipers were shooting at invaders. Gustafson believed it would be “practically suicide” to get more involved, but Blaine was right there as the looting took place.

At about 11:00pm on May 31, Blaine spotted 300 white men trying to break into the J. W. Magee Sporting Goods store. He managed to stop them, but then a crowd discovered the back door. “They rushed me,” Blaine claimed. He was pushed through the door and into the mayhem. “I did my best to get the men out of the store and failing that, asked them to do as little damage as possible.”

As the invasion commenced, Blaine raced to the airport and got a seat in an airplane that circled the area, looking for a possible counter-offensive by black forces, perhaps from a neighboring town. Seeing nothing, he returned to Tulsa until martial law was declared when the National Guard arrived to stop the destruction. A reporter for the Tulsa World noted that an attorney asked Blaine if he set fire to any buildings, “did any looting or murdering in the negro district.”

“[Blaine] laughed and shook his head.”

Some secondary sources have portrayed George H. Blaine as an active participant in the violence, first by deputizing armed looters and then encouraging them to go on the rampage. Scott Ellsworth, in Death in a Promised Land, states that, contrary to Blaine’s testimony, he did not get pushed into Magee’s hardware store, but rather organizing the looting. The owner of Magee’s believed Blaine was “the one who broke into his store and dealt out the guns.”

Ellsworth also confirms that Blaine was in one of the airplanes flying around Greenwood, although the record is still unclear whether his airplane dropped incendiary devices on the neighborhood. We also know that the deputization of drunk and disorderly white men was a major contributor to the violence, and it is possible that Captain Blaine, along with another friend of Russ’s–Commissioner Adkison–deputized many of these men, who then believed they had free range to loot, pillage, and even kill Black people.

Even a charitable view of Blaine and Adkison’s actions during the Massacre would have to acknowledge that these two police officials did nothing to stop the atrocities of deputized whites once the invasion was underway in the early morning hours of June 1. Rumors about Blaine’s involvement circled around the city for years, and came into public view after Russ resigned his position as Police Commissioner in 1942 to rejoin the military. Blaine had butted heads with longtime police officer John Smitherman, considered by many to be the city’s best detective. Smitherman, a Black man who once had his ear cut off by Klansmen, was not easily intimidated, but when Blaine fired him, Smitherman struck back with a media operation.

Smitherman collected stories about Blaine’s activities on those two fateful days in spring 1921 and then paid a journalist named O.B. Graham to write them up in his newspaper, The Appeal. Smitherman, apparently, wanted the statements about Blaine’s role posted on handbills. I cannot find any extant copies of The Appeal, but the Tulsa Tribune summarized the piece when Blaine sued Smitherman for libel, stemming from the article (Blaine’s lawsuit went nowhere, and may have been an attempt to discredit Smitherman). According to this missing article, witnesses placed Blaine squarely among the looters and arsonists in the morning of June 1, 1921. Blaine, the piece claimed, was the Tulsa Police Captain “active in the burning of homes in the Negro district.”

A bricklayer named Laurel Buck, testified that when the violence broke out, he went to police officials to be deputized. He did not receive a deputy’s star but someone in the police department told him to “get a gun, and get busy and try to get a n*****.”

Was it Blaine or Adkison who gave Buck those instructions? Even if it was someone else in the Tulsa Police Department, they would have to answer to the higher brass, and that higher brass would later be retained and promoted by Russell Cobb two decades later. What did Russ know about his friends’ actions on those two days in 1921? If he knew how intimately they were involved, would he have changed his mind about endorsing them for higher office? He stumped for Blaine when he ran for Sheriff, and wrote a letter commending Adkison to presidential hopeful Thomas Dewey. But he also commended a number of black Tulsans for supporting Republicans as well, including his bartender/confident, John Alexander

Finally, I wondered about what my namesake did on June 1, 1921. He was in Tulsa at the time, working for Empire Oil Company from 1919 to 1921. In September of that year, he left the country to provide famine relief in the Soviet Union under the direction of Herbert Hoover. Russ—a New Yorker with deep roots back east—had fallen in love with Tulsa. He would eventually return there with his aristocratic Russian wife and have a son—Russell Cobb, Jr.

Unlike a lot of old Tulsa families, I never heard anything about my great-grandfather hiding blacks in his basement. In fact, I never heard anything about a massacre, a riot, or anything other than our own version of “résistancialisme.” The Cobbs had helped their black chauffeur/bartender become the first black mail carrier in Tulsa. So it was said. I did a little digging and found that wasn’t true. What else wasn’t true?

I asked a lot of questions but all I got was silence. Family members stopped talking to me. I was told I was writing “woke propaganda.” I was the literal devil according to one relative.

Was I being ostracized because I was getting closer to the truth or because I had disturbed the peace of the dead? I’m sure my relatives see this whole endeavor as pointless as best, dangerous at worst. I pushed on, aware that I would never know what my great-grandfather was doing in Tulsa on June 1, 1921. I would never know if his friend, George Blaine, had bombed Greenwood.

The lack of clear answers drives me to despair sometimes, but I take some bit of solace from the words of Rabbi Tarfon:

“You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."

The story I wanted to tell was one of oil, water, and booze, because these were the liquids that made the city what it is. Oil, obviously, because the strike at the Glenn Pool eventually made Tulsa the Oil Capital of the World. But water does not get enough attention. Tulsa has very little natural drinking water, and the water we did have in the 1910s was monopolized by Charles Page and the Sand Springs Bottling Company. We biked by the failed Water Works plant where the city tried to bypass Page’s control by drilling water wells in 1911.

Tulsa drilled water wells and also built a Waterworks that would purify the sooty and salty Arkansas River water, but, at the same time, the city was building major refineries that dumped contaminated water and pollutants back into the river. Men like Josh Cosden were becoming extraordinarily rich from refining, but the environmental damage was unchecked.

We biked through Newblock Park, named after the “Klan candidate,” Herman Newblock (1922-1928) and parked our bikes in the old Newblock municipal pool. This is where Eddie Faye Gates said that workers had found skeletons from the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 when excavating for the pool in 1928.

Ah, yes, booze. The Klan said that part of their mandate was to quash the bootlegging rampant in Tulsa at the time. But booze flowed freely, and Charles Page worked closely with the "King of the Oklahoma Bootleggers” Bill Creekmore. A gunfight on the Sand Springs Line between bandits and Tulsa police claimed the lives of three people in 1929, just west of the Cave House, which also contained a speakeasy.

Booze was central to much of the swindling of the time. One of the unsolved murders we discussed, that of Gabriel Emarthla, involved vast quantities of liquor that Emarthla either drank himself or was forced to drink before he was killed on the Katy railway tracks. Emarthla had just inherited a wealthy estate from his father. They are both buried at Tallahassee Indian Cemetery, also on the bike tour.

Larry told me about the difficulty he and other people from Crosbie Heights have had making these trails safe for transit and recreation. There’s a forlorn aspect to much of this area. He said the trail had been improved, even though the lighting had been cut down and stolen by people looking for copper wiring. There are signs of a renaissance, with some artist studios cropping up along Charles Page Blvd. I tried to make the case to bring back the trolley (the Interurban, it was called). Hello—local billionaires: this is a worthy project.

Aaron recognized the name of old Billy Bowlegs Bruner, the namesake of Bruner Station. He was doing time for shooting a deputy federal marshal when Pres. McKinley himself pardoned Bruner and he then went to work for the marshals’ service.

I got to share many of these forgotten or misremembered nuggets of history, but perhaps more importantly, I learned from others.

Rev. Marlin Lavanhar shared stories about how Tulsa’s water wars hit home in his congregation, All Souls. Tony Shanks gave me a conceptual framework to think about how the branding of Tulsa as the Oil Capital was psychological architecture that still exists.

The question, then, for me, was: do we deconstruct the existing psychological architecture by, say, renaming Charles Page Blvd? Or do we add on to it in constructive way by, say, adding more public history signage and art?

Someone—I can’t remember who—talked about the fight over renaming Lee School to Council Oak School. Some liberal alumni were still attached to the Lee name. They knew he represented the Old South, but didn’t want to erase that history because, for good or for ill, it was part of who we were, and we need to reckon with that. I think it was Michael Mason who said to me that Lee Roy Chapman didn’t like that people were erasing the name of Tate Brady from Tulsa when it was discovered he was a Klansman. We need to stare that history squarely in the face. But how to do it? I’m not really sure I have an answer. What do you think?

Thanks to everyone who came today!

I was Paris for an academic conference but I got obsessed about this painting and wanted to know why the of Oklahoma had art with such a sketchy provenance. It’s extremely complicated. Contracts are sacred in our modern world, and OU had a contract. But Leone Myer, who lost family in the holocaust and art works during Occupation had something more sacred—righteousness. Join me in figuring out how Oklahoma Explains the Twisted Legal Drama of Art Looted by Nazis.

I will update as soon as I can wrap my head around this story

My last piece was a bonkers travelogue from Tulsa to a small pueblo in eastern Cuba. The gist of it was that Tulsa oilmen—including Russell Cobb Sr. and Jr.—sunk some serious money and manpower into making pre-Castro Cuba the next big oil boom. The Cobbs were players in this “secret adventure” but it obviously went well above and beyond my family jewels—so to speak. The secret adventure in the Caribbean mixed political power with capitalist speculation. Had the Tulsa oil venture in Cuba succeeded, oil money would have fuelled suburban sub-division, and even more American ex-pat money and development. Imperialism, in other words.

In the case of Cuba, the empire building efforts failed miserably, but that was just one chapter. It got me thinking about a nickname for Tulsa that was thrown around a lot until the 1960s—The Magic Empire. Tulsa stopped using that nickname around the time the Vietnam War made many Americans question the moral compass of American imperialism.

But it used to be everywhere!

There were “magic empire” gas stations, radio stations, clubs, Boy Scouts. Tulsans were proud of the moniker, especially when America believed in its imperial mission of “making the world safe for democracy.” Manifest Destiny—Tulsa had shown the world its civilizing power, while sweeping the ugliness of such an endeavor under the rug (the 1921 Race Massacre, Native land swindles and murders, Klan violence, political repression)

The peak years of American imperialism were 1898 to 1929, when the United States seized the crumbling remnants of the Spanish Empire (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines), and also sent out the troops to occupy nations in Central America and the Caribbean. It’s no coincidence that those years correspond with Tulsa’s greatest boom times. Remember that until 1907, Tulsa was literally Indian Territory. Some of the same figures in national politics who orchestrated the demise of tribal government also led the U.S. into an imperial phase.

Case in point, Orville Platt of Connecticut. Now—the words “Platt Amendment” are etched with scorn into the minds of Cuban people. Why? Because this Amendment was a legal justification to limit Cuban sovereignty. It allowed the United States to interfere in Cuba affairs whenever it felt like its national interest was not being served by the Cubans. Sen. Platt, at the very same time he was writing the legal rationale for naked American imperialism, pressured Congress to end tribal sovereignty in Indian Territory. So writes Kent Carter in an official history of the Dawes Commission published by the National Archives:

“In 1896 a discouraged Henry Dawes told a congressional committee that after three years of effort, virtually nothing had been accomplished. Congress, which was under increasing pressure from supporters of statehood and business groups pushing for economic development, decided to proceed without the tribes' agreement. Senator Orville Platt introduced an amendment to the Indian Office appropriation bill that authorized the commission to "hear and determine the application of all persons who may apply to them for citizenship" and "determine the right of such applicant to be admitted and enrolled." The resulting act was signed on June 10, 1896, and marked the beginning of the end of tribal autonomy.

Put plainly, Sen. Platt made the federal government the decider of who was an Indian under the Dawes Commission. Platt forced a concession from the Chickasaws so that the federal government could own the springs around Sulphur, Oklahoma and then—the hubris!—the government named this natural oasis that Indigenous people had used for centuries “Platt National Park.”

More on old Orville: he was adamant that the United States not cede control of The Philippines. Sen. Platt thought it was our Christian duty to control and guide The Philippines toward civilization. “By conquest, The Philippines are ours,” he said. Remember—he’s saying this at the very same time he’s forcing the Muscogee Nation to allot lands around Tulsa.

Indeed, Platt didn’t want to stop at The Philippines. It was the gateway to China and American power, religion, and money would eventually make China ours as well (and that’s still playing out in real time under Trump 2.0).

After the Dawes Commission opened tribal reservations into farms, town lots, and oilfields for white settlement, the area around Tulsa oil fuelled American gunboats, tanks, troop carriers in its imperial ambitions. The population boomed and fortunes were made, all in a land that had been set aside for Native Americans exiles from their traditional lands. If that isn’t imperialism, I don’t know what is.

Before Vietnam—and Star Wars, I guess?— “empire” didn’t have such a negative connotation. That’s what Great Western Powers did, they built empires. And Tulsa, the Creek Town now the Oil Capital of the World, served as an example of the bounty of Empire.

Here’s a sketch by Paul Corrubia, done for the Chamber of Commerce. Note the celebratory tone in the caption, courtesy of the Museum of Tulsa History:

"The Oil Capital's skyline is one of the crown jewels of the Magic Empire of the youthful Southwest. Modern skyscrapers, ever clean because Tulsa's fuel is natural gas, stretch into the Oklahoma sky out of the rolling prairie in tremendous tribute to twentieth century pioneers who built this Arkansas river giant."

If Tulsans hadn’t soured on the idea of being an imperial center after Vietnam, Hollywood made the point with Darth Vader. The Galactic Empire was a totalitarian dictatorship and Vader represented the moral rot that accompanied the conquest of land and people. Then reality set in. The price of oil collapsed. Banks failed. Tulsans moved elsewhere—Houston, Dallas, anywhere but here.

I can’t remember when I first Googled the phrase “Central Intelligence Agency” with the name “Russell Cobb,” but I’ve repeated that search a lot lately, just to verify I have not lost my mind.

Google shows numerous mentions of my doctoral dissertation on a literary magazine financed with CIA money via pass-through organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom. These citations refer back to research I did as a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, when–I thought–I had conducted a thorough survey of CIA activities to counter Cuban-style socialism. I won’t bore you with all that but you have to know it to understand what comes next.

I spun off a few scholarly articles on the topic of Latin American culture and the CIA’s attempt to turn literary giants like Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Márquez into “assets,” and then moved on with my career.

But then, a couple of years ago, something remarkable popped up with the terms “Russell Cobb” and “CIA”: a type-written pdf labeled “top secret,” dating from 1949. A stamp at the top of the document reveals that it was released for public consumption in 2012. It is a chronicle of Director Allen Dulles’s affairs--a glimpse into an agency with a global reach and unbridled ambition to fight anything it deems as “communism.”

Then, there on page 26 of this chronicle, is the name Russell Cobb, listed as “Acting Chief, Tulsa.” I have no doubt that this is my great-grandfather. I grew up hearing references to him as a spy and one obituary mentions time spent in the CIA.

At the age of 52, Russ had seen it all. He fought in France in World War I and then in a gruesome combat mission in Alaska against the Japanese in World War II. He had seen cannibalism among Russian families during the Soviet Famine of 1921, and married a Russian former aristocrat who sold soap in a market in Saratov. In 1949, he would have been forgiven for kicking up his heels on the executive desk of Cobra Oil Company in downtown Tulsa, where he ran a modestly successful oil company.

Instead, he joined the CIA and apparently became the Station Chief for Tulsa. This immediately raised two questions for me:

1. Doesn’t the CIA’s charter (from the National Security Act of 1947) bar it from exercising police powers or engaging in general domestic law‑enforcement or domestic intelligence activities absent specific authorization?

2. The CIA in Tulsa? Headed by Russell Cobb? Are you f-ing kidding me?

Only one material clue came down to me: a Minox III camera produced in Latvia in the 1950s. The Minox III is a pocket-sized camera capable of photographing documents at close range, perfect for espionage. My father wound up with the Minox and I discovered it in a box of his jewelry after he died in 1980.

I don’t know why it never occurred to me to ask more questions about my namesake and his tenure in the Agency. Probably because, like the typical child of privilege in Tulsa, I was told to not ask too many questions about money or power.

To hell with it, I’m asking those questions now.

The letters CIA conjure up an image of an all-powerful organization that can reshape the destiny of nations. The CIA can disappear people and topple governments. The Agency inspires fear and awe into those who despise it as well as those who see it as a force for good. We are trained to see its agents as smart, devious, and determined to carry out a mission. The agents are amoral and slightly unhinged, like Carrie Mathison in Homeland, but possess genius-level intellects.

That’s a compelling story for a thriller, but the actual missions of the CIA include all-too-human foibles, oversights, and miscalculations. The CIA often conducted operations in an ad-hoc manner that backfired in significant ways. Agents bumbled their way into complicated situations without a clear plan and ended up aborting the mission. The failed attempts to remove Fidel Castro from power might be the most telling examples of this reality. Those stories have been recorded, memorialized, and analyzed many times, of course, but it never occurred to me that my family might have played a small role in the Cuban fiasco.

The first part of this whole fiasco I reported in this post. That one was mostly about the Tulsa speculation in Cuban oil and the shock—SHOCK! that the revolutionaries wanted full control of their own natural resources.

I ended that post promising to take you to the place where the Tulsa oilmen—includes Russell Cobb I and II—drilled for oil. Let’s go there now!

In preparation to drill exploratory wells in eastern Cuba, Rusty had formed a company with several men. One was Mike Benedum, a legendary geologist who had led Oklahoma oilmen from the pseudo-science of creekology into the modern science of geology. The person mentioned in the clipping was the Treasurer of the company, William J. Casey.

I wondered if this Casey was the same person who later became Chief of the CIA. and had found himself in the crosshairs of a Congressional investigation during the Iran-Contra Affair. It seemed far-fetched that my grandfather was doing business in Cuba with a CIA spy, but the truths buried in Tulsa’s past were often wilder and more unbelievable than anything cooked up in a potboiler.

The first breakthrough came from a retired doctor who had fought in the Revolution of 1959. Dr. Miguel had known Che Guevara and received a medal for his military service from Fidel Castro. He was, as the Cubans say, “un buen revolucionario.” Miguel’s devotion to socialism and the Cuban state was undiminished by time and hardship. He had fought in the Sierra Maestra and also a bit in the outskirts of Santiago. He remembered that in the foothills, some thirty miles from Santiago, there had been a group of “Yanqui” prospectors, doing some sort of business in the pueblos.

I had only one geographic coordinate to share with him, the Rio Cauto, in eastern Oriente Province. There had been some industrial development there near the small town of Palma Soriano, Miguel said. He called a trusted driver, Cristián, who had access to fuel. Cristián, for his part, was a retired engineer who had also devoted a lifetime of service to the Revolution, but had little to show for it except for a late-model Chinese sedan that he had a permit to use as a taxi.

I told Cristián that my grandfather had prospected for oil somewhere near the Rio Cauto in rural Oriente Province in the 1950s, and I would like to Palma Soriano and see if anyone had stories about Yanquis who came there, or if there were any relics of the operation. He was interested but, as usual, the main obstacle was fuel. Even though it was only 30 miles away, he would have to ask around to get gasoline for the trip. It would also cost me around $50 USD, about twice the monthly salary for an average Cuban.

Cristián eventually got access to a tank of gasoline and we were on our way. We traveled on a piece of highway called the Autopista Nacional that abruptly ended without warning. A small road trafficked by sputtering motorcycles, bicycles, and horse-drawn carts took us into Palma Soriano. We passed a local history museum and asked if there was a historian who might know something about oil prospecting in the area. The man at the desk looked slightly annoyed at our questions, but he did give us a name: Manolito. Another consultation at the Town Hall also yielded the same name. It was clear that Manolito was the font of knowledge about this small pueblo. Manolito was supposed to be at the art gallery at the town square, but we had arrived during lunch time. A woman in the gallery told her to go to Manolito’s house, just down the street two blocks, to the left and then find a metal blue door.

A piece of corrugated metal served as the front door. Cristián called out Manolito’s name and in a few minutes a slightly irritated woman came out to greet us. She had been watching a telenovela and making lunch. She sat us both on a couch and made a cafecito as we waited for Manolito to get dressed. A worried-looking man with white hair and grey stubble came in to greet us. Manolito looked diminished by age and an ever-worsening national diet, but when Cristián mentioned research into Cuban oil, he perked up.

Manolito was not just a local historian, but an authority on the history of oil and gas exploration in Cuba. He had carried out a research project twenty years prior that interviewed Cuban workers who had been through a short-lived oil boom in the 1950s. He and a colleague had published the work as a book, called Petroleum: Testimony of a Secret Adventure. The stories he’d heard seemed like something out of a magical realist fable. When I finally found Manolito’s book, it reminded me of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, with a touch of political thriller. Manolito–his proper name is Dr. Manuel Oliva Sirgo–wrote:

A singular event took place in Palma Soriano in 1956. For months, a group of Americans drilled for oil on what was once the land of Dr. Picazzo, today known as the neighborhood of Bambá. Under mysterious circumstances, the oil well was sealed in a few days of hard work. The Americans abruptly left in the same way they arrived, in complete silence and in the early morning hours.

Manolito wrote that the prospect of oil in the province of Oriente–the poorest area of a poor country without fuel–captured the imaginations of the people in the area. In the 1950s, people in Oriente lived as they had centuries ago, with a wealthy elite who enjoyed a life of luxury at the expense of poor rural people who worked back-breaking jobs on sugar plantations. Oil could have changed all of that, but then the Americans left and a complete social and political transformation happened with the Revolution. As that movement calcified into communist conformity, the oil dream passed into the lore of oral history and people gradually forgot about the Americans. Manolito’s project, then, was to document the living history of the episode before all the witnesses died.

Finding a copy of Petroleum: Testimony of a Secret Adventure (2004), co-authored with David González Gross became its own form of adventure. When it was published, a state-run radio station had produced a radio documentary about the whole episode. Manolito and González won a prize and the attention of CUPET, Cuba’s nationalized oil company. CUPET confirmed that there had been some intensive petroleum prospecting in the area in the 1950s, including a well that reached some 6,000 feet below the surface. The well had a name: Eugenia #23. As for reserves of petroleum, there was little evidence. This book had seemingly disappeared from all bookstores and libraries in Cuba. I searched for it in vain for weeks. Only through inter-library loan was I finally able to get a copy through Stanford University.

This book led into a world that had been erased by seven decades of socialism and fear of a U.S. invasion. This was a world in which Americans treated Cuba as their own private fiefdom and bribed their way into anything they wanted. Much as they had done in Tulsa in the 1910s, the American business men needed the collaboration of locals. They found one in Juan Eugenio González Rivera, who ran a gas station. González Rivera was known far and wide as Yenyo.

Yenyo described an early morning encounter with a group of five Americans, who showed up with pipelines, motors, and drilling equipment in Jeeps. Next to Yenyo’s gas station was a Jeep dealership and garage, which served a nearby sugar plantation, also run by an American company. These five Americans told Yenyo they were going to be in Palma for a while and needed a house with electricity and running water. Yenyo could tell these Americans had arrived with some serious money and he quoted them the figure of $150 a month, an unheard of sum in those days.

“They didn’t even bat an eyelid,” Yenyo said.

Yenyo went to one of the nicest homes in town and told the owners they had a remarkable opportunity. They could find somewhere else to live for a while and lodge some Americans who would pay them $150 a month. The homeowners immediately took the deal. Yenyo also found two local women to serve as cooks and housekeepers. He called the oil refinery in Santiago which provided gasoline to much of eastern Cuba. He made a contract with the refiners to send him gasoline at 16 cents a gallon, which he then sold to the Americans at 20 cents. Then he called his brother, telling him that Americans could put him to work. By this time, the entire small town of Palma Soriano knew about the Americans. They made deals with the mayor and the landowner, a former aristocrat called Dr. Picazzo.

Yenyo had established himself as an indispensable middle man, but he was wary of the lead American, a Native American from Oklahoma named Wolf, and his interpreter, a Cuban named Mike. Wolf had the build of an enormous bull, and the Cubans nicknamed him “Mr. Büey” (bull). He seemed to be in charge of the others, a rowdy bunch who drank copious amounts of rum and frequented the town brothels. For his troubles, Yenyo received checks in his bank account of $500 a month, an unheard of sum in those days in that area of Cuba.

“It was a pretty good business, you know?” Yenyo told Manolito.

Yenyo could not believe the amount of physical and monetary waste the Americans generated. As they were building the derrick, they needed more supplies. Wolf told Yenyo to get in the Jeep and drive him to Sears in Santiago. They bought dozens of pairs of work gloves, hammers, and all sorts of materials. They used the gloves one time and then threw them away. “They wasted everything. It was criminal,” Yenyo said.

Manolito interviewed another man named Pipe who said the boss of all the Americans was a man named “Mr. Coff.” Finding no one associated with this adventure by that name, I could only assume that Coff was, in fact, Rusty Cobb. Pipe said that Mr. Coff flew in to a remote landing strip, piloting his own Cessna airplane, to survey construction of an oil derrick. The drilling operation needed to reach around 7,500 feet under the surface, so it required dozens of laborers. Some roughnecks came from the States and stayed in shacks or run-down hotels. Cuban workers rented rooms in town. The drilling operation was on the farmland of Dr. Picazzo, so they built a large fence around the derrick to keep the cattle away.

It was an industrial operation without precedent in rural eastern Cuba, so it attracted curiosity seekers, who were shooed away. Some poverty-stricken locals found piecemeal work at the site, including a Black man known as Radamé, who was warned by his friends that the Americans were racist. Radamé did odd jobs for the Americans who paid well but treated him poorly. One day, Radamé became curious about what was happening on the other side of the fence. He got up on his tiptoes and saw workers putting a muddy black substance in bottles with a label on it. Mr. Wolf saw Radamé watching and sacked him on the spot. “I screwed up and wound up without a job,” Radamé said.

There was little electricity, but once the Americans started building the first oil derrick, it illuminated the town with lights like a gigantic Christmas tree. People gathered in the main plaza just to observe it, and to watch the Americans throw money around. There was one decent hotel in town, and three brothels.

“When the Americans came,” Manolito said, “the brothels were completely booked up.”

One of the stories Manolito heard over and over from the workers concerned the lack of bathrooms on the site. “They were in a hurry to construct the derrick and didn’t bring in toilets. The workers found a ditch to relieve themselves but there was no toilet paper in town. The Americans gave them dollar bills to wipe their asses.”

Now Cristián was just as excited about the story as I was. “Where did they come from, these Americans?” he asked.

Manolito said that one oilman had a landing strip built on a plantation. He flew in and out on a Cessna airplane he piloted himself. Others came in trucks, including technicians from Havana and roughnecks from the States. They were all directed by one man, who Manolito identified as “Mr. Coff.”

“Mr. Coff flew in from Texas. He brought a long glass tube with him. When the drillers hit oil, Mr. Coff filled up the tube and flew straight back to Texas.”

“Could the pronunciation be ‘Cobb’?” I asked. “My grandfather’s name was Russell Cobb..”

“Eso es,” Manolito said.

Manolito’s grey eyebrows arched above his thick eyeglasses. He was only slightly less astonished than I that the grandson of the rich oilman was back in this dying pueblo. Palma Soriano was suffering the fate of many Cuban small towns, whose population has been drained by outmigration since 2020. The last dream of an economic revival came in the late 1950s, when Mr. Coff and his entourage kindled a fantasy of prosperity through oil wealth. Manolito wrote about this time in a poetic language. In Palma, he writes, “thousands of eyes watched the progress of the drillers, imagining what would come later.”

“The people believed that the drill bit cutting through the Earth would bring them riches and jobs. They believed that their children would sleep with a full belly after so many years of misery and hunger.”

“As they sleep, the drill bit goes up and down, breaking through the earth at a slow speed. It strikes a yellow paste that comes out of the hole like a kind of spit. Little by little, the drill bit looks for the underground black vein. As it does, the drill emits a cacophony, a cloud of dust, sweat, and tears.”

Manolito’s knowledge of the Cavalier oil exploration matched up with what I knew about my grandfather, with one exception. The witnesses he interviewed mentioned Mr. Coff’s destination as Texas, not Oklahoma. When I mentioned this, Manolito gave me a quizzical look. It occurred to me that, like the vast majority of Cubans I had met, he knew nothing about Oklahoma. Perhaps Rusty explained where he was from in the same manner I was accustomed to explaining my home state: “it’s the state just to the north of Texas.”

Another key detailed suggesting Oklahoma was the infamous Mr. Wolf--the Bull--who was, as the witnesses said, a “mestizo” Native American. Oklahoma, I wanted to tell the Cubans, shared a history of American imperialism with Cuba. At the same time the Americans invaded Cuba under the guise of liberating them from Spanish colonialism, a wave of U.S. citizens overwhelmed tribal governments in Indian Territory under the guise of providing them with the tools of civilization and capitalist progress. It was a lecture that would have to wait, because Manolito was now energized to show me the site of the legendary Eugenia #23, the one drilling spot that seemed promising in 1957.

He was pretty sure he knew where the site was located but it had been over twenty years since he had been out there. On my phone, I had the image of a crude map I photographed from the provincial archives in Santiago. It showed an approval to explore for minerals in a certain area that appeared to be northwest of town.

Manolito studied the map and felt pretty certain he could find the spot where they built the Christmas tree oil derrick.

“Can we get there in a car?” I asked.

“We can try,” Manolito said.

Now Cristián was not so thrilled about our adventure. He would have to take his precious car through a creek bed, and onto rutted out dirt roads. As we bottomed out on river rocks, Cristián moaned, “por dios.”

About five miles north of town, I spotted a rusted container that resembled an oil tank. Manolito got out of the car and introduced himself to a man guiding a team of oxen through a farm. The oxen driver pointed to a cluster of houses down at the end of a road. He said a pipeline had once run through the area. We came to another house with an oil tank and talked to some of the residents. Everyone seemed to have the same aura of extreme, perhaps existential fatigue. The men all seemed to have leathery, walnut-colored skin that revealed their ribs.

As Manolito talked to the folks about the pipeline, Cristián inspected his car for damage. I followed Manolito and a couple of farmers through a recently-plowed field. The farmers said you could still find relics from the massive drilling operation here–cables, chunks of concrete, rusted iron.

The story could have been lore based on some apocryphal tale, but it pointed to something noticed by all the witnesses. The Americans squandered money and resources in a place lacking both. This ignited contradictory feelings of envy and anger in the local population. Some locals wanted a piece of the pie, but prostitution and drunkenness outraged others, perhaps delivering some Cuban hearts and minds to the bearded rebels spreading their nationalist, anti-imperialist message through the countryside at the very same time Cobb and company drilled deeper and deeper.

Cristián, Manolito, and I continued to wander through the fields, punished by the late afternoon sun. We had been on this excursion all day, and the common denominator was poverty. There was little food, fuel, or electricity. There was also very little garbage, as no one seemed to possess much of anything. Certainly, there was no sign of an oil boom, however remote in the past.

“Did they ever find any oil?” I asked Manolito and the farmers.

This was, as it turned out, the $64,000 question--also the title of a popular television game show running at the tim--of the “secret adventure.”

In the oral histories collected by Manolito and his research partner, the answer was ambiguous. The man known as Yenyo stated that Mr. Coff collected samples that looked like crude oil and then flew back to Texas in his Cessna. A short time later, Yenyo went back to the drilling site. There was The Bull--Mr. Wolf--looking very nervous. Working shoveled mud into a pool. They had lit a match to see if there were hydrocarbons in what they had excavated. There was no oil, but plenty of natural gas, which had caught on fire. The Bull was in a bad mood. “Mr. Yenyo,” he said, “we have lots of minerals here, including gold, manganese, and silver. But oil--no.”

Other Americans came to tell Yenyo the contract was over. They collected everything: motors, tools, and pipes. This well came to be known as Picazzo #1. Someone, Yenyo, said had taken a last chance at finding oil, placing dynamite where the seal was. A tremendous stream of black liquid came out of the earth, but then nothing.

The Americans were not done. Rusty gambled on the idea of Cuban oil, but his financial stakes were backed by the research of a remarkable female geologist who appears as a passing figure in the oral histories. The geologist was named Dollie Radler Hall, and her surveys were intricate and convincing, but, as a woman in a misogynic world of oilmen with egos and fat wallets, she also had to do domestic chores. This contradiction was noted by the Cubans who remarked on the geologist who seemed to know the most about the countryside of Oriente but, who, nevertheless, cooked and cleaned for her husband and his associate. Radler Hall had excited Tulsa with a speech she gave to the Chamber of Commerce in 1955 titled, “A Look at the Oil Possibilities in Cuba.”

At some point in 1957, the Americans came back, this time on the hunt for Eugenia #23.

More workers came, some from America, others from Havana. They had Jeeps and other trucks. They built an even larger, sturdier derrick this time. A wealthy landowner and lawyer with political ties to the Batista regime was Rusty’s main Cuban operative. His name was Dr. Oscar Garcia Montes. A U.S. expat businessman named Peter K. Waering was also involved. One of the only references I could find for Waering came from the U.S. Department of Justice in a Foreign Claims Settlement Commission document. Waering had a claim against the Castro government for expropriating his business interests without fair compensation. Waering’s main loss was $30,000 in mineral rights in Oriente Province. In one photo, Waering is posing next to Rusty in front of their drilling operation. Had it been possible that the Cobbs were, as they used to say during the Cold War, “victims of communism?”

I needed to understand the role of their Cuban lawyer, Dr. Oscar Garcia Montes. Garcia Montes’s name and signature were all over the documents authorizing the Cavalier Oil Company to explore and extract petroleum in Cuba. Garcia Montes had, at one point, been the Secretary of the Treasury for the old regime. He had clearly been involved in this quest to find oil, but he was mainly known for his work in getting a nickel plant up and running in the 1950s. Nickel, I found out, was an alloy essential for the military at the time. Garcia Montes was the ultimate Cuban insider, an adviser to Batista, a highly influential thinker in the realm of economics, and someone the U.S. government trusted to make business happen. One State Department official wrote that Garcia Montes was trustworthy and brilliant, but also over-eager to be a part of a new government.

During World War II and beyond, Cuba had seemed like the staunchest of U.S. allies. The United States wrote out favorable trade compacts with Cuba, buying sugar from the island and, in exchange, the Cubans cooperated in the fight against German U-Boats in the Caribbean. Garcia Montes had been instrumental in making the partnership between Havana and Washington work. This partnership had made him quite rich, and I can only suspect that the thought of an oil bonanza excited him every bit as much as it did Rusty.

In the media buzz around the Tulsa development of Cuban oil from 1955 to 1957, there is a gaping omission of a potential problem–the surging opposition to not only Batista, but to the class of people around him who were enriching themselves from American investment while many Cubans lived lives of misery; opposition to people like Oscar Garcia Montes, in other words.

Especially in eastern Cuba, citizens from the middle and working classes were becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to the Batista dictatorship. 1957 was a pivotal year, with the opposition mounting violent attacks on the government and the Batista regime responding with extra-legal repression. Around the same time Mr. Coff was flying back to Tulsa with his sample of Cuba mud, the Ambassador in Havana cabled Washington with a dire warning:

A state of acute tension, accompanied by recurrent acts of violence, exists in Cuba, resulting from the harsh discipline imposed by a dictatorial government and from the conspiratorial and terroristic efforts of a disorganized opposition to unseat it. The situation threatens the continuation of democratic institutions in Cuba, and possibly the safety of American lives and property. If the government falls, a period of chaos and anarchy is likely to ensue which Communist elements within and outside Cuba may be expected to exploit to the maximum extent of their ability. Should the United States try to correct this situation, and if so, how?

The State Department responded that it found itself between a rock and a hard place. Batista was an unpopular dictator. It was in American interest to have him defeated democratically. But the most popular opposition leader was Fidel Castro, who has operating in the Sierra Maestra mountains, not too far from where Cavalier wanted to drill Eugenia #23. Castro, the State Department noted, had advocated nationalizing foreign interests in Cuba, including–presumably–the nascent oil industry.

Some CIA agents actually thought Castro was a viable alternative to Batista. The New York Times was effusive about Fidel. He would enjoy a brief moment as a rock star in the American media from 1959 to 1960. Have you ever seen the photo of Fidel in Harlem?! This was revolutionary chic. Compare this photo with CIA man Bill Casey above and tell me whose cooler.

Then Castro set about seizing landed estates and foreign companies. The CIA changed course. Now it was determined to overthrow Castro with a group of Cuban exiles.

I think you know how that turned out. But there’s one more story to tell—I’m still trying to figure out how that one ends. Spoiler—it involves more of the CIA in Tulsa.

—Walter Benjamin

I’m going to get back to the mystery of Centennial Manuel in a minute, but I want to pause to think about the Benjamin quote above. Walter Benjamin was in Paris in 1940 fleeing the Nazis. Benjamin looked around him and saw artistic treasures that were spoils of war, of oppression, of the anonymous labor of people whose names are lost to history. He argued for a “history against the grain” of the consensus. That’s what I’m trying to do here.

I’m afraid some people might think I’m out to rain on their parade of roadside Americana fun. But I don’t think we have either civilization or barbarism, anymore than the world is divided into good and evil. These are false yet powerful binaries. Route 66 is both civilization and barbarism, the open road of freedom for some, a mechanism for oppression for others. In the words of John Hope Franklin— “we’ve got to tell the unvarnished truth.” The whole truth, including the truth people like Joe Tiger, Addie Perryman, Centennial Manuel.

Never heard of them? Therein lies the problem.

Now back to (the other) Centennial

I was stumped by the dearth of information on Centennial Manuel on the internet and on newspapers.com. I had only vague sketches of her killing in 1909 as a clue to understanding how her land along Route 66 passed out of her hands. In the last instalment, I talked about an article that mentioned that her husband, Tom Williams, was charged with murder but that Williams insisted his gun had gone off as an accident when the couple was riding back to Taft in a buggy. In a followup piece, he said he had meant to shoot a hawk.

Who shoots a hawk? Something weird was going on here.

After that the trail went cold. I took another approach: search Centennial by her married name, Centennial Williams. This was counterintuitive because the Tulsa allotments were issued in the name of Centennial Manuel. It was worth a shot. Here’s the oldest article that surfaced:

Now I was in business. A wealthy Muskogee man named C.M. Bradley had been indicted for forging Centennial’s name on a deed. The article protested that Bradley was completely innocent, but it pointed to something questionable—at the very least—about the fate of Centennial’s allotments.

The plot thickened in 1907, when the Tulsa Democrat announced that a Muskogee attorney had bought another chunk of Centennial’s allotment for $12,500 and then sold it to the Union Loan and Trust Company to plat individual lots for $16,000. This part of the land would come to be the oldest portion of Maple Ridge, some of which was bulldozed to make way for freeways.

Now—theoretically—Centennial has netted another $12,500. Adjust that for inflation and she has $440,000 in 2026 dollars. Add that on to the $46,000 she had made for selling one 20 acre piece, and now Centennial Williams has close to a half a million dollars adjusted for inflation!

This is serious money for a Black person in Oklahoma at the time. Remember, the people responsible for statehood are also determined to institute a regime as oppressive as anything in the Old South. You can’t sugarcoat it: statehood brings lynchings, harassment and torture by “white cappers.” Black Oklahomans see their right to vote stripped away, and now they are subject to daily humiliations like separate—and inferior—train cars, school systems, and even phone booths. All this is happening at the very same time Centennial is amassing wealth.

Are you beginning to suspect this doesn’t end well for Centennial?

To find out more, I contacted my friend/co-conspirator Gina, who has a basement full of files of Great Tulsa Swindles. Gina had been researching Centennial for a long time. She believed that Centennial had strategically been selling land to create a safe and prosperous life for herself and Tom Williams in Taft. She saw Centennial as savvy and very intelligent. She mentioned something I could not find online.

Centennial had been a student Tullahassee Manual Labor school. I found a photo of it around the time she would have been a student.

Tullahassee Mission was founded by Presbyterian missionaries in 1850. It burned down in 1880, and was later rebuilt to educate Freedmen. According to Dr. Gary Zellar, “Tullahassee was the only Freedman boarding school to remain open after tribal dissolution in 1906 and was operated by the Interior Department until 1914 when it was sold to Wagoner County and continued as a school for African American Oklahomans until 1924.”

Centennial came out of this world, then, probably fluent and literate in both Mvskoke and English. She may have strategically selected allotments just outside Tulsey Town—remember Tulsa is a Creek town!—as speculative investment. Or, also possible, someone selected the allotments for her, knowing that the restrictions on the sale of allotments could be easily lifted for those Muscogee people less than one-half blood quantum or classified as Freedmen. Enter C.M. Bradley, who may have forged a deed for himself from Centennial.

According to the Dawes Commission, Centennial knew what she was doing. She said she wanted that land, even though it was about 50 miles north of her home in Taft. She had a daughter named Castella Garrett, who died in infancy on August 25, 1901. She then married Tom Williams, a non-tribal citizen originally from Texas.

As I mentioned in the previous entry, Centennial starts selling off chunks of her allotment and fetches a good price. Then, in 1909, she is killed by her husband. The prosecution argues that Tom murders Centennial, but Tom says it was an accident. After a hung jury in the first round, Tom is finally convicted of murder and sent to McAlester for life.

A court stops Tom Williams from disposing of any assets belonging to Centennial. The “slayer rule” applies to him, and she dies intestate. Now, the estate is picked over by white men—administrators, bondsmen, lawyers. All of them want a piece. Note this page from her probate.

Centennial could have been sitting on about $50,000 at the time of her death from real estate sales, agricultural and oil leases, potentially about $11,000,000 adjusted for inflation in 2026. And then Tom gets mad at her and kills her? He’s no dummy; he’s a constable in Muskogee County. He knows he won’t get a cent of that money if he’s liable for her death.

I have two competing theories:

1. Tom Williams is a jealous husband who, in a fit of rage about her spending, shoots Centennial. This is supported by a neighbor who heard them “quarrelling".”

2. Tom is set up to kill Centennial by white grafters, who say they will absolve him of murder, but double-cross him. I know this might sound like conspiracy theory, but keep in mind this is exactly what happened in the Osage Reign of Terror, and—more to the point here—it happened to another pair of Freedmen minors, Herbert and Castella Sells, who also lived in Taft.

I think it was #2. Hear me out.

In the same small town where Centennial lived—Taft—two small children, Castella and Herbert Sells, died when their family’s house in Taft exploded and burned on March 23, 1911.

Prosecutors found that a group conspired to buy the Sells family allotment lands, which had oil wealth. To clear title, conspirators decided the Sells children would be killed, and then a man posing as the father would be the heir.

Witnesses placed Bill Irvin with other men (including D.R. “Doc” Allen, F.L. Martin, John Coombs, Sam Lowe) in repeated trips to Mexico where a man was procured to impersonate Hardy Sells and deeds were executed. Several witnesses testified that Allen and Lowe described a plan to blow up the house with dynamite and that Irwin would supply money.

Another co-conspirator? Centennial’s brother, Jim Manuel.

The conspiracy was only revealed when Doc Allen—the Black man in Mexico—turned state’s evidence to say that the plan was hatched by the white grafters, who also planted the dynamite. Eventually, Bill Irwin was caught and convicted for murder and conspiracy.

The kicker is that Irwin himself was poisoned in jail. He said the conspiracy went above him to reach the wealthiest segment of Muskogee society.

About the name Zeb Mackey. He was the Sells’ step-father and had a violent reputation around Taft—much like Tom Williams. Also like Tom, Zeb Mackey made for a convenient suspect. He would have a motive to kill the step-children and inherit their wealth. The initial suspect was, indeed, Zeb Mackey. Note that the Sells-Mackey family and the Manuels are neighbors and relatives. Perhaps a conspiracy to kill Centennial and then push her only heir into prison—Tom—was a proof of concept. Shortly after Tom is sent away to McAlester and Centennial’s estate is gobbled up by white grafters, the Sells are murdered. Coincidence?

We will never know what secrets Tom Williams took with him to the grave. I cannot find anything on the man after he is sentenced to life in prison for killing his wife. It is entirely possible that Tom watched Centennial’s success with a mean streak. She had managed her affairs with incredible acumen. Notice what she bought with her land sales in Tulsa:

She also bought real estate in Taft itself. She owned parts of corporations, hogs, chickens. The woman had a diversified portfolio! Perhaps Tom Williams watched as his wife became a successful entrepreneur and, like many men, could not abide a woman besting him in public affairs.

But we know Oklahoma, at this time, was-in the immortal words of Angie Debo-emersed an “an orgy of graft and exploitation almost beyond belief.” Who benefitted from Centennial’s death? Certainly not Tom Williams.

After Centennial’s allotments in Tulsa were sold off, the stately neighborhood of Maple Ridge emerged. The segment of 11th Street south west of Peoria became home to Oaklawn Cemetery and a part of Route 66. Today, this is all part of revival of Tulsa, a “cultural hub” according to the Wall Street Journal. A monument to civilization, to be sure. But also an invisible monument to barbarism almost beyond belief.

Please RSVP to Russell Cobb

cobbrussell@gmail.com

There’s another Centennial along Route 66 that will get zero recognition this year, and I’m starting to research her. No, I did not mess up my pronouns; Centennial Manuel was a woman, a Creek Freedman woman, to be exact. And she was along a handful of Muscogee Creek citizens who were the first land owners of what became Route 66 in Tulsa. Other Muscogee allottees along Route 66 were quite noteworthy and documented. For example, George Perryman owned a large chunk of land just south of downtown Tulsa, and was a patriarch of this first family of Tvlse. You can read about him in many publications. Fascinating story, but I’m here to bring the stories to life that you can’t Google.

What about Centennial? There is almost no information for her online. Here’s what happened when I Googled her name and the word “Tulsa”

This is a timely project—look in the upper lefthand corner and you’ll see Google is paying homage to Route 66 today! What a coincidence.

Now, there are two hits regarding Centennial. One is someone on Facebook asking for more information about her, specifically if she’s buried at the Freedman cemetery near Muskogee (that’s a whole other story involving a fire-eating performer named Orange who bought a bunch of death certificates at a thrift store and is now dedicating himself to preserving the cemetery, which had been abandoned. Yeah.)

The other hit is me talking to Eli Grayson on Africans and Indians Tabletalk on KBOB radio in Tulsa. We were talking about allottees in Tulsa and Eli mentioned this Centennial Manuel. He didn’t have a lot of information about her life, but he said that he allotment went through land that became Oaklawn Cemetery and Route 66.

After the interview was over, I was left pondering Centennial’s mysterious life. And the more buzz I saw around the Route 66 Centennial, the more I thought about this pre-history of the Mother Road. Who was Centennial? Where did she live? How did she wind up with some prime land so close to downtown?

I often turn to Newspapers.com to shed light on these mysteries and to separate lore from the historical record. Here’s what I found about Centennial. The first article about her dates from 1904, and says she “got a good price” for selling 20 acres of land just outside the townsite of Tulsa. There is a railway easement running through it.

I got out my Hastains map and found her allotment. It was divided up into three sections and there was a small piece of one allotment where the Midland Valley Railroad went through it.

That 20 acre chunk is surrounded by George and Moses Perryman and William Childers. Today, that would be near the highway interchange of the BA Expressway meets Highway 75.

As for the real estate deal, the sale of 20 acres at $65 an acre would have netted Centennial $1300 in 1904. Adjusting for inflation, that’s $48,000 today. Not bad. Not kick up your heels and enjoy the good life rich, but a substantial amount of money. Keep in mind, Centennial still has around another 140 acres of land in a prime area of Tulsa.

The bottom line is that for a Black woman in what will soon be the State of Oklahoma, where Jim Crow will be codified into every aspect of life, Centennial Manuel is doing quite well for herself.

But then I discovered the only other article I could find about Centennial. Five years after she sold her 20 acres, she was married to a man named Tom Williams in the town of Taft (most—Creek allottees did not actually lived on the land the received from the Dawes Commission).

One day in early 1909, Tom went to Muskogee for business as a constable. He took the train to Taft in the eventing and Centennial met him at the depot. They were riding a horse and buggy back to their house when Tom noticed something suspicious along the road. He later said it was a hawk.

Tom drew his pistol on the hawk, but it misfired and hit Centennial, killing her instantly. When they got home, Tom threw Centennial on the bed. He collapsed on top of her, struck with grief.

Centennial’s uncle showed up and immediately suspected murder. The uncle—I can’t find his name—attacked Tom, and he fled down the road to Muskogee. Another constable named Thompson saw the scene and arrested them both—Tom for murder and the uncle for assault.

Tom’s lawyer told the press that his client was originally from Texas and the citizens of Taft were prejudiced against him. There was a rift between “state Blacks” who came to Indian Territory from the South and Freedmen, people of African descent who had been enslaved by citizens of the Five Tribes.

The article ended by quoting Tom Williams’ lawyer, Mr. Schuermyer of Muskogee, saying that his client would be cleared of any wrongdoing. The whole story was so absurd—why would he want to shoot a hawk anyway?—there had to be more to it.

But that was it! Was Tom convicted of killing Centennial? What happened to the rest of her 140 acres? Who ended up with all the money after Centennial’s land was sold? Were other Muscogee allottees with land on Route 66 murdered?

I suspect that her death had something to do with the value of the land and that Tom Williams was a pawn in a larger game. But it’s also possible he was simply jealous that she controlled the land and the wealth and that he, a Black man from Texas with no tribal affiliation, was cut out of important business decisions.

Centennial—what happened?

Let’s think about this for a second. Centennial still has some of the most valuable land in Tulsa in 1909. In a few years, her land will be the heart of old Maple Ridge. If Tom inherits the land, but he’s convicted of murder, I imagine he’ll be pressured to sell the land. But who will he sell the land to and how does a big chunk of it wind up as Oaklawn Cemetery?

Fortunately, I know someone who may have some answers. My friend Gina, who is also afflicted with Tulsa truthstorianism, has been researching Centennial for years. In Part 2, I’ll see what Gina has to say.

In the meantime, get out there and enjoy the Route 66 party. Just know there is more to the Centennial than meets the eye (I hope you see what I did there).

We do have a preponderance of evidence that many leading Tulsans were in the Klan, and that the Klan ordered and directed many acts of domestic terrorism from 1921 until 1924. Many of those acts never came to light, and at least 6 assassinations—mostly of “radicals”—took place that were never covered in the press. These were called “mer rouge” events—after a murder of a Catholic in Louisiana that was never reported or documented.

So these documents attached here are of historical value and they are from an unimpeachable source—the National Archives. Thank you to supporters like Rev. Marlin Lavanhar who help defray some of the costs of traveling to NARA to dig this stuff up.

Now—one last thing. Why did Lesky not move forward in seeking damages from these Klansmen? He just let the thing drop.

We’ll never know for sure, but I had a chat with Phil Goldfarb, a noted Jewish geneaologist who has researched other cases of forgotten antisemitism in Tulsa, and he said that many Jews decided that the judiciary in Oklahoma was stacked against them. Makes total sense, especially considering longtime Tulsa County District Judge Robert D. Hudson stayed loyal to the Klan even when it was shunned by the political elites.

So who was the judge in the case of Lesky v. Klan? None other than Robert Lee Williams, the 3rd governor of Oklahoma. Even by the standards of the day, Williams was a virulent racist. See this from Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System by Brando Simeo Starkey:

Gov. Williams had devised an explicitly racist law to deprive Black Oklahomans of their right to vote. Would now-Judge Williams rule in favor of a Jewish man seeking damages inflicted on him by the Oklahoma Klan? Highly unlikely. And considering that the Klan was known to issue death threats to Jews in Tulsa (see below), it makes sense that Lesky would throw in the towel and move to Kansas.

So there you have it. An antisemitic and racist group of Oklahomans enforcing white supremacy through political violence. After the deed is done, they try to sweep the crimes under the rug.

Plus ça change?

Despite the scary times we live in, Tulsa has come through its reckoning a wiser, more compassionate, more accepting place. Warts and all, I’m proud to call it home.

Now—a dump of records for future historians and researchers. This is S.K. Lesky v. the Ku Klux Klan, case 4104 in the Eastern District of Oklahoma.

3371085 4104 Sklesky V Kukluxklan

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What would Woody say?

Stay gold.

I can’t overemphasize this enough: Tulsa was unique from 1921-1925: it was ground zero for the Klan’s strategy to become the dominant force in national politics. Yes, the Klan’s national headquarters were in Atlanta, and then in Washington, but it was Tulsa that served as the laboratory for creating an Invisible Empire that dominated city government, the police, and even district courts, buttressed by a newspaper—The Tulsa Tribune—that would print ads and friendly pieces about the Klan’s forms of rough “justice.”

The statistics speak for themselves: the vast majority of whippings, abductions, and torture sessions in Oklahoma by the Klan occurred in Tulsa County. Gov. Walton—a hot mess of a governor who had one redeeming virtue: he hated the Klan—picked the Hotel Tulsa to carry out a military tribunal for the whole state. The Tulsa Klan had an LLC—the Tulsa Benevolent Association. It had a Kids Klub (yes, that was the name), a very active women’s auxiliary group. The Klan sponsored a giveaway of a new car and drew 10,000 to a Klan Bazaar. You can’t make this stuff up.

Anyway, before I leave these nincompoops behind, I want to put this in the public domain because, as far as I can tell, no one has consulted the records of this lawsuit before. It concerns Solomon K. Lesky’s lawsuit against the Tulsa Klan and Richard Lloyd Jones. You see, the Tribune sent a reporter to Lesky’s tarring and feathering and the reporter participated in the torture. That’s what is alleged here. Read it for yourself. Hopefully the Museum of Tulsa History puts in this in their files. I know All Souls Church is doing the right thing in searching for reconciliation around Jones’s actions.

Lesky seeks $150,000 in damages

The Klan tarred and feathered Lesky in 1922.

Lesky seized from his home at gunpoint.

After the tarring and feathering, they dumped him downtown to humiliate him.

His kids were shamed and bullied. He had to move to Kansas.

Springer—Lesky’s attorney—dropped this case. It was dismissed and never mentioned again.

Until now.

News outlets wanted to know what Richard Lloyd Jones’s role was, but there was no response. Remember Jones tried to purge the Tribune of its articles stoking fear about a “negro uprising” on May 31, 1921.

Names are named. The Tulsa Klan committed more than 70 documented violent acts in Tulsa County alone. No one was ever convicted. We need to know the names of the perpetrators. Thanks to Lesky, we have these names:

Charles B Peters

Richard Lloyd Jones

Bob Adkins

W. Shelly Rogers,

N.C. Jewett,

Minor Merriwether,

E. H. Consolvo

C.L. Holland

D.C. Rose,

Charles W. Reynolds,

C.R. Philbrick,

I. W. Montgomery

Floyd Mendenhall.

—Tulsa oilman W.H. Garbade

I pushed aside my plate of shrimp and grits. Sandy had a story for me, and I wanted to give her my full attention.

“I know why your grandfather lost all his money,” Sandy said. “Fidel Castro.”

Sandy’s father served cocktails at the Petroleum Club in Tulsa. One night in 1960, he came home cursing the name of the new Cuban revolutionary leader. The talk at the Petroleum Club was about Castro’s demand that U.S.-owned refineries on the island process Soviet crude oil. It was a non-negotiable. If the oilmen refused, Castro would nationalize the entire oil industry, seizing American assets and canceling contracts.

Many Tulsa oilmen had investments in Cuba, and Rusty Cobb had promoted drilling on the island to a number of wealthy investors. Rusty had acquired hundreds of thousands of acres in oil concessions from the dictator Fulgencio Batista in the mid-1950s, and had promised that the world’s next great oil boom would be in Cuba. I found an old clipping in a newspaper of my grandfather posing next to a drilling rig.

“A real Cuban wildcat,” read the photo caption.

Rusty was not the only American speculating that Cuba might be the next great play in the worldwide search for oil, but the major oil corporations, such as Standard Oil of Indiana, had found little of interest in their discovery wells. By 1956, Rusty had spun off an oil company called Cavalier Petroleum Co. that partnered with a legendary figure in petroleum geology, Mike Benedum of Pittsburg.

Benedum was approaching the age of 90 at the time, but among oilmen, he was still known as “the king of the wildcatters.” It had been a dream of Rusty’s to work with Benedum, who made a fortune going against the grain of the conventional wisdom held by Standard Oil Company. Benedum prospected for oil in areas that Standard thought would yield dry holes, especially in west Texas. Benedum’s strokes of luck were matched by some colossal missteps. In an episode that served as a prologue to the Cuban adventure, Benedum managed to convince Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek to grant him sole concession to explore for oil in all of China in the 1930s. Shortly thereafter, Japan invaded and Benedum–along with all American investors–were kicked out of China. The great Pennsylvania wildcatter returned to America with his tail between his legs.

I’m not sure how this elderly legend of Pittsburg met Rusty, a 30-year-old gambler from Tulsa, but in spring of 1956, they announced that they had a fifty-fifty partnership in Cavalier, which secured 682,000 acres in mineral concessions from the Cuban government. With Benedum attached to the project, the oil and gas world took notice.

This was not the first time that Americans caught a speculative fever about oil in Cuba. In the 1930s, the geologists, seismologists, and wildcatters swarmed the island, having obtained favorable concessions from Batista. The Cuban government was willing to allow American companies free reign to drill almost anywhere with one caveat: they had to drill a well to at least a depth of 4,000 feet within five years or have their concessions nullified. Sinclair Oil and Royal Dutch Shell were two majors who looked all over Havana and Matanzas Provinces. Finding only very modest signs of hydrocarbons, the boomlet was soon over.

Cuba has incredibly varied geological formations, and oil seeps had been discovered centuries ago. It had all the indications of oil fields: shale rock, porosity in rocks under the surface, and traps where hydrocarbons might be found. One thing was geology; another was sex appeal. Rusty’s friend Conrad Hilton was betting big on Havana at the time. The Havana Hilton was supposed to be a crowning symbol of Cuba’s cosmopolitan, modern, and pro-business orientation under Batista when it was finished in 1958. The hotel would soon be overrun by revolutionaries who unceremoniously shut down the gambling operations and rampant prostitution in the hotel. They renamed it Habana Libre, a symbol not of go-go capitalism but of a socialist liberation movement.

Rusty, meanwhile, was one of a handful of Tulsa oilmen who had reignited the old dream of finding the Cuban “elephant”--oilman talk for a gigantic oilfield. The vice-president of Russell Cobb Jr, Inc., William Martin, said that “[the Cubans] want us down there and are willing and anxious to cooperate in making our business transactions pleasant.”

Pleasant was one word for what the Americans were doing in Cuba at the time. Mob bosses controlled a vast criminal underworld, including the casinos at fine hotels catering to people like Rusty Cobb. The U.S.-backed dictator, Batista, was known to round up political opponents and torture them in sadistic fashion. Batista engorged himself with backing from American investors and support from the U.S. government. Some Cubans looked the other way, as Rusty and his associates went on spending sprees at local stores. Hard liquor was still mostly banned in Oklahoma, and the American visitors drank copious amounts of rum from Santiago.

Another Tulsa oilman contrasted the favorable agreement oil companies had struck in Cuba with a more conservative approach in Canada. In Alberta, oil majors had found an elephant with the Leduc #1 oil well in 1947. A massive scramble was on for an oilfield that covered a huge chunk of the Canadian Prairies. The Canadians imposed heavy taxes on oil profits and limited the amount of land any one company could acquire. The Cubans, William Garabade said, charged a fraction of the taxes the Canadians charged.

Rusty recalled an air of excitement in the best hotels in Edmonton and Calgary, but what was happening in Cuba made the Canadian venture seem rather dull. Yet, just as the Oklahoma oilmen waxed on about the investment climate in Cuba, Fidel and Raúl Castro, along with Che Guevara, founded the July 26 Movement, which made plans for an armed insurrection against the Batista regime. One pillar of the movement’s agenda was to end neocolonialist arrangements such as the one Rusty’s had signed with the government. The revolutionaries were in exile in Mexico, but chartered an old yacht called the Granma to reestablish themselves in Cuba. The journey bordered on disaster, but a handful of armed rebels finally managed to stake out a base of operations in the Sierra Maestra in 1957.

A reporter followed Rusty to the Hotel Nacional in Havana, where oilmen sipped mojitos and played roulette, surrounded by a lush garden where peacocks strolled the premises. Cuba had everything that Rusty appreciated about the good life–booze, loose regulations, easy money, and willing women. At the very same time that Rusty was enjoying himself in Cuba, the revolutionaries were staging their first attacks on the Cuban military. In January 1957, the rebels spied an army barracks at the base of the Sierra Maestra, about 100 miles from Santiago.

This whole story has been chronicled in books, movies, and Cuban museums many, many times. But the chapter with the Tulsa oilmen has been completely ignored or swept under the rug. That’s the story I’m trying to reconstruct here. It’s labor-intensive

I thought about Rusty and his associates. They had big plans to develop Cuba, not just its oil infrastructure but also its real estate. The brains and money behind Tulsa’s Lortondale–a model midcentury modern suburban idyll–had a plan to create over 600 houses in Cuba.

Did they know about the trouble brewing in the mountains? In an era of anti-communist paranoia, how could they have missed the signs of socialist revolution coming straight at them? To be blunt–were they that ignorant, or just full of American hubris?

In a strange coincidence, I was scheduled to lead a study tour of Cuba for university students during the spring of 2024. At the time, I had only a blurry outline of my grandfather’s Cuban adventure, but I would try to learn more. The group of twelve students stayed with families in Santiago de Cuba, and we spent two weeks traipsing around eastern Cuba, with a base at the Universidad de Oriente, where guest professors came to lecture on Cuban politics, history, and culture. We occupied one of the few buildings on campus with an air conditioner, a behemoth from China that made a new similar to a plane at takeoff. We still sweltered. If there was one throughline common in all our experiences, it was the constantly shifting and precarious nature of transportation. Lack of fuel made everything difficult, and our Cuban partners talked about gasoline like Prohibition-era Americans looking for whiskey. Someone knew someone who, for the right price, might be able to fill up a truck to take us to a place.

I’ll take you to that place next time!

And that was before the current crisis.

If you’ve seen the news from Cuba today, you know that everything hinges on the inability of Cubans to obtain oil. Society is breaking down because oil—like it or not—powers everything in our modern world, from medical operations to the food supply to transportation. With a plentiful supply of oil, you can have a content populace. Without it, you have a society on the brink of collapse.

Now, what if I were to tell you that 70 years ago, the picture in Cuba looked completely different? That Cuba seemed poised to become the locus of the world’s next great oil boom? That’s precisely what happened, and a handful of Tulsans were the protagonists of the story.

In 1957, the Tulsa Tribune reported that Russell Cobb, Jr. had drilled a gusher in the Province of Oriente. The oil find portended a larger wave of drilling in Cuba that would turn the island nation into a major producer.

What happened?

I’ve been working on this story since I snapped that photo on the back of motorbike in May, 2024, and I’m looking forward to bringing it to you in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I hope you’ll subscribe to the newsletter.

Now here it is 2026, I’m back in Tulsa and working on a new book: The City of Magical Thinking. The premise is that Tulsa has been a warped laboratory experiment for the best and worst tendencies in American life. And given that four generations of men named Russell Cobb have lived through it, I have some personal stakes in getting the story right.

So, here’s the next chapter: Tulsa Explains Everything. I take the city as a grain of sand in which to examine the entire universe. It will be fun, maddening, and infuriating. I’m asking for your support because it requires a lot of time and effort, searching rare books and manuscripts, archives, oral histories. It’s time well spent, but it doesn’t come cheap. Thanks.

There was plenty of blame to go around for the violence, damage and loss of revenue, but the National Labor Relations Board pointed a finger at the collusion between the Tulsa Police Department and Mid-Continent management as an illegal move that made a bad situation worse.

The Police had gone outside of their jurisdiction to provide tear gas to company guardsmen, who then attacked striking workers. The workers retaliated with sabotage, including fire bombs of oil infrastructure. Then, as the strike dragged on, Police Commissioner Floyd Rheam orchestrated an spy operation that involved sending an officer up an air shaft and into the hotel room of a union leader to wiretap his phone conversations.

This wiretap was then shared with union-busting management at Mid-Continent. The entire operation was illegal and a Tulsa federal judge told a grand jury that such a conspiracy was a felony akin to breaking and entering. Meanwhile, Commissioner Rheam had been replaced by Eddie Shields, who just straight up embezzled funds from a vending machine in the department.

The Tulsa Police Department was a den of thieves, and into this milieu came my namesake, Russell Cobb I. He was determined to clean things up.

I wanted to see if Russ was involved in the dirty tricks played on the strikers, and fortunately came up with nothing.

Even though Russ was an oilman whose sympathies lay on the side of capital, not labor, he had clearly been disgusted by the state of play in Tulsa during the Depression. As he campaigned through the spring of 1940, his supporters took out an ad in the Tribune. The ad told Tulsans that Russ represented a new era for the city, not because he was a “crusader” or “reformer,” but because he was “a sane, sensible man.”

But Russ had to contend with J.M. Adkison’s attempt to revive his political career. Adkison, if you know your 1921 history, is one of the few people we can identify as an actor contributing to the horrible violence of June 1.

During the Massacre, Adkison was Police Commissioner. The World reported that, “for three hours city officials, under direction of J. M. Adkison, police commissioner, and Charles Daley, inspector of police, with the assistance of part of the Home Guard company, formed armed white men into companies and these companies were marched to advantageous positions.”

Adkison sought higher office under the presidential administration of Calvin Coolidge, but his actions during the Massacre dogged him and threatened to ignite a debate about the Klan’s power over Tulsa and his contribution to its waves of political violence. Everyone knew Adkison was the “Klan candidate,” and he was advertised as such.

Coolidge had kept the Klan at arm’s length, opposing its rhetoric but also refusing to directly attack it. Klan political bosses sought to have Adkison installed as a federal marshal for Tulsa in 1925, but the former Police Commissioner also had powerful opponents. Those opponents were ready to lay out Adkison’s role as a protagonist of Home Guard and police attacks on Black people. The whole thing threatened to put Tulsa under a critical microscope and Adkison backed down.

Even though the Klan ceased to be a political power in 1940, everyone remembered Adkison as “the Klan candidate.”

Behind the scenes–in conversations lost to history–Republican bosses talked Adkison down from running for Police Commissioner again in 1940 and clearing the way for Russ to become the Republican favorite.

In the months leading up to the election, Russ sought to contrast himself with the corrupt, bootlegging, Klan robe-wearing, and incompetent series of former Tulsa Police and Fire Commissioners. An ad run by his supporters characterized Russ as a competent family man. This was how they marketed Russ:

A college graduate, successful in business. He is a husky sixfooter, loving people and with the ability to manage his own affairs and help the other fellow. Cobb is not a ‘politician.’ He does love Tulsa and intends to make it a safe and decent city of homes. Cobb believes that the rank and file of the Fire and Police departments are sincere capable men, lacking only firm, impartial leadership to end the turmoil and bickering existing for the past several years.

Russ told the press that the salary of the job “held no special attraction,” since he was already a successful businessman. On the campaign trail, Russ talked about his dogs and his chickens, and his love for Tulsa. He was a lifelong Republican, but thought the Democratic candidate for mayor, C.H. Veale, “was a hell of a fine fellow.”

Russ didn’t want to oversell on reform, but thought that the police force had been so corrupted over the years, that it might be a good idea to bring in J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. to help clean up its act. Veale agreed. Both men won decisive victories in municipal elections, and the Tribune predicted a positive change. But the Klan’s man, Adkison, would not disappear, and he won election as Streets Commissioner.

“For the first time in city history, it appears that the police problem will be tackled with vigor,” a reporter wrote on April 3, 1940.

Russ did not so much defeat the Klan candidate as he did marginalize him from the police department. But the Klan and their men were still around. What would they do with Russell Cobb in power?

On to that story in Part 2!

One of my favorite Cosden anecdotes seems like it was ripped from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story.

Cosden built a skyscraper in downtown Tulsa at 4th and Boston. He made his home in a penthouse on the 16th floor. He staged cocktail parties at his penthouse, and guests threw ice cubes onto the street below.

Early Tulsa history is full of people like Cosden, gamblers who spent a million dollars of someone else’s money, sticking a straw in the earth’s crust and coming up with liquid gold.

We tend to forget that most of these gamblers lost because in America we love winners. So much winning!

Cosden won, then lost, then won again. In the end, he left a refinery that was the site of violent labor struggle. This guy could seriously be the subject of a Netflix series. He moved into a Tulsa mansion across the street from another millionaire and then stole the man’s wife while ditching his own. Sorry, Ottille.

Cosden once wrote a check in the lobby of the Hotel Tulsa for $12 million. Cosden’s first Tulsa house is down the street from mine, on the corner of 16th and Cheyenne Ave. It’s an ornate craftsman built in 1912, one of those houses with a name—Mission Manor.

Look—I could go on with Roaring Twenties stories about the Prince of Petroleum and jazz age debauchery but I really want to dig into something that outlived ol’ Joshy: his refinery in west Tulsa. After Cosden sold it, it became known as the Mid-Continent Oil Refinery.

It’s still there. I watch it belch god knows what sort of toxins from my perch in Riverview.

Did you know that this refinery was the scene of a lengthy, dirty, and violent strike that went on for years during the 1930s? I sure did not. The strike had tremendous consequences for the labor movement, and for the trajectory of west Tulsa. It involved tear gas, sawed off shotguns, illegal wiretapping, and pitched fistfights.

The strike gave the whole area of town such a bad rap that some say that west Tulsa never recovered.

Do you know much about the infamous Mid-Continent Refinery Strike? Please share your stories and stay tuned as I delve into it.