Who Was the Real Thomas Gilcrease?
Every school kid in Tulsa will recall trips to the Gilcrease Museum. It’s a lovely place right on the border between the Osage Nation and Tulsa proper. The collection of Western art sometimes borders on the shlocky, but there’s something so epic and grand about it, you can’t help but take it all in with pleasure. And there’s some priceless Native American art, too, including a piece by my middle-name sake, St. Clair Homer, a Choctaw sculptor.
But like just about everything else in Oklahoma, there is a twisted, complicated, and dark story behind Gilcrease, namely the museum’s founder, the oil man Thomas Gilcrease. I’d heard some stories. Gilcrease was a “two-dollar” Indian, who bribed his way onto Creek by Blood list of the Dawes Rolls. Or he’d married a Creek woman just to swindle some land. Or he was a really nice white guy from Louisiana who fell in love with a Creek woman and had an honest and pure passion for Native American art. This being Oklahoma, any combination of the three was possible.
So I was a little surprised to dig through the archives and see this incendiary headline come up.
I’d researched enough of the Great Oklahoma Swindle (please help the author out by acquiring a copy) to know that “white slavery” was actually a euphemism for prostitution. It was quite common for white oil men to abduct land-owning Native American women and push them into prostitution until the women signed over oil leases to the men. More about that here.
Back to Thomas Gilcrease. The charge was that he had abducted a Cherokee or Creek girl named Eathyle Chambers, taken her to Kansas City and promised her the moon. He then left her there and went back to business as usual in Tulsa. That business being making a ton of money from oil leases in the Glenn Pool. In August, 1913, a U.S. Marshall arrested Gilcrease at his famed ranch (that gorgeous piece of land referenced at the top of this story). He was bonded out for $1000 and the charge was eventually settled out of court. There were other reports about Chambers in other Oklahoma newspapers, most of them dismissive of her claims of “white slavery.”
In 1913, Gilcrease was a 23-year-old wealthy man, also enrolled as a Creek citizen himself. Complicated, I know. Most newspapermen assumed that Eathyle Chambers was some sort of gold-digger, and mocked her claim. But then there was this curious bit at the end of a Muskogee Times-Democrat piece about the incident.
MARCUS WHO? I thought. Marcus Covey.
This was now a rabbit hole.
Now I’m on the trail of Marcus Covey, who was, indeed, a wealthy Cherokee minor. As Oklahoma’s oil boom kicked into full gear after statehood, white men took control of Native oil wealth by anointing themselves guardians in court. And I really mean anointing, because the oil men and the judges were in cahoots to take as much of the land and money as they damn well pleased. Oklahoma guardianship is f%$# up, and very understudied phenomenon.
Anyway, Marcus Covey’s father had a tentative arrangement to lease his son’s land to Gilcrease when another oil men stepped in and offered better terms. Gilcrease — according the Muskogee Times-Democrat — was double-crossed by the elder Covey and, ho boy, young Thomas was pissed. He struck back. Gilcrease had young Covey abducted right off the streets of downtown Tulsa as he berated Covey’s dad for going back on a verbal agreement.
Marcus was taken to Denver, then New York City, where a car broke his leg (it’s unclear if Gilcrease had anything to do with that). Finally, the lad was shipped off to London, where he would be kept until his 21st birthday, when he would sell his land to Gilcrease. It sounds like an expensive abduction, but apparently, Gilcrease wanted to offer a carrot, along with the stick, for Marcus’s land. Here’s the whole piece.
After reading about the Covey saga, I thought back on the Eathyle Chambers accusation. We have two instances of pretty damning charges against Thomas Gilcrease. Who was this man? I don’t purport to know. I have more questions than answers. For example, did he just happen to be allotted some of the richest oil land in Oklahoma (the middle of the Glenn Pool)? Or had his father (a white man) known that the place was oil rich? Gilcrease was enrolled as a Creek, because his mother was listed as 1/8 Indian on the Dawes Rolls. But the Gilcreases were living in Louisiana until the 1890s.
I wrote this up as a working investigation of Thomas Gilcrease. Like I said, I have lots of questions. I don’t want to cancel the man or rename the museum (yet). But the mythologizing of people like Gilcrease has obscured the historical reality of early Oklahoma. That reality is one of land swindles, racism, violence, and legalized theft. What an American story.
Did you like this story? You can support research like this by buying my book, which looks carefully at this moment in history. It’s research I’ve just begun and would like to do more of. I appreciate your support.
