Columns & Opinions

The discovery of oil transformed communities and entire states in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana saw their economies transform overnight with the discovery of oil. For the Osage of Northeast Oklahoma, they saw their impoverished, dilapidated reservation transformed into one of the richest communities in Oklahoma almost overnight. It attracted great jealousy and then hatred and then murder. In the end, it took one former Texas Ranger, Thomas White, to help solve the case.