22 GHOSTLANDS

So much is gone now. Gone are the big petroleum companies

and the forests of derricks as the vast oil fields have been
increasingly depleted. Gone is the Million Dollar Elm. Gone are
the railroads, including where Al Spencer and his gang pulled off
the last train robbery in Oklahoma, in 1923. Gone, too, are the
outlaws, many of whom died as spectacularly as they lived. And
gone are virtually all the boomtowns that smoldered from
morning until night. Little remains of them but shuttered
buildings colonized by bats and rodents and pigeons and spiders,
while in the case of Whizbang there is nothing save stone ruins
submerged in a sea of grass. Several years ago, a longtime resident
of one of the boomtowns lamented, “Stores gone, post office gone,
train gone, school gone, oil gone, boys and girls gone—only thing
not gone is graveyard and it git bigger.”

Pawhuska is filled with its share of abandoned buildings, but it
is one of the few towns that remain. It has a population of thirty-
six hundred. It has schools, a courthouse (the same one where
Ernest Burkhart was tried), and several restaurants, including a
McDonald’s. And Pawhuska is still the capital of the vibrant Osage
Nation, which, in 2006, ratified a new constitution. The nation
maintains its own elected government and has twenty thousand
members. The majority are scattered in other parts of the state or
the country, but around four thousand reside in Osage County,
above the underground reservation. The Osage historian Louis F.
Burns observed that after “only shreds and tatters remained” of