Mystery of Mary Elkins: Was she another unaccounted victim of the Reign of Terror?

A portrait of E-ne-ke-op-pe (Mary Elkins) in Osage clothing. Courtesy Photo/Osage Nation

Written By: Chelsea T. Hicks

(OSAGE RESERVATION) Candace Shelton is the granddaughter of full blood Osage Mary Elkins, and the daughter of Mary Jacqueline Elkins Shelton. Mary Elkins died young at the age of 30 in 1932, and Shelton has long wondered what happened to her grandmother.

Read this story on Osage News here.

Much of these women’s lives are a mystery to Shelton, who does not even know who her real grandfather is. 

In the 2000s, at the Grayhorse Inlonshka, she received an unexpected clue. 

An old family friend, Ava Huffaker, approached her at the dances. Initially, Candace did not remember her from her childhood visits to Fairfax, but she learned Ava was the daughter-in-law of her family’s guardian, Homer Huffaker.

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T).

Homer Huffaker was the guardian for both Mary Elkins and her daughter Mary Jacqueline, and he managed their money and affairs.

Mary Elkins did not fare well under Huffaker’s care. After she died, the 13th Osage Tribal Council requested an investigation into her death. Mary Jacqueline also died young, at the age of 45 in 1967.

Ava Huffaker told her that Shelton’s real grandfather was actually the guardian, Homer Huffaker.

“It just fit,” Candace recalls of hearing the information.

The stories Shelton had heard from her mother, Mary Jaqueline, about who her grandfather really was did not make much sense, she said. “I’d heard from my mother that her father was ‘an Englishman.’ No name, just ‘an Englishman’ who died in a plane crash before mother was born.”

“As close as mother was to the Huffakers, and [given] the story about her father being an Englishman that was killed in a plane crash … Ava said, ‘Do you really not know?’ It made sense that we would have visited a lot as children,” Shelton said. 

Shelton did not grow up around her mother, Mary Jaqueline. She believes that both her mother and her grandmother, Mary Elkins, were harmed by the diminishing access to their Osage culture, which resulted from the actions of Homer Huffaker. For example, Mary Elkins was given the Osage name “Eagle down,” but it is not known whether Mary Jacqueline ever received an Osage name. Shelton was not given an Osage name as a child and hopes to be named as an adult.

Alcohol and exploitation

Shelton has worked in Indian Country for the past 35 years. From her work as a psychotherapist and consultant with Guiding Star Lodge, an alcohol and drug treatment center for Natives, to her role as Senior Native American Specialist at the Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) Center for Excellence, she has seen that people who do not have access to their culture often suffer addictions that leave them with brain damage.

“Alcohol changed [my] mother’s life and changed Mary’s life, and it’s changed lots of people’s lives,” she said.

When white settlers and guardians supplied alcohol to Natives, Shelton believes they did so intentionally to control them, to get what the newcomers wanted – land and resources.

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“People supplied Mary and … [and other] Osages [with alcohol] … These guys come down here and the way they deal with it is: Let’s give them alcohol and let’s keep them drunk. There was no one looking out for them,” Shelton said of her family, and of other Osages.

Mary Elkins suffered from alcohol addiction. Before that, she lived an extraordinarily difficult life.

After tuberculosis took the lives of her family by the age of 11, she survived, and her guardian Homer Huffaker took her in to live with his family. By the age of 20, she had given birth to Mary Jacqueline, allegedly fathered by Huffaker.

Elkins’ daughter, Mary Jacqueline Elkins, was also raised by the Huffakers, starting at the age of 10, when Mary Elkins died. She went to private school in Kansas City, and then attended Mills College in California, said Shelton.

“I feel like my mom never … she just never felt grounded,” said Shelton.

Like her daughter, Mary Elkins had also been sent away for long periods during her childhood, attending tuberculosis sanatoriums in California and Colorado, then attending Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kans. She graduated from the Orton School for Girls, a finishing school in Pasadena, Calif., preparing young women for entry into fashionable society. She then married a businessman named Jack Daughtery who died soon after Mary Jacqueline was born. But questions of paternity remain.

Mary Elkins’ brother, Ernest Elkins, died that same month, on April 11, 1922. His guardian had also been Huffaker. When Mary Elkins inherited her brother’s headright, Huffaker controlled all of her family’s wealth. In addition to her headrights, she had amassed 5,000 acres of oil land that he also controlled.

Through the 1930s, guardians controlled not only a ward’s finances but also their ability to buy and sell land, as well as where their money was banked, what loans they could get, and where they could make purchases. According to FBI Agent John Wren, one of the first Native Americans to become an FBI agent, Homer Huffaker was a guardian who took part in various deals “cheating the Indians out of money.”

Homer Huffaker, a suspect man

Huffaker was born in Council Grove, Kans., to slaveholding pioneers and U.S. government schoolteachers who had made their way west from Missouri.

He’d come to Grayhorse in 1892 to work for his brother-in-law, L.A. Wismeyer, who ran a trading post at Grayhorse. In 1903, Huffaker moved to Fairfax to work as an assistant cashier at the First National Bank of Fairfax. Between 1919 and 1938, he was a guardian to 12 Osages who died, including Mary Elkins and her brother Ernest.

The writer Michael Snyder, an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, described Huffaker as overseeing the financial epicenter of the Osage Reign of Terror at the First National Bank of Fairfax. In “Our Osage Hills,” Snyder writes that Huffaker’s friendship with William Hale, one of the masterminds of the Reign of Terror, made him very suspicious.

Huffaker was quoted in an “Evening News” article on Dec. 26, 1935, saying that Osages had learned dishonesty from the citizens of Fairfax. “They’ve learned dishonesty – I say it frankly and I believe other early residents will back me up – from us. They’re discovering that truth and sincerity don’t always pay when dealing with a paleface,” he said.

Veronica Redding, an Osage from the Hominy District, came across Elkins’ obituary during research about Osages who may have been victims during the Reign of Terror but were never accounted for. What she found about Elkins was chilling.

Newspaper reports about Elkins’ life were filled with scurrilous reports about alcohol abuse and reinforced racist stereotypes about her life as a Native woman who couldn’t handle her money.

“Who furnished the liquor that killed Mary Elkins?” reads an article inundated with racism, published in the Washington Herald in 1932. “America’s Richest Indian Heiress Dies of Too Much Money,” the headline states. The article tells a salacious, exaggerated story of “squaws” and “redskins” fighting, falling in love, overspending, and racing down the streets drunk on a horse.

The article disrespectfully describes Elkins’ funeral, reading “her body was lowered into the grave to the weird wailing of hired mourners.”

“It seems to me that they were keeping her in a state where she couldn’t make her own decisions, so they could take advantage of her and her money. It’s really hard to read,” said Redding. “It’s just heartbreaking to think of what this woman went through and her children afterwards, too.”

A life of little privacy, attracting danger

Mary Elkins’ wealth and her identity as an Indian attracted racism from Colorado Springs’ newspaper articles that criticized her actions with invasive reports, from commenting on her jewelry spending to detailing the events of nights out drinking. When Mary Elkins married prize fighter Wilbur “Bobby” Corbett on a trip to Kansas City, Mo., Huffaker found out about it in the newspaper.  

In response, he sent a lawyer and contacted the Osage Agency Superintendent, who sent a lawyer of their own to investigate as well. The Agency wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs with their findings, concluding that Corbett’s courtship to Elkins was in fact a Fairfax-born conspiracy to kill Mary Elkins.

The Superintendent wrote: “Mary Elkins is probably the wealthiest Osage Indian … there has been an undoubted attempt made to obtain this property through a marriage and discharge of the legal guardian. In connection with this plan there is, I believe, sufficient direct evidence that she was furnished on many occasions with large amounts of whiskey and kept in an intoxicated condition, both before and after the marriage ceremony.”

At that time, Elkins’ estate was valued at $1,000,000, the equivalent of $19 million today. She had eight-and-a-half headrights.

As the New York Times reported on Aug. 17, 1923, “Mary, an Osage Indian, is the owner of 5,000 acres of oil land near Pawhuska, Okla. … She alleged that Corbett, immediately after the marriage, began to beat her, saying that, ‘a squaw had to be whipped to make her submissive.’ Moreover, she charged that her husband sought to draw her dividends and royalties, amounting to a large sum yearly, and that he married her for her money only.”

Corbett also allegedly gave Elkins opiates in an attempt to hasten her death.

The Osage Agency lawyer, A.T. Woodward, arranged for an annulment of the marriage, according to a 1923 article in the Osage Journal and the superintendent’s recommendation to the commissioner of Indian Affairs was that the Department of Justice be requested to “obtain evidence against the persons guilty of plotting the marriage of Mary Elkins and that they be prosecuted for conspiring to interfere with the functions of the Government.”

The Department of Justice did not pursue an investigation into the Fairfax conspiracy.

Instead, the lawyers negotiated with Corbett, who bribed them with a $10,000 payoff to drop the matter. He accepted $1,000 as payment for not contesting an annulment.

After the harrowing marriage, Mary Elkins was married two more times to men who she claimed physically abused her. Nine years after her annulment from Corbett, she was found dead in her own bed. She was only 30 years old.

Huffaker had her body sent back to Fairfax, where he ran the Big Hill Trading Company, an establishment offering funeral services along with furniture, food and other items. The Big Hill Trading Company, where he sent her body to the coroner, was actually a hub of Reign of Terror murder plots and cover-ups, according to Snyder. The business was often used to inspect the bodies of Osages after death. It was the Big Hill Trading Company that examined Anna Brown’s body after her murder, helping to cover up the crime, as told in David Grann’s bestselling book, “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Huffaker also ran the operation and actually held the building in Mary Elkins’ name. He used their services to examine her body after her death.

Although the Osage Tribal Council petitioned the Department of Justice to investigate Mary Elkins’ death, even offering to pay for the investigation, nothing happened. “It is believed that [her death] was not due to natural causes,” read a July 25, 1932, letter from the Office of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior.

In response, the Department of the Interior recommended an investigation into her death, “as many of the full-blood Osage Indians appear to believe that Mary met with foul play,” a 1932 letter from the Superintendent stated. 

The Department of Justice did not pursue an investigation for Mary Elkins, because they said there was no evidence enclosed in the petition other than “selling or furnishing liquor to a ward Indian,” the Attorney General wrote.

Elkins’ death remains mysterious and Candace Shelton is still hoping to find out the facts of what really happened.

Aftermath of the trauma

Snyder argues that Mary Elkins’ death is still highly suspicious and “should be viewed in light of the previous attempt made on her life and the wider context of concurrent plots against Osages.”

After the fraught events of the Reign of Terror, the biggest loss for Candace is the severed connection to her family and her Osage culture, she said. 

“The early death of Mary Elkins resulted in Mary Jacqueline, a very rich little girl of 10, being raised by the Huffakers and being sent to schools in Kansas City and California, away from the reservation and the stabilizing influence of the Osage culture,” said Candace Shelton.

“Mary Jacqueline was married three times and had three children, … her wealth and short life [was spent] looking for something to fill the loss of so many things, unaware that she also was dealing with generational trauma. She died alone at 45 due to alcoholism,” Candace Shelton said.

She hopes that Huffaker had loved her grandmother in some way and had taken solace in the fact that Mary Jacqueline received all of Elkins’ headrights. But her feelings are ambivalent.

“When you look at the power differential and you look at the emotional part of it, we would certainly view it today as … abusive,” she said.

“So many people felt like it didn’t matter what happened to the Natives. People looked at them as heathens – that whole concept, which I hate – that’s how they were looked at. … it’s the same kind of genocidal attitude toward Native people or people of color.”

Today, Candace Shelton is working to reconnect and is searching for her other family members. She hopes this can provide some healing and a better story.

Her next step is to find cousins, aunts, or clan members who are related to Mary Elkins, and to keep working to find out more about what really happened to her grandmother.

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Fund for Indigenous Journalists: Reporting on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two Spirit and Transgender People (MMIWG2T).