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EUGENE T. JOHNSON
Vol. 3, p. 1057

Prominent among those who have been prominent and influential in
connection with the furtherance of civic and material development and
progress in Atoka County is Eugene T. Johnson, who now holds the dual
office of vice president and manager of the American National Bank of
Atoka, and who has been prominently identified with governmental
affairs in Oklahoma. He had been an active member of the bar of the
State of Texas for a period of ten years prior to coming to Oklahoma,
and has given patent assurance of his abiding loyalty and public
spirit as a citizen of this vigorous young commonwealth.

Under appointment by Hon. Frank A. Hitchcock, then secretary of the
Department of the interior of the Untied states Government, Mr.
Johnson was for seven years engaged as collector of revenues for
several Indian tribes, and the superintendency of the segregated and
other domains of the Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw, nations of Indian
Territory. Some of the features of Mr. Johnson's work in this
connection constitute an important phase of the more recent history
of that section of Oklahoma, inasmuch as the work of which he had
supervision resulted in the restoration to the tribes the original
status of these reservations and set up a system of governmental
supervision that yields the greatest possible returns from their
common property. This work embraced the ejection of timber-cutters
from the timber reservation of the Choctaw Nation, though this result
was not compassed until after many arrests had been made and seventy-
three indictments had been returned against alleged trespassers, the
cases being brought before the Federal Court at McAlester.

For many years the valuable timber of this reservation, amounting to
many millions of feet, had suffered from depredations. Hundreds of
men, some of them having control of large sawmills, had, without
authority of law, created and profitable carried on an immense lumber
business from which the Choctaw Nation received no revenue.
Ineffective efforts had previously been made to eject these
trespassers and when Mr. Johnson undertook to accomplish this end the
status of affairs was such that the trespassers looked upon the
interference on the part of government officials in the light of a
joke. The task of finally clearing the reservation of such men and
mills was therefore a difficult one and required the most mature
judgement and the most circumspect and deliberate action. Government
men were subject to rebuffs and threats, and at times open warfare
became imminent. Men were ejected and in a few days reentered the
reservation from some other route and resumed operation.
Superintendent Johnson finally was compelled to take possession of a
considerable amount of their property and to report the names of
offenders to the Federal grand jury. One hundred and two saw mills
were located, and the removal of this property from the reservation
was an event of a magnitude not equaled in importance since the days
of troubles with the cattle men who opposed ejection from other
Indian Reservation in the western part of Indian Territory. Many
times Mr. Johnson's life was threatened, for men of wealth were being
compelled to desert a source of income that has been worth millions
of dollars to them. The restoration of this large and extremely
valuable timber reservation to the Indians re-established a firm
basis for the conduct of Indian business that will produce the
maximum revenue for the tribe.

The timber reservation of the Choctaw Nation embraces a large region
of the Kiamichi Mountains, in the fastness [sic] of which many men
had established themselves. The ejection of a man from a mountaintop
home thirty-five miles east of Talihina constitutes an example of the
arduous duties of the Government men. For three years this sturdy
mountaineer, far removed from railroads and white settlements, had
lived in a log hut which he had constructed on a mountaintop several
miles inside the reservation. He had cultivated a small tract of
land, on which he grew such products as his family could consume, and
in the mountains he killed bear, deer, turkey and other game. The
furs and hides thus obtained were a profitable source of income. This
man was a trespasser. His habitation was reported to Mr. Johnson, who
took the lead of a party of his men and set forth for the
trespasser's cabin. They surrounded the primitive domicile
undiscovered by its occupants, and then relieved the man of his guns
and ammunition, consisting of rifles, Winchesters, pistols and
quantities of powder and shells. His cabin was a veritable
fortification and he intended to fight to retain possession of the
same. Every personal article of the family was removed from the spot
and hauled out of the reservation. The man had paid no rent, no taxed
and no other revenue of any sort to the tribe, and was living a
leisurely but profitable existence on tribal property. The ejection
of this man afforded an object lesson that probably caused a complete
evacuation of the reservation on the part of men of his habits who
had slipped in from the Arkansas side.

To rid the segregated coal lands of the Choctaw Nation of
trespassers was another of the duties that devolved upon Mr. Johnson.
There are 2,500 farms on these lands, and many of them had been
occupied by white men without the permission of the Government, which
received no rentals from the property. The entire area of half a
million acres was cleared of trespassers and there was established a
system of rentals through which the treasury of the Indians was
vastly enriched. This piece of work also constitutes an important
phase in the annals of the Indian nation, for it represented a
dividing line between the era of unprofitable and loose management of
Indian matters and an era of scientific system that makes the
treatment of tribal property both lucrative to the Indians and of
inestimable benefit to the value of the property leased for the use
of white men.

Until system had been brought out of chaos, the use of grazing lands
in the Creek and Cherokee nations had been a troublesome problem to
the Government. There were instances of cattle men leasing one
section and then proceeding to fence fifteen sections, thereby
gaining use of the additional and far greater tracts by paying rent
only for one section. This resulted in many disputes and much actual
and threatened litigation. Mr. Johnson, with characteristic
circumspection and zeal, worked on the problem from the ground up,
and he finally evolved a system that made rentals and acreage
satisfactory to both the cattle men and the Indians, besides opening
a large grazing territory to the cattlemen of Texas. In order that
there might be no question about lease titles and acreage, and in
order that the tribes might obtain the largest consistent revenue
from their grazing lands, Mr. Johnson made trips to Texas to assist
in the execution of leases.

Another of the important duties which Superintendent Johnson and his
assistants were called upon to perform was the checking of the
invoices of merchants, to determine whether or not they were paying
the proper amount of tax into the tribal funds. In the Creek country
this tax was one-half of 1 percent of the merchant's invoice, and in
the Choctaw country the rate was one-third of one per cent. Mr.
Johnson found upon investigation that many merchants had neglected or
refused to pay this tax, some of them for many years. His activities
of enforcement caused the institution of a suit to test the validity
of an old law, under which the tax was levied, and during the
pendency of this suit, two and one-half years, no taxes were paid.
The Court of Appeals of the United States upheld the law, and
thereupon Mr. Johnson revised the system of collection and put it
upon a substantial and satisfactory basis. Within his period of
service several million dollars were collected and turned into the
treasury to the credit of the Indian nations. Collections were not
easy, however. Occasionally a merchant hid his invoices and sought to
evade the law of the Government. Until some of these merchants were
threatened with prosecution if the taxes so assessed were not paid
the troubles did not end.

Eugene T. Johnson was born at Spring Ridge, Cadde Parish, Louisiana,
in 1875, and is a son of Benjamin F. and Livey (WILLIAMS) Johnson.
His father was a native of the State of Mississippi and became a
substantial planter in Louisiana, where prior to the Civil was he
owned a large plantation and many slaves. Mr. Johnson's preliminary
education was gained in the public schools of his native state and
was supplemented by a course in an academy in that state. Later he
was graduated in the Texas State Normal School at Huntsville, Texas,
and in Lebanon University at Lebanon, Ohio. Thereafter he devoted
four years to teaching in the public schools of Texas, and later he
completed a course in the law department of Valparaiso University, in
the City of Valparaiso, Indiana, in which celebrated institution he
was graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Laws. In the defraying
of the expenses incidental to acquiring his higher academic and his
professional education Mr. Johnson depended entirely upon his own
exertions, and in this work, as in all other practical affairs of
life, he is most appreciative who thus feels the lash of necessity.
That his ambition was one of courage and action needs no further
voucher than the statement that within a period of five years Mr.
Johnson received five college degrees and diplomas.

In 1890 Mr. Johnson engaged in the practice of law in Karnes County,
Texas, and later he removed to Marlin, the judicial center of Falls
County, that state, where he continued in control of an excellent law
business until 1900, when impaired health led him to go to Colorado,
where he remained one year and recuperated his physical health. He
then came to Oklahoma, and at varied intervals has here been engaged
in governmental affairs and in banking. His appointment in connection
with the work of the Department of the Interior, previously noted in
this article, was made in 1904, and he continued the incumbent of
this position until 1911, when he resigned and became associated with
the American National Bank of Atoka, this being the only national
bank in Atoka county. The institution is affiliated with the Federal
regional reserve bank in the City of Dallas, Texas, and it is
affiliated also with the Oklahoma Bankers' Association and the
American Bankers' Association.

As before noted Mr. Johnson is vice president and executive manager
of the institution. After his graduation in law he gained valuable
experience through being associated for one year with the
representative law firm of Follansby, O'Connel & Athers, of the City
of Chicago, and prior to engaging in the practice of his profession
at Karnes, Texas, he had been engaged in active practice in the city
of San Antonio, that state. Mr. Johnson has achieved definite and
worthy financial success through his own well ordered efforts, and in
addition to his banking interests he has valuable farm and ranch
holdings in Oklahoma and Texas. In the Masonic fraternity he has
completed the circle of both the York and Scottish rites. He is
affiliated also with the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and
in politics he pays unswerving allegiance to the democratic part. His
name is still enrolled on the list of eligible bachelors in Oklahoma.

Typed for OKGenWeb by Janie Edwards, August 1999.