A POOR OLD INDIAN

Out in Los Angeles Mrs. Anna Laura Barnett is arguing with judges and pursuing newspaper photographers as she attempts to regain a share of the estate of her late husband, Jackson Barnett, the Indian who became a millionaire when oil was discovered on land assigned to him by the government. She is continuing a controversy which already has made the Barnett case one of the most fantastic in the annals of litigation.

Old Jackson Barnett was willing to live and die in obscurity on his Oklahoma farm and he would have done so without the discovery of oil, after which he was married to Anna Laura Howe. The government's contention that the Indian was too witless to understand the meaning of the marriage vows and that the marriage was invalid was sustained in the federal courts. But 15 years of litigation followed. Mrs. Barnett had employed attorneys, one of whom was Harold McGugin, now a Republican candidate for governor of Kansas. In the course of the litigation large sums were transferred to Mrs. Barnett and the lawyers by Barnett's thumbprint signature. Last year the United States district court ruled that these transfers were unlawful and wrongful in that Mrs. Barnett and her lawyers knew of Barnett's mental incompetence.

It is regrettable that Jackson Barnett lacked the cerebral powers to appreciate irony. The white man conquered the country of his ancestors and gave him a tract of land on which to exist. White man's oil was discovered on his land, and he was inflicted with the white man's millions. He consented to participation in a marriage contract which his limited mental powers, according to the court, could not comprehend. A lawyer accused by a federal court of unlawful and wrongful conduct in the handling of his affairs runs for governor of a state, and apparently with some success, since Mr. McGugin is receiving a wide audience for his charges of partisanship against the Huxman administration. Old Jackson Barnett would have enjoyed it all, had his benumbed brain been capable of a sense of humor.

Taken from The Kansas City Journal Post.