The ‘Richest Indian’ and the Battles for His Wealth

He was called the “richest Indian in America,” but his tastes didn’t run to polo or champagne. Rather, Jackson Barnett’s interests were--quite literally--pedestrian.

Before and during the Depression, Barnett was one of Los Angeles’ living landmarks, standing day after day on the northeast corner of Rossmore Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard--always impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit and always doing the same thing: directing traffic.

Nearly everyone saw him as a harmless, rather charming character--except the federal government. For two decades, it pursued Barnett and his wife through hundreds of court appearances in three states, and even dragged them before a U.S. Senate committee.

Barnett, a Creek, was born around 1841 in what became Oklahoma. After a fight with U.S. soldiers attempting to force his people onto a reservation, Barnett fell from his horse, sustaining a head injury that left him with a childlike mind. As a consequence, he never learned to read or write.

When the government officially turned Oklahoma into “Indian Territory,” Barnett received 160 rocky, unusable acres near what would become the town of Henryetta. He lived happily until oil began gushing from the rocks on his property in 1912.

That very year, the government went to court and had Barnett declared mentally incompetent. His government-appointed guardian quickly leased his land to an oil company on favorable terms.

For almost a decade, the federal government gave Barnett an allowance of $40 a month. Then, he met 40-year-old Anna Laura Lowe, who literally took him from rags to riches.

In 1920, when Barnett was 79, he married Lowe, who persuaded the government to increase her husband’s income to $2,500 a month.

“My wife is pretty damn smart. Why, she can make change for any amount of money, even a $50 bill--yes, sir--quick as anything and right every time. They can’t fool her,” said Barnett.

But Lowe had her eye on more than small change.

The government objected, for example, when it discovered that Barnett had given away more than $1 million in Liberty bonds he had extracted from his federal trust: $550,000 had gone to the American Baptist Home Mission Society for the endowment of Indian schools in Oklahoma and an equal sum had gone to his wife.

In 1923, shortly before the couple moved to Los Angeles, a federal judge in New York ordered that the bonds be returned and that all of Barnett’s funds be turned over to the Department of the Interior to be held in trust. The action was blocked while Barnett’s lawyers appealed. Three years later, federal marshals compelled the couple to appear before Senate hearings in New York, Washington and Oklahoma. Ultimately, the lawmakers would declare that Barnett’s wife had “kidnaped him by seductive wiles, petting and persuasion and married him only for his money.”

While suits, countersuits and appeals continued, Barnett spent his days directing traffic in front of his mid-Wilshire home.

When he wasn’t on the curb, he could be found on his 100-acre ranch in Coldwater Canyon, caring for his horses, Shorty and Dimples.

Barnett’s love for horses, long, black cigars and the woman who fondly called him “the chief,” ended on May 29, 1934, when he died in his sleep at 93.

Three months later, a U.S. district judge ruled that Barnett had been incompetent and his marriage, therefore, was annulled. All his property was ordered turned over to the Department of the Interior to be held until a court could determine who his heirs should be. In 1936, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision.

More than 800 people subsequently sought a share of Barnett’s $3-million estate. A federal court decided that 33 Creeks and a Caucasian relative were the heirs. Lowe got nothing.

More lawsuits were filed by the widow’s creditors and attorneys, and the government seized her accounts and Coldwater Canyon property. Nothing was left except her 15-room colonial mansion on Wilshire, partially paid for with $40,000 from Lowe’s daughter from a former marriage.

Lowe was jailed for contempt of court after failing to relinquish her rugs, tapestries and furniture. The government tried to take her to court for not watering her lawn, but backed down in the face of bad publicity.

Thousands of women in Los Angeles rallied to her cause, signing petitions and sending them to congressmen, senators and the President and his wife, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

But Washington ignored their pleas and the grace period on Lowe’s eviction notice neared its end.

On Oct. 30, 1938, in front of a crowd of a thousand or more, federal officers pelted her home with tear gas canisters. The widow, brandishing an ax, emerged crying, screaming and kicking, along with her daughter. The police dragged both into waiting cars and took them to jail.

They were released soon afterward and moved into a small house in Los Angeles. In 1952, the chief’s widow died penniless in her child’s arms.