Charles Sewell Crookham was born in 1923 in Portland, Oregon. He studied at Oregon State College (now Oregon State University) in Corvallis; Loyola University in Los Angeles, California; Multnomah College in Portland; and Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Crookham then earned his law degree from the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. He served in U.S. Army during World War II.

Crookham's early legal career was in trial and appellate practice as an attorney with the Portland firm Vergeer & Samuels. In 1962, Oregon Governor Mark Hatfield appointed him as a Multnomah County judge, a position he held until 1988. In 1985, Governor Vic Atiyeh appointed him as chair of the Oregon Governor's Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. In 1992, Governor Barbara Roberts appointed Crookham to finish Dave Forhnmayer's vacated term as attorney general. Crookham died in 2004.

Source: Obituary in the Oregonian newspaper by Robin Franzen, October 13, 2004, page D8.

In 1954, the U.S. Congress passed legislation to terminate federal recognition of the Klamath Tribes. The legislation would effectively remove trust status for the tribes' reservation, which included timberlands with the potential to produce 3.8 billion board feet of lumber, and render previous treaties with the U.S. government meaningless. In 1956, tribal management specialists T. B. Watters and E. G. Favell asked for amendments to the legislation, and with assistance from U.S. Senator Richard Neuberger and U.S. Representative Al Ullman, termination was delayed until the end of August 1961.

Tribal members were given the choice to either withdraw from the tribe in exchange for a one-time payment of $43,000, or retain rights to their share of the reservation's forest land for modest quarterly payments. 1,659 members opted for the one-time payment, while 474 members opted to remain. Reservation lands that were not sold were transferred from federal trusteeship to trusteeship under the United States National Bank of Oregon. In 1969, a majority of the remaining members voted to sell the lands in the bank's trust. The U.S. government refused to purchase these lands, and the bank's efforts to find private purchasers met with protests from conservationists. This led to litigation that concluded with the government settling on a $130.54 million payment in 1980 and adding the lands to the Winema National Forest.

The Klamath Tribes' trust status was restored in 1986, but this did not restore the majority of their former reservation lands.

Source: "Termination and Restoration in Oregon," by Donald Fixico, Oregon Encyclopedia, https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/termination_and_restoration/; "Bribed with Our Own Money: Federal Abuse of American Indian Funds in the Termination Era," by David R. M. Beck (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press and the American Philosophical Society, 2024), pages 97-99; "Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations," by Charles Wilkinson, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), pages 82-84; "Klamaths offered $130.54 million," by Dick Johnston, Oregonian, February 8, 1980, page 1.

In 1961, the Oregon State Bar suspended Portland attorney F. Darold Windsor (1918-1971) from practicing law in the state. The bar alleged that in his dealings with clients from the Klamath Tribes, Windsor had commingled clients' funds with his own, had failed to keep adequate records, and had assisted in circumvention or evasion of the Klamath Termination Act. He was suspended from practice in July 1962. In 1964, Windsor was arrested on charges of embezzling the funds of two Klamath individuals. After the first trial ended in a mistrial for a faulty indictment, Windsor was found guilty and sentenced to a seven-year suspended term and five years' probation. He was disbarred that same year.

Sources: Articles in the Oregonian newspaper, "Attorney Criticized," June 24, 1961, page 4; "Suspended Portland Lawyer Arrested," January 24, 1964, page 11; "Judge Rules Case Mistrial," April 3, 1964, page 18; "Lawyer Draws Probation Term," June 20, 1964, page 15; "Court Disbars Portland Man," July 28, 1964, page 10; vital records via Ancestry.com.