"I think the opinion is based on the club paying for those sketches Colt may have done. Wasn't he paid $10,000 or something as a consultant (TEP?)."
Sully:
The story is that Crump paid Colt $10,000 to come to PVGC and do whatever he did there or for the club's course. The only known source of the story of that payment comes from a man by the name of Joseph Baker who for years lived at PVGC, was a very good friend of Crump's, and incidentally was the man Crump went to Europe with when Crump purportedly went to study architecture for three months in 1910-11, among other things. The only oddoty of that $10,000 payment of Crump's to Colt is apparently the first time anyone ever heard that was went Baker wrote it in a PVGC remembrance in 1950 almost forty years after the fact. Jim Finegan in his PVGC history book of 2000 implies that perhaps Baker who was in 1950 a very old man may've gotten somewhat confused about all that. It's hard to say at this point. One thing I do know is that no one else has ever been able to remotely corroborate that payment---not from Colt's side and not from PV's side. There certainly is no financial entry of any kind like that in PVGC's financial records which are all pretty much intact.
"What was the basis for the Shinnecock Indians losing rights to their land? Did they sell it?"
Who the hell knows? The White Man wasn't all that fair to the American Indians, generally speaking, as I'm sure most of us know. They may've taken that land from them or perhaps they did pay them something. Even if they did pay them something I think we also know the White Man could be a pretty tough negotiator when it came to the Indians. Hence the sale of Manhattan Island for app. $26. Let's say the Indians sue for the return to them of Manhattan Island and get it. At that point they'll probably owe capital gains taxes of about 29 kagillion dollars and when they go to resell it they'll have to negotiate the The Donald and everyone knows that The Donald's "Art of the Deal" is no bowl of cherries for sellers!
