Outlaws
My heroes have always been cowboys.
And they still are, it seems.
Sharon Vaughn
Now as through this world I ramble
I seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen.
Woody Guthrie
.
From at least the 1930s until at least the 1980s, cowboys and outlaws were Oklahoma’s fascination, culture and collective historical memory.
Where else but in Oklahoma City could there have been established a “Cowboy Hall of Fame?” An embarrassingly provincial attraction when opened in 1955, the complex has evolved into a nationally recognized historical and cultural center now known as the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
Where else but in Oklahoma City would the first UHF television station in town be a “cowboy station,” broadcasting nothing but old cowboy movies and re-runs of TV Westerns?
Sure, the entire country may have been gripped with TV Western fever during the ‘50s and ‘60s, but only Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico felt they were still living in a western. And only Oklahoma took the outlaw to heart almost as dearly as the cowboy. Oklahoma even has a town named Gene Autry.
Ironically, very few westerns were filmed in Oklahoma and very few were filmed about Oklahoma. But much of the western lore that developed into our collective myth of the Old West was born in Oklahoma. And Oklahomans – feeling continually like the country’s ugly stepchild, and suffering from their Dust Bowl and farmer/share cropper/dumb Okie/hillbilly image – lassoed that lore as their own.
*
Eight- or ten- or twelve-year-old kids are not likely to look a friend in the eye upon receiving a solemn factual pronouncement and say, “that’s bullshit.”
So I didn’t. But by the time a third female classmate informed me that “I’m directly descended from Jesse James,” I began to wonder just how many direct or collateral descendants Jesse actually could have had. I decided I didn’t believe any of these stories, but the larger truth behind them was in Oklahoma’s love affair with its outlaws.
*
Woody Guthrie, the “Dust Bowl Balladeer,” has long been recognized throughout the country for his love of America and its people and as the godfather of all modern folk singers. Yet he was scarcely acknowledged in mid-century Oklahoma because of his leftist, populist politics. Guthrie wrote union hymns, labor songs and angry works about the “copper bosses” and the “mining bosses,” but he also wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” “Oklahoma Hills” (a love song to his home state), a paean to the Columbia River and her giant hydroelectric dams, and dozens of other songs celebrating the greatness of America and of Oklahoma.
He also wrote a passel of songs about outlaws, the most famous of which was “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd.” Woody’s songs painted the outlaws as modern Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, or as poor innocents forced into a life of crime by an unjust system. Or both.
They are all fiction, and maybe he never meant them as truth. But Woody knew his audience, and he knew what he wanted to say. His audience believed in the outlaw and Woody believed that society forced people into outlawry.
Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, for instance – a Sallisaw, Oklahoma, boy – was an all-around bad guy who first got into major trouble by robbing a post office at age 18. A couple of years later, he was sentenced to prison in Missouri for yet another robbery. Described by Time magazine as “a murderously cool shot,” he was accused of at least six murders and numerous bank robberies.
Every crime in Oklahoma
Was added to his name.
Woody’s version, however, painted him as a peaceful farmer who, defending his wife’s honor against a vulgar deputy sheriff, killed the deputy in an uneven fight and then fled to live the life of a reluctant outlaw who never forgot the home folks.
But many a starving farmer
The same old story told
How the outlaw paid their mortgage
And saved their little homes.
Others tell you ‘bout a stranger
That came to beg a meal,
And underneath his napkin
Left a thousand dollar bill.
It was in Oklahoma City
It was on a Christmas Day,
There come a whole car load of groceries
With a letter that did say:
You say that I’m an outlaw
You say that I’m a thief
Well, here’s a Christmas dinner
For the families on relief.
In truth, Oklahoma was rather wild and woolly during much of its short history, having spent much of that history as a sort of terra incognita surrounded by American states.
*
Beef, of course, gave rise to the cowboy, as the cowboy in turn would give rise to the early Oklahoma outlaws. And for most of the Nineteenth Century, American beef was – almost by definition – Texas beef. The northern and eastern states had suffered a lamentable shortage of steaks and roasts during the Civil War, but that didn’t mean the cattle had stopped breeding. When the war ended, Texas was awash in cattle and the north was desperate for a good steak.
Oklahoma City would later become a major railhead, stockyard and meat packing location (with that vile-smelling part of the city being known as “Packin’ Town” until its name was gentrified during the city’s revitalization in the ‘90’s), but Kansas boasted the major railheads for most of the last part of the century: Wichita, Newton, Abilene and, later, Dodge City.
The cattle drive, that staple of the horse opera, generally left Texas, crossed through Oklahoma and ended up at one of the Kansas railheads where the cowboys were paid and sated their pent-up thirsts with whiskey and whores. Several major cattle trails crossed Oklahoma, but the only one glorified by Hollywood was the Chisholm Trail, which ran through Lawton, El Reno and Enid, pretty much straight north and only a few miles west of today’s Interstate Highway 35. (The only other “famous” trail was the Santa Fe Trail, which went from Texas through New Mexico and up to Denver. How many people, after all, would pay to see a movie called “The Western Trail,” “The Shawnee Trail” or “The Goodnight-Loving Trail?”)
More than a quarter-million head of Texas longhorns were driven up the Chisholm trail in 1866, and the numbers increased every year. With the cattle came the cowboys, and the cowboy culture was largely developed in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas between 1866 and 1889.
Passing through Oklahoma, many ranchers noted that its vast stretches of grassland, on which the cattle grazed on their way to market, would be ideal for raising cattle – and were that much closer to Kansas. Cattle ranches began to pop up in the sparsely populated Territories, particularly in the Unassigned Lands, but also on leased lands in the Indian nations.
*
Texas had cattle enough after the war, and little else. But times were equally hard throughout the south: few jobs, few prospects, legions of rootless men who just happened to be fair horsemen. Thousands of southerners drifted to Texas to work in the new profession of “cowboy,” earning $40.00 or less per month to round up, separate, brand and then herd a collection of stupid cows up to Kansas – a trip of six weeks or so at 12 to 15 miles a day.
First came the roundup. Adult cows already had proprietary brands burned into their hides a couple of years before, but in the spring, their calves would still be trailing after them on the unfenced plains, while Mom grazed with cows from the neighboring ranches. Brands allowed the ranchers to separate their cattle from their neighbors’ longhorns as they lumbered about in huge unsegregated herds. A long nursing period identified whose calves were whose, so the calves could be branded each year as were their parents before them.
Cutting (the ability of a horse to turn on a dime at the rider’s slightest pressure to outmaneuver a contrary cow or calf) and calf roping, both favorite modern-day rodeo events, originated with the roundup. (Don’t try to understand ‘em, just rope, throw and brand ‘em.) Bull-dogging, or steer-wrestling, wouldn’t be invented until much later, on the rodeo circuit. Bull riding also came along sometime later just for the thrill of it all. Real cowboys didn’t ride bulls: what would be the point?
Today’s real cowboys just as often use helicopters or pickups (the kind of pickup with the six-foot-diameter tires and oversized springs; the kind of pickup you need a step ladder to climb into; the kind of pickup you see all over, nearly always clean and waxed, not one in ten of them ever having actually gone off-road) as horses. But there is no scarcity of wannabe cowboys in the country bars.
I live today in the suburbs of the San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area, and just spittin’ distance from the small ranches in the Livermore Valley – those that haven’t been taken over for growing grapes. In a local bar of a Friday night you can hear the call of the wild wannabe cowboy: “Boy, I busted that filly!” “Shit, that ain’t nothin’. I tooken that old blue stallion that couldn’t nobody ride and when I’s finished with ‘im, we’us haulin’ calves outa the creek.”
Sometimes, one or two of these barroom cowboys actually make it into the local annual rodeo. For the most part, however, hanging onto a strap on top of a “buckin’ bronco” or a “Bramer [Brahma] Bull” isn’t quite as easy as hanging onto a bar stool and a glass of beer.
*
Ah, cowboys. The last rugged individuals. Our heritage.
Or, wait a minute. The sodbusters were the last rugged individuals, holding their own against the ranchers dedicated to the open range. All our folks really wanted was to have a milk cow or two, a truck garden and a cornfield or wheat field fenced in by barbed wire (“bob wahr”) against the ranchers’ cattle.
The dutiful family man drives to work every day in his Ford sedan but dreams of a fiery red Corvette. Oklahomans have mostly adopted the values of their sodbusting ancestors, but they dream of cowboys.
And if there aren’t a lot of cowboys in Oklahoma any more (or at least not as many of them as there are farmers, businessmen, shop clerks, check cashing agents or pawn brokers), there are certainly enough cattle to satisfy anyone’s hunger for a taste of the Old West. More than a million head a year pass through Stockyards City (the former “Packin’ Town”), which has led the country in cattle sales for more than thirty years. Cattle auctions – open to the public and quite the tourist draw – are held twice a week and the boast is that the public can see “actual working cowboys” at the auctions.
The prime venue for seeing cowboy skills, however, is the rodeo circuit. There are almost 100 rodeos annually in Oklahoma, including the junior ones. Never mind that most of the participants in the qualifying rodeos are professional athletes and only a few are actually working cowboys trying their luck and skills against the pros. These are cowboy skills – except, of course, for the steer wrestling and the bull riding. But there is no scarcity of wannabe cowboys in the minor rodeos, either.
It’s easy for me to make light of rodeo contestants. I’m about as non-athletic as it is possible to be. I can’t hit a golf ball without an ugly slice; my ankles are too weak to play tennis; three bad disks prevent me from doing martial arts and general laziness stops me from taking up bulldogging or calf roping.
But I do recognize the skill it takes and the toll it takes to be a rodeo performer. The sport is more demanding and more brutal than football, occasionally more graceful than ballet, less cruel but more dangerous than bull fighting. And the glory moments are just that – being measured in seconds. The performer’s professional life is short and even the best of them earn only a fraction of a professional ballplayer’s annual salary.
Just don’t call them cowboys.
*
Cowboys were hard-working men, twelve or fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, six weeks or more at a time. At the railhead, they tended to become hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard…well, we know…men. Then it was back to Texas to start all over again. All of this for a top salary seldom more than a sawbuck a week. And when it wasn’t droving time, the ranches couldn’t keep all of the hands on salary, so the cowboy sort of drifted.
Some of them drifted into crime. Some of them drifted in and out of crime. As the herds passed through the Territories and the ranchers eyed the Oklahoma prairie as an ideal site for ranches, some of the cowboys eyed the area as ripe for pickings.
When the Unassigned Lands were opened for settlement by the Run of 1889, a huge part of Oklahoma’s open range became unavailable for cattle grazing. Barbed-wire fences cropped up, ranches were abandoned and hundreds of cowboys were left without work. Four years later, the Cherokee Strip, bordering Kansas, was opened by an even larger land run, with the same effect on cattle ranchers and cowboys.
While some outlaws chose their profession because it beat working, some took to robbing and stealing out of necessity. Maybe Woody was right, after all.
*
Indian Territory was a patchwork quilt of separate governments and Oklahoma Territory had only municipal governments, if at all, making the future state not only vulnerable to lawlessness, but also an ideal base of operations for the lawless. Some of the local boys confined themselves to stealing horses and cattle, or running whiskey to the Indians, but some took up robbing banks, businesses and trains. Among the more colorful of them were Bill Dalton, Bill Doolin, “Tulsa Jack” Blake, John and Mack Glass, Bill, Henry and Belle Starr, “Little Dick” West, the Slaughter Kid, Jim, Pink and Tom Lee and Blue Duck (later fictionalized in Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.”)
It came as quite a shock to many Oklahomans when research within the last couple of years revealed that Jesse James – ancestor of so many of my pre-pubescent girlfriends in the 1950’s – had never been west of the Mississippi River. What is to happen to all of those stories about Jesse and Frank in Oklahoma and western Arkansas?
The occasional female also took up the outlaw trade, including Belle Starr and Tom King, the latter a skilled horse thief who was famous for her many jail breaks. Although she dressed like a man and used a man’s name, one newspaper described her as having “a pair of eyes that would tempt a knight of St. John.” She evidently flirted her way out of many a territorial jail, including once eloping with a deputy sheriff. (The details of this last event read suspiciously like speculation by a sensationalist press. If it happened at all, I haven’t found any records to indicate whether or not the love affair lasted much longer than it took Tom King to get the hell out of El Reno.)
*
Much like a Mafia family in the Twentieth Century, the most formidable Oklahoma outlaw gang handed down the reins of power from one family (the Daltons) to another (the Doolins.)
Bob Dalton was one of ten sons, four of whom became lawmen in the Territories. Oldest brother Frank, a federal marshal, was killed in the line of duty during a shoot-out with a gang of whiskey runners. Brothers Gratton, Bob and Emmett worked the right side of the law for a while, but decided that stealing horses and selling whiskey paid better. More lucrative still was robbing trains, which they first tried unsuccessfully in California before returning to Oklahoma where the pickings were easier.
Train robbing in the Territories seemed fairly easy at first for a gang with guns, horses and ingenuity. Trains carried the annual stipends promised to the Indian nations for relocating to Oklahoma, payrolls for post office workers and other federal employees and transfers between banks. But train robbing quickly began to offer fewer rewards and more danger as federal marshals began to hide in waiting on particularly money-laden trains.
The Dalton Gang, after a couple of narrow escapes with trains full of armed deputies, decided it was time to retire. In a real-life decision straight out of a thousand Hollywood movies, they decided to make one last big score before leaving the country for good.
Bob Dalton chose, as his farewell salute, to rob two banks at once – in the same town – something even the James Gang had never done. I suppose he can be forgiven; he’d only been at the bank- and train-robbing business for a couple of years. Maybe his success after the abortive California job had been mere beginner’s luck. But of all the hubris, he chose his hometown, Coffeyville, Kansas, where his and his brothers’ faces were well known.
Five members of the Dalton Gang rode into Coffeyville on October 4, 1892. When the smoke cleared after the shootout with law officers and local citizens, four were dead, including Bob and Gratton Dalton. Only Emmett survived to go to prison and later write his memoirs.
Following Bob’s death, the man who would become the most notorious outlaw of his day took over leadership of the gang.
*
A sixth man had originally ridden with the Daltons toward their final shootout that October, but turned back just outside of Coffeyville when his horse came up lame or threw a shoe. He was never positively identified, but was believed to be Bill Doolin.
Bill Doolin was a peaceful cowboy until a misunderstanding with some Kansas lawmen over illegal possession of beer (Kansas was a “dry” state) left two of the officers wounded and Doolin a wanted man. He had met some of the Dalton boys while he was cowboying and, since honest work was no longer an option he decided to throw in his lot with them.
Fortunately, he wasn’t with the gang that tried the double heist in Coffeyville the following year.
But during his one-year apprenticeship with Bob Dalton, he learned a good deal about the business of robbing trains. After Coffeyville, he proved so successful as the leader of what was now the Doolin Gang that within a few months he had built his following up to possibly as many as ten or twelve other outlaws, not including the two star-struck teenage girls who called themselves Cattle Annie and Little Britches. The girls ran errands, acted as spies and, nearly 90 years later, found themselves the title characters in a Hollywood western.
*
Until statehood in 1907, each nation in Indian Territory had its own legal system but was still subject to federal law (although tribal courts were abolished in 1898). Oklahoma Territory’s only regional law was federal. Oklahoma justice was handed out by the U.S. Court for the Western District of Arkansas, located in Fort Smith and personified, from 1875 to 1896, by Judge Isaac Parker, known as “The Hanging Judge.”
A former Missouri judge and two-term congressman, Parker was nominated at age 36 for the federal bench by President Grant, and charged with cleaning up the corruption of his predecessor’s tenure and the rampant lawlessness of Indian Territory.
Parker professed to be – and may well have been – opposed to the death penalty, and he was well-known as a champion of Indian rights and of women’s suffrage. But his progressive views did not stop him from handing down the death sentence more than 160 times during his 21 years on the bench. Accounts differ as to the number of the condemned actually executed, but it seems to have been somewhere between 75 and 90.
When the Supreme Court ruled that persons sentenced to death for federal crimes had the right to an appeal, almost 75 percent of the appellants had their convictions overturned by higher courts. Parker was reportedly not pleased.
Parker earned his nickname during his first few months on the bench. Incensed by the killing of so many of his appointed deputy marshals by outlaws, he ordered a gallows constructed that could hang 12 men at a time. In the first four months after his arrival in Fort Smith, he presided over 18 murder trials resulting in 15 convictions and eight death sentences.
On September 3, 1875, six men were publicly hanged on Parker’s huge gallows, an event reportedly attended by 5,000 spectators and dozens of midwestern newspapermen. Many accounts claim Territorial folks approved of Parker’s harsh brand of justice, but much of the rest of the country found it shocking and barbaric. Nonetheless, it would be another 14 years before he was ordered to put a stop to public executions.
*
Almost entirely forgotten are the men who really made the state safe for sodbusting. Only Oklahoma history buffs can rattle off the names of the “Three Guardsmen” and know who earned the title of “the man who drove the outlaws out of Oklahoma.” Since lawmen are generally not as romantic as outlaws and cowboys, even many educated Oklahomans, who might be familiar with the legend of Bill Doolin, wouldn’t remember Bill Tilghman.
Judge Parker appointed upwards of 200 federal marshals to police the Territories and to bring outlaws (they are always referred to as “outlaws;” had the word “criminal” not been invented?) to justice at Fort Smith. Several of these became locally famous in their day, but none more so than Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas, the “Three Guardsmen.”
Tilghman, a former deputy sheriff under Bat Masterson in Dodge City, had already made a name for himself as an expert lawman when Parker lured him to Fort Smith in 1891. Fearless and dogged, a sort of less-malign Inspector Javert, Tilghman dragged outlaw after crook after criminal to Parker’s court for trial. And he brought more of them in alive than any other law officer of his time, killing only two men during his law enforcement career. He captured Bill Doolin without firing a shot, and later brought in Cattle Annie and Little Britches.
Tilghman later served in the state senate, as chief of police of Oklahoma City and as an advisor on an early motion picture, “The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws.”
Christian “Chris” Madsen was a soldier in the Danish Army before emigrating to the United States and enlisting in the cavalry, where he saw action in the mopping-up skirmishes with the Plains Indians for the next ten years. In the early 1890’s, he accepted a post as deputy U.S. marshal for the Territories. He was instrumental in tracking down members of the Doolin Gang, and there are many anecdotes (who knows how true, since they are mostly taken from newspaper reports of the time) about his skill and toughness. Interestingly, he also later became a moving picture consultant.
The third of the “Three Guardsmen” was the only one to receive any modern recognition. Henry “Heck” Thomas served as a deputy marshal for 30 years, and was credited with arresting more than 300 wanted men during that time. It was Heck who killed Bill Doolin after Doolin refused his offer to surrender. Although Tilghman was probably the better lawman, Thomas received more local acclaim and has had more books written about him.
In the 1972-73 and ‘73-74 television seasons, Heck Thomas was fictionalized as “Hec Ramsey,” played by Richard Boone in his post-Paladin days. In the series (actually fairly good, since Boone was its star, but marred because it was produced by “Dragnet’s” Jack Webb) Ramsey was a sort of frontier Sherlock Holmes who used modern and not-yet-tested investigative techniques to solve crime in the Oklahoma Territory.
The fictional Hec Ramsey was based on a germ of truth, as Heck Thomas was noted for solving crimes by using stakeouts, logical deduction and playing one suspect off against another.
Folks who write about early Oklahoma history tend to gush a bit over “The Three Guardsmen,” but it does seem safe to say that they brought more than just a semblance of law and order to the Territories and made them a safer place to homestead.
*
Before Tilghman, Thomas and Madsen ran them down, the Doolin Gang spent five years robbing banks, trains and railroad stations in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri, earning extensive press coverage and even more extensive rewards on their heads. But while they had once been hidden and protected by some local families and communities, the men found their traditional safe havens no longer so safe when the pressure against them really began to build in 1895.
At Doolin’s suggestion, the gang split up, only to be killed or captured, one by one. Doolin himself was finally captured, peacefully, by Bill Tilghman, in January, 1896. Deposited in the Guthrie jail, he was later joined in captivity by one of his confederates, Dynamite Dick.
Doolin and Dick staged a successful breakout in June, freeing several other big- and small-time crooks awaiting trial for everything from murder to counterfeiting to selling whiskey to Indians.
Several months earlier, Doolin had sent proposals to the marshal’s office in Fort Smith, offering to surrender if promised a minimum sentence. The offers were refused. Less than two months after the jail break, Heck Thomas, with the help of some of Doolin’s former citizen protectors, caught up with him. Thomas reportedly offered Doolin the chance to surrender unconditionally. Doolin refused and was later buried in Guthrie.
With the crushing of the Doolin Gang, the day of the big-time Oklahoma outlaw was ended.
Wait. That’s not true. Rampant lawlessness was ended, but big-time outlaws would flourish again. And mid-century Oklahomans always held a special place in their hearts for their outlaws.
And as through your life you travel,
As through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.