The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  The children were at school, but he didn’t consider waiting for them an economical use of his time. Cherokee youth obeyed its parents like three-day-old whelps, at least until it reached that damnable age when it knew all that transpired in the world and at the bottom of the wine-dark sea (Bowers read Homer the way Parker read the Old Testament, frequently and with pauses to commit long passages to memory), and held all who came before it as benighted and pathetic. The deputy thanked Mrs. Christie, put on his hat, and went out to beat the brush. Christie was two dollars on the hoof and a man had to pay for his biscuits and gravy.

  He’d trafficked with Indians sufficient to know why they were the best hunters of game who ever lived: a white man, armed to the teeth and away from paying work, fretted about the time and expense and the humiliation that awaited him at the hands of his peers if he returned to civilization empty-handed, while an Indian, nearly naked and carrying a bow, thought of nothing but his quarry. The difference separated the two by the span of three seconds, during which a turkey flushed suddenly and without warning fluttered either to safe harbor behind a tardy shot or crashed to the ground before its wings had chance to spread wide. Bowers was cogitating along these very lines when a high-pitched gobble sounded from a thicket to his left. Supper, he thought, and was in the act of unscabbarding his Winchester when a bullet struck him square on the knob of bone that stuck out the side of his left knee. Splinters of white-orange pain took away his breath, and he had to grab the horn of his saddle to keep from tumbling off his horse. The carbine fell—and added to Ned Christie’s growing arsenal as the deputy raked at the flanks of his mount and galloped to safety like a wounded turkey. That afternoon a Cherokee surgeon in Tahlequah spent an agonizing hour separating fragments of lead from shards of bone, wound gauze around the leg, and pronounced Joe Bowers a lucky man.

  “Lucky enough to walk with a limp until God calls me home.” The patient anesthetized himself from a flask of Old Gideon.

  “Lucky enough to walk at all,” said the surgeon. “Ned hits where he aims.”

  Deputy Fields told Joe Bowers he had balls bigger than his brains, and cursed him for a pettifogging fool all the way to Christie’s cabin.

  “Don’t go out there in hot blood, John,” Curtis had said. “Wait till we get what more we can out of Parris and we’ll both go. You don’t want to repeat Joe’s mistake.”

  “Joe went out there to talk. That was the mistake.”

  He told Curtis to stay with Parris. The surgeon was wrapping their prisoner’s broken ribs, and Fields didn’t trust the man enough to leave them alone; Christie had friends all over and there were poisons on the shelf sufficient to wipe out an army of witnesses who could give evidence against him. He checked the loads in all his firearms and drew a fresh horse from the livery.

  That idiot cripple Bowers had learned a bit of the lingo, passed a pleasant how-de-do with Christie when Christie was sober and disposed to behave like a senator from Michigan, and thought he knew the red man. No one knew a red man but another red man, and sometimes not even him. But Fields knew the depth of the chasm between civilized man’s concept of justice and order and the savage’s notion of right and wrong. He determined to camp out at Christie’s cabin for however long it took him to return to the bosom of his family and to tell him, over the barrel of a carbine, how the cow ate the cabbage and that there was no help for it but to plead his case in Fort Smith, wearing irons all the way. One dead deputy was one too many when manpower was short and miles were long, and now another was on crutches.

  He caught both kinds of luck. It was first light when he got to Rabbit Trap, and Christie was at home, asleep next to his wife, whose instincts were even keener than his. At the first clink of a bit-chain outside the cabin she nudged him. He leapt from bed, scooped up his Winchester in the same movement, kicked wide the door to the outside, and pared a rasher of bacon off the side of Fields’s weathered neck as the deputy wheeled his horse to narrow the target. Fields, caught by surprise both by the man’s presence and by his sudden appearance, rode hell for leather in the opposite direction, blood flying in a rooster tail from a flesh wound that would vex him for weeks, scabbing over and breaking open fresh every time he forgot and turned his head too fast; expecting any time during the ride the sudden slam of a bullet in his back. Christie held his fire, but the memory of that nightmare flight would haunt the deputy forever, ruining him for the life of an active peace officer.

  Days later, a message from Rabbit Trap reached Tahlequah by Cherokee telegraph: “Tell the marshals to stop sneaking around and I’ll stop shooting them.”

  When word got to Fort Smith, Parker didn’t weep. The deputies were still alive, through no virtue of their own, and in any case after ten years on the bench he’d heard so much harrowing testimony and dropped the gavel on men of such abiding wickedness, rapists and debauchers, horse cripplers, slaughterers of families, that nothing short of the serious illness of his wife or sons—two, now, following the birth of Jimmie—could squeeze a tear from those weary ducts. His sentences now fell with the crack of a lash, and Mary’s cakes for the condemned erected a barrier that separated man and wife along the very foundation of those things each held dear. Rumors persisted of days of silence in the Parker household after a hanging.

  He did not weep, but interrupted court for only the second time on news from the territory to summon Marshal Boles to his chambers.

  Boles regarded him across the walnut desk the size of a dinner table, scaped with writing paraphernalia, burst leather portfolios in heaps, and cigars standing to attention in a glass jar. “Christie’s no ordinary outlaw.”

  “They’re all ordinary,” Parker snapped. “Possums are less common. Our purpose is to make them extraordinary, and as rare as dodoes.”

  “They say he’s sworn never to kill an officer of the court.”

  “They say reams of nonsense about Jesse James and his kindness to widows. If Christie took such an oath, he should have done so before he killed Dan Maples.”

  “I wouldn’t place a great deal of faith in the word of that man Parris. His reputation gives a bad name to Indians everywhere.”

  “An innocent man places his faith in a public trial. Some of the worst men who have trod the scaffold put up less protest than Christie.”

  “One deputy is dead and two wounded. I fear we’ll lose more before he’s run to ground, and that when he is he will never stand on the scaffold.”

  “If that’s his choice we’ll honor it.”

  Boles fingered his beard. “Is that a judicial order?”

  “Don’t flower it up with legal rhetoric. These are simple men, recruited by Fagan and you and your other predecessors from rough fields. Tell them to abandon the quaint conceit of taking Ned Christie alive.”

  EIGHT

  In 1889, Judge Isaac C. Parker had commanded the Eighth District Court fourteen years, six days per week, with sessions often extending into the small hours of the morning, to be reconvened at 8:00 A.M. In that time, his dark hair and beard had turned silver, although he was not yet fifty, and close study of case histories by lamplight had left deep dents in the bridge of his nose from gold-rimmed reading spectacles. In that time also, five United States marshals had been appointed to direct the activities of deputies who patroled the Nations. It was a pork-barrel post, assigned by various presidents in reward for services rendered in electing them to office, with spoils attendant and no specific requirement beyond a talent for administration, and some were better at that than others, who left the details to a succession of anonymous secretaries and clerks. Terms in Congress, judgeships, and high rank in the military crowded these men’s past professional experience, with little or no connection to fieldwork in law enforcement; the legend of the hard-riding, straight-shooting U.S. marshal was an invention of hack writers, who would also create the myth of the town sheriff. By and large these officials spent their days behind desks and their whiskers resembled those of elder buffalo, which grew them to t
he ground. Five marshals, with three to go before Parker’s robes went up on the hook for good.

  Gone was the courthouse in the barracks with its hellish basement jail. The building had been given over to jailers’ quarters, and the former courtroom to the detention of female prisoners. Now Parker adjudicated from behind a high oak bench of the Eastern type in a stately three-story structure of red brick, with attic storage for physical evidence exhibited in criminal trials: stained axes, broken bottles, pistols, knives; common junk out of context, but each someone’s tragedy. Pair upon pair of shoes and boots for whose possession men had been slain; a museum of lore as sordid as a reliquary from the Spanish Inquisition. The building dominated South Sixth Street near the center of town, a block from Garrison Avenue and culturally miles from the old fort where Parker had condemned forty-three men; a little less than half the number he would eventually send to the most notorious apparatus of execution after the guillotine of Paris. This structure stood where it always had, on the grounds of the old powder magazine, but with a sloping roof now to protect Maledon and his subjects from the elements and a high board fence to keep out the uninvited. No longer would crowds stream in from remote places to buy chicken legs and bottles of beer from vendors and watch men die in ones, twos, and sixes. Parker disapproved, but had been trumped by Congress in deference to public opinion in the States; he believed now as he had from the start that capital punishment was a public affair, carried out honestly and in the open, and not behind cover, like a lynching in a barn. But men more persuasive than he had been chipping away at his authority for years. His decisions now were vulnerable to appeal to higher courts, although no attorney had as yet mustered the sand to seek another opinion on his client’s behalf.

  Even the redoubtable William H. H. Clayton, who had welcomed the Parkers to Fort Smith and introduced himself as the judge’s partner in the prosecution of criminals from the Western District of Arkansas and the great Nations, had been forced to sit out the current Cleveland administration, pursuing private practice, while another pled cases for the U.S. in his place. Disregarding loyal local functionaries who had continued to serve him since his earliest days, Parker remained the single consistent and unifying feature of the federal court on the border, with one exception; George Maledon, more grizzled and bristly than ever, still climbed the whitewashed steps of the scaffold, bearing his basket of ropes and dropping two-hundred-pound sandbags from them through the trap.

  As for those who had best cause to hate and dread judge and executioner, they awaited trial and sentence in a well-ventilated jailhouse that from a distance resembled a military barracks, with full hospital facilities staffed by a doctor and male nurses. Situated between Second and Third streets, it offered food and sanitary provisions far superior to the vermin-infested meat and foul buckets that once stood in the chimney wells of the old basement. Here, shackles were rarely used, a last resort for the violent, the escape-obsessed, and the suicidally inclined. Showers had replaced the bathtubs made from half-barrels, and ablutions were encouraged, rather than offered as a reward for good behavior. However, the squee-thump of Maledon’s responsibility penetrated to its depths as it had those of the first jail.

  Fort Smith had grown, away from its reputation as a Gomorrah for cowboys from Texas to drink whiskey to the point of insensibility and sample women of a particular type, toward a place where families settled in proper frame houses, attended the churches of their choice, and sent their children to school. There was talk of spreading macadam on the streets of mud and dust, of adding a second streetcar to the line. The discharge of a firearm in the Silver Dollar or the House of Lords or any of their twenty-odd competitors brought swift investigation, jail, and a fine. Row girls were prohibited from soliciting business in the saloons—indeed, even from entering—and a 9:00 P.M. curfew was strictly enforced upon them.

  Fines levied for infractions swelled the treasury and helped finance the civic improvements. What passed without comment—for it was scarcely necessary—was that Fort Smith was growing on the broad shoulders of Judge Parker. With justice come to the frontier, settlers and the merchants who lived off their trade bought lots, broke ground, and built without fear for the safety of themselves and their children. When the Parkers rode to church in their fine carriage-and-pair, women on the street nodded and men removed their hats. For visitors stopping over on their way West, the spectacle was like getting a glimpse of the royal family in London.

  Throughout all of these recent developments, these sweeping advances and reforms, Ned Christie remained at large.

  Four years had passed since his declaration of war, and he had not been heard to utter a word of English in all that time. Around him he had gathered a small army of men who felt as he. Youths mostly, they were in open rebellion against their stoic parents, for whom the shameful story of the Five Tribes’ eviction from the Eastern states at the stroke of a presidential pen, and the corpse-strewn Trail of Tears that had led them at bayonet point to this desolate place, were tests of the People by the Ancient. For their children it was an atrocity, and Ned Christie was their avenger. They abandoned their schoolbooks and the tools of civilized trades and joined him to raid corrals of horses, shops of supplies and provisions, and wanderers of cash. The only token required for induction into this society was a working rifle and extra ammunition. “With this,” Christie said, hoisting a new Ballard above his head, “I live longer.”

  His cabin was stacked with weapons: Winchester carbines and Henry rifles, Stevens shotguns, revolvers from the factories of Colt and Remington in America and of Deane-Adams in England, belly guns, horse pistols, hideouts, guns that loaded through the breech and through the muzzle, guns that took cartridges and ball-and-percussion guns that required powder and bullet molds and yards of wadding, palm shooters shaped like mollusks and big-bore buffalo guns lethal at both ends; knives, daggers, bayonets, cavalry swords, and hatchets for close work. Christie’s wife had to clear the table of cleaning rods, parts of weapons, and cartridge-loading paraphernalia to set out breakfast. Washing day produced a bounty of live rounds, empty brass casings, and copper firing caps from her husband’s pockets. The house took on the aspect of the armory of the old garrison in Fort Smith.

  Officers of the court who had visited the cabin and seen the kegs of powder and boxes and wooden crates of ammunition lying about suggested wistfully that a bit of flaming pitch hurled through a window would effectively disarm the West’s most wanted fugitive; but the memory of January 1875, when a pot of Greek fire supplied by the Pinkertons blew up the Missouri home of Jesse James’s mother, tearing off her arm and killing the outlaw’s nine-year-old half brother, stayed the hands of the law in this regard. That incident had turned the countryside in James’s favor and extended his career another seven years.

  But it was agreed as far away as Fort Smith that Christie’s longevity depended less upon warriors and weaponry than upon the network of generally law-abiding neighbors who kept him informed of preparations to invade his territory. Their sympathy for his situation, while not inviting cooperation in his vendetta, spoke of their faith in his innocence in the death of Deputy Maples. When deputies asked them if they’d seen Christie, they were polite, they offered them cups of steaming coffee in winter and dippers of ice-cold well water in summer (jars of moonshine if they knew them well enough), and shrugged their shoulders; then when the visitors left they sent their children running to Rabbit Trap. The deputies, slowed down by the tumbleweed wagon and disinclined anyway to fire up the locals by chasing down and boxing the ears of their offspring, chewed tobacco, watched them hurdling fences and splashing through streams, and soldiered on, rifles across the throats of their saddles in case of ambush. Most often the worst they found was Christie not at home, and that was the end of the matter until next time. He slept in his cabin most nights and took to the brush when the alarum was raised.

  A photograph of Christie taken about this time, in a studio in Tahlequah, shows off his lean, rangy
figure to best advantage, with hair tumbling black and glossy well below his shoulders, Mandarin whiskers trailing from his chin, a clear challenge in his gaze, and about his person two Colt revolvers and a Model 1866 Winchester. Unlike the case with many a staged pose, weapons and the man appear familiar with one another. The circumstances of its creation, in the busy capital of the progressive Cherokee Nation, with deputies searching every Native face for his features and a price of a thousand dollars on his head offered by U.S. Marshal John Carroll, spoke volumes about the nature of the man and the reasons for his legend.

  Four years of assaults and escapes—hornet-stings about Parker’s furious head—lulls in the fighting, brief violent brushes with the “marshals,” and cold camps kept while men searched the hills, caves, and thickets for some sign of his passage, and Ned Christie’s war was only a little more than halfway to the finish. But his candle was burning low.

  There came to Fort Smith a tall man, by appearances born to the saddle, whose long hair, handlebars, and neat imperial moved the more literary of his biographers to compare him to D’Artagnan. At the time of his encounter with Ned Christie he was nearing forty and had settled into a practical and comfortable working uniform of corduroy trousers, flannel shirt, high-topped boots made to his measure, and a white hat with a swooping brim, a fashion just then finding its vogue after the example of Buffalo Bill Cody, inventor of the Wild West. He spoke with a gentle drawl—foreshortened when he barked instructions to his companions and commanded fugitives to come out from behind their barricades—and had three children with his wife, who had packed them up and returned to Georgia, where people placed family before duty. He’d argued against the move, but had failed to prevent it, or to persuade her to return. “You can’t expect a woman to understand or respect it when manhunting has got into your blood,” he told his few intimates. “I can’t find fault with one who doesn’t.”