The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  Back home, his wife and son turned away reporters asking for details of human interest about the domestic life of a celebrated hangman. They said there was nothing of interest, and pressed shut their door.

  V

  A PROMISE TO PUNISH

  That virtue is her own reward, is but a cold principle.

  —SIR THOMAS BROWNE

  EIGHTEEN

  “Which Cherokee Bill is this? It seems to me this court encounters one every couple of months.” Judge Parker trayed his cigar to review the request for a warrant.

  “The worst of the lot so far,” said Colonel Crump. “His right name’s Crawford Goldsby. It stands to reason ‘Cherokee Crawford’ didn’t answer, though he could claim ‘Greaser Bill’ and be closer the mark. There’s Mexican and Sioux in his blood, and I’m told his mother was black as Jed’s boot. There’s Cherokee on her side, too, but it’d bleed out if he were to nick his little toe. He looks like he ought to be butchering chickens in Nogales.”

  “I didn’t inquire into his ancestry. He rides with the Cook brothers. I was under the impression we had them on the run.” Parker paged back and forth through the record. Crump’s reports were closely written and maddeningly chronological, a product of his army training.

  The marshal, a second-term Cleveland appointee who had succeeded Jacob Yoes, adjusted his beard the way another man might straighten his necktie. He put more pride in his military background than in his present spoils position, and Parker considered him competent, although he had a prejudice against him for replacing George Winston, who had served the court as bailiff since before Parker’s own appointment, with a Democrat. He suspected Crump distrusted Negroes, and therefore that he harbored disloyal opinions of the judge as a carpetbagger.

  “Jim’s in custody in Tahlequah,” Crump said, “or was. The word is he escaped, but God help the white man who tries for a straight answer from the Cherokee courts when they soil their britches. Brother Bill’s still at large. The posse that took Jim lost a man; Goldsby’s tagged with that killing. That’s neither here nor there, since he was Lighthorse and it’s Indian jurisdiction, but Goldsby’s a rotten little egg of eighteen. They say he shot his first man over a woman at a dance.”

  “In Fort Gibson, I see. The man recovered.” Now came details of Goldsby’s adventures with the Cooks and their band. “Chicken. Dynamite Dick. The Verdigris Kid. I wish these fellows read something other than Ned Buntline’s Own. Why haven’t I heard of Goldsby before this?”

  “Up to now it’s been by guess and by God. There was the man at the dance, who pulled through, and any of a half dozen Cherokee Bills might have been responsible for that Lighthorse affair. A conductor named Collins on the Katy Flyer took one through the heart because Goldsby forgot to buy a ticket, but go find a coach passenger who’ll admit he saw anything if it means coming to Fort Smith. This time, though, we’ve got Cherokee Bill’s own word for what happened in Lenapah.”

  Bill Cook kept a loose hitch on his brother Jim’s gang. Two members, thought to be Cherokee Bill and the Verdigris Kid, cut out to rob Schufeldt & Son, a store and post office in that busy town in the Cherokee. The Kid laid down fire outside to discourage interference while Cherokee Bill ordered John Schufeldt to open the safe. When the man in the street called for shells, his partner searched the store, spotted a curious housepainter named Ernest Melton peering through a window on the alley, and shot him in the face. The bandit then filled his pockets with money from the safe and fled on horseback with the Kid.

  Crump thudded a finger on a passage in his report, attributed to deputies W. C. Smith and George Lawson: An informant in our employ, acting upon instructions, sought out “Cherokee Bill,” who said, “I had to kill a man at Lenapah.”

  Parker signed the warrant, and a petition calling for a reward of $1,300 from the Justice Department for the capture or death of Crawford Goldsby, alias Cherokee Bill. The request was granted, as he knew it would be; Crump had recently traveled to Washington to plead his case with Attorney General Richard Olney to encourage public cooperation in bringing an end to such as the Cooks, and the Department of the Interior had become involved in the interest of establishing a territorial government. A pen-and-ink likeness of the bandit drawn from witness descriptions appeared in train stations and telegraph offices throughout Arkansas, Texas, and the Nations: Cherokee Bill’s broad Hispanic face and flat negroid features peered out from beneath the broad flat brim of a pinch hat.

  “If these efforts fail,” Olney had announced, “it is assumed that the military will be called into requisition.”

  Parker glowered at the suggestion. To Crump he said, “These United States have entered a new chapter: We no longer declare war on countries, only men.”

  “Whatever help we get is all to the good.”

  “The difficulty is in persuading it to leave once it’s served its purpose.”

  The judge authorized wires enlisting the aid of the Cherokee Lighthorse and the Indian police in the Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw nations and on the Osage reservation, and drafted a personal invitation to the directors of the Rock Island, Santa Fe, and Missouri, Kansas, and Texas railroads to lend their detectives to the cause. These men responded swiftly and in the affirmative. With Crump’s deputies placed on alert, some five hundred men had joined the hunt. It had taken only seventeen to run Ned Christie to ground. This time, at least, there would be no cannons.

  The killing in Lenapah had shifted Cherokee Bill’s accomplices to the background, with $250 offered for each, dead or alive. Deputy W. C. Smith, who had helped connect the bandit to the murder through his own words, remarked to his partner, George Lawson, that the price of shooting housepainters had risen steeply since he’d come to the territory.

  When a small party of manhunters crossed Bill’s path and shot his horse out from under him, Bill took to the scrub on foot—and vanished. They tracked him until his trail doubled back on itself, then gave up the chase. Stories of his Sioux blood got into the newspapers, a biography ran many columns, attributing more killings to its subject than to the Doolins and Daltons combined. Writers in the East borrowed from it heavily to fill out space between garish paper covers. With all the hostile tribes subjugated, popular fiction in the 1890s turned toward road agents and guerrillas. By Christmas 1894, Cherokee Bill was nearly as well known as Kris Kringle.

  A trio of Cook associates was surrounded by deputies and Indian police outside Sapulpa. Two were killed and a third was taken to Fort Smith and tried with another man captured during the robbery of a bank in Chandler. Parker sentenced them to ten to fifteen years in the Detroit House of Corrections.

  The rest of the gang migrated west, away from their pursuers, but not in such haste they failed to attend to business. In the Seminole Nation, they waylaid a family of German settlers on their way to Tecumseh, robbed the father of his money and a gold watch, stole the horse from the wagon, and raped the man’s daughter. The hunt for Cherokee Bill had improved communications; deputies trailing the gang from the scene of the atrocity wired the Texas Rangers, who captured three members near Wichita Falls without firing a shot and held them until the deputies arrived to remove them to Fort Smith. Parker sent one man to Detroit for thirty years and the others for twenty years apiece. Some who witnessed the proceedings muttered that the judge was mellowing.

  “He’s saving his teeth for Cherokee Bill,” said one.

  The rumor furnace was stoked and putting out heat. Cherokee Bill had raped the girl; Cherokee Bill was nowhere near the Seminole at the time of the assault, but was robbing a train at Red Ford; Cherokee Bill was taking a holiday in Nowata, openly courting a girl named Maggie Glass. It was a signal of a desperado’s rise to stature that the laws of space and time presented him with no greater challenge than those of man. Few who followed his adventures could encompass the fact that neither his name nor his alias had yet appeared in print scant months earlier. The stuff of legend now traveled at the speed of Morse code.

 
He was, in fact, in none of the places attributed to him at the time of the Seminole incident, but sleeping long hours under the attic roof of a farmhouse near Talala. Neighbors who remembered the farm’s first ownership referred to it as the Frank Daniels place. There, Bill found cartridge-loading equipment and sent his sister, Maude, who worked the farm with her husband, George Brown, into town to secure powder. Brown, a wolf-lean man several inches taller than his guest, had during their tenancy established the house as a regular stop on the local whiskey peddler’s route. When Brown’s store ran out before the peddler’s return, he saw giant rabbits for a time, then after the shakes passed grew quiet and relatively amiable; Bill during these periods considered him better company than he’d been running with, and the pair smoked and swapped stories on the front porch evenings when the wind didn’t blow from the north while Maude washed the supper things inside. It was only when the peddler had come and gone and Brown made up for lost time that the farmer lost his affability and made cutting remarks, usually at his wife’s expense but sometimes at Bill’s; the recurring complaint was that his brother-in-law considered him a hotelier, and slept all day “like a hog” and kept Brown up all night with his bullet-rammer chunking directly above the bedroom where the Browns rested. “How many shells does a man need to defend an attic?”

  Cherokee Bill’s host was not the only one to take note of his nocturnal activities. In Talala, Deputy Lawson, who knew Bill’s sister lived nearby, had spread money around town against information on any change in the Browns’ routine; he had aspirations regarding collateral rewards offered for the fugitive dead or alive, but found business too confining to stake out the farm. Informed of Maude’s recent black-powder purchases, he wired Tahlequah for reinforcements from the Cherokee Lighthorse for a raid on the homestead.

  Brown’s sneering remarks seemed to have no effect on his houseguest. In the days before his infamy, Crawford Goldsby had been thought by some a typical dumb greaser, and probably a coward. The vilest insult to his face made no change in his expression and brought no retribution. These witnesses had not been present when Bill was with his sister, his confidante in the early years when his father took out his mixed-blood miseries on the only other masculine member of the household, first with his belt, then when Crawford grew too large to present his backside without protest, his fists. When Brown grew weary of trying to get a rise out of Cherokee Bill and took a horsewhip to Maude over the matter of an overcooked ham, Bill dusted the black powder from his palms, loaded his revolver with six newly minted rounds, stuck it under his belt in back, and went downstairs.

  He found his sister curled into a fetal position in the corner next to the stove and Brown standing over her, panting like a hound, the whip dangling from his hand, exhausted from his exertions and sweating pure skullbender from every pore; he smelled like a still in ninety-degree heat. Streaks of blood stained Maude’s dress where the lash had shredded the material.

  “George, let’s go out for a smoke.”

  Brown looked at him, his features stupid. He appeared to take a moment to recognize Bill. “I’m fresh out. You smoked everything in the house but the rat shit in the potato bin.”

  “I’ve got cigars.” Bill patted his shirt pocket.

  “What’d you do, steal ’em? You spent every penny you stole on whores. I ought to’ve put Maudie out on the line herself for all the use she is around here.” But he dropped the whip and started toward the door. He had one foot on the porch when Bill drew the revolver and shot him in the back of the head.

  Maude screamed and began blubbering widow’s incoherencies. Bill went to a cupboard, emptied a coffee jar of household cash, reached down to pat her shoulder, saddled up his horse in the barn, and rode hard for the Cimarron with his saddle pouches full of fresh cartridges. It really was a shame what she’d done to a fine Arkansas ham.

  The new year of 1895 was barely a month old when the story, reported widely in newspapers as far east as Chicago, was retold in Cherokee Bill’s Gamble, in which the Bandit Prince shot a stranger’s cruel husband in a fair fight and upended a bank bag filled with greenbacks onto the woman’s kitchen table before taking his leave.

  Deputy Lawson, in the company of the Cherokee Lighthorse, had found Maude Goldsby Brown seated hollow-eyed at that same table, bare but for a worn oilcloth cover, with a dead man on the porch under a rug to discourage flies. He borrowed a shovel to bury George Brown while the Indian policemen watched, smoking and retelling old jokes in Cherokee.

  Cherokee Bill’s story so overshadowed that of the Cooks’, the worst gang ever to plague the Nations until the coming of Rufus Buck, that when Jim Cook resurfaced, years after the capture and imprisonment of his brother Bill, journalists suffered his company only to ply him with questions about Cherokee Bill, who had joined the band too late for Jim Cook to offer any recollection of him. In the early years of the twentieth century, Jim formed an alliance with Al Jennings, an Oklahoma train robber recently released from custody, to film a series of fanciful photoplays about the wild days on the border, only to be cast out of the company for his inability to embroider upon historical fact. He passed from the record, penniless and forgotten.

  Cherokee Bill, it was said, traveled with a small library of his exploits, seasoned like a cookbook with exclamation points and purple adjectives; he’d grown up reading similarly embellished accounts of Ned Christie’s vendetta and took almost carnal pleasure in his own ascension into that company. In the meantime he’d taken his amusement at the expense of banks, stores, a train or two, and the odd complacent traveler, and made sport of the humorless men who gathered, heavily armed, to write his final chapter.

  Judge Parker, who maintained a close watch on everything that appeared about events that took place in the Nations, expressed little outrage over the distortions in Cherokee Bill’s Gamble. By the time he learned of them, Cherokee Bill was in the Fort Smith jail awaiting justice.

  NINETEEN

  The new courtroom reminded some visitors of a giant humidor, wainscoted four feet high all around, with stout rails separating the gallery from the proceedings, straightback chairs for the jury, a paneled box for witnesses beside the judge’s high bench, and pews polished by the shoulder blades and backsides of those who sat to spectate, bored and mesmerized by turns by the inexorably turning gears of justice. The furlongs of polished oak smelled strongly of furniture oil, which on hot days when the slow swoop of the electric ceiling fan failed to stir the heavy air blended with sweat and the stench of mothballs from woolen suits just out of storage.

  Others compared the place to a church, and the analogy was not inept. For all the men who had been removed from that insular chamber to the new federal jail, there to await their appointments with George Maledon on the old scaffold, and the men and women who had been escorted from there in manacles to trains bound for penetentiaries in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Little Rock, there were nearly as many stories of innocence established, wrongs reversed, families reunited, and unions sanctified: Parker had performed weddings there and at his home. Accounts of these happy occasions found their way into the social columns of the Elevator and the Evening Call, but died on the telegraph wires between Fort Smith and the newspapers in the East, where multiple executions boosted readership far more dependably, although not so much as in the days when the engine of the law had chugged away in the old military barracks; with the escalating situation with wicked Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, America had begun to fancy itself a world power, and business was more pressing from the eastern half of the globe. The Shah of Persia was dead by an assassin’s hand, the British were mired in the Sudan, the Turks were slaughtering Armenians in gross lots in Constantinople. The Hanging Judge seemed as quaint as knee breeches.

  Nevertheless the scaffold was maintained in working condition. Mollie King, who with two of her lovers had murdered and buried her husband, Ed, in the Cherokee Nation, had been found guilty and scheduled to hang, but as her four female predecessors had h
ad their sentences commuted or their cases pardoned, and J. Warren Reed had taken up her standard, Parker doubted he’d be executing a woman that season. Still other cases considered settled in Fort Smith hung like overripe fruit on the tangled branches in Washington while the dates set for final disposition came and went. His enemies in Congress and on the Supreme Court had engaged him in a war of nerves, a staring contest in which he was determined not to flinch. The gray nonentity from the staff of deputy marshals who had assumed Maledon’s responsibilities upon his retirement oiled the trap, treated the ropes as prescribed by the man he’d succeeded, and dropped sandbags to stretch the hemp and test its strength, the squee-thump! blending as always with the other routine sounds of Fort Smith. One never knew when the men in the capital might decide the old gargoyle on the bench was right for once, and the equipment must be equal to expectations.

  Parker meanwhile attended church each Sunday—sometimes twice, in deference to Mary’s Catholicism, although not as frequently as when her brandy bill was not so high and her tread more steady. There were weeks when she didn’t imbibe, and accompanied her husband to meetings of the Social Reading Club, of which he was president, and which met in the homes of members. They read and discussed Uncle Tom’s Cabin, General Wallace’s Ben-Hur, the poems of Rudyard Kipling, and The Prisoner of Zenda, which Mary defended with passion, but which the judge considered a cheap imitation of better works by Dumas the elder. She recited poetry—Wet the Clay was the favorite—and Parker, buoyed by an unexpectedly favorable finding in Washington and a saturation of Sunday bonhomie, sang “She’ll be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain” in a rich baritone while the organist from the Methodist church played piano. The husbands shook his hand with enthusiasm and their wives expressed surprise at the strength of his voice. They avoided the indiscreet depositions in court and had never heard him condemn a prisoner to his face with all the thunder of a damnation in the Book of Exodus. (“Old Thunder” had become a term of endearment applied to him by deputies who had been present during sentencings.)