by The Branch
But Parker’s story is more than just a legal thriller. Any drama that employes Belle Starr, Heck Thomas, the Dalton brothers, Bill Tilghman, Ned Christie, Bill Doolin, Cherokee Bill, Chris Madsen, “Cattle Annie” McDougal, Jennie “Little Britches” Stevens, and the fascinating and sinister George Maledon—the Dr. Kevorkian of his day—ought to run on Broadway for at least as long as Parker sat in judgment. All are legends, and the real wonder of the thing is they all played out in the same geographic locale within a span of two decades.
Unlike most of the tales associated with the American West, these are closely documented, in thousands of pages of trial transcript, period newspapers, many of whose editors prided themselves on accuracy, and three volumes that are absolutely essential to the solution of the enigma that was Isaac Charles Parker:
Hell on the Border, by S. W. Harman. Three years after Parker’s death, Harman, a defense counsel in his court, published this massive chronicle, with names, dates, and all the pertinent details attending the most notorious cases that came across the Fort Smith bench between 1856 and 1896, with photographs and tables listing defendants, charges, victims, and dates of trials and sentencings, noting commutations, pardons, retrials, and their results. The book is indispensable, and is the major source of most that has been written about Judge Parker.
He Hanged Them High, by Homer Croy. An anecdotal and highly entertaining account of Parker’s life and work (even the index is amusing), Croy’s book draws its material from Harman, long-buried transcripts, and contemporary newspaper accounts, with valuable new information gathered from interviews with surviving personnel and direct descendants of the principals, many of whom were still alive when the book appeared in 1952.
Law West of Fort Smith, by Glenn Shirley. A prolific and popular Old West historian, Shirley distilled information from the Harman and Croy sources with research of his own among newspapers, court records, and biographies of figures peripheral to his subject to create a chronological and highly readable history. He is, however, casual about some facts (asserting that both of the Parkers’ sons were present when they first came to Fort Smith, when James had not been born yet), and the lack of an index among more than one hundred pages of appendices, notes, and bibliography is irksome to researchers.
Although to my knowledge The Branch and the Scaffold is the first novel to present Judge Parker as its central subject, he has played an important supporting role in a number of works of historical fiction. These are among the best:
Cherokee Bill, by Jon and Tad Richards. This comes closest to being a novel about Parker. The judge shares nearly equal space with Clarence Goldsby, with the rest of the volume divided more or less evenly among J. Warren Reed; his wife, Viola; and, of course, George Maledon. It’s a rip-roaring read, authentic in detail, with much navel-gazing on the part of its eponymous protagonist.
Hanging Judge, by Elmer Kelton. Despite its title, it’s mostly about Justin Moffitt, a newly sworn deputy U.S. marshal assigned to Parker’s court, and his relationship with another fictional character, Marshal Sam Dark. Kelton, heir to the “King of the West” mantle that once belonged to Louis L’Amour (and a better writer than L’Amour by far), is known for his intimacy with historical detail, fully drawn characters, and compelling plots, and his subject matter here delivers in all three departments.
True Grit, by Charles Portis. The book is best known as the inspiration for the movie that won John Wayne his only Oscar; but the role would not have been so meaty had it come from the brain of a Hollywood screenwriter. An Ozarkian, Portis draws from primary sources and his own relationship with the locale to create a seminal work in the literature of the frontier. The early scenes in Fort Smith are worth the price of the book, but what follows is pure entertainment, and “true grit.”
Winding Stair, by Douglas C. Jones. Jones, an Arkansawyer, hit the national bestseller list with The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer, postulating what might have happened had Custer survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but here he plays it straight, with a lengthy cameo by Parker and a brief but unforgettable glimpse of Maledon in a plot based loosely on the manhunt and final disposition of the Rufus Buck Gang. Eben Pay, the fictional lawyer hero, is naive and a bit prissy, but Jones’ creation of Deputy U.S. Marshal Oscar Schiller is his best contribution to the pantheon of Great Western Characters Who Never Existed.
Parker has been represented in the cinema with spotty success. James Westerfield was too old and bald in the movie True Grit, but played the role with an admirable balance of authority and irritability; John McIntyre, another fine character actor who donned the robes in the dismal sequel, Rooster Cogburn, was also much older than Parker lived to be, but was closer physically; at least he had hair. The best Parker in Hollywood was Pat Hingle, who in Hang ’Em High bore a close resemblance to the judge during his early years on the bench, and characterized him with an Old Testament clarity of purpose tempered with conscience—rendering inexplicable the decision to change his name and even the name of Fort Smith. (Fun fact: One of the men Hingle sends to the scaffold is James Westerfield, True Grit’s Parker!) The film and True Grit, book and movie, borrowed heavily from He Hanged Them High. Dale Robertson’s gunslinging Judge Parker in a TV movie, The Dalton Gang’s Last Ride, was claptrap, although it’s entertaining to see Parker shoot down bounty hunter Jack Palance in a quick-draw contest at the finish.
Bloody business connected with the Indian Nations did not end with the breakup of the Eighth District Court, and a number of mysteries that took place in its jurisdiction are still unsolved.
No one ever stood trial for the murder of Myra Belle Shirley, better known as Belle Starr. The likeliest candidate, neighbor Edgar Watson, was arrested, but released for lack of evidence, only to be shot down by a citizens’ posse in his home state of Florida in 1910. Ed Reed, Starr’s shiftless son, remains a strong suspect. In 1971, a man named Robinson reported that his grandmother, Nana Devena, had confessed on her deathbed to slaying Starr in a case of mistaken identity involving a feud with another neighbor.
No hard evidence supports the controversial theory that Heck Thomas did not kill Bill Doolin but peppered his tubercular corpse with buckshot in order to claim the reward and split it with Doolin’s wife. Glenn Shirley, in Heck Thomas, Frontier Marshal, called the story “scurrilous,” and in Bill Doolin, Outlaw O.T., Colonel Bailey C. Hanes suggested it was fabricated by an enemy of Thomas’ to discredit him, but Dennis McLoughlin, in his entry on Doolin in Wild and Woolly: An Encyclopedia of the Old West, asserts on the authority of his research that Thomas acted from altruistic reasons and talked Doolin’s penniless widow into accepting part of the reward after the fact. Whichever account is true, in a chronicle jam-packed with stalkings and gunfights, the postmortem-shootout theory is the more intriguing, and deserves further investigation.
Emmett Dalton, youngest of the bandit brothers, recovered from severe wounds suffered during the addle-pated attempt to rob their first two banks simultaneously in their hometown of Coffeyville, and was paroled from the Kansas State Penitentiary in 1907. He became a building contractor in Hollywood, moonlighting as a writer for the silent screen. His memoirs, When the Daltons Rode, were filmed in 1940, three years after his death from old age, but censorship required that the man upon whose autobiography the script was based die in the robbery along with the others.
George Maledon retired after the appeals process cheated him of the satisfaction of stretching the neck of the man who’d murdered his daughter. After failing at farming and shopkeeping, he toured the country with his ropes and tintypes and a piece of the original mainbeam of the Fort Smith scaffold, lecturing on the theme that crime does not pay. He died in Johnson City, Tennessee, on May 6, 1911, a few weeks short of his eighty-first birthday.
Ike Rogers did not long outlive Cherokee Bill, with whom he’d shared a bizarre night in bed and the next day turned over to Parker’s deputies for the reward. In August 1897—by chance, some said—he stepped out
of a railroad coach onto the platform in Fort Gibson and was shot fatally through the neck by a revolver in the hand of Clarence Goldsby, younger brother to Cherokee Bill. Goldsby, who, incredibly, was employed as a payroll guard at the time, dove under the stopped train, sprang up on the other side, and ran away from his pursuers, who were probably not that keen to begin with; Rogers had been overheard boasting that he would kill Cherokee Bill’s brother.
James Parker, the judge’s second son, committed suicide in 1918. It was said he never got over the loss of his father.
Charles Parker, his firstborn, married a daughter of Prosecutor William H. H. Clayton. She left him. He hadn’t many friends beyond those of the drinking variety and few turned out for his funeral when he died of cirrhosis of the liver in Durant, Oklahoma, in 1925.
Mary Parker buried her sons and returned to Fort Smith, but the generation that had grown up since her husband’s death did not remember the town’s former first lady. She went back to Durant, where she had lived with Charlie, and died a year later. She was interred beside her husband in the National Cemetery in Fort Smith.
J. Warren Reed lost his enthusiasm for the practice of law after the passing of his nemesis. (“Our beloved judge has fallen asleep,” he told a reporter for the Fort Smith News-Record.) He began a book about the court, then lost interest in that too and turned his notes over to S. W. Harman, who used them for Hell on the Border. Then Reed lost his wife. He retired to a life of senile dementia in Muskogee. In 1912 he joined Viola in Fort Smith’s Oak Cemetery.
Ned Christie presents as great a challenge to history as he did to the Eighth District Court. Depending upon the source, he was either an innocent or a fiend or remarkably stupid; and the last two are insupportable by the evidence. Slipshod sensationalists have charged him with multiple robberies and as many as eleven murders, but when pressed for details fall silent. That he was cunning is inarguable. Accused of murdering a federal officer, a crime which then as now invited swift and savage retribution, he managed to remain at large for seven years, with every deputy marshal and Indian policeman in the territory knowing where he was, and when they finally converged upon him in his self-built fortress, a cannon failed to dislodge him and his ingenuity trumped even dynamite. Did he kill Deputy Daniel Maples? The picture is murky; I introduced a canine atrocity in lieu of specifics about the “disturbance” that led to harsh words between them. The long record of skirmishes with Parker’s men, several of whom Christie shot but none fatally despite ample opportunity, casts doubt on his guilt in the Maples killing. I’m inclined to believe that had Christie gone to Fort Smith to tell his side of the story, he might have been released. Popular history, of course, would have suffered.
Henry Starr, no doubt in part for volunteering to disarm Cherokee Bill in the federal jail, was allowed to plead his murder case down to manslaughter and served five years at hard labor. Paroled again in 1913 after robbing a bank in Colorado, he caught Dalton fever two years later and took a bullet through a leg while trying to rob two banks in Chandler, Oklahoma. He was sentenced to serve twenty-five years in the state penitentiary, but was granted a pardon in 1919. (By now his adventures had begun to appear in serial form in Sunday newspaper supplements, where they were devoured by little Charles Arthur Floyd, who was not yet known as “Pretty Boy.”) In February 1921, Starr left his automobile running in front of the People’s Bank of Harrison, Arkansas, adjusted his snap-brim hat, and with pistol in hand swaggered into a shotgun blast courtesy of the manager. He died the next day, the last of the old-time Oklahoma badmen.
Defending Isaac Charles Parker from detractors is a staple of books about him. However, modern opinion of his record is more moderate than it was in his own time, particularly in the East. The fact that as many men (counting local peace officers and Indian police) died in the court’s service as were condemned by it suggests that circumstances were far from overbalanced in the court’s favor, and judiciary reviews have for the most part supported Parker’s rulings. Certainly the men and women he felt duty bound to protect experienced no ambiguity in the matter; they showed up in the hundreds to pay their respects at his graveside service. Wherever one stands on the thorny subject of capital punishment, it is tempting to hope that such as he will sit in judgment in a case of personal interest.
As for the Fort Smith scaffold, silent since the dissolution of the court, the suggestion that it be sent on tour with Maledon horrified the citizens, who were eager to forget it ever existed. The city council had it burned and the ashes buried. Two generations passed in near ignorance of the court and its great engine of death; then, with mock gunfights being staged in Tombstone, Arizona, and pilgrimages being made to the scene of Wild Bill Hickok’s murder in Deadwood, South Dakota, the city had a change of heart and reconstructed the scaffold on its original site to draw visitors. It stands in the shadow of the courthouse, directly under Judge Parker’s window.
Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
I: A DREAM OF JUSTICE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
II: A PRAYER FOR NED CHRISTIE
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
III: A WOMAN IN HER TIME
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IV: A FLAW IN THE SYSTEM
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
V: A PROMISE TO PUNISH
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A SUMMATION FOR THE DEFENSE
