The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Another chapter in my Murder and Mayhem in NE Oklahoma book (https://amzn.to/3Zlvl3U) is about the Tulsa Race Massacre. On Monday, May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old African American, was accused of accosting Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white girl, in an elevator in downtown Tulsa. The next day, Rowland was arrested and placed in jail.

Rowland denied that he had molested the girl, but his protestations of innocence made no difference to many Tulsans when they heard of his arrest. Tension between Blacks and whites during the Ku Klux Klan era of the 1920s was high, especially in Tulsa, where many Black citizens lived in and around the thriving Greenwood business district, which was known as black Wall Street because of its economic success. Meanwhile, many poor whites just across the railroad tracks to the south were struggling financially and surely resented their prosperous neighbors.

Throughout Tuesday afternoon and early evening, rumors of a lynching were whispered from one white Tulsan to another, and by about 7:30 that evening, hundreds of angry whites had gathered outside the Tulsa County Courthouse. The mob demanded that law officers turn over Rowland, but Sheriff W.M. McCullough refused.

When a group of Black men showed up to help defend Rowland if necessary, McCullough assured them they weren't needed and they left, but their appearance alarmed and angered the white mob. By 9:30 p.m., the mob had grown to about 2,000. McCullough tried to talk to the mob into dispersing, but the crowd hooted him down.

About 10:00 p.m., a second group of armed Black men, after hearing of the growing mob, went to the courthouse to offer their help in maintaining order, but again they were turned away. As the black men were leaving, a white man accosted one of them and tried to disarm him. The black man, a World War I vet, refused to hand over his weapon. During the ensuing struggle, a shot was fired, and the riot was on.

The white mob opened fire on the African Americans, and the Black men returned fire. Greatly outnumbered, the Black men retreated toward the Greenwood district, skirmishing with a pursuing horde of whites along the way. Fighting broke out elsewhere as well.

Hundreds of whites, including some members of the mob, were deputized and told to "Get a gun, get a nigger.” In their fury, the white mob largely forgot about Dick Rowland.

Angry whites prowled the streets of downtown Tulsa looking for Blacks to exact vengeance on. They broke into stores and pawn shops to steal guns and ammunition. Some of the rioters included Tulsa policemen.

The armed Blacks were driven across the Frisco tracks that separated Greenwood from downtown Tulsa shortly after midnight. Outnumbered, the Black men made a determined stand, as the two sides exchanged gunfire for over an hour.

After the Black defenders were finally forced to retreat, a few carloads of whites conducted drive-by shootings through the Black neighborhoods while others in the white mob began setting fires to African American homes and businesses.

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the National Guard was called out, supposedly to restore order, but they spent most of their time rounding up Blacks to hand over to police as prisoners.

With the coming of daylight, white rioters poured across the tracks into the Greenwood business district looting and burning homes and other buildings. Anyone who resisted was shot. Some policemen and even a few National Guardsmen joined the rioters.

By the time order was finally restored around noon on Wednesday, at least 60 and some say as many as 300 African Americans were dead. About 6,000 Black Tulsans had been rounded up and placed in temporary internment camps. About 10,000, almost the entire Black population of Tulsa, were left homeless. Over 1,000 businesses and homes were burned and many others looted but not burned.

Sheriff McCullough secretly whisked Dick Rowland out of town sometime during the riot. Sarah Page later declined to prosecute, and Rowland was exonerated. But, even today, Tulsa is still reckoning with a legacy of racial hatred that has stained the city for over a hundred years because of the senseless violence sparked by a casual encounter between the two young people.

Often called the Tulsa Race Riot or the Tulsa Race War in the past, this tragedy has come to be known more aptly in recent years as the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Cherokee Bill and the Bill Cook Gang

Another chapter in my Murder and Mayhem in NE OK book https://amzn.to/3B4XjJa is about Crawford Goldsby, one of the most infamous outlaws in the history of Indian Territory. He had his first run-in with the law in the fall of 1893 when he was just seventeen. He went to a dance at Fort Smith, where he got into a fight with an older man over a girl. A few days later, Goldsby went looking for the man and shot him three times, seriously wounding him.

Adopting the name Cherokee Bill, Goldsby soon joined the Bill Cook outlaw gang. In July 1894, the Cook gang held up a Frisco passenger train at Red Fork, Indian Territory. Later the same month, the gang rode into Chandler and robbed the Lincoln County Bank in broad daylight. A barber across the street from the bank was shot and killed by one of the gang members.

On September 17, four members of the Cook gang robbed the J. A. Parkinson store in Okmulgee at gunpoint. On October 9, three members of the Cook gang held up the Valley Depot at Claremore.
Two hours after the Claremore stickup, the same gang reportedly robbed the depot at Chouteau over twenty miles away.

In the fall of 1894, a newspaper article described Cherokee Bill as the “first lieutenant” of the Cook gang and also its "best shot and the most dangerous member.”

On November 9, 1894, Cherokee Bill and another man rode into the small village of Lenapah about ten miles north of Nowata and held up the Shufeldt store. During the robbery, Bill shot and killed a young man standing at a window in nearby restaurant.

On Saturday evening, December 22, Cherokee Bill and several partners held up the train depot in Nowata. A week later, Cherokee Bill killed his brother-in-law over the man's alleged mistreatment of Bill's sister. Two days after that, Bill paid a return visit to the Nowata train depot and single-handedly robbed it again.

Lawmen captured Bill Cook in New Mexico on January 12, 1895, and just a couple of weeks later, Cherokee Bill was captured near Nowata. Both outlaws were brought to the federal jail at Fort Smith, Arkansas. Cook was found guilty on several robbery charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Cherokee Bill was convicted of murdering the young man at Lenapah and sentenced by Isaac Parker, the so-called hanging judge, to die on the gallows. While awaiting the outcome of an appeal, Cherokee Bill killed a guard during an escape attempt. He was tried for that murder, too, and again sentenced to death. The fateful day finally came on March 17, 1896. According to one report, Bill seemed as indifferent to his impending death as he had been to life, and he remarked just before the lever was pulled dropping him into eternity that it was "a fine day to die."

Check out my new book for a much more detailed account of Cherokee Bill's exploits.

Henry Starr and the Murder of Deputy Marshal Floyd Wilson

Another chapter in my recent book, Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/3AZiJY7, is about Henry Starr. A nephew-by-marriage of the noted Belle Starr, Henry once boasted that he had robbed more banks “than any man in America,” but he never bragged about killing Deputy Marshal Floyd Wilson early in his criminal career near Nowata, Oklahoma.

Born near Fort Gibson in 1873 in the Cherokee Nation, Henry moved with relatives to the Nowata area in 1888. His first run-ins with the law came about three years later, when he was accused first of horse stealing and then of introducing illegal spirits into Indian Territory. Starr later claimed he was totally innocent of both charges, but he decided, if he was going to be treated like a criminal, he might as well become one.

After a railroad agent was held up at Nowata in August 1892, Starr was charged with the crime, and the railroad later sent out a special agent, accompanied by Deputy Wilson, to try to apprehend the robber. In mid-December, Starr killed Wilson in a confrontation a few miles northeast of Nowata. Starr allegedly shot Wilson several times after the deputy was already down.

After Wilson's death, authorities redoubled their efforts to capture Starr, but that didn't keep him from pulling off a number of other crimes before he was finally arrested in Colorado and brought back to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to face numerous charges, including the murder of Wilson. Convicted of the latter charge, Starr was sentenced to death, but the verdict was overturned on appeal, and Starr eventually received only fifteen years in prison in a plea-bargain deal.

Starr's sentence was commuted by President Teddy Roosevelt after only a few years, and he supposedly tried to go straight for a while but soon relapsed into his old ways. After another spree of crimes, Starr was arrested in Arizona in 1909 and brought back to Colorado to face a bank robbery charge there. He was found guilty and sentenced to a long stint in the penitentiary, but he again got out early when he was released on parole in 1913.

Starr drifted back into Oklahoma and soon went on another criminal rampage. Again convicted of bank robbery, he was sentenced to 25 years in the Oklahoma State Prison. He was paroled after serving only four years, and he briefly went into the movie business but apparently decided he liked being a criminal better than playing one in films. Starr's notorious criminal career finally came to an end when he was mortally wounding during his gang's robbery of a bank in Harrison, Arkansas, in February 1921.

This is a greatly condensed version of the chapter on Starr in my new book.

Bob Rogers: A Desperate Outlaw and a Reckless Villain

Another chapter in my new book, Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/48W8aRZ, is about Rob Rogers and his gang. Rogers is not as well-known nowadays as several other desperadoes who infested the Indian Nation in the latter part of the 19th century, such as Henry Starr, but Rogers was quite infamous in his own time.  

Born about 1873 in Arkansas, Bob, who was part Cherokee, moved to the Nowata area of Indian Territory with his father, Frank, and two younger brothers when he was still a boy. Some sources say Bob first became involved in criminal activity when he was scarcely 18, but details about these early incidents are scant.

Rogers’s first criminal exploit that can be well documented occurred on November 3, 1892, when he killed forty-year-old Jess Elliott, a lawyer from Vinita. On the fateful day, both men had been drinking when they got into an argument at a billiard parlor in Catoosa, and Rogers, going by the name Bob Talton, knocked the older man down and started beating him. Bystanders separated the combatants and put Rogers out of the parlor. Rogers waited outside, however, and when Elliott finally emerged, Rogers knocked him off his horse and slashed his throat with a knife. Elliott died before medical help could arrive.

Eight months later, the Bob Rogers gang, which now included his younger brothers, robbed the Frisco depot at Chelsea (Oklahoma) of $418 on the evening of June 30, 1889. 

About noon on July 13, Rogers and two partners in crime robbed the Mound Valley (Kansas) Bank, making off with about $800. 

On Friday evening, October 20, two men entered the depot of the D. M. & A. Railroad at Edna, Kansas, and forced the agent at the point of a revolver to open the safe. Recognized as Bob Rogers and Dick Brown of “the Wooten-Rogers gang of outlaws,” they made off with about $50. 

An outlaw gang tried to hold up a Missouri, Kansas and Texas train at the Kelso switch about six miles northeast of Vinita on December 22, 1893. The robbery attempt failed, but the escapade was later credited to the Rogers gang.

Bob Rogers and his crew struck again two nights later, Christmas Eve, when they held up an Iron Mountain Railroad train at Seminole in Indian Territory about five miles south of Coffeyville, Kansas. The gang cleaned out the mail and express cars and also went through the passenger cars "securing valuables of every description."

On the early morning of January 23, 1894, US deputy marshals surprised the Rogers gang at the home of Frank Rogers on Big Creek between Vinita and Nowata. Bob Rogers and another gang member were captured, while two members of the gang were either killed outright or mortally wounded. 

One newspaper opined that this episode would mark the end of Bob Rogers's criminal career, but Rogers wasn't ready to hang up his holster. Released on bond, he came back home and soon started organizing another gang. By very early March 1895, the new Rogers gang had already committed “several small depredations” in the area of Nowata, and just a day or two after this report circulated, the Rogers gang held up a store at Angola, Kansas. 

Rogers’s new notoriety didn’t last long. On Friday evening, March 15, a posse led by US. marshal James Mayes trapped Rogers at his father's home. Rogers killed one of the posse members before the lawmen retreated and called on Rogers to come out and surrender or else they would burn the house down. Rogers agreed to give up and was allowed to carry his gun out with him as long as kept it pointed down. When he got out onto the front porch and was ordered to drop the weapon and throw up his hand, he instead raised it and began backing toward the house. He got off just a single shot before he was riddled with bullets by the posse. 

Celebrating Rogers's demise, one newspaper said that his death would "rid the country of a desperate outlaw and reckless villain.”

Check out my new book for a much more detailed account of the Bob Rogers gang's activities.

 

Ned Christie, Hero or Villain?

Another chapter in my latest book, Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/40Azy65, chronicles the escapades of Ned Christie, a Cherokee Indian who waged a personal war against Federal authorities during the late 1800s. Much like Zeke Proctor, whom I wrote about last week, Christie was viewed in a completely different light by much of the Cherokee Nation from how he was characterized in the American press. To newspapermen, Christie was a notorious desperado who’d killed a deputy US marshal from ambush, but to many Cherokees, he was wrongly accused of murder by a repressive federal government and his resistance to arrest was nothing short of heroic.

A well-respected member of the Cherokee tribe, Christie first ran into trouble when he killed a man with whom he was hunting after the man supposedly called him an S.O.B. Charged with manslaughter and tried in a Cherokee court, Christie was acquitted in 1885 and went on to serve on the tribe's Executive Council.

Around the first of May 1887, US deputy marshal Daniel Maples was killed at Tahlequah while Christie was there for a tribal meeting, and he and three other men were eventually charged with the crime, partly because they were known to oppose federal authority in Indian Territory. The other three men were arrested, and one of them accused Christie of being the trigger man in the shooting of Maples. Christie said he was innocent and was willing to be tried in a Cherokee court, but he refused to surrender to federal authorities.

Thus began a years-long "war" between Christie and his allies on one side and deputy marshals on the other, as Christie, from his so-called fort east of Tahlequah, defied attempt after attempt to arrest him. After numerous futile attempts to kill or capture Christie, deputy marshals finally surrounded his home/fort in early November 1892 and killed him during a day-long siege and a furious exchange of gunfire.

Christie’s body was taken to Fort Smith for identification and then released to his father for burial in the family cemetery at Wauhillau, Oklahoma. Since his death, Christie has often been sensationally depicted in books and articles as a violent, bloodthirsty desperado. On the other hand, at least one story emerged in the early 1900s purporting to exonerate Christie completely of the Maples murder, the crime that catapulted him into outlawry, and many Cherokees today honor him as a hero for standing against US government encroachment on tribal properties and rights.

This is just a brief summary of the chapter about Christie in my new book. Check out the book for a much more extensive version of Christie's story.

Goingsnake Gunfight

Like the Boudinot and Ridge murders I wrote about last week, the Goingsnake gunfight that left eleven people dead near Christie, Oklahoma, in April of 1872, is something I've previously written about on this blog. However, since one of the chapters in my new book, Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/4fbdFhZ, is devoted to the gunfight, I'm going to summarize the event again. 

Exactly what happened is a matter of dispute to this day, because the two sides involved in the gunfight, Cherokee tribal members and the US Marshals Service, told markedly different stories. What we know for sure is that Ezekial "Zeke" Proctor, a member of the Cherokee tribe, was scheduled for trial in the Goingsnake District of the Cherokee Nation on April 15 on a charge of having killed Polly Beck two months earlier.

Polly, who was married to a white man named Kesterson, was also a member of the Cherokee tribe, but a combination of family and tribal resentments had cast her and Proctor on opposite sides. Polly's family had sided with the Treaty Party (see last week's post) over thirty years earlier when the tribal members were removed from their homelands in the Southeast to present-day Oklahoma, whereas Proctor's family had sided with the Anti-Treaty Party. Also, Kesterson had previously been married to Proctor's sister, and Proctor reportedly blamed him for the breakup of the marriage.  

Most important, perhaps, was a jurisdictional dispute between Proctor and his allies on one side and Polly's family and friends on the other. After Proctor killed Polly and wounded Kesterson, Kesterson had journeyed to Fort Smith to enlist U.S. authorities in the matter, while Proctor and his allies felt strongly that the matter should be left to Cherokee tribal authority. The US Marshals Service now claimed jurisdiction in the assault on Kesterson, but the Cherokee Nation considered Kesterson an adopted citizen and resented any interference in the matter by the US government.

On the day of Proctor's trial for the murder of Polly Beck, a party of deputy marshals, along with some of Polly's kinsmen, showed up with the avowed intention of arresting Proctor on the assault charge, should he be acquitted on the murder charge. As I say, exactly what happened next is a matter of dispute, but a gunfight broke out almost immediately, and when the shooting ceased, nine men lay dead, two mortally wounded, and several others suffering wounds of varying severity. Most of the fatalities (seven or eight) were deputy marshals. 

Even what to call this incident has been a matter of disagreement over the years. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, reports from the deputy marshals called it a massacre, and the white press adopted that terminology. So, for many years, the incident was known in popular culture as the Goingsnake Massacre. More recently, the term Goingsnake Tragedy has been suggested as a more objective term. 

Check out my new book for a much more detailed account of the Goingsnake Tragedy. https://amzn.to/4fbdFhZ

The Murder of Elias Boudinot and the Ridges

I've previously written on this blog about the feud that developed in the early 1800s between the Treaty Party and the Anti-Treaty Party factions of the Cherokee Nation over the tribe's removal from its ancestral homelands in the southeast United States to what is now Oklahoma. One of the chapters in my book Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma https://amzn.to/3Urovbn (scheduled for release on Monday) touches on the same subject. Specifically, the book chapter deals with the murders of Treaty Party leaders Elias Boudinot, Major Ridge, and his son John Ridge by members of the Anti-Treaty Party.

The murders, which took place in June of 1839, occurred in present-day Oklahoma, but they grew out of a feud that dated back several years to a time prior to removal of the Cherokees from the Southeast. When the federal government began pressing the Cherokees in the early 1800s to sign treaties ceding their lands in Georgia and other southeastern states in exchange for land west of the Mississippi, Boudinot and the Ridges were among the leaders who aligned with the Treaty Party, which favored removal. The Treaty Party was mainly composed of mixed-race Cherokees, who had intermarried with whites and largely adopted American and European culture. The much larger Anti-Treaty Party, led by tribal chief John Ross, was composed mainly of purebred Cherokees, who eschewed the ways of the white man and wanted to preserve tribal culture.

Even Boudinot and the Ridges had initially opposed removal. In fact, Major Ridge was among the tribal leaders who had adopted a resolution in 1829 calling for any member of the tribe who signed further treaties ceding Cherokee lands to be subject to the death penalty. However, he and other mixed-race members of the tribe had gradually come to see removal as the only practical step. 

Because they cooperated with the federal government, members of the Treaty Party received support and transportation when they removed to Oklahoma in 1837. The Anti-Treaty Party, on the other hand, had to be rounded up and removed forcibly in the fall of 1838, an infamous trek that came to be known as the "Trail of Tears." The ordeal the purebred Cherokees underwent during the trip further embittered them against Treaty Party members.

After the Anti-Treaty Party arrived in their new land, they, the Treaty Party, and the Old Settlers (i.e. Cherokees who had come west years earlier), met to try to reach a consensus government, but the meeting ended in impasse, as the Treaty Party insisted on retaining the government they had already established in the new land. 

After the meeting, held on June 21, 1839, broke up, some members of the Anti-Treaty Party met secretly and invoked the old "blood" law that Major Ridge himself had once espoused, calling for the deaths of Ridge, his son, and Elias Boudinot. A few of those present were appointed as executioners by drawing lots. 

The killings were carried out the next day. John Ridge was killed at his home on Honey Creek in the northeast part of Indian Territory near present-day Southwest City, Missouri. His father, who had left for Arkansas earlier on the 22nd, was overtaken along the road and killed near the state line. Meanwhile, a different party of executioners killed Elias Boudinot on the same day near his home at Park Hill, a Cherokee settlement in the Tahlequah area.

In the aftermath of the slaughter, John Ross was accused of authorizing it, but the best evidence seems to suggest that the killings were carried out in secret without the tribal chief’s knowledge. Stand Watie, who was Boudinot’s brother, and other Treaty Party members swore revenge, and federal troops were summoned from Fort Gibson to help keep the peace for a brief time. 

A tentative truce was fashioned, but the resentments left over from the feud between the Treaty Party and the Anti-Treaty Party continued for many years. During the Civil War, for instance, most former Treaty Party members sided with the Confederacy, while most Anti-Treaty Party members joined the Union forces, and both sides used the cover of war to discharge old grudges. Confederate general Stand Watie or troops under his command, for instance, are reported to have burned the John Ross home during the war.

The sketch above is a very condensed version of the events chronicled in my new book.