Outlaw Dick Adams

I'm currently working on my next book, which will likely be called Murder and Mayhem in Northeast Oklahoma, since it is scheduled to be part of the Murder and Mayhem series published by The History Press. One of the desperadoes I considered including in the book was Dick Adams, a notorious thief and whiskey peddler who operated mainly in the Spavinaw region during the 1890s; however, I've pretty much decided not to include him, since he really wasn't all that desperate or infamous. So, I'm going to write about him here.

Adams was first heard from on the criminal front in the spring of 1895 when several officers went out southeast of Vinita across the Grand River to try to capture him and other outlaws said to be terrorizing that neighborhood. The mission proved unsuccessful.

According to a later report, Adams had first come to Oklahoma (Indian Territory at the time) from Missouri several years prior to his run-in with the law. He was an upstanding farmer at first who was considered very industrious. It was said he would work from sunup to sundown.  

Not finding farming profitable enough, however, he turned to whiskey running. He would travel to Arkansas by day and return at night with a load of whiskey, which he reportedly sold mainly to the black population along the Grand River. When law officers got on to his scheme, he began to steal cattle.  

In February of 1896, Adams and some of his cohorts clashed with a posse led by US marshal Heck Bruner. The two sides exchanged gunfire, but no one on either side was seriously injured.

In November of the same year, lawmen made a raid on a band of cattle thieves on Mustang Creek about ten miles from Vinita. In the ensuing gunfight, Adams was wounded with a shotgun blast to the gut, and one of his sidekicks was killed. 

Then, about the first of December, four black men were arrested near Bolen's Ferry on Grand River for stealing a steer from a man living at the ferry and butchering it. Adams was also implicated in the crime, but he evaded arrest. 

About the first of September 1897, Adams was arrested at Sapulpa. At first there was some doubt as to his identity, but it was finally confirmed that he was indeed Adams and he admitted participating in the shootout on Mustang Creek. In late September, Adams passed through Vinita in the custody of lawmen who were taking him to jail at Muskogee. Quite a crowd turned out to watch the notorious outlaw pass through town.

Adams pled guilty to cattle theft and was sentenced to four years in prison. Some observers thought he got off with a very light sentence, considering that he was under indictment on three other charges at the time and those charges were dropped. Among the critics was a Vinita newspaperman, who said that Adams "never shot a man in his life and was a notorious coward, always running away when an attempt was made to capture him."