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.
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