The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

TEN

  Three years of skirmishes followed, but Heck Thomas, either in punishment for his failure to kill or capture Christie or because he was too well known in Going Snake to breach the outlaw’s early-warning system, was assigned to other duties. Another Heck, surnamed Bruner, assumed command of the investigation, and with deputies Rusk and others fought running battles with Christie’s men in and near Rabbit Trap Canyon; three more deputies and several Indians friendly to Parker’s court were wounded.

  Whether Christie himself took part in these fights was a subject of heated argument in the saloons of Fort Smith, where veterans of the seven-year conflict gathered to show off their scars and swap war stories. Some said Heck Thomas had broken his spirit when he took away his eye and his good looks, others that he was still recuperating. Still others insisted he’d died of his injury and that his friends had entered into a conspiracy to keep his legend alive by carrying out raids and defensive operations in his name. L. P. Isbell, retired from service with a paralyzed shoulder courtesy of Christie, said the biggest mistake the deputies ever made was to destroy the cabin, and with it the one place the outlaw was sure to return to from time to time; now he could be anywhere in the miles of alien country, crouched in ambush behind the next fallen log or perched overhead in a tree.

  “Time was you could rout him out with a rifle and a plan,” he said. “Now you’d be lucky to take him with the Seventh Cavalry.”

  Which words would be remembered in the marshal’s office later.

  Christie had, in fact, recovered, with the treatment of the same Cherokee surgeon who had dug Christie’s bullet out of Deputy Joe Bowers’ knee in 1885; and if anything his spirit was more determined than ever. He, his family, and those who remained loyal to his rebellion had withdrawn to the far end of the canyon, chosen a site high in the Cookson Hills against a wall of striated rock with a view of every approach, and hacked a path between it and a steam-driven sawmill operated by an acquaintance, who provided wagonloads of hickory logs, enough to build a small settlement. Working from sunup to sundown, and drinking himself nights into stupefaction—the only rest he knew—Christie, with a bandanna knotted diagonally around his head to keep the sweat from burning his vacant socket, dug stones from the earth with his companions to erect a foundation and notched and stacked the logs four deep. When the walls were complete and a roof added (and rethatched with damp sod on a regular basis to resist catching fire from hurled torches), the low, dark building, with narrow ports in place of windows, was aesthetically inferior to the comfortable cabin the Christies had lost, but as a fortress its fame spread swiftly. By the time the legend crossed into Arkansas, it included a moat stocked with water moccasins and a standing army of fifteen of Christie’s closest supporters. In reality, time, attrition, and Native impatience to waiting had shrunken his resources to his wife and family, lieutenanted by son Arch and a whiskey peddler and petty thief who called himself Soldier Hair; and Christie was afraid of snakes.

  By October 1892, President Harrison had installed Jacob Yoes as U.S. marshal for the Eighth District. Yoes, a choleric Teuton several years younger than any of his predecessors and several times more ambitious than John Carroll, assigned seventeen deputy marshals to lay siege to Ned Christie’s stronghold. It was the largest federal force ever assembled against one man, and Yoes took personal command of the expedition, the only marshal in Parker’s long tenure ever to take saddle in the field.

  “At least if we shit the bed this time we won’t be alone,” remarked one Christie veteran.

  As the summons to report to duty shot out over the wires, deputies Bruner and Paden Tolbert traveled to Coffeyville, Kansas, borrowed a military cannon and personnel to help them load it aboard a flatcar, and escorted the gun by rail to Tahlequah. Army engineers in Fort Gibson transferred several cases of dynamite from the powder magazine to Yoes and took his receipt.

  There was no longer need for secrecy. Christie was said to feel secure in his citadel, and in any case had broadcast his vow—translated from the Cherokee—to retreat no farther: “Like the bear, I will die where I was born.” Indians in all five nations, and non-Indians who lived there by their leave, observed for days as men straddling glossy, well-fed mounts passed through their settlements, weighted down with pistols and big-bore rifles and belts of ammunition, stars flashing on their breasts. These witnesses laughed as Tolbert and Bruner cursed and whipped mules struggling to pull their artillery piece out of the mud. Then it hove to, gleaming in its ugly potential, and they fell silent.

  An army was on the march. Some swore they heard the roll of drums calling men to muster.

  Judge Parker, more aware than ever that the eyes of the East were upon him, broke precedent and assigned a press agent to the campaign. The bespectacled little German set up his tripod in a private coach and in the same sawmill where Christie had acquired his building material and committed the solemn, droopily moustached, self-important faces of the heavily armed men to glass plates. When the magnesium glare faded and sight returned, they rocked over the rails and took to their saddles, each to his own thoughts, and all of them trained on the days ahead.

  “Fat men on fat horses loaded down with iron,” said Soldier Hair, conversing with Christie in their native tongue. “I bet a case of whiskey they don’t make it halfway through the canyon.”

  Christie swigged from a bottle of Nancy Shell’s stock and passed it over. “Why not make it two? That’s the last of it.”

  His wife came to stand over them. They were sitting on the hard clay floor of the fortress with their backs against the logs, which was how they spent most of their days, with their Winchesters across their laps. Christie had lost his taste for the card games the white man played, and both had forgotten the games enjoyed by their ancestors. Part Indian, part snake . . .

  “Supper is on the table,” she said.

  “Eat it and tell us how good it was.” Soldier Hair giggled and drank.

  She raised her skirts and kicked the bottle from his hand, cutting his lip. He cursed and grabbed for his carbine, but was impeded by Christie, who lunged across him to rescue the bottle before it emptied. By then the long Cherokee tradition of female dominance had kicked in, and Soldier Hair sat back and smeared away the blood with the back of a hand.

  “You are no better than that pig John Parris.” She spun on her heel.

  “Who is John Parris?” asked Soldier Hair.

  A few days later, Christie helped his wife onto the seat of the wagon that had swept him away from his burning cabin, handed up the smallest of his children, and sent them off to her sister’s house in Tahlequah. She fixed him at length with her mahogany-colored eyes, then gave the lines a flip.

  Dawn came the color of metal on November 2, with the raw-iron smell of early snow. The dogs outside were barking and had been since an hour before daylight. By then the men on the grounds had all found their positions behind trees and in the brush. Christie had given up trying to keep overgrowth clear of the fort as a waste of time and energy; it marched relentlessly, more stubborn even than Parker’s marshals, and at forty, after seven years spent on high alert and with the effort of keeping his balance with only one eye, he lacked the endurance, and Soldier Hair the ambition. Arch had grown into an arrogant young rebel who considered yard work beneath him. They were a fine gang of desperadoes.

  The men in the fort had traded positions at the gun ports throughout the last dark hour, but had failed to find a mark to shoot at, and Christie was unwilling to snap off at mere rustles in the brush; his neighbors sometimes took it upon themselves to stand sentry uninvited, and in any case he was reluctant to shoot one of his dogs by accident. It was his soft spot for dogs that had gotten him into this pickle, but there it was: You could change a man’s station over a trifle such as a misunderstanding, but his basic nature was bred in the bone. He contented himself with waiting for a proper target, and admonished Arch and Soldier Hair to do the same.

  Ironically, when the challenge came, he’d
dozed off; and when Yoes introduced himself, in a bawling voice best suited to a platform bunted for Independence Day, and told him there was nothing for it but surrender, it startled him into firing a shot through his own roof. He’d fallen asleep in a crouch against the wall with his finger on the trigger.

  A quarter-hour’s worth of racket ensued, with repeaters and buffalo guns and the deep bellowing roar of Stevens streetsweepers clearing the woods of birds, varmints, and deer for a mile about and tearing great yellow gashes in the logs, but otherwise doing no damage to his redoubt; there was nothing stouter on the Holy Spirit’s green earth than native hickory, and no better workmanship than the Cherokee. A stray pellet of buckshot found its way through a port and broke in half a washbasin in its stand, but Christie had ceased to fret about his wife’s nice things. That was a bit of freedom he hadn’t counted on when he’d decided to abandon the life of the little white man and ride the high country. He loved the old girl, but there were times when the dungeon in Fort Smith seemed preferable.

  Arch found the first target, but as far as his father could tell by the way the man in his sights retreated into the brush without staggering, the only pain would be felt by his tailor. Christie regretted never having had the chance to tutor his son in the manly art of marksmanship; an unforgivable failing in a skilled gunsmith. To plug the gap, he sent a round after the boy’s, knowing the marshal had better sense than to withdraw in a straight line. It would be an insult to himself to assume otherwise. A man rated his standing by the quality of his foes.

  “Fire!”

  When the cannon opened up, from a cover built of cut branches on the edge of the woods like a deer blind, Christie grinned, like a child at a medicine show, at the gout of smoke and fire erupting from a sylvan patch—and laughed loud enough to be heard by his attackers when the three-pound ball struck a log with a thud he felt in his testicles and bounded away in a reverse trajectory nearly identical to the first, striking the ground just short of the woods and bouncing into them like a sphere of rubber cast by a titan playing jacks.

  “Duck!”

  That set the pattern for the next several rounds:

  “Fire!”

  “Duck!”

  “Fire!”

  “Duck!”

  Each time, the ball struck the logs hard enough to rattle his teeth, only to plummet back toward its source. Christie took snap shots at exposed limbs as the marshals in charge of the cannon scrambled out of harm’s way. While they were reloading, he joined Arch and Soldier Hair in pestering the other marshals, using the smoke that blossomed from behind trees for a mark. Clouds of spent powder stung their eyes and a fog lay over the yard as in lithographs Christie had seen of Gettysburg.

  Again the brush stirred in which the cannon was hidden; he braced himself for another blast. Then the brush parted and he saw the great blue-black muzzle for the first time, approaching the fort as if under its own power. It stuck out over the top of iron rails stacked in a square inside the wagon it sat upon, the rails shielding the men who were pushing it. As Christie drew a bead, hoping to dislodge the stack, bullets rataplaned off the logs near his gun port. He threw himself away from it. For the better part of a minute, all three defenders crouched in cover while the marshals laid down heavy fire at all the openings. Then thunder shook the earth as another three-pounder struck, harder than the others. Still the fort held.

  Thirty times the logs were struck. That was more balls than had been brought, but some were used more than once because they had an accommodating habit of returning home after they had failed to stave in their target. Down on the ground, Marshal Yoes got the gunners’ attention and slashed a hand across his throat. Bruner and Tolbert jumped out of the wagon and ran for the woods, unshipping carbines from their shoulders as they abandoned the artillery for the infantry. Yoes called for more fire and sent deputies Bill Smith and Charlie Copeland running to the wagon, carrying a crate of dynamite between them by the rope handles. The wagon containing the silenced cannon stood twenty yards from the fort, a miniature redoubt in its own right and the first armored vehicle in combat history.

  With Tolbert and Smith hammering at the fort on one side and deputies Ellis and White doing the same on the other, Copeland dashed the sixty feet, trailing smoke from a burning fuse, and jammed a bundle of six sticks of dynamite into the space where two logs crossed at the corner, then ran a serpentine course back with bullets stitching the sod around him.

  The roar of the explosion boxed the ears of marshal and deputies, pounding the ground and throwing eight-foot sections of log thirty feet in the air. Ellis, White, Copeland, Tolbert, and Smith charged the fort under cover of the smoke and dust, levering and firing as they ran.

  A gap had been blown in the wall large enough to admit a wagon. The deputies vaulted over the debris and wheeled right and left, throwing down on shadows in the haze.

  A volley of shots sent them to the walls. In the lull that followed, they searched for targets, but as the fog settled, they saw they were alone. Tolbert opened his mouth to shout this information to Yoes—then flattened against the wall as more reports crackled from nowhere.

  “They’re under the floor!” White pointed his Winchester down and slammed a succession of bullets through the planks, new and yellow and recently erected on a framework built on the clay beneath. The other deputies joined him, riddling the boards.

  Outside the fort, Deputy Marshal E. B. Ratteree saw a man crawl out through a space beneath the floor, but held his fire in the murk of smoke for fear of hitting a fellow deputy. The man saw him and shouldered his own rifle. Before Ratteree could react, his face caught fire. Momentarily blinded by a powder flare whose mark he would carry for the rest of his life, he fired back.

  Ned Christie bounded to his feet, whooping and gobbling. A space of silence, and then a dozen carbines rolled thunder. He pirouetted and fell, as loose-limbed as a scarecrow.

  Arch Christie escaped once again, as he had from his father’s burning cabin three years before. The deputies found Soldier Hair crawling on hands and knees under the floor and had to turn him over with a foot and shove their muzzles into his face to obtain his surrender; he was badly burned and both eardrums were punctured.

  Jacob Yoes’s deputies slung Christie’s corpse into the wagon containing the cannon and carried it a hundred miles to Fort Smith like a trophy bear. They took a door off its hinges, leaned the stiff body against it, propped Christie’s Winchester in his arms, and posed with him for the little German photographer; it was the closest any of them had gotten to him in seven years. After citizens filed past to look at the man who had declared war upon the United States, Watt Christie arrived to claim the remains and took them back to Rabbit Trap for burial and the traditional Cherokee plea for the disposition of his spirit.

  III

  A WOMAN IN HER TIME

  These impossible women! How they do get around us!

  —ARISTOPHANES

  ELEVEN

  Judge Parker congratulated Marshal Yoes, but had not the leisure to draw a breath of relief at the close of the longest hunt for a lone fugitive in American history. Privately he considered the expenditure of seventeen men, an artillery piece, and dynamite to exterminate one bandit an admission of desperation, and a failure of sorts. In any case, the docket left no space for reflection, and his enemies in Congress were threatening once again to slice up his jurisdiction like one of Mary’s cakes for the condemned. Many of these meddlers had still been at school when he first took the bench; it was the privilege of youth to regard so venerable a fixture as an impediment to civilization instead of its instrument. The hanging of six more men in company on January 16, 1890, had revived all the old arguments, even though the private nature of the execution—attended by invitation only, with passes signed by the marshal—had drawn little fire from his old nemesis, the Eastern press. The eyes of the Union were drifting eastward, toward the robber barons of New York, and southward, toward the Spanish situation in Cuba, and no less
an authority than Frederick Jackson Turner was about to declare the frontier closed. It was at such times that a man felt the world turning beneath his feet.

  The strain of defending his territory, and of his punishing schedule, had whitened his hair and beard. From a distance he appeared to be wearing a polished porcelain bowl on his head, and when he bent over his papers in court he looked like an old woman in his robes. That impression evaporated when he lifted his chin and fixed the prisoner in the dock with the cold blue stare of an experienced killer of men. Seventy-one had died by his judgment.

  The number should have been higher. Presidents would interfere from time to time, to placate certain wrongheaded contributors, and his opponents on Capitol Hill, carpetbaggers to the last, had granted convicted prisoners the right to appeal his decisions to the Supreme Court, after fourteen years of allowing him a free hand. For a time, no attorney exercised this right, knowing Parker for a fair man and not wishing to incur his displeasure by questioning his wisdom. Then J. Warren Reed, a prancing peacock of a man, Parker’s opposite in everything but gender (and his silk shirts and wasp-waisted clawhammer coats obscured even that distinction; also, he was his wife’s intellectual inferior), took the case of his client, a thief and murderer named William Alexander, to Washington. The Supreme Court had reviewed the evidence, ruled incompetent the testimony of a key prosecution witness, and ordered a new trial. This time, Reed went on the attack, splitting the jury five to seven; and William H. H. Clayton, Parker’s friend and partner in justice from the early days, rusty and out of practice from his hiatus under Cleveland, had told the judge in confidence that he was pessimistic about the outcome of the third trial. (Next month, he would drop all charges.)

  When Parker himself was still awaiting word of the decision in Washington, a groundswell of cheering penetrated the window of his chambers in the new courthouse, originating in the fresh construction of the jail, and he knew he’d been defeated. Minutes later his clerk, Stephen Wheeler—brigadier general, retired, in the Arkansas State Militia, still baby-faced behind his imperial whiskers—appeared holding a telegraph flimsy. Parker merely nodded. Somehow, the news had reached the men most directly affected by the appeals process before it entered the halls of justice. Predators were the first to sense weakness in the enemy.