The Branch and the Scaffold

by The Branch

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s pleased to call himself a gambler, but that isn’t his only source of income.” Parker turned his glass in its wet circle on the desk. His eyes remained on his guest. “He receives an annual allotment of eight hundred dollars from the Indian Bureau as a husband of a Cherokee with two children of Cherokee blood.”

  The hangman lowered his head another inch.

  “His family’s in Muskogee, where he’s been arrested twice for possession of alcohol. His drink of choice is Jamaica ginger. You may have heard it called Ginger Jake. It’s a scourge in the territory.”

  Maledon nodded. This was a flavoring extract obtained from ginger, intoxicating in the extreme and lethal if ingested in large quantities without diluting it with water. Banned in the territory, it was readily available across the Texas state line, where retailers and wholesalers proliferated, well aware that most of their customers transported their purchases back to the Nations for sale or personal consumption. Carver had been acquitted both times he’d been tried in Fort Smith; it was difficult to convince a jury, to whom the offense itself was a trifle, that a young man who presented so fine an appearance in court had anything in common with the sots who came through on that charge.

  “Where are they now?”

  “Charlie Burns, who checked Carver into the jail twice, saw them at the slip last week, waiting for the ferry. They could be anywhere in the eastern Nations by now, although I suspect not too close to where his wife and children are struggling to survive without their allotment.”

  “Can you send someone after them?”

  Parker looked more uncomfortable yet. “At present, I’ve no sufficient cause to issue a warrant for Carver. Annie is past the age of consent in the State of Arkansas, so the white slavery laws don’t apply. I’ve no doubt he’s guilty of defrauding the United States by appropriating funds intended for wards of the government, but without evidence I can’t authorize his arrest. Old friends in Congress are just waiting for me to make that kind of mistake. I am sorry, Mr. Maledon, truly I am.”

  Maledon combed his fingers through his whiskers, over and over. “I must go after them myself. If I talk to her I can make her see reason.”

  “You’re sixty, and in no condition for such a journey. Where would you search? If you were fortunate enough to stumble upon them, Carver would be within his rights to send you away.”

  “You’ve forgotten I’m not exactly helpless without my ropes.”

  “Shooting down an escaping prisoner and shooting down a man in his own neighborhood are not the same thing. I should not want to sentence you to die on your own scaffold, but I will if you do murder, and there will be no phrases of comfort when I make the pronouncement. You are not a cold-blooded killer; you must disabuse yourself of that notion.” The judge’s expression had softened. Then it went flat. “In any case, your presence is needed in Fort Smith. There are four capital cases awaiting your attention.” Parker hooked on his spectacles and opened one of the portfolios on the desk. They were acts of dismissal.

  Maledon rose and went to the door.

  “George.”

  In seventeen years, neither judge nor executioner had addressed the other by his Christian name. Maledon gripped the knob and waited.

  “I’ll direct Yoes to have his men maintain a weather eye for Carver and Annie. Some of them know the girl by sight, and his face is familiar in the Cherokee, but I’ll see descriptions are provided. They can report how she is faring. She may get homesick in the meantime. Most runaways come back under their own volition.”

  Maledon left without responding. He spent the rest of the day on the scaffold, oiling the gears that operated the trap and inspecting the mortises and tenons for cracks and dry rot. He did not return home until after dark, and then he locked himself in his study without speaking to his wife. There in the company of his ropes and the faces of old customers he smoked pipe after pipe, filling the room with noxious vapors.

  In March, John Thornton mounted the steps to the scaffold for the murder of his daughter in the Choctaw Nation, whom he had shot through the head, presumably in a fit of rage after she’d deserted him for a husband. The condemned man offered no words of explanation or farewell. When he dropped, the rope whizzed around his neck, the knot caught in the hollow behind and below the left mastoid, and blood geysered like water from a hydrant as the vertebra snapped clean through and the muscles of his neck, too weak to support his superincumbent weight, tore apart. Jerking, his body remained connected to his head by the tendons alone. Several officers of the court, who had reported to that enclosure many times to witness the fulfillment of sentence, never returned to see another. A few resigned. Thornton’s coffin dripped blood from its seams as it was lowered into the Catholic cemetery.

  George Maledon had not been present. Some said he’d refused to participate because Thornton had fought in the uniform of the Union, others that Parker’s partner in punishment had lost his taste for the business. Said one, “That’s like Old Scratch losing interest in snaring souls.” Wagers were proposed, but no one offered to approach him for the truth, and nothing was to be gained by asking the judge to betray what went on in chambers. Deputy Marshal George S. White, whose inexperience while filling in for Maledon had produced the gory spectacle, pledged to adhere to his other duties henceforth.

  Soon afterward, Fort Smith society learned that Annie Maledon and Frank Carver had left the Nations for far Colorado. No one knew just when the news had reached her father.

  SIXTEEN

  Eighteen ninety-two was a big year in the Nations. Apart from the scandalous flight of the Prince of Hangmen’s only daughter, that twelvemonth witnessed the explosive end of the low comedy of Ned Christie’s war, and in Coffeyville, across the Kansas state line, the annihilation of the Dalton Gang after three years of train robbery, some sixty thousand dollars spirited away from righteous hands, and the lowest casualty count of any of the desperate associations of the era.

  The brothers—Bob, Grat, and Emmett—had first taken to the adventurous life in the service of Parker, riding with their eldest brother, Frank; then leapt the fence after whiskey smugglers slaughtered him from ambush in 1887. For a time, they had partnered with smugglers and rustlers while still wearing badges, but when warrants were issued in Fort Smith for their arrest, they fled to California, where they struck the Southern Pacific Railroad but failed to break open the safe in the depot. Back in the Nations—Oklahoma Territory, now, with Sooners busting clods on homesteads once divided among the Five Civilized Tribes—they took on four new members, including Bill Doolin, and carried away fourteen thousand dollars from the Santa Fe Limited at Wharton in the Cherokee Strip. Other raids took place in Lelietta, Red Rock, and Adair; their take now rivaled that of their distant cousins, Frank and Jesse James, who had been seventeen years at the enterprise, but that wasn’t enough for leader Bob, a bucktoothed, jug-eared criminal mastermind shot through with the sin of vanity.

  Under the influence of busthead whiskey, Bob proposed a shift from trains to banks, which he reasoned had the advantage of standing still, and added that an experienced band like theirs could split up and assault two such institutions at the same time, doubling the plunder and eclipsing the infamy of the James Gang forever. Moreover, he suggested Coffeyville, a town known to the brothers since infancy, as the place to benefit from their plunge into legend. He sobered up later, but having parried aside the others’ arguments was reluctant to withdraw his scheme in the cold light of wisdom. His solution to the intelligent point that the residents of Coffeyville knew them as well as they knew Coffeyville involved false beards and farmers’ overalls. The town met them in force with scatterguns and squirrel rifles and laid them out on a boardwalk to have their pictures taken. Emmett alone survived to begin a period of lengthy imprisonment in the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing. In Fort Smith, Judge Parker read the details in the telegraph column of the Elevator and put away early plans to hang three brothers at o
nce.

  His jurisdiction was shrinking. The new homesteads were part of the United States, with local magistrates put in place to adjudicate disputes and violations of the criminal code. Congress and the Supreme Court had assigned crimes among Indians to the tribal courts, which forced Parker’s deputies to parse out complaints according to what constituted an Indian: full-blood, half, eighth, sixteenth? Mistakes were made, carrion-eaters of the J. Warren Reed stamp swooped, and the judge was brought to task in Washington. He accused the justices of splitting hairs, was quoted, and bitter invective circled about him under the Capitol dome. Open letters signed by Parker and officials in the U.S. Department of Justice appeared in the press. Reporters described the contretemps, borrowing colorful verbs and adjectives from the boxing columns. Washington whittled away at his fiefdom. Circuit courts were allowed to review all capital cases tried in the Eighth District, inserting yet another wedge between Isaac Parker and God Almighty. Colleagues helped themselves to cases that for years had gone directly to his desk, yet his docket grew no lighter: He mounted the bench every morning at eight, Monday through Saturday, and often did not descend from it until past midnight. The dark smudges beneath his eyes looked like bruises, the last brown hair on his head turned white as filament. He was fifty-three years old.

  At home alone, her sons pursuing activities outside her ken, Mary Parker drank brandy to lay her cares to rest and bring on sleep. One bottle no longer lasted her a week.

  Parker’s men, led now by the legendary Three Guardsmen: Heck Thomas, Chris Madsen, and Bill Tilghman, rode through the Nations alongside the tumbleweed wagons and left them behind to scale the Winding Stair Mountains and the walls of Rabbit Trap Canyon, rooting out rapists and murderers and whiskey distillers, swapping lead with them, and occasionally stopping slugs. Those who failed to rise decorated the walls of Marshal Jacob Yoes’s office with their likenesses.

  And George Maledon worked oil into good Kentucky hemp with his strong hands and waited for news of Annie and Frank Carver.

  In Colorado, Carver found work on a cattle ranch. The wages were minimal, but he supplemented them by gambling, at which he was sufficiently adroit to show a profit without arousing the suspicions of his opponents, who tended to try suspected sharps on the evidence of circumstances alone and punish them, according to their humor or the charms of the defendant, on a scale with stripping and flogging at one end and lynching at the other. Aware of the delicacy of his situation, Carver drank in moderation and held Annie’s interest with gifts and loyal attention. When after two years the ranch foreman was forced to cut personnel and Carver’s luck at the tables turned bitter, the pair returned to the Cherokee Nation, where Frank boarded Annie with a colored woman eight short blocks of the house where his wife had taken in washing and sewing to support herself and their children; he did not return to his wife, however, hoping to persuade her to grant him a divorce on the grounds of desertion. This she refused to do, and since there was little honest work to be found in that vicinity and money that might otherwise have been spent at cards and dice went toward foodstuffs and house repairs, the pressure to provide income compelled Carver to ride the rails to Texas, preying upon passengers with friendly games of chance and spending most of what he won on Jamaica ginger in Texas.

  Annie was not the sort of mistress who embroidered pillowcases in her man’s absence and sold fresh-laid eggs to earn her board. She transferred bags and baggage to the home of another Frank, surnamed Walker, and there made sport with the Maledon name and the manly reputation of him who had forsaken respectable domesticity for her sake; so Carver regarded the situation, as Annie and Walker learned weeks later, when word reached them that Carver had returned.

  In Fort Smith that season, the interruption in the Maledon family unit faded into the background as Parker considered that the Dalton episode had not so much come to an end as begun a new phase under the command of Bill Doolin, who had joined the gang in 1891 but had not been present in Coffeyville when it was torn apart a year later. While the bodies were still on display, and a surgeon was still plucking lead from Emmett Dalton, Doolin assembled a rich association of colorful nicknames in the persons of George “Bitter Creek” Newcomb, “Tulsa Jack” Blake, Oliver “Crescent Sam” Yountis, Richard “Little Dick” West, Roy “Arkansas Tom” Daughtery, George “Red Buck” Waightman, and two others, including Bill Dalton, eldest brother of the demolished family, who had forsaken the California legislature for the lure of his blood after Coffeyville had destroyed his hopes for high office. These lurid appelations crimsoned many a gray column and Western Union bulletin board as banks and trains fell to assaults throughout Kansas and the newly minted Oklahoma Territory.

  But these were not the Nations of memory, where a desperado might reasonably expect to retard the consequences of his calling in the wild scrub of the Cookson Hills and the root cellars of neighbors who still held the United States to account for the Trail of Tears. The great Land Rush of 1889 had introduced thousands of white settlers into the extremities of the Eighth District, who tore up the scrub for potatoes and built ricks to store corn, not fugitives. Among them was a thirty-eight-year-old former Iowan named William Matthew Tilghman.

  Tall and rangy, with swooping moustaches and eyes that went from kind to vengeful as quickly as clouds slid away from the sun, Tilghman had shot buffalo at eighteen, served as a deputy sheriff under the legendary Charlie Bassett in Dodge City at twenty-three, and divided the next ten years between his ranch near Fort Dodge and a succession of positions keeping the peace in the roughest cowtown in Kansas. When Oklahoma opened to homestead, he’d quit his job of city marshal and staked out several lots in Guthrie, whose quickly expanding population elected him marshal. Two years later he laid aside that badge and took up the simple six-sided star of deputy U.S. marshal under Jacob Yoes and Judge Isaac C. Parker.

  Tilghman’s experience needed tempering yet, for the territory retained a vivid sense-memory of untamed wilderness; Ned Christie was not long in his grave, and in many districts the quality of a man’s boots was worth more than his life. Heck Thomas, who had failed to apprehend Christie but had since sacrificed marriage and family to the service of Parker, taught the new man the basics of manhunting in hostile country. An ordered, military approach to what amounted to enemy lines came courtesy of forty-one-year-old Chris Madsen, who had served in the Danish Army, the French Foreign Legion, and the United States Fifth Cavalry, with which he had ridden into the Battle of War-bonnet Creek and covered Buffalo Bill Cody while he slew Chief Yellow Hand and tore from his head the first scalp for Custer in 1876. A hard man with flint in his beard, a plug in his cheek, two grown children, and already a string of dead fugitives in his portfolio in Fort Smith, Madsen bridled only when younger deputies addressed him as “Pops,” cuffing their ears hard enough to make them ring and unleashing a string of Scandinavian curses. His Danish accent became pronounced when he was excited, which he almost never was; a quickening of his jaws as he chewed was for those who knew him a clear indication that the moment was tense. He was a chief deputy, and even Thomas called him “Mr. Madsen.” (Parker, practically a contemporary, hailed him by his Christian name.)

  The people of the Nations would come to know them as the Three Guardsmen: Madsen, hard and silent on the trail; Thomas, eyes bright when he caught the scent of human prey; Tilghman, easy in his manner but cat-swift in his reflexes. A trio of killers.

  In the spring of 1893, the Doolin Gang raided a bank at Spearville, Kansas, divided the plunder, and split up to hide out until posse fever passed. Entering the Cherokee Strip, Crescent Sam Yountis lost the use of his exhausted mount, challenged a farmer riding a fresh bay to surrender his animal, and blasted him off its back when he demurred. The bandit caught the reins before the horse could bolt, vaulted into the saddle, and galloped on to his sister’s farm.

  The killing took place near Guthrie, where Heck Thomas and Chris Madsen rode circuit for the federal court. Madsen knew all the farms in the vicinit
y. He collected Thomas, laid siege to the farmhouse, and shot Yountis with a Winchester when he emerged from the house and fired at Thomas, who kicked the revolver from the dying man’s hand as he struggled to rise.

  “Too damn bad I didn’t get you,” Yountis said.

  “You came close enough, py golly.” Madsen put his boot heel on Yountis’ throat and held it there until he finished struggling.

  The gang struck a Santa Fe express in Cimarron soon after, and bettered the Daltons’ final adventure by dividing its ranks and holding up two trains simultaneously at Wharton. This, Parker reflected, represented a new phase in frontier outlawry: the drive, beyond mundane material gain, to make one’s own mark on the historical record and imitate in life the swashbucklery that incarnadined the popular press. Frequently, tardy raids upon hideouts abandoned by wanted men, and saddle pouches confiscated from captured bandits, yielded small libraries of tattered paperbound novels with whole sensational passages underscored heavily in pencil; blueprints for adventures yet to be undertaken, and the bar raised to first-column level. When Charley Pierce, a charter member of the Doolins, was recognized and shot to death by fellow hands on the ranch where he was hiding out, his pockets were found to be stuffed with yellowed cuttings from Texas and Arkansas newspapers chronicling the gang’s depredations. Over a cup of tea while addressing one of his wife’s social clubs in Fort Smith, Parker remarked drolly that it was just a matter of time before some progressive band of border ruffians applied to St. Louis for a press agent. Only Mary Parker, who maintained a barometer of her husband’s passions, detected the depth of his despair over the public lionization of the element he had sworn to banish from his jurisdiction.