I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang

by Leonce Gaiter

  Maoma marched to Sam and slapped him on the side of the head with his gun. “What’d you go an’ do that for. I’d o’ killed him.”

  “I was helpin’,” Sam whined.

  “Don’t need no help shootin’ a man,” Maoma grumbled as he stomped to his horse.

  Theodosia leaped from Rufus’ saddle and walked to the bleeding figure on the ground. She fell on her knees as if to pray and looked at his face.

  “His eyes is open. He ain’t dead.”

  All ran toward the man.

  “He ain’t breathin’,” Lewis said. “His chest ain’t movin.”

  “Can he see us?” Luckey asked.

  “I shot him. He’s dead,” Maoma insisted.

  Rufus kicked at him once, and then again. “He mus’ be dead. He ain’t movin’ and he’s got three holes in him.”

  Theodosia leaned forward and touched one of his eyes. The lid slipped shut. The man now had one eye open.

  “He’s winkin’ at me,” she smiled. They all laughed. She then touched the other lid and dragged it down.

  “Now he’s dead,” she announced. She smoothed his hair and placed his arms neatly at his sides. She took Rufus’ hand as she rose.

  ~ ~ ~

  In the next two days, four women in four towns claimed ravishment at the hands of the Rufus Buck gang. Each had a tale more harrowing than the last. Parker’s Marshals were tracking the Bucks, and it was unlikely that rapes 100 miles apart were committed by the same men within 24 hours, especially when they’d recently been sighted another 50 miles from either. But hysteria had taken over, and the Bucks monopolized the mind of the Territories, simultaneously raping women in Okmulgee and Checotah, stealing horses in Muskogee that same night, and burning half the houses in between. Men torched their own barns and women clawed their own faces and ripped their own clothes to convince the world that they’d been singled out to be touched by pure evil.

  Parker received a letter from Sam Brown, the Euchee Indian Chief, ensuring his full cooperation in capturing the Buck gang. The Creek Light Horse would be at Parker’s disposal, the letter assured. Even here in Ft. Smith—not even part of the Territories—people talked of little else. The stories were so gruesome, the images so otherworldly that the mere human imagination could not resist them. Folks dwelt on them like newborns, imagining and embellishing, telling and re-telling, and most of all, personalizing—women seeing themselves desperately shielding their modesty in the face of gun barrels held by dark men who slavered for lust and vengeance; men fighting to the death to protect their women from the shameless fiends.

  “I tell you what I’d o’ done…” was the relentless introduction to a fantastic tale of wholly imagined valor.

  Few on the streets talked of murder. John Garrett had been all but forgotten. Callahan’s Negro farm hand had lived. They had not yet heard of the young man at the camp.

  On Tuesday August 6, 1895, eight days after the killing of Marshal John Garrett, the District Attorney at Fort Smith formally charged Rufus Buck, Lewis Davis, and Luckey Davis with premeditated murder. He also charged all five gang members for “an assault on Sam Houston, a Negro and not an Indian… with intent then and there feloniously, willfully and of their malice aforethought to kill…” As evidence of the gravity of threat of their crimes, 12 of the district’s 18 deputies were assigned to capture or kill the Rufus Buck gang.

  As Judge Parker read the charges, Virgil Purefoy knocked lightly on his door. Entering, he wore a pained expression as immoderate as all of his others. He stood almost at attention.

  “The Ayers girl,” he intoned, “one of the first of Buck’s victims… the one… violated as her father was watching… she’s dead.” Virgil hung his head to denote appropriate solicitude.

  “How?” Parker asked.

  “They don’t know,” Purefoy replied. “They found her dead in her room.”

  “Did she take her own life?”

  Purefoy shook his head. “I don’t know, but they said she’d gotten weaker the last few days.”

  The girl had seemed so proud and strong. Parker had admired that in her, a true pioneer woman, adept at sloughing off the past and moving on. Her strength was the reason he had asked her to stay. He had assumed the Buck gang’s quick capture, and he looked forward to her powerful testimony in court.

  “She had to have died of something,” Parker said peevishly.

  “I’ll find out, sir.” Purefoy left the room.

  Parker sat back in his chair, too shaken to continue his work. At first he wondered why this death pained him so. But the fact that she died in his town and under his protection … it made a difference. Would she have lived if he had not asked her to stay? A strong woman of the Territories was a woman nonetheless. She had suffered the greatest insult any woman could, one from which most would never recover, and he had asked her to remain and idly count the days before imparting her shame to the world.

  “God forgive me,” he muttered.

  Another knock at the door.

  “Come in,” he barked.

  Purefoy reluctantly re-entered. “Something I forgot to add, sir.”

  Parker waited. “Go on.”

  “The last report had something new. They said that there was a girl with the Buck gang. A white girl, about twelve or thirteen years old.”

  “We’ve had no reports of a kidnapped girl.”

  “They said she was quiet, but didn’t look scared. Said she wasn’t tryin’ to get away, either.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Purefoy hemmed and hawed, as if he didn’t dare suggest it. “A couple of the widow’s sons made it sound like she might have been with them.”

  “Nonsense!” Parker spat. “What could a young girl do but remain quiet and try to stay alive.” Parker turned from Purefoy. “Check the localities. See about a missing girl.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And keep this quiet,” Parker added. “Not a word to the papers or anyone. Just the Marshals.”

  “Yes sir.”

  As Purefoy left, a renewed sense of urgency shook Parker. His Marshals had to find them soon. A young girl in their midst. The public would go mad if they knew. Hysteria would overwhelm all reason.

  He then considered the young girl. A strong woman had succumbed to an ordeal with the Bucks. What chance had she? He shook his head to eradicate the filthy images his own mind immediately conjured. He choked back a mouthful of bile at the thought of her helplessness and anguish. The idea of one of God’s most innocent so besmirched literally sickened him.

  ~ ~ ~

  For four days, Bill Swain had camped near the spot where the niggers took his daughter. He did little but scan the distance for her skipping figure returning, as always, from one of her private adventures. In four days she had not come. She had never stayed away for more than four hours. He played the scene over and over. How she looked at him with contempt, and walked to them, calmly climbing atop the horse. And again and again he dismissed the image, insisting that she had no choice, that she knew she had no choice. They had guns. They were outlaws. As he waited, two passing wagons had stopped to warn him.

  “You better get back to town,” the first driver said, “the Rufus Buck gang’s maraudin’ out here. They’re rapin’ women and killin’ men.”

  He said nothing about his encounter. How could he? He couldn’t admit that his daughter had ridden away with them. Something in him knew she had. She hadn’t been scared. She had wanted to go. He sat out here waiting, beneath a blistering sun and violent storms... He had sat out here like Jesus in the desert not to receive Truths, but to deny them. The question now was how to make it good—how to shield himself, yet again, from the shame and blame that were surely his to bear. It was, it seemed, his life’s work.

  The old letter screamed as he concocted his tale.

  You dragged me to the fields and hoed some rows and threw some seeds like they would come up overnight. When they did not, you spat and cursed me, as if it had
been my fault. When old Remmie, the only nigger left on the place, tried to tell you how to make crops grow, you took a shovel and beat him half to death screaming that you were a white man and no nigger had anything to tell a white man. You sold everything for a carpetbagger’s pittance. I asked you where we would go and how we would live. You never answered.

  It was that man whose daughter would run away with niggers. He had spent his life running from that man. He was not that man. She had been grabbed and forcibly taken. He saw in his mind her violent struggle, her kicks and screams for her father’s loving arms as the vicious black hands grabbed at her, touched her all over, lurid and leering and he, her father and protector, despite the guns pointed at him, lunged and heaved so hard to save her that three of the gang had to hold him back. He played the scene repeatedly until it stank of truth, until he could hear every cry and see every tear that ran down his lovely daughter’s face. He had been wronged, his daughter brazenly abducted, her innocence stolen, her beauty probably ruined, her chastity surely profaned. He threw his belongings into his wagon and climbed aboard. He pointed his horse for Okmulgee.

  There, he reported an unspeakable crime.

  11

  Henry Hassan, whose wife was left mute and insensate after her ordeal with the Bucks, leased a farm northeast of Orcutt. The morning the Buck Gang arrived, just as most mornings, Henry Hassan had considered himself blessed.

  “What happened to you at the Hassan’s?” Parker asked, resisting the urge to grab the beautiful, bedraggled girl’s shoulders and shake her—to unleash the flood of tears that surely hid behind the calm façade—to free her outrage and regret. Seeing her beat her breast and tear her hair at the remembered horrors of her ravishment would purge her of the stain, purge him of his doubt about her part in this.

  Theosodia flashed a smile so beatific that he instantly longed to touch her face and pay homage to the purity it signified. This was the girl—the innocent, the vision—whom the desperate Bill Swain had so tenderly described. It was the image that had moved Parker to invite the anguished father to kneel and pray beside him to almighty God for her safe return. This smiling gift was the child who inspired the father’s unmistakable air of humility and supplication as he so fervently, so devotedly entreated the Lord—the girl who prompted the hardscrabble father to desperate prayer.

  “Three of ‘em held me,” Bill Swain had wept, “and I struggled with every piece o’ strength the Lord gave me, but may He in all of His mercy forgive me... it was not enough.” His tears moved Parker deeply.

  “Who’s Hassan?” the wide-eyed object of the father’s prayers now asked the Judge.

  “The lady with the husband and children. On the farm.”

  “They had great big pigs,” Theodosia giggled.

  “What happened to you there?” Parker repeated. “You can tell me. You can tell me what they did to you. You’re safe here.”

  “I am?” she asked, prompting Parker’s heart to race with anticipation.

  “Yes. Yes, girl. You are. Nothing like that will ever happen to you again. Your father and I will promise you. Tell me.”

  He had mined for suffering. Now hoped to find it. Like a ghoul, he wanted tales of savagery and defilement—any outrage to this girl’s person or dignity. Parker knew that this beautiful little girl could not have tolerated the barbarities these dark fiends let loose on his Territories, that she stood as removed from raping and torturing as he—who had striven to live according to God’s holy word—once believed he stood from eternal damnation. He brutally snatched at her innocence like an infant does its mother’s teat; like a drowning man at a paltry scrap of wood.

  “Tell me,” Parker begged her.

  “That other man’s eyes was open;” she began as if in the middle of her tale, “but that lady… Hassan… her eyes was closed and she looked dead, but she was still breathin’. I closed the man’s eyes an’ they stayed shut, an’ he was truly dead ‘cause you can’t be dead with your eyes open. So I tried holdin’ her nose to stop her breathin’ so she could be dead, too. But she didn’t stop breathin’ an’ be dead like he did.”

  Theodosia paused to play with her fingers.

  “Why wouldn’t she die?” she asked with all of the innocence Parker dreamt to see in her.

  ~

  Seeing the riders coming on, Henry Hassan paused to watch. Hassan dropped the hay he was feeding and strode toward them, a calm smile on his face, assuming they were lost, or thirsty. If so, he would offer directions and water, or have his wife fix them some food. He saw the color of their skin, counted their numbers and then he stopped. He remembered the stories he’d heard—about the horrors.

  Then he saw the guns.

  He turned to run, but a bullet scored the ground at his feet. He stopped and turned to face them. Five of them. Indian and colored. Five revolvers pointed at him. The Rufus Buck gang. He raised his hands.

  “Henry!” He heard his wife call.

  “Get the children inside and lock the door,” he yelled. “Now!”

  From the doorway, Rosetta Hassan saw the riders. Two of her three small children played near the house, Rosetta’s elderly mother overseeing them.

  “Mama, bring the kids in. Hurry up.”

  Her mother, frozen at the sound of the shot, looked nervously at the riders as she shooed the children toward the house. Once they’d piled in, Rosetta Hassan slammed the door and dropped the lock. She then dashed to a cabinet and pulled a revolver. She checked to make sure it was loaded.

  In the quiet, she waited. One of her children wept softly and she opened her arms, cradling a weeping child with one hand, holding a revolver on the other.

  Outside, the riders surrounded Henry Hassan. He recognized the mean-looking one named Maoma. A couple of months prior, Maoma had passed through Hassan’s farm. Hassan had asked him to close the gates behind him—a request Maoma had belligerently refused.

  “Get us some water,” Rufus demanded.

  Every creak of a saddle, every rumble from a pig or cry from a flying bird was like a whip crack in the stagnant silence. Hassan’s pants snapped loudly as he walked to the well. The pail smashed down and the pulleys wailed as he hauled the sloshing pail back up. He lugged it to the riders, held it aloft, and let Rufus pull the ladle and drink. The scene had been so unnerving that Hassan hadn’t registered the girl. Now, as she lifted the ladle and smiled sweetly at him, he jerked his head to Rufus, about to protest, but thought better of it. Rufus nodded, instructing Hassan to serve the others. Hassan did as he was bid.

  When he had served the last, Rufus said, “This is a nice place,” as he looked around the Hassan farm.

  “I got this place fair,” Hassan argued.

  “Ain’t no white man on Indian land got it fair,” Rufus said. “We’re takin’ it back.”

  “You better get goin’,” Hassan said, trying to sound helpfully conspiratorial. “They’re all after you… the Marshals. They gonna catch you up soon. If you go now, you can outrun ‘em. You can leave the girl here. She won’t slow you down.” Hassan looked sympathetically at Theodosia.

  “You gonna kill him?” she asked.

  “If he don’t leave,” Rufus replied, “we gonna kill ‘em all.”

  “If you do, I get to close his eyes like the other one,” she said.

  Hassan shook his head as if to clear it and deny what he had heard. He held his arms imploringly toward the girl.

  “You come on down, honey, and we’ll take care of you,” he coaxed.

  “You got no place to stay, no place to live,” Rufus said. “How you gonna take care o’ somebody?”

  Hassan wiped sweat from his lip.

  “Luckey, who’s in the house?”

  Luckey and Lewis glanced at one another, as if to snap themselves into perfect sync. They dismounted in unison and pushed on the door. Locked.

  “Open it up,” Luckey called.

  Silence.

  Luckey stood back as Lewis shot a bullet through it.

/>   Hassan lurched as if to run, but two more bullets anchored his feet to the ground.

  After another moment, they heard the latch. The door creaked open. Rosetta Hassan stood there, three small children surrounding her, and an old woman behind.

  “You can take a horse and a cart,” Rufus said. “Nothing else.”

  “Henry!” Rosetta called.

  “You stole this land,” Rufus added.

  “You can’t get nowhere,” Hassan pleaded. “They all after you. The Lighthorse. Everyone. You better run. Jus’ run. We won’t say nothin’.”

  “’Bout now, all the Indians in this Territory is takin’ their land back, getting’ rid o’ thieves like you. You don’t walk out livin’, we’ll carry you out dead.”

  “Indians is after you, too. I told you. The Creek Lighthorse is huntin’ you down. Indians want you caught just as bad as white. Everyone’s after the Rufus Buck gang.”

  Sam looked questioningly to Maoma, who shifted nervously in his saddle.

  “Let’s take what we can an’ go,” Luckey called.

  Rufus barely bothered to aim as he shot. The bullet grazed Hassan’s calf. He fell, shouting at the fierce pain.

  “He’s bleedin’,” Theodosia announced.

  Rosetta ran to her husband and held him in her arms. She reached for the wound as if a touch could heal it. She wept as she rocked him.

  “Indians gonna take it all back once they hear what I done,” Rufus insisted.

  “It’s all over the Territory,” Hassan panted. “Everybody knows. They all know. They all huntin’ you down. Dead or alive. You better jus’ run. Run and leave us be.”

  Rufus leapt from his horse and charged at Hassan.

  He knocked Rosetta away with the butt of his gun and grabbed the front of Hassan’s shirt. “I know Cherokee Bill,” he yelled in the shocked Hassan’s face. “We had a plan to take it all back.”

  “Cherokee Bill’s gonna hang,” Hassan pled through trembling lips.

  “But the rest of us ain’t,” Rufus screamed at him. “We all comin’ for ya’.”