The first time anyone ever caught him stealing, Charley Floyd was not even ten years old. A box of fancy iced cookies was his downfall. Although Mamie Floyd regularly baked enough sugar and oatmeal cookies to overflow a big dishpan, there was always something special about getting store-bought treats. Later on, as a grown man, Charley was not able to remember exactly how old he had been at the time he stole those cookies, but he damn sure never forgot getting nailed red-handed.
That first incident took place in Sallisaw at a grocery store owned and operated by J. H. Harkrider, a respectable fox hunter and merchant who came to Indian Territory from Arkansas in 1899. Harkrider was not just another middle-aged shop clerk with an apron tied around his soft belly. He could take care of himself. He had the ability to talk drunken Indians into surrendering their gun belts and sometimes their whiskey. When he was a younger man running a shoe and harness business, Harkrider had repaired a saddle for Henry Starr, one of the territory’s most notorious outlaws. He remembered that Starr was “in every way a perfect gentleman.” When the storekeeper heard people “talking about how mean and ugly” Starr was, Harkrider “just told them that they didn’t know what they were talking about for that was all lies.”
In the decade after Oklahoma’s statehood, Sallisaw was still as wild and woolly as an unbroken mustang. According to an old account, there were so many gun battles in the streets on a single afternoon that Harkrider had to dive headlong into his bathtub three different times in order to stay clear of stray bullets whistling through the windows. With all the troublesome cowboys and tough farmhands he dealt with through the years, Harkrider did not even think that the Floyd boy he caught snitching sweets from his store would one day be branded as America’s public enemy number one.
“I had some little cakes and cookies in boxes and they kept disappearing,” Harkrider remembered many years later. “I marked some of the boxes and watched to see where they went.”
Soon enough, Charley Floyd rambled into the store. He was all alone. The youngster stood around for a few minutes, perused the neat rows of canned goods and bins of dried beans, ran his fingers over the countertops, and then left. As soon as Charley slipped out the door, Harkrider, who had been watching the lad like a hawk, swooped down on the cookie boxes and found that one was missing from the shelf.
“I got an officer and we went around to the alley and there was Charley Floyd eating some cookies. I asked him where he got the cookies and he admitted getting them out of my store after I showed him the mark. We tried to scare him up some and show him he shouldn’t steal, and then we let him go.”
As far as Harkrider was concerned, Charley had learned his lesson. The boy never stole anything else from him. At least, he was never caught again stealing in the store.
Charley tried to learn from mistakes and always did his level best to escape parental discipline, especially the wrath of his father. He wanted to keep his nose clean enough to stay on Walter’s friendly side. That was no easy task. Walter could be stern and unbending. Even so, when his father was in a good mood, Charley liked to be in his company. The hunting and fishing outings with his father did not happen nearly often enough for the boy, however. Charley soon discovered that there was more to life in Oklahoma than summertime baptism celebrations, berry-picking parties, or pie suppers.
Work always came first. People cherished their share of good times, but the everyday rural experience was not always idyllic—far from it. Charley quickly figured that out, too. There was an abundance of bitterness that mingled with the sweetness. For every teaspoon of honey, there was a tablespoon of castor oil—sometimes a double dose. There were endless prayer meetings and monotonous school lessons for every snowball fight or game of marbles. Charley knew he would have to invest long hours sweating in the fields to make up for his more frivolous moments.
To be properly enjoyed, pleasure had to be earned. Before sitting down to a fine squirrel dinner, there needed to be a hunt. Sweet milk to wash down the slabs of hot gingerbread resulted from a trip to the barn in the early-morning darkness. Thick molasses did not just appear in the can by magic. That took some effort, too. Community events, such as quilting bees, hog slaughters, and barn raisings, were associated with struggle and strain. Dances and play parties came at the end of a strenuous week of work. Oklahomans at this time played hard but had to work even harder.
Out in the country, where the majority of people lived, the hands of the women and children were as callused and rough as the men’s. Farm life was harsh and demanding. There was nothing easy about it. Most families had to toil like peasants from sunrise to dusk in order to keep the wolf from the door. Among honest people, nobody was exempt from labor. If a youngster showed any promise or ambition, his elders said it was because the child had grit or spunk. There was no tolerance of sissies or malingerers, and no such thing as being allergic to hard work. Everyone was expected to pull together and do his or her share.
It was certain as sunup that nothing was free. That became clear to Charley when old man Harkrider and the town policeman caught him in the alley with the cookies. Likewise, it was true that a stolen watermelon could be sweet and juicy enough to risk a load of bird shot in the butt and legs, but before a boy slipped beneath a fence with a melon tucked under his arm, at least for an instant, he weighed the consequences of getting caught in the act. Playing hooky from school, skinny-dipping at the creek, or laying up in the woods with cohorts to smoke corn silks usually resulted in extra hours spent cutting kindling, scrubbing chalkboards, and a good country whipping to boot.
Charley and the other rough-and-tumble farm youngsters were raised with an old saying: One had to pay for the piper if one wanted to dance. That single maxim was ingrained in them as much as all four Gospels and the Ten Commandments combined.
However, some of the boys of Charley’s generation, like others before them, soon discovered that when it came to earning a living, not everyone chose to go to the cotton field or on cattle roundups—not by a long shot. The promise of slopping hogs was not enough to keep everybody on the farm. There were those who believed that they simply were not suited to honest labor. They stayed alive by operating on the other side of the law. They took up arms in order to steal from people, rob banks, trains, and stores. Cattle and horses were routinely stolen. Sometimes, during the perpetration of a crime, innocents were shot and even killed. Illegal whiskey was made and sold in the same deep woods where these fugitives hid. Some of these lawless people lived on the fringes. A few were able to keep a foot on both sides of the law. It was a difficult balancing act, though, and most of them eventually toppled and fell.
Folks who lived in Oklahoma recognized that it was a land conceived in violence, the last frontier of the outlaw. This was particularly true in eastern Oklahoma, called Indian Territory until statehood came in 1907. Even more than Oklahoma Territory to the west or the narrow panhandle strip known as “no-man’s-land,” the eastern half of the “twin territories” acted as a true refuge for the lawless and untamed. These seemed to thrive there in great numbers.
When Charley and his family first came to Oklahoma, some of those old-school desperadoes, including that infamous bank robber Henry Starr, were still in business. Stories of hidden loot, gun battles, heroic deputy sheriffs turned outlaws, vigilante justice, and ruthless villains who met their Maker at the business end of a hemp rope fueled the imagination of Charley and his chums.
Most of these outlaw stories had been tampered with over the years. Lots of spice and garnish had been added. What had once been reasonably sound historic accounts were now seasoned with ample portions of hearsay and exaggeration and twisted into tall tales. Some were nothing more than pure country bunk. Bandits and outlaws were mythologized beyond recognition by dime novelists or by grandfathers who embellished their fireside yarns with each telling. Newspapers did little to help. Publishers and their reporters were not as concerned with accuracy as they were with selling papers. One day, the accused could be indicted in headlines, while the next day, the same ordinary thief might be made into an overnight celebrity. The public was confused. Fact and fiction merged uneasily. Reality was often as elusive as smoke.
In truth, outlaws had presented problems in Indian Territory from the very beginning. This was clear even in Georgia prior to the Indians’ removal from their ancestral lands in the late 1830s. While still back in Georgia, the Cherokees were forced to employ a band of armed riders called “regulators,” whose mission, according to the tribal council, was “to suppress horse stealing and robbery, to protect the widows and orphans, and kill any accused person resisting their authority.” Once the Cherokees and the four other Civilized Tribes were forcibly moved to Indian Territory, similar groups called light horse companies were formed to preserve the peace and act as a shield against fugitives from justice who wandered into the lands.
Some of the Indians’ light horsemen guarded the territorial borders against the importation of diseased cattle, while others helped put down tribal insurrections. Almost all of them were particularly effective when it came to terrorizing white whiskey peddlers who crept into Indian Territory with their barrels of hooch. Among the Indian tribes, justice was sure and punishment swift. For example, those who were found guilty of stealing a horse or mule knew they would receive one hundred lashes on their bare backs. If they repeated their crime and were found guilty again, they also understood that they would go the way of convicted killers and rapists. That meant taking the long walk to the nearest gallows or a hanging tree.
For the most part, the members of the Five Civilized Tribes became prosperous farmers during the long period between their eviction from Georgia and other Southern states and the outbreak of the Civil War. When the war came, however, it took its toll on the residents of Indian Territory. Although there was a definite division of allegiance among the Indian nations, old blood ties made the Southern influence strong. Many Indian slaveholders knew that they faced substantial investment loss if the Yankees won out. As a result, regiments of full and mixed bloods were mustered. They proudly carried the Confederate Stars and Bars into battle. Guerrilla bands also operated in the territory, including Col. William Quantrill’s dreaded raiders. Local renegades stole livestock and burned both Union and Confederate Indian villages, and pro-Confederate Cherokees destroyed military targets as well as the homes and barns of civilians who billeted enemy troops and stored their supplies.
After the war, there was not much improvement of conditions for the Indians. Punitive treaties schemed up in Washington during the period of Reconstruction diminished the holdings of the various tribal properties. The federal government transformed much of the land forcibly taken back from the Five Civilized Tribes into a dumping ground for other Indians, who were moved into the twin territories. Former slaves and vagabonds from Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri emigrated to Indian Territory and squatted on tribal lands. Many of these people raided the Indians’ smokehouses and corncribs. Vigilante groups were formed to halt the rise in crime.
Besides the addition of more Indian residents and freedmen, white newcomers also entered the Indian nations via a network of cattle trails, stage routes, and railroad tracks that crisscrossed the land. As postwar problems mounted, the Indian governments were left without adequate funds to maintain their law-enforcement efforts. Federal troops were too busy policing the western frontier to help out. Indian courts that had once been so effective were now in utter chaos and had no jurisdiction over the tidal wave of misfits who poured into Indian Territory.
The brush-covered hills, hidden caves etched in the river bluffs, and the chain of secluded towns all acted as meccas for criminals. Along with the droves of drifters, gamblers, and whores came murderers, rapists, and rustlers. If a man or woman was wanted by the authorities in his or her own state, all he or she had to do was mount up and “light out for the nations.” No questions were asked of strangers and there were no white man’s courts to extradite the outlaws. The authority of the various tribes’ light horse forces applied only to Indian citizens. Indian Territory became known as a “robber’s roost,” and its sinister reputation spread faster than fresh gossip at a church supper. A popular saying sprang up that fit the situation perfectly: “There’s no Sunday west of St. Louis—no God west of Fort Smith.” Tribal leaders and decent citizens could not agree more. They cried out for help.
Finally, in 1871, the federal government responded to these pleas by moving the Western Arkansas Federal District Court from Van Buren to Fort Smith, just one hundred yards east of the Indian Territory boundary line. A series of federal judges was brought in and charged with protecting the public by cleaning up the nearby breeding grounds of some of the most evil felons ever to pack a six-gun. However, most of the judges were either incompetent, corrupt, or inefficient. The situation did not improve in Indian Territory. A Fort Smith newspaper editorial, published in 1873, came right to the point: “It is sickening to the heart to contemplate the increase of crime in the Indian country…if crime continues to increase there so fast, a regiment of deputy marshals cannot arrest all the murderers.”
Within two years, however, some changes for the better were made. The major adjustment came in 1875 when Isaac Charles Parker was named presiding judge at the burgeoning river town of Fort Smith. Parker was only thirty-six years old when he arrived at the courtroom, but he had a strong background in law and politics. He had been city attorney, district prosecutor, and district judge in St. Joseph, Missouri, and had put in two terms in Congress, representing a district in western Missouri that knew only too well the guerrilla escapades of Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, and the James-Younger gangs.
A big, broad-shouldered man with piercing blue eyes, a mustache, and a goatee, Parker was the youngest judge on the federal bench when he got the nod from President Ulysses S. Grant to rule the troubled court. Parker was an ardent Republican, a strict Methodist, and a careful student of the Bible. He believed that without exception the wicked should be punished to the letter of the law. On May 10, 1875, only eight days after he and his family arrived by steamboat at Fort Smith, the judge opened his first term of court. Out of eighteen persons brought before him on murder charges during that initial session, fifteen were convicted. Eight of them were given death sentences.
The very first murder trial he presided over ended in a swift conviction. Parker delivered a lengthy condemnation of the prisoner, but instead of telling the man he would be hanged “until dead,” the judge emphasized the convict’s fate by declaring, “I sentence you to hang by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead!” Parker did not hesitate in doling out death sentences, and more often than not, the condemned also received Scripture lessons, long lectures, and was urged to repent before he met his Maker. Parker’s closing words to each sentenced prisoner were the same: “Farewell forever until the court and you and all here today shall meet together in the general resurrection.”
Parker’s draconian style won him national acclaim. Newspaper reporters came from all over the country to see Parker in action and hear his pronouncements. The law-abiding citizens and outlaws alike soon dubbed him the Hanging Judge, a nickname he despised. Others called him “Bloody” Parker and “Butcher” Parker. Actually, the execution chores were left to George Maledon, a capable hangman with long whiskers and deep-set eyes who took great pride in his work. Maledon became a familiar sight on the streets of Fort Smith, usually carrying a basket that contained the handwoven hemp rope he so deftly used at the gallows. Each rope was handwoven in St. Louis and was soaked with a pitchy oil to prevent the hangman’s knot, with its thirteen wraps, from slipping. This ensured a quick death for the black-hooded convicts. Of the seventy-nine criminals who swung limply from the Fort Smith gallows, Maledon’s handiwork sent sixty of them to eternity. This number included the first ever six-man hanging, considered his masterpiece. When he finally retired as a hangman, Maledon toured country towns and cities with one of his treasured ropes and lectured about the lives and consequent deaths of many of the culprits he had executed in the name of law and order.
“I’ve never hanged a man who came back to have the job done over,” Maledon quipped without the hint of a smile. “The ghosts of men hanged at Fort Smith never hang around the old gibbet.” Like the judge he served, Maledon earned a sobriquet all his own. The severe Bavarian native was called the Prince of Hangmen. Posted over his well-used scaffold was a sign that read THE GATES OF HELL.
In order to mete out his brand of punishment and to restore peace and tranquility to Indian Territory, Parker appointed two hundred deputy marshals to ride for him. They were to bring all wrongdoers to the dungeons at Fort Smith, which became known as “Hell on the Border.” Certainly not all those who served Parker and the court were angels. Several of them had been either brigands themselves or would later resort to the life of an outlaw. The righteous Parker had to swallow hard and sometimes even turn the other way. As he put it, he was “obliged to take such material for deputies as proved efficient in serving the process of this court.” Although Parker had to permit some rascals and questionable characters to represent him in the field, there was one kind of man he could never tolerate. No marshal who was a coward was allowed to venture out into the Indian country.
The tough lawmen who rode west out of Fort Smith had to cover an area of more than 74,000 square miles, an area about the size of New England. It was at best a difficult assignment. Nonetheless, Judge Parker required that his men risk their lives to patrol the nations and serve arrest warrants. “Bring them in alive or dead” was the standing order, but the officers tried their damnedest to return with live prisoners in order to collect all the mileage expenses and fees due them. Deputies were paid no salaries but received six cents a mile travel pay while on official business and a flat fee of two dollars a head for every criminal brought in alive. They depended for the balance of their income on rewards offered for the most sought-after felons.
Courageous deputies such as Paden Tolbert, David Rusk, Willard Ayers, Dave Layman, and many others took an oath to serve Parker and his court. At least one-third of Parker’s total force of lawmen died in the line of duty. The best-known of Parker’s deputies were Bill Tilghman, a former buffalo hunter and Dodge City marshal; Heck Thomas, a Confederate veteran who was twelve when he fought under Robert E. Lee; and Chris Madsen, a Dane who had served with the French Foreign Legion in Africa and the U.S. Cavalry in the far West. This intrepid trio was called the Three Guardsmen. They were the top guns of all the Men Who Rode for Parker, as the deputies called themselves.
During the late 1880s and early 1890s, new federal laws were passed that stripped away large portions of Parker’s jurisdiction. As the Indian Territory’s population increased, more courts were needed to meet the demands. The judge’s critics, including the eastern press, which called him “harsh, cruel, and tyrannical,” also helped bring about the end of his long legal career. Finally, in September 1896, after the balance of his jurisdiction was taken from him, Parker retired. It had been twenty-one years since he had first come to Fort Smith. His dark hair and beard were now totally white, and although he was only a month shy of turning fifty-eight, he looked like a man of at least seventy. He died two months later on November 17, 1896, from a heart attack, and was buried at the national cemetery at Fort Smith, just a few blocks from his courtroom and gallows.
Like most other country boys of his day, Charley Floyd was well acquainted with the story of “Hanging Judge” Parker and his band of deputy sheriffs. Charley was mesmerized with the old Indian Territory legends of the pursued and those who chased them. Charley especially liked hearing about the ones on the other side of the law.
He knew by heart the escapades of Jesse and Frank James, Belle Starr—the “Bandit Queen”—the Daltons, the Youngers, Bill Doolin, and all the other desperate men and women who had operated for many years in and around the Oklahoma hills where the Floyds grew cotton and corn. Those old desperadoes, shrouded in cobwebs and fantasy, made potent dreams for the young cookie thief. They became Charley’s legacy.