There was no shortage of idols for Charley Floyd and his bold mates. Any suntanned boy with the nerve of a cat burglar who grew up picking cotton and shooting agates during the adolescent years of the twentieth century had a glut of champions to choose from and imitate. Most of them were distant images—pictures in a book or newspaper, or popular names that came up during conversations at the cotton gin or after church services. Some were larger-than-life characters—a blustery Teddy Roosevelt ranting from a podium draped in bunting or an aging Buffalo Bill Cody with white hat in hand, riding into the arena’s limelight for a final bow. Still others were far less grand or conspicuous.
A few of the young fellows from Sequoyah County doted on Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton-educated historian and the U.S. President who tried in vain to keep the country out of the menacing war that started in Austria-Hungary in 1914 and stormed across the continent. Wilson was a Virginia native and had lived as a boy in Augusta, Georgia, where in the spring of 1865 he peered from his father’s Presbyterian parsonage window and saw a dejected Jefferson Davis pass as a captive in a guarded carriage on his way to federal prison. It was a scene Wilson would never forget.
After he completed his education, Wilson briefly practiced law in Atlanta before he became a professor and college president and then entered the political arena. In 1910, Wilson gave up the presidency of Princeton University and became the governor of New Jersey. In 1912, he was the Democrats’ choice for President. He won the election with only 41.9 percent of the popular vote. In the 1916 election, he won more handily with 49.3 percent. Although Wilson was certainly not a landslide President, every male member of the Floyd family—from Bartow County, Georgia, to Sequoyah County, Oklahoma—backed the Democrat for President in both elections. Wilson was their man.
School boys from Hanson, Muldrow, Akins, Vian, and the other dirt-road towns that dotted the hills of eastern Oklahoma respected the distinguished President just as much as their elders. Woodrow Wilson also served as a role model for the bookworms and teacher’s pets. Unlike Buffalo Bill, he wore spectacles and dressed in tailored suits and neckties almost every single day of his life. Sometimes he had on soft gloves and top hats when he gave speeches before large audiences. Wilson described himself this way: “I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles.”
Charley thought the President was solemn and scholarly. Along with preachers, judges, and doctors, Wilson was placed in a category of exalted figures beyond reproach. He clearly was not someone an ordinary kid had any desire to emulate. Charley would have just as soon patterned his life after the Sunday school superintendent or the Prince of Wales as pretend to be the President of the United States.
John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing, a mustachioed Missouri warrior and ultimately America’s first six-star general since George Washington, was quite another story, however. Here was a man any lively boy could mimic.
During summertime games in the days before the United States entered the conflict in Europe, the farm boys around Hanson pretended that Pershing and his troops had come to the rescue. Charley’s patched overalls became Pershing’s immaculate uniform. The imaginative boy pretended a folded Sallisaw newspaper was the general’s smart cap with gleaming leather brim. Ribbons, once given out at the county fair for pear preserves or layer cakes, now masqueraded as battle decorations awarded for acts of bravery above and beyond the call of duty. Branches torn from sumac trees turned into make-believe sabers of forged steel, and wooden stakes used for holding up Mamie’s tomato plants served as sham Enfield rifles. In the minds of Charley and his friends, dried cornstalks left standing in the field were really advancing enemy regiments, and sun-bleached corn leaves were glistening bayonets. Morning fog in the cotton patch became the Hun’s deadly poison gas hovering over the trenches, and, with a bit of imagination, the frame schoolhouse was transformed into the French fortress at Verdun in 1916, the year before the United States went to war.
The general turned the heads of the more adventuresome young people who considered war to be child’s play. They had grieved right along with Pershing when his wife and three of his four children burned to death in a fire at San Francisco’s Presidio in 1915. They rallied with him when Pershing found just the therapy he needed—a call to arms. He gave his troops a taste of combat and also titillated the little boys back home as he pursued the revolutionary Pancho Villa and his elusive rebels along the Mexican border. Finally, in 1917, when Wilson at last asked Congress to declare war, Pershing got his chance to confront the German peril. The flocks of red-blooded lads who whistled and waved flags for the eager doughboys, who sailed to glory and gore at Belleau Wood and the Somme, had already fought and won thousands of rehearsal battles against the Kaiser in the yards and forests across America.
In the turbulent teenage years of the century, the disparate duo of Wilson and Pershing were but two of the vaulted names youngsters held in high regard. The country had more than enough icons to go around. Military and political leaders abounded. There were global explorers, big business tycoons, and stars from the fledgling motion picture business to choose from. Many of these instant folk heroes grabbed the headlines as well as the hearts and minds of much of America’s youth. Sports figures captivated even more.
Major league baseball, having just reached the status of the national pastime, provided the public with the likes of Tris Speaker, Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, Larry Lajoie, Walter Johnson, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and Honus Wagner. A left-handed batter and right-handed thrower out of Narrows, Georgia, who played for the Detroit Tigers, was no slouch, either. Named Tyrus Raymond Cobb, his adoring fans knew him as Ty Cobb. He was the Georgia Peach. The Floyd brothers, all adept ball players themselves, approved of Cobb’s fiery competitive spirit. They especially liked his daring base running characterized by the way he slashed spikes when he slid hard into the legs of opponents. Cobb was as tough as his last name.
There were other sportsmen worthy of worship. Jim Thorpe, a sturdy Sac and Fox Indian from near Shawnee, Oklahoma, was one of them. Thorpe excelled at several games, including football, and was considered by some to be the greatest athlete in the world. Charley, as well as every other farmer’s son, was stunned when Thorpe confessed that he had earned wages playing professional baseball and thus was ruled ineligible to keep the track and field medals he had won for his record performances at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. “I was not very wise in the ways of the world and did not realize this was wrong,” admitted Thorpe after the honors were stripped away. Lots of Oklahoma boys were sympathetic.
Charley and the other lads who liked a good scrap and wore their black eyes and split lips like badges of courage also admired the big-time prizefighters. Good news for many of those fight fans came in 1915 when Jess Willard, a 250-pound behemoth, gained notoriety as the Great White Hope after he defeated Jack Johnson, the first black to hold the heavyweight championship. Willard decked Johnson in the twenty-sixth round of a match held in Havana, Cuba, because Johnson’s legal problems prevented him from fighting in the United States. Johnson had become involved with a white woman and was in trouble with the law for transporting her “across state lines for immoral purposes.” While awaiting trial he jumped bail, left the country, and fought in exile. Years before, when he first won the heavyweight crown, the victory of a black man had touched off race riots throughout the nation resulting in the deaths of at least a half-dozen blacks. When Willard knocked out Johnson, there were predictable roars of approval across the land. Someone had finally taught that “uppity nigger” a lesson.
Charley knew the big Kansan could not retain the champ’s crown for very long. There was a real battler waiting in the wings who fought under the name Kid Blackey. Charley had his eye on him all along. A savage puncher, the Kid was soon tagged with another nickname that was taken from the tiny Colorado town where he was born. He became known as the Manassa Mauler. His real name was William Harrison Dempsey, but he was better known simply as Jack, and those who climbed into the ring with him soon found out that he was capable of delivering stinging knockout punches when a fight was only a few seconds old.
Jack Dempsey was one of Charley Floyd’s true idols. Charley followed his entire boxing career and never lost faith in the big pugilist. The payoff finally came in 1919 when Dempsey dethroned Willard and became the new champion of the world. So thorough and fierce was the thrashing Dempsey gave Willard that soon after the fight began many of the 45,000 spectators jammed into the Toledo Arena were screaming “Stop it! Stop it!” Just thirty seconds after the conclusion of the third round, Willard’s seconds tossed two towels into the ring to signify their man’s surrender. Down in Oklahoma, when Charley got word of Dempsey’s victory, the fifteen-year-old was so pleased, he cheered himself hoarse. The hammering Dempsey, like the fleet-footed Cobb, was among Charley’s favorite champions, but he also looked up to other prominent contemporaries.
Although the radio had not reached the Floyd home by World War I, Charley was reasonably aware of current events. He listened to his parents and their friends as they sat on the porch and discussed the fate of the world. Occasionally, he caught a glimpse of front-page headlines, or read the sports pages from a Tulsa newspaper. A thumbed-over copy of the Kansas City Star, left lying around a store, was more of a rarity. The big Sunday newspaper editions out of Tulsa were the best. They were filled with feature stories and comic strips, and in the rotogravure section were scads of photographs of the rich and famous. On posters displayed outside moving picture theaters, Charley saw the images of Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin. He became familiar with the star bronc riders and bulldoggers of the wild West shows from the tour placards tacked on barns and fence posts.
However, some of Charley’s best heroes were plucked straight out of the rudimentary literature and history lessons that were taught at the country school he attended. The curriculum was basic, presented by young men and women who had received teaching certificates after they matriculated from the eighth grade. Some teachers were only a few years older than their students. Interspersed with the arithmetic and penmanship exercises were the predictable sugarcoated accounts of the voyages of Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Colonial soldiers at Valley Forge, and the glories of Custer’s Last Stand. Tales of Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Hiawatha, and Huckleberry Finn were also handed down along with stories about Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, George Washington, and Abe Lincoln.
To Charley, they were all impressive figures. But in his eyes, none of them—not the trim infantry officers in their Sam Browne belts nor the characters described in the history books, not the Georgia Peach drawing blood at second base nor Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox, not even the great Jack Dempsey with his crushing paws of iron—held a candle to Jesse James.
In Jesse James, a prodigiously talented bank and train robber who was shot and killed in Missouri in 1882, Charley Floyd found his favorite hero of all. He worshiped the bloody ground over which the outlaw once rode.
James left his prints everywhere he went. Unknowingly, he spawned a great many legends throughout the countryside. In contrast to the other heroic figures Charley idolized, James was long dead and buried. But there were many presumably accurate accounts of the notorious outlaw that were passed around like a jar of moonshine making the rounds at a wolf hunter’s midnight fire.
Charley eavesdropped on the discussions of old men who met at the country stores. When they had finished solving the problems of the world, these timeworn men were usually good for at least a couple of rousing stories about the days past when the James boys regularly visited the territory. No one dared challenge the authenticity of these tales; no one really wanted to. The old men’s romanticized descriptions of wild chases, ill-gotten treasure, hangings, robberies, and shootings were sweeter than pecan pie to Charley Floyd. The murderer and robber had become a folk hero for an entire generation of boys, especially those who lived where the bandit once roamed.
No single criminal left so deep an impression on the American culture as Jesse Woodson James. He was Charley Floyd’s guiding light.