Ruby Hardgraves, a tenant farmer’s barefooted daughter with a splash of Cherokee blood, was one of the best things that ever happened to Charles Arthur Floyd. He damn well knew it, too, and so did she almost from the very start. Ruby and her kin lived around Akins, and when she started budding, Choc caught her scent and stayed on her trail like one of Walter Floyd’s top-drawer hounds shadowing a vixen fox.
Born February 6, 1907, more than nine months before Oklahoma and Indian territories joined together for admission to the Union as the forty-sixth state, Ruby was almost exactly three years younger than Choc. Also like Charley, she was a pure child of Aquarius, and her birth date also fell on a Wednesday, but her folks, like the Floyds, did not practice astrology or follow the stars.
Ruby’s father was Ben F. Hardgraves, a sharecropper born in 1883, a man who spent his life walled in by fields of cotton. Hardgraves was a twenty-four-year-old with not much more than a mule and a strong back when his daughter arrived on a cold winter’s day. Ruby’s mother, a native of Crawford County, Arkansas, had been born Sarah Adel Edwards in 1888, but many of her family and friends as well as her husband preferred to call her by her pet name, “Deller.” She was the sixth of fourteen children born to Perry Commodore Edwards and his wife, Mary Elizabeth McKibben Edwards, and the strain of Cherokee heritage of her mother showed up in the cheekbones of the new baby daughter.
Ruby never really got to know her mother very well. Sarah “Deller” Hardgraves died at the age of twenty on September 24, 1908, in southeastern Oklahoma, while giving birth to another infant girl at the family’s small cabin. Ben, whose own father was dead, did the best he could to care for Ruby, and he got some help with his little girl from his mother, Lydia, and her husband, Hugh Gay, a second-generation Irishman who had outlived at least two other wives. The Gays kept a tidy cabin near Akins and Ruby’s step-grandfather worked as a janitor at the Akins school after he retired from farming.
Ben Hardgraves kept plowing the rented land, and when he found another wife, he was overjoyed. Her name was Maggie and her disposition was sweet and pleasing. Ben’s happiness increased even more when his new wife accepted young Ruby as if the little girl were her own daughter. Maggie Hardgraves, an amiable Irish lady who baked buttermilk biscuits that would have made the devil shout praises to the Lord, gave Ruby the love and attention she needed. Eventually, Ben and Maggie would have four children of their own. There were three Hardgraves sons, named J.B., Jess, and Albert, and a daughter they named Pauline. All of them looked up to their older stepsister, Ruby.
Like others in the vast tribe of cotton farmers who made up the tenant system, the Hardgraves were unadorned folk. The boys were clad in faded denim hand-me-downs and the same kind of caps the factory workers in the cities liked to wear. The women went without rouge and lipstick. The Hardgraves family worked other men’s fields and lived in a series of frame houses and cabins, mostly unpainted and weathered, or occasionally covered with whitewash and a few morning glory vines. When they met friends or relatives at a reunion, funeral, or holiday gathering, they used the formal one-pump handshake that was common among country people and full-blooded Indians.
The boys paid no attention to hunting seasons. They roamed the fallow fields and meadows with their .22 rifles and single-barrel shotguns, looking for rabbits that would end up simmering in a frying pan with some onions and potatoes. They staved off the winter with ricks of blackjack oak, and when it was dark and cold, they wrapped up in quilts and listened to the raw wind trying to get inside. In the summer when those winds turned hot and dry and the house was stifling, they took the bedding outside and slept beneath the sheltering night sky. Farmers’ children laid on their backs and told secrets. They talked themselves to sleep while they watched for the first star to appear. It cost nothing to make a wish, and sometimes they even came true. Ruby sent a thousand wishes into the dark sky with the hope one of them would come to pass.
Sharecroppers had no sedans or trucks like the Floyds, and most of them never dreamed of owning their own home or their own land. “Don’t have a pot to piss in” is what people said about the sharecroppers. There was an Old Testament God and a New Testament Jesus to console them, however, and they did grow some fine produce. They had their vegetables and fruit and chickens. They had a little tobacco and they made up their own whiskey. Everything the sharecropping families consumed they grew themselves. Self-reliance was important to folks like Ben Hardgraves and his bunch. This also meant they held on to the few cash dollars they managed to keep, and did not put the money in a bank, where they felt they were likely to lose it.
It was true enough the banks in the state had come a long way since the early days in the 1700s when ingenious French traders stored away in chests valuable fur pelts that were deposited with them by Indian clients for future trading. During territorial times, the banks managed to move out of temporary buildings and makeshift operations in general stores and even started resembling real banks back in the East, at least in terms of details such as tellers’ cages, rolltop desks, vaults, and brass spittoons for the patrons.
Between 1903 and 1920, the number of banks in the state increased from 531 to 978. Not many of the rural banks enjoyed good health, however, especially after World War I when the foreign demand for American agricultural goods returned to normal levels and prices for the farm products tumbled. The banking and financial community reverberated with the force of the agricultural depression. Farmers could no longer come up with their loan payments, so bankers throughout the agricultural areas failed to meet their own obligations. The domino effect escalated, and, as a result, many banks closed their doors and ceased operations. During the decade of the twenties, there was an average of 550 bank failures in the United States each year, and the majority were located in small farm towns. In just two years from 1921 to 1923, seventy Oklahoma banks—including the Sallisaw Bank and Trust Company—failed.
The banks in the farming areas had never acted like the banks elsewhere in the nation. Rural banks were involved both in land speculation and horse trading. Even back in the days of World War I in Europe, when the cotton market began its collapse, farmers felt the squeeze from local bankers who increased agricultural interest rates. Instead of taking in deposits, these bankers mostly loaned money at high and often exorbitant rates to small farmers. Such usurious interest charges led, in large part, to much of the tension between urban and rural Oklahomans.
By the 1920s, worried bankers foreclosed on farm notes and repossessed mules, horses, and plows. They formed associations and worked at convincing rural governments to hire county agents to advise local growers about modern farming techniques. They also continued their efforts to motivate farmers to plant a diversity of crops other than the usual wheat in western Oklahoma and cotton in the eastern half of the state. They waged a losing battle.
Regardless of the desperate nostrums bankers tried, rural America failed to reverse the tide. Farmers packed up their new Fords and fled their property. The number of tenancy farms increased to the point that, by the mid-1920s, tenants worked as much as 80 percent of the land in some counties. The itinerant farmers and tenants failed to heed the advice about forsaking cotton, and they planted their crops from fence post to fence post. Like their fathers and grandfathers before them, they lived no better than serfs. Some of them planted cotton right up into their own dirt yards. They even stopped putting in vegetable gardens so they would have more space to devote to the crop that controlled their lives. During the first half of the decade, the value of farm land decreased by 23 percent and the average gross income for farmers fell to record lows. To poor folks, like the Hardgraves, their few precious greenbacks were much safer hidden away in an old molasses can or placed between the pages of the family Bible than in a bank where the risk of failure or theft was as strong as ever.
During this time, robbers continued to prey upon the surviving small banks scattered throughout the countryside. Hostility toward the bankers of eastern Oklahoma, especially from the small farmers and sharecroppers, remained as strong as it had been a few years earlier when Henry Starr pointed out in his defense that bankers were “in the robbery business, too.” The Oklahoma Bankers’ Association estimated that at least sixty to seventy-five banks were robbed each year during the twenties. Oklahoma’s frontier image was safe with the people in Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, who read in their newspapers about the bank robberies and bandits. As the losses mounted, the bank-association officials urged rural bankers to bar their windows, issue tear-gas guns to tellers, hire armed guards, and install alarms and vaults with time locks. Along with the increase in robberies came a steady rise in the banks’ annual insurance rates, from two dollars per thousand dollars to twenty dollars per thousand. To stem the tide of robberies, the association formed a crime-prevention team and even hired the Burns Detective Agency, whose undercover agents snuck around and tried to get chummy with those who knew the bandits. The agents wanted to turn up culprits by infiltrating some of the robbery gangs. They had limited success.
Social bandits were still the rage in Oklahoma. They would remain so for many years to come. Some of the bank and train robbers were heroic figures. These were ordinary criminals who were cast as modern-day legends. A few of them hoped they would be only half as lucky as Henry Starr or even Jesse James and become national celebrities before their deaths. They basked in the image of good old country boys who were driven to a life of crime by outside forces and circumstances beyond their control. Just as in the heyday of the James boys, the banks and railroads remained the villains and scoundrels, not the outlaw rogues who robbed them. Folks still believed that county-seat bankers were only worried about getting their usurious interest rates. It was the bankers, the Working Class Union had once warned, who were to blame for forcing law-abiding cotton farmers to adopt outlaw ways. These men who took up the mask and revolver were content to preserve Oklahoma’s old image as the last frontier, all the while adopting the latest in modern weaponry and speedy automobiles for their getaways.
Even though the bank robbers and train bandits of the 1920s were switching from cow ponies to autos, many of the old customs lingered. One Oklahoma outlaw who had a difficult time forsaking the old ways was Al Spencer. Nonetheless, he became one of the few bandits who was able to ride over the cusp separating the old outlaw days and the modern criminal era.
Spencer was born in 1893 near the Indian Territory town of Lenapah, located in what would later be named Nowata County, just south of the Kansas line and the town of Coffeyville, where the Dalton gang was shot to bits in 1892. Crawford Goldsby, the outlaw who met his end on the gallows at Fort Smith and called himself Cherokee Bill, and Sam McWilliams, a bandit known as the Verdigris Kid, were familiar characters in these parts. It was in Lenapah where Henry “Bearcat” Starr committed his first robbery and also shot and killed a railroad detective.
Spencer, like the intrepid Starr, began his career of lawlessness as a cattle rustler and horse thief. He soon went on to robbing stores and banks. Henry Starr was said to have robbed more than fifty banks. Some of the editorial writers and pulp authors, known for exaggeration and ballyhoo more than fact checking or accuracy, claimed Spencer eventually robbed almost that many himself. In headlines, Spencer was labeled the Phantom Terror and the Wild Rider of Oklahoma. He was also called the King of the Osage, in reference to his favorite stomping grounds in the Osage Hills, where some of the clannish people considered outlaws to be respectable businessmen.
Many years after Spencer’s death, Paul Wellman, the Oklahoma native and former Wichita newspaper reporter who later wrote for the Kansas City Star, came up with an interesting theory that some Western historians disputed but could not disprove. According to Wellman and his best sources, Spencer not only knew Henry Starr but was one of the bandit’s companions who managed to escape the fracas in Stroud, Oklahoma, in 1915. Based on his contacts with midwestern underworld figures, Wellman also stated that Spencer, as well as Starr, was well acquainted with the cunning John Callahan.
Throughout the country’s tumultuous teenage years, Spencer and a few of his sidekicks continued to operate in northern Oklahoma. They managed to avoid capture until 1920, about the time when oil began flowing in earnest from the Osage fields. On March 8 of that year, Spencer was hauled into a district court and was convicted of horse theft. The judge straightaway sent him off to the state penitentiary at McAlester.
Inside the stout prison walls of “Big Mac,” Spencer became reacquainted with old friends and made some new ones, including a balding convict with a prominent nose named Frank Nash. An avid reader of the classics, Nash spouted poetry and used his time in the pen to bone up on his favorite author, William Shakespeare.
Nash was born in Indiana in 1887. He came west with his family and was raised in the southwestern Oklahoma town of Hobart, later the county seat of Kiowa County. Named for the vice president under William McKinley, the town sprang to life in 1901 when the Kiowa-Comanche Indian lands were opened for settlement. By 1902, Nash’s father, John O. Nash, had established a hotel in Hobart and, from the first day of operation, horses and buggies bringing customers lined up in droves on the street out front. Known simply as the Nash, the hotel became a favorite resting place not only for commercial travelers and railroad men but also for drummers who tried to arrange their schedules to include at least several nights in the comfortable two-story frame building. Nash later gave the hotel to his daughter and son-in-law, Alice and John Long. Under Alice’s shrewd management, and with her younger half brother, Frank, acting as cook, the hotel’s reputation as a first-rate place to eat spread like prairie fire.
Frank Nash wearied of the steamy kitchen, however. He hated slinging hash for traveling peddlers and Bible salesmen as much as Choc Floyd despised chopping cotton. Nash had no interest in clerking at the front desk. Instead, he turned to burglary and theft as an added means of support. By 1913, he and two accomplices had carried out several successful capers. When Nash and one of his cohorts suspected the other member of their troika of squealing to the authorities, they shot him stone dead. Nash and the other fellow were arrested and jailed at Hobart. While they awaited trial, Nash’s strikingly beautiful half sister, Alice—remembered around town for her velvet dresses, ostrich-plume hats, and diamond jewelry—saw to it that Nash and his fellow prisoners dined on fare brought to their cells hot from the hotel kitchen. Years before when Nash had served a term as a youthful offender at the reformatory at Granite, he had also received sumptuous meals from the hotel, compliments of the thoughtful Mrs. Long.
In July 1913, Nash’s first trial on the murder charge ended with a hung jury when the members split their decision. A new court date was set, and on September 12, 1913, a news item with a Hobart, Oklahoma, dateline appeared in several newspapers, such as the Eufaula Democrat:
The second trial of Frank Nash for the murdder [sic] of “Humpie” Wartman resulted in his conviction of murder in the first degree, with a sentence of life imprisonment.
John Huber has already been convicted of complicity in the same murder and is now serving a life sentence for the crime.
On September 13, Nash was sent to McAlester to spend the rest of his life. As a convicted killer wearing number 4458, he could no longer sup on hotel cuisine. Nash spent less than five years behind bars, though. A personable fellow and a respected prison trusty, Nash was able to convince the warden he had been rehabilitated and was anxious to serve his country by battling in the trenches of France during World War I. On August 16, 1918, Nash was pardoned. Instead of going straight to the local recruiter and enlisting, the twenty-five-year-old returned to Hobart and went into seclusion. In no time at all, he was back to his old tricks.
On October 18, 1919, Nash was arrested by sheriff’s deputies in connection with a bank robbery at Cordell, Oklahoma, but the charge did not stick and he was released. Nash and some other bandits turned right around and hit the bank at the farming community of Corn, Oklahoma. He was again arrested, tried, and this time, he was convicted of burglary with explosives. Nash, sometimes known by the alias Charles B. Edgar or by the name “Jelly,” was returned to prison on August 4, 1920, to serve a twenty-five-year hitch. Waiting for him at McAlester was a fresh inmate uniform; a new number, 10672; and Al Spencer, the Osage bandit who had been residing there since March. The two men found plenty to talk about, including how to perfect their bank-robbing techniques.
Spencer, who had been granted a mysterious one-month prison furlough in 1921, escaped from the penitentiary on January 27, 1922. The cagey outlaw made a beeline to the Osage Hills, where he had been born, and immediately began hatching plans for the bank robberies he had been plotting in prison. Jelly Nash was fearful of getting shot in a break, so he had opted not to accompany his friend over the wall but to earn another early release and walk out the front gate. His strategy worked.
Following Spencer’s lead, Nash made application to the warden for a leave of absence “for business reasons,” and in December 1922, he was again pardoned in time to celebrate the holidays. Nash had no intention of ever returning to prison. The enterprise Nash wished to pursue was business of an unorthodox sort, and he promptly slipped into the wild hills and joined Al Spencer as his right-hand man. They assembled a formidable crew. Some of those who rode off and on with Spencer and Nash included such legendary desperadoes as Ike Ogg, Stanley Snyder, Henry Wells, Earl “Dad” Thayer, Ray Terrill, Curtis Kelly, Grover Durrell, Walter Philpott, Barnard Clark, Frank Billingsly, and Bud Jenkins. Goldie Bates was a young woman who became chummy with Spencer while he and the others operated out of the Osage country. It was a forceful and rugged company, and whether they actually pulled the jobs or not, the Spencer gang took the blame for a good many bank robberies.
Rag towns bloomed almost overnight in the oil-rich hills and prairies of the Burbank field in Osage County. They were rank and bawdy places, and the oil companies hired tough cowboys and ex-soldiers to act as special law officers to help keep the peace. Robbers, whores, bootleggers, and thugs flocked to the oil patch camps to prey on workers or else create new identities for themselves. Innocent farm girls interested in bettering their lives came to the instant towns, but they found the best jobs to be had were at dance halls, where they got to keep only a dime out of every quarter charged for a waltz. Many of the girls learned there was even more money to be made on a brothel cot once the dancing stopped.
Life was cheap in these boomtowns. It was not uncommon to see a curious crowd gathered around a corpse lying dead in the streets, or for workers on their way to the pump jacks in the fields to spy a body with its throat cut from ear to ear lying in a ditch. Hijackers went out to the remote oil rigs and took watches, wedding bands, or anything of value they could find on the drilling crews. Rural mail carriers, and those traveling in buggies and Model T’s were often mugged and robbed. Some of the outlaws were “coke heads,” as they were called then, and had expensive dope habits to finance.
Not all the thieves carried guns; some used fountain pens. Besides the common criminals, there were also con artists who made enormous profits by selling oil-rich Osage Indians ridiculously marked-up merchandise such as clothing, fancy automobiles, and grand pianos. Some unscrupulous white men in business suits amassed fortunes by cheating Osage Indians out of their valuable mineral rights or even murdering them in order to get at the oil deposits beneath the bluegrass prairie.
One of the wildest boomtowns in the Burbank oil field was Denoya, named for a prominent Osage Indian family but better known locally as Whizbang, after Whizbang Red, a notorious Kansas City madam. Shootings, knifings, and no-holds-barred fistfights were common occurrences in Whizbang. It was said that it wasn’t safe for a woman to be on the streets of Whizbang after dark, and in the early 1920s, the town bank was robbed on at least two occasions. During 1923, bandits held up several banks in the Osage territory or adjacent counties where they found refuge. Banks in Burbank, Ripley, Barnsdall, Cambridge, Bartlesville, Denoya, Fairfax, and Shidler were all robbed that year. The bank in the tiny Osage trading center of Grainola was hit twice, although during one of the incidents, a storekeeper with a rifle was able at least to wing a fleeing robber and cause the felon to drop one of the sacks of money.
“Those were very wild times,” reflected Pat Patterson, a profane and colorful character who lived in the area many years later. “There were bootleggers and people making whiskey. You could give a buck and get back plenty of ol’ ‘bang head.’ Whole tribes of folks lived out in the hills who had always stayed just one step ahead of the law. Their moral sense was different from most everyone else. They had their own code and ways of doing things and they saw nothing wrong with robbing a bank so long as it was insured and nobody got hurt.”
Boomtown banks were juicy targets for robbers. Many of the bank jobs pulled in Oklahoma during that period were credited to Spencer and his followers. Some said the Spencer bunch, armed with sawed-off shotguns, raided the Pawhuska Post Office and robbed as many as twenty-two banks in a twenty-month period following his escape from the penitentiary. Others claimed his total number of bank jobs was at least twice that number. Alva McDonald, a U.S. marshal who was tracking the bank robbers at the time, disagreed. He believed that Spencer’s participation in the bank robbery epidemic of the twenties was exaggerated. “Spencer was a good publicity man,” said McDonald. The law officer contended that Spencer’s gang had a hand in only a small number of the offenses that were marked on their criminal ledger.
By far the most notable crime Spencer engineered occurred on August 21, 1923, when he, Nash, and three other bandits carried out one of the nation’s last train robberies on horseback.
The brazen holdup of Katy train number 123 took place on a Tuesday afternoon near Okesa, an Osage County town on the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad line. Located southwest of Bartlesville, the prosperous city that served as the headquarters of Phillips Petroleum, Okesa was named shortly after the turn of the century from the Osage word for halfway because the tiny settlement was midway between the Cherokee Nation on the east and the Osage capital city of Pawhuska, only a dozen miles away. Several outlaws were known to live in the countryside near Okesa, and the Sunday before the train robbery, Spencer reportedly planned the escapade with members of his gang over breakfast at a local farmhouse. Spencer’s heist of twenty thousand dollars in bonds and cash from the Katy Limited passenger train was a spectacular feat. Even though Nash was opposed to this old-style method of obtaining funds, even he had to admit the nineteenth-century robbery approach of chasing a train from galloping cow ponies and firing revolvers to intimidate the passengers smacked of Jesse James and the Youngers.
During the robbery, Nash chatted with the train engineer and crew, and even commiserated with them about the tragic passing of Warren G. Harding. On August 2, less than three weeks before the Okesa train robbery, the fifty-seven-year-old Republican President, whose private life was surrounded by rumor and controversy, had died of an embolism in a suite at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel.
It should have come as no surprise to those on the train that Nash, an avid reader and probably a cut above the average bandit of his day, was thoroughly informed when it came to current events. Besides recalling Nash’s cordial demeanor and comments of concern about the late President Harding, eyewitnesses later told investigating law officers that the holdup was carried out with exacting precision and that the outlaws actually expressed regrets for the pistol whipping of Byron Tower, the train’s fireman, during the initial moments of the robbery when the horsemen overtook the locomotive.
Local lawmen formed a posse and gave chase. By nightfall, some of those known to be disciples of Spencer were either in custody or had been thoroughly grilled. Within a short time, at least eight conspirators, including Spencer’s sweetheart, Goldie Bates, were arrested and held on hefty fifty-thousand-dollar bonds as federal marshals closed in on the chief suspects. Rewards totaling more than ten thousand dollars were offered by Oklahoma Governor John Callaway Walton, the railroad, and federal government.
On September 20, 1923, approximately a dozen law officers, acting on a tip received from sources, located the wily bandit leader just below the Kansas border near a schoolhouse on the Osage-Washington county line. U.S. Marshal Alva McDonald, Deputy U.S. Marshal Luther Bishop, Postal Inspector Jack Adamson, Bartlesville Police Chief L. U. Gaston, and a Pawhuska police officer, Billy Crowe, were part of the posse that set up an ambush on a dirt road leading from the dense woods.
Around sunset, the officers spotted a lone man wearing what appeared to be an old army shirt, overalls, and a cap. He was also carrying a rifle and revolver, and when the automobile headlights flashed on him, the man dashed from the trees and ran for the road. The manhunters opened fire and the lone figure fell when at least three bullets found their mark. It was said that Luther Bishop, who went on a few years later to become one of Oklahoma’s first State Crime Bureau agents, fired the fatal shot. The man killed that evening reportedly had thousands of dollars in bonds hidden on his body. He was Al Spencer. The King of the Osage was dead. Some said his death marked the end of the frontier outlaws. Perhaps so, but it was still a long way from the close of the era of the social bandits.
At the time of Spencer’s death, Oklahoma was in turmoil and had been since September 15, 1923, when Governor Jack Walton, despite threats on his life, professed war on the Ku Klux Klan and placed the entire state under martial law. The furor over the Tulsa race riot in 1921 and the Tulsa Klan marches in 1922, when one man even lost his ear when he dared register black voters, continued to reverberate. On September 26, less than a week after Spencer was killed, sixty-five state representatives—angry because they believed the governor had overstepped his power—tried to convene at the state capitol in Oklahoma City in order to impeach Walton. They were turned back by armed guards. Walton, who critics said was nothing more than an opportunist, was justifiably concerned because the KKK had continued to build a head of steam not only in his state but around the nation.
In the summer of 1923, Burton Rascoe, then a prominent Oklahoma writer and literary critic, wrote an article for The Nation in which he minced no words and pointed out that his home state had sunk into what he could only describe as a “mental, moral, and spiritual torpor.” It was not just the bigots of the Ku Klux Klan to whom Rascoe took exception, but also the wealthy business tycoons, land speculators, and unethical bankers, only interested in their own personal gain at the sacrifice of others. Rascoe, the son of a Seminole County farmer, also wrote about the disgraceful conditions of the tenant farmers and sharecroppers, whose lives were dominated by backward agricultural methods and who wallowed in ignorance. He suggested that because of their sorry condition and lack of education, most of the dirt farmers were paranoid about other people, and that they tended to label nonconformists and unconventional thinkers as Reds. In response, he was branded as Comrade Rascoe in a letter to the editor that appeared in the August 22, 1923, issue of The Nation, only a couple of days after the Okesa train robbery.
Meanwhile, Governor Walton, a former mayor of Oklahoma City, who was born in Indiana and raised in Nebraska and Fort Smith, Arkansas, where his father operated a small hotel, had already started his own crusade against the Klan that same month by declaring martial law in Tulsa County.
Walton was a civil engineer turned politician and had been loudly criticized for blatant patronage in his political appointments. He had received endorsements from various labor unions as well as the Farmer-Labor Reconstruction League, considered a radical organization by conservatives. After his election, the establishment politicians and big-business interests saw the writing on the wall. Walton’s inauguration party had even departed from the traditional elegant affair and turned into a two-day noisy spectacle, complete with farmers in their work clothes, costumed Indians, and liquored-up cowboys all enjoying fiddle serenades, clog dances, and a feast of wild game cooked over a mile-long open pit. The shindig would have put a lasting grin on Andrew Jackson’s face, but it made every self-respecting old-line banker and oil-field patrician cringe in disgust.
In turn, Walton’s ineptitude and his efforts to please everyone and appease all political factions caused him instantly to lose credibility even with supporters. His popularity faded more with his radical declaration of martial law in Tulsa and Okmulgee counties, establishment of military censorship over the press, and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. The final outrage was Walton’s use of martial law statewide, an act that resulted in the formation of a movement to impeach him as governor. Public support turned against Walton. Embarrassed Democrats and anti-Klan forces joined with the Klan itself to get rid of the governor.
In a last ditch try to keep his position, Walton called the legislature into special session on October 11, 1923, in order to destroy the KKK in the state. The lawmakers refused to convene and gathered instead on October 17 at the request of Speaker of the House William D. McBee. The representatives drafted twenty-two separate charges against Walton and voted for his impeachment. On October 23, Walton was suspended from office and Lieutenant Governor Martin E. Trapp, a native of Kansas considered to be the epitome of the professional politician, became the acting governor.
The end was in plain sight for Walton. Rumors had spread throughout the domeless capitol building that he was even a Klan member. Eleven of the charges against Walton were upheld, including public payroll padding, suspension of habeas corpus, illegal collection of campaign funds, excessive use of his powers to pardon criminals, and general incompetence. On November 19, the Senate concurred with the House. Jack Walton was impeached and was formally removed from the post of governor. His tenure of office from January 9 to November 19, 1923, was to go down in history as the shortest term for any elected Oklahoma governor.
Although the civil unrest and impeachment proceedings dominated most everyone’s attention in Oklahoma during the last months of 1923, the lawmen tracking down the remnants of Al Spencer’s gang did not stop their efforts to round up the others involved in the Okesa train robbery. Soon after they shot and killed Spencer, they apprehended the other train thieves, with the notable exception of Frank “Jelly” Nash.
Throughout the autumn months of 1923, they followed Nash’s trail. He headed south, first to Alamogordo, New Mexico, where he allegedly went into business with a lady bootlegger, and then on to the Mexican border city of Juárez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso. His attempt to establish an alibi for the train robbery failed, and Nash rode a burro into the high mountains of the state of Chihuahua to work as a ranch hand. During a visit to a Juárez cantina, Nash was identified by an off-duty El Paso policeman, who remembered the bandit’s face from a wanted poster. The rancher who employed Nash refused to turn him over to the U.S. authorities but did agree to send Nash across the border on a bogus errand so law officers could apprehend him. Although the horse he rode spooked at the shallow river crossing, Nash was able to coax the mare across the Rio Grande into Texas. He rode directly into the waiting arms of Alva McDonald, the U.S. marshal who had been after Nash ever since the holdup at Okesa. Known for his sense of humor, Nash reportedly smiled when he saw the proverbial jig was up and told the law officers about his horse balking at the border. “I should have listened to her,” said Nash, laughing.
On March 3, 1924, Frank “Jelly” Nash was convicted of the assault of a mail custodian, and was sentenced to twenty-five years at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.
Down in Sequoyah County that very same month, Choc Floyd and Ruby Hardgraves spent as much time together as possible. She was seventeen years old, tall and slim. He was twenty, stocky and strong. Choc was surely aware of the Okesa train robbery and the death of Al Spencer the year before. He may even have heard about Frank Nash’s capture and subsequent trial in Oklahoma City. Choc was also busy making moonshine with his big brother, Bradley, and playing poker with friends. And there was also Ruby. The two of them thought about little else but the other.
No one could have known that smart-aleck farm kid Choc Floyd and thirty-seven-year-old convict Jelly Nash would one day be linked in a bloody episode that would profoundly affect law-enforcement procedures for years to come.
However, that was all years away—almost a decade—and even a single year seemed an eternity for young lovers or men doing hard time. In March of 1924, Jelly Nash was assigned yet another prison identity and became number 20769 at Leavenworth. As Nash grew accustomed to his newest home, Choc and Ruby pursued their romance. They had secret places to go, and they found themselves alone in the thickets or the piles of hay in the barn. They tried to stay out of winter’s way. Choc and Ruby went to the secluded country graveyards of dead family and friends; they made love under a river of stars.