A Flash in the Pan
The Poe-Hart Gang
Very few people these days have even heard of the Poe-Hart gang; anybody who reads about their time is generally interested in the big names: the Daltons, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, the noxious Barker family. The Poe-Hart bunch didn’t last very long, and they were a far cry from romantic, but while they were on the prowl they were hell on wheels to lawmen and bankers. They may have been a candle in the wind, but while they lasted, they shed a lot of light.
The Poes were Texas folks, a very large family until cholera got both parents and two children. But our story starts a little later in Indian Territory, when Adolphus Lane Poe—called Pony—and his brother Bill rustled a herd of horses near Fort Supply. Pony got himself caught and went up the river for three years for that one, courtesy of the Honorable Isaac Parker, better known as the “hanging judge” of the US District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, all the law there was west of Fort Smith. Brother Bill evaded the law for a while but was caught a little later and got six years of his own.
Pony was a suspect in at least one crime after that, and when Bill got out of stir he soon indulged in a little armed robbery and went off for fifteen more years. But Pony stayed out of jail, married, raised a family, and lived on a hardscrabble farm near a place called Nuyaka. The family grew, and to his own kids was added Bill’s son, Oscar, whose mother abandoned him on Pony’s doorstep when Bill went back to prison.
Pony and Oscar turned out to be two of a kind, and Oscar had been picked up for horse theft by the time he was seventeen. This was a first offense—at least the first for anything this serious—and the law cut him some slack. A year later, in 1909, Oscar went to stealing horses again, again got caught, and this time got two years. Once he got out, he tried cattle rustling up in Oklahoma, and this time he got five years’ hard time.
Paroled in 1915, he went to work in the Oklahoma oil patch until, a month or so into his new life, he tried to sell a company team and wagon to a rival oil company. The potential buyer smelled a large rat, but when two peace officers came to arrest Oscar, he opened fire on them, badly wounding both. What to do? Why back to the welcoming arms of Uncle Pony at his out-of-the-way ranch.
And here he was not only safe from the law, but chanced to meet the Hart brothers, Harrison and William, twin survivors of an impoverished family from Centralia, Oklahoma, a wide spot in the road up toward Vinita. It was a match made in heaven, for the Harts were on the run, too. They had been accused of burglary, among others things, and Will had complicated things by shooting the local schoolmaster, the ostensible reason being that the teacher had scolded his sister for some sort of classroom misbehavior.
And so the Harts came to meet Pony Poe, who hired them on to ride his blooded horses. Both young men had been jockeys, but in addition to riding for Pony, they spent some time in petty theft around Nuyaka. And it was probably then that Pony recruited them into his horse-stealing operation.
For Pony was into a very good thing. It was the winter of 1915-16, World War I was raging, and the European combatants were buying horses at a prodigious rate. Oscar and Will played large roles in the theft of other people’s herds, which were then stashed in remote canyons until they could be marketed. Oscar and Will got themselves caught rustling, however, and spent some time in jail in Nowata County.
That time wasn’t wasted, however, since the boys met a couple of kindred spirits, Russell Tucker and Jess Littrell. Littrell had been around; he had spent a couple of years in federal prison for—what else?—horse theft and afterward tried his hand at bootlegging. It got him arrested in 1911, 1912, and 1915. Tucker had joined him in the marketing of ardent spirits, bonded him out, and hit the road for the high lonesome. They were Pony’s kind of kids.
Business was booming in the horse market, and Pony soon decided he needed more help. He found it in brothers Floyd, Lee, and Glenn Jarrett and brother-in-law Ab Connor. All of them had been pains in the neck to the local law for years. The Jarretts were a memorable piece of work. They came from a huge family, of which seven out of ten brothers turned bad. They were not master criminals, certainly, as one story relates.
Ab, Lee, and Glenn went off to rob a train in the spring of 1911, with the master moron of the criminal world, Elmer McCurdy. Elmer later won some small claim to fame by getting himself killed by the law but still carving out a stellar postmortem career: He spent many years touring raree shows as a dummy, permanently dead and ossified with arsenic. But he still enjoyed a time in the limelight he had never achieved in life, until he was finally discovered for what he really was when his arm fell off during a filming of The Six Million Dollar Man.
On this job, this band of boobies blew the express car safe to get at all that money; only, they used far too much nitroglycerin and blew the car apart and the safe out into a field. Curses! Foiled again!
Gang member Walter Jarrett robbed a bank in Prue, Oklahoma, fought the pursuing lawmen, and the law won. The rest of this fragrant little bunch went their nefarious ways. Glenn Jarrett was especially active; it got him five years in the Kansas State Prison. Oscar and Will Hart stuck together, and rustling on the grand scale proceeded apace. Pony Poe’s army expanded to include not only Oscar and the Harts, but also other Hart brothers, Lee Jarrett, and Red Cloud Scruggs.
The gang graduated now to armed robbery, pulling several jobs in Coffeyville, Kansas, not so long before of the bloody end of the Dalton gang. After several forays to that long-suffering little town, they moved south into Oklahoma for a bit, then back to Coffeyville.
It was a typically stupid act. Oscar and Will had a pair of floozies with them, and the object of their trip was plainly not business but pleasure. But they were recognized and finally forced to surrender. The evidence they carried with them was overwhelming: cash—one of the women had almost twelve hundred dollars shoved into her corset—gold coins, a stolen pistol, and jewelry, including a wedding ring stolen right there in Coffeyville.
It got better. With Will and Oscar in jail, they began to have an interesting visitor, none other than Pony Poe, packing a handgun and a great wad of cash. He was a cattle buyer, he said, and in spite of several days’ interrogation he remained a mystery, finally released for insufficient evidence.
And then, the night before Will and Oscar were to be shipped to Oklahoma for trial, several of the rest of the gang broke both men out, first getting the law to take one of their members inside masquerading as a drunk. He opened the door for the others, and all of them, including Will and Oscar, were gone.
A whole string of robberies followed down in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Pony had arrived in Independence, Kansas, to bail out Mabel Brooks, apparently Oscar’s common-law wife. Unfortunately for Pony, an alert official recognized some of the bail money bills as among those stolen in one of the gang’s robberies. Pony was back in the slammer.
The next act was played out in Nowata, Oklahoma, where a carload of men robbed, of all things, a meat market, which they looted of divers supplies, including a whole hog carcass. A couple of carloads of citizens followed the bandits’ car; its tracks led one group of them to Big Blue Canyon, a brushy, rocky, wilderness used as a refuge as far back as the Civil War, and allegedly even by the Dalton gang. It was crawling with rattlesnakes and riddled with caves, a very bad place to go man-hunting in.
There was a four-citizen posse, led by the town marshal, and the five walked up on the big automobile parked close to the canyon’s mouth. They walked too far, for about the time they decided they ought to back away and get some reinforcements, the outlaws opened up on them.
The marshal was killed, and two of the citizens fell, too, one of them mortally wounded; the other was seriously hurt but would survive. Only two possemen stayed in action, and one of them thought he had hit one of their attackers with a shotgun round. The bandits chose to get on with their flight rather than try to finish off the little posse, and so they set fire to the possemen’s car, climbed into their own automobile, and roared away.
This left the population of little Delaware, Oklahoma, to mourn two of their most popular citizens. Most everybody came to the funerals, a choir sang “sometime, we’ll understand,” and the dozens of lawmen who attended the marshal’s funeral left with a new and bitter resolve.
Then the bandits showed the stupid streak so common to their kind. Tucker and Littrell whooped it up at a dance. They boasted to a couple of flirtatious ladies that they were big, bold bank robbers who intended to rob the bank at Okemah very shortly. The women passed this incautious bragging on to the law, which immediately heightened security.
It turned out that the target bank was in the town of Harrah, and the robbery was successful, netting some four thousand dollars’ worth of goods, even down to the mean-spirited theft of a banker’s diamond stickpin. Citizen posses pursued unsuccessfully, and the trail went cold—until, that is, a typical stupid bandit episode: Jess Littrell and Russell Tucker blandly returned to town by train. They went to the local home of one Joe Welsher, where a large posse surrounded them.
After negotiations and agreement to release Welsher’s wife and children, the bandits instead surrounded themselves with the Welsher family and bolted out the back door, firing as they went. The posse held their fire to save the Welshers, and such few shots as they could get off were ineffective. One posseman commented later, “I believe in the future, I’ll stick to my office job.”
So the outlaws got away clean, escaping two brushes with other posses, stealing a car, and finally rousting out a cabdriver named Fuller, whom they paid to drive them to Boley, an all-black town east of Oklahoma City. There they stuck up a schoolteacher in a buggy, jammed a gun in his ribs, and forced him to drive them farther. When they finally let the schoolteacher go, the teacher drove “at a furious pace” to find some law. Once he did so, the long hunt was finally over.
The bandits had taken refuge in a local home, and once the posse arrived, they ran wildly out the back door, shooting as they ran and headed for the dubious safety of a chicken coop. Tucker didn’t make it, drilled through the head by a posseman’s bullet. Then the law made the mistake of summoning Littrell to surrender; the answer was a blast of fire that killed a deputy, whose last words were said to be “I wish I hadn’t came here.”
The posse responded with a torrent of fire, nearly tearing the chicken coop apart, and Littrell, hit repeatedly, changed his mind about surrender. He had been hit five times, including a round through one lung. The posse recovered more than one thousand dollars in loot and even the treasured stickpin.
Once Littrell had been moved to jail in Okemah, Sheriff Jones was faced with a new problem: A substantial portion of the citizenry was talking about a lynching party. The sheriff got his badly wounded charge out of town, and with a stop for emergency medical help, he got Littrell to the state prison at McAlister.
Now the hunt for the rest of the gang got some help, a tip on the gang’s whereabouts. Among other helpful events, the hunters arrested a young felon who had escaped the Vinita jailhouse with Poe and Hart. This young man regurgitated a complex tissue of lies and excuses about the gang, including the tale that Oscar intended to set the all-time outlaw record by hitting three banks in the same town. Maybe so, but he would never get the chance.
The law’s attention centered on the Nuyaka Mission country, a wild brushy area not far from—where else—Pony Poe’s place. In a spot called Hell Hole Canyon, they found the bandits’ empty camp, just a tent and the remains of a fire. On the thesis that the bandits might be back, the posse waited. They were right.
After a miserable wait in the snow through a bitter night, the posse saw their quarry returning to the campsite. Spotting the lawmen, the outlaws opened fire, and a wild fight followed. Oscar and Will Hart charged the posse, showering their position with Winchester rounds, but the law’s aim was better. Oscar and Will were hit hard multiple times. Will fell motionless in the snow, but Oscar crawled for cover, now banging away with his pistol. Harry Hart took a bullet near the left eye, and he too went down to stay.
Oscar, still firing, was finally hit by a rifle bullet in the head, and that, as they say, “was all she wrote.” Only one posse member had been hurt, and his wound was only superficial.
It had been a smashing victory for the law; the only fly in their ointment was the small amount of loot recovered. Stories of hidden loot were inevitable, but decades of searchers have come up empty in this wild area.
What was left of the outlaws was entrusted to the ministrations of the Okmulgee Furniture and Funeral Company. There was much excitement over the good guys’ triumph. Even Oscar’s widow, Mabel, showed up, to tell the press that she had tried and tried to turn Oscar from the paths of evil, but there was just no saving him. She also said—and this was far closer to the truth—that the Poe family was responsible for his vile deeds, “a pack of thieves who are beyond redemption.”
Mabel seemed to have plenty of money; her baggage required three men to move it, and she paid for clothing and high-grade coffins for the burial of all three men. Facing charges of receiving stolen property and harboring fugitives up in Kansas, she sniffed, “a widow is not well treated in the state of Kansas.”
She departed Oklahoma by train . . . but not to Kansas.
Jess Littrell finally recovered enough to be dealt with. He was moved to Oklahoma County to face charges there, and he got twenty-five years. He was then moved back to Okemah and given life for murder. He could look forward to another murder trial in Nowata County in the unlikely event that he lived long enough. Lee Jarrett was picked up off a road in 1921, right next to a wrecked Ford, stone dead, apparently as a result of some drunk driving with at least one other wanted criminal, who was nowhere to be seen.
Which left Pony Poe. Pony saw the handwriting on the wall after the Poe-Hart gang was no more. He not only moved to Texas but changed his name. Leaving his family, he wandered across the West, working, among other things, as bootlegger, oil-field worker, and laborer.
He did at least one more stretch in the pen out in New Mexico on a charge of larceny. While confined, he killed a man, but he had his first good luck in quite some time: A guard saw the killing and said it was self-defense.
Pony spent his last years sponging off his distant relatives, still drifting from job to job. He had lost the allegiance of his close family, once they found out he had long had a second “family” up in New Mexico. He did visit a daughter in the 1950s, a reunion that ended when Pony shot and killed his son-in-law after some sort of domestic dispute, later ruled justifiable homicide.
Pony died in a 1963 car wreck in Ardmore, Oklahoma. He was eighty-seven and crooked to the end. No driver’s license, but three social security cards. He ended up in an indigent’s grave.