13

THE UNCHRISTIAN CHRISTIAN BOYS

Most western bad men probably turned crooked simply out of laziness and the lure of wallowing in money without working very hard; a farm boy could quickly tire, as one of them delicately put it, “of following a mule’s behind all day.” The same was true of eating longhorn dust morning to night. Some, like the James boys, got addicted to excitement during the war and never returned to the paths of peace. Some turned outlaw because it made them feel like somebody important.

And a few of them were simply born bad.

Like the Christian boys, brothers Bill and Bob. In 1891, their family moved from Texas into the open land north of the Canadian River and settled in what would become Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma Territory. This wild area was the land of the “saloon towns,” wide-spots-in-the-road like Violet Springs, Young’s Crossing, Keokuk Falls and the Corner, a tiny patch of land on the South Canadian River. Their saloons attracted the trash of the territory.

Violence was endemic. Keokuk Falls was known for its “seven deadly saloons.” At the Corner lived a patient doctor named Mooney, who treated dozens of casualties from gunshots, knifings and violent batteries. He once did an amputation on a saloon table while a drunk held a lamp to light the doctor’s work and revelry continued all around him.

Violence was a way of life. In Keokuk Falls, somebody shot a saloonkeeper named Haning in the head, left him on the floor of his bar and then came back later, “between daybreak and sunrise,” to finish the job by driving a rusty nail into his ear. When trains of the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Gulf Railroad stopped in Shawnee, the conductor soothingly announced: “Shawnee! Twenty minutes for lunch and to see a man killed.”

These towns were hellholes, and they died hard. Even after Violet Springs was moved in its entirety to Konawa, its saloons carried on until all of Oklahoma went dry in 1907. At the turn of the century, the Pottawatamie country boasted more than sixty saloons and two distilleries. Shawnee’s daily booze intake for some 3,500 souls in 1903 was estimated at twenty-five gallons of whiskey and seven hundred gallons of beer. The county was heaven for career outlaws like the Daltons, brothers Jim and Vic Casey, Bill Doolin, Zip Wyatt and inept amateur bandits like Al Jennings. With Indian Territory on two sides, the county was ideal as a base for the bootleggers who ran prohibited hooch into Indian lands. It was here that the venerable term “bootlegger” may have had its genesis, describing those smugglers who rode into Indian country with pint bottles of John Barleycorn stuffed into the tops of their boots.

Surprisingly, many good people lived here, too. The Pottawatomie country was known as “a fine country for the poor man,” where crops grew well and game abounded, where one little town was named “Moral,” for its first citizen decreed no booze would be tolerated in his peaceful community. And the Anti–Horse Thief Association did what it could to curb rampant livestock theft, decreeing that all horses must be branded with a “c” on the left jaw and have papers. Woes betide the man who rode a branded horse but had not the proper papers for his nag.

The Christian family was numbered among the honest folk, well respected in the county. The brothers proved to be black sheep, however, and won an early and unenviable reputation as whiskey runners and horse thieves by the time Bob and Bill were in their twenties. The Christian boys headquartered in Andy Morrison’s saloon in Violet Springs until Andy was murdered while sleeping in his own back room. And in 1895, the brothers graduated from small-time crime to killing.

It happened in April 1895 in the town of Burnett (though there is also a story that the whole sordid affair happened up in Guthrie, north of Oklahoma City). It came to pass when the brothers and a drinking buddy, one John Mackey, walked out of Doug Barnes’s saloon and found the law waiting for them. Deputy Will Turner (or Turney) had warrants for the brothers’ arrest and thought he was tough enough to try to bring them in single-handed. Turner didn’t count on the brothers and Mackey all drawing on him at once. He died in the dusty street.

Tough sheriff Billy Trousdale ran down Mackey, and the Christian boys turned themselves in—not at all a good idea. The court reporter who recorded the case remembered that a “horde of people attended from the Four Corners District, and were about the hardest looking lot in my experience.” Disreputable audience or not, however, the brothers were convicted.

One story relates that the presiding judge was J.D.F. Jennings, who “was angry with the Christians because they had killed a friend of his famous son Al, one of Oklahoma’s more celebrated but inept outlaws.” Or maybe the judge just didn’t like murderers. Whatever his mood, this tale relates, he gave the Christian boys life sentences and shipped them off to the Oklahoma City calaboose to await shipment to the pen.

Well, maybe, but more probably the boys were tried and sentenced by Judge Henry Scott, and the court reporter remembered that Judge Scott gave the brothers twenty-five and twenty-two years for the killing. The Oklahoma City Oklahoman , however, told its readers that the Christians had been sentenced to eight and ten years. In later days, Jennie Cantelou, the court reporter, remembered the sentences as quite lenient, recalling, perhaps inaccurately, that the deputy had been “killed from ambush.”

After sentencing, whatever their terms actually were, the pair was transferred to jail in Oklahoma City, then a two-story building fitted out with interior steel cages and thought to be a solid, secure lockup. Confined at the same time, in the same cell, was a nineteen-year-old bad hat called Casey, who, with his brother, had murdered Deputy Marshal Sam Ferris over in Canadian County in the later part of May.

One Casey—either Jim or Vic, depending on what account you read—had been shot up in the fight with the deputy and later died. But the surviving brother—the Daily Oklahoman said it was Vic—was going to stand trial for murder. He was due to be released on bond but apparently didn’t care to wait.

Since neither he nor the Christians wanted any part of prison, Bob prevailed on Jessie Finlay, his girlfriend, to smuggle in several guns, which he stashed in the stovepipe inside his cell. The outlaws chose Sunday, June 30, 1895, to make their break, for on Sundays, the jailer, J.H. Garver, allowed his prisoners to move about in the corridor outside their cells. Garver must have been an easygoing sort, or just plain negligent, because one day earlier, the Pottawatomie law had wired him, warning about the possible jailbreak. He paid no attention.

At first, the break went well. Casey and the Christians pistol-whipped the jailer and ran into an alley behind the jail. There, one of the Christians—probably Will—stole a horse belonging to police chief Milt Jones and galloped out of town. The other brother—probably Bob—and Casey fled on foot, stopped a couple in a buggy and shoved their pistols into the driver’s face. Carpenter Gus White, the driver, would not let loose of the reins and managed to pull the horses to a halt. Although the fugitives shot White in the leg and stomach, he would survive.

Chief Jones was closing in on the fugitives, however, and as he got within eight or ten feet of the buggy, one of the outlaws, in the back seat, turned and shot down Jones. Some observers thought Christian killed the lawman, but the coroner’s jury decided that Casey murdered Chief Jones. Whoever fired the fatal shot, the officer staggered onto the sidewalk and sank down against a building. He was dead in five minutes.

A wild gun battle then broke out on Grand Avenue between the fugitives on one side and Officers Stafford and Jackson and several armed citizens on the other. The lawmen drilled Casey through the neck and head, and the desperado died in White’s riddled buggy.

Other citizens ran desperately for cover. One passerby went down with a leg wound, and a woman was slightly wounded by what the Oklahoman called “a spent bullet,” but otherwise the local folks, except for Gus White, escaped unharmed.

Not so the shootists. In addition to Casey’s fatal wound, Bob Christian was also hit but managed to run off down Grand Avenue until he met blacksmith Frank Berg, driving a cart. Christian robbed Berg of his cart, whipped up the horse and clattered off, at least until he stuck up another driver and hijacked a faster team.

With Chief Jones lying dead in the street and both of the Christian brothers vanished, Oklahoma City reacted angrily, sending a posse of “infuriated citizens” equipped with bloodhounds after the outlaws. The Daily Oklahoman opined that there was “little doubt” the fugitives would be captured. “Should they be caught,” the paper editorialized, “a double lynching will surely follow.”

That might well have happened, for the citizenry of Oklahoma City was furious. One journalist rather accurately described the Christians as “noted thugs and desperadoes,” and another, having viewed Casey at the undertaker’s emporium, somewhat spitefully commented that he “looked much better in death than in life.” But to do the justice everybody wanted, the law first had to catch the Christians. That would prove very tough to do, though posses searched high and low.

Closer to home, the authorities soon established that a number of people had been involved in planning the break. Jessie, the loyal girlfriend, spent fourteen months in jail for her part. Jailer Garver discovered that he should have paid attention to the warning wire. His negligence got him ten years in prison, and he served two before he was pardoned. Ironically, his incompetence would surprise nobody; the sheriff had planned to fire him on the Monday after the break.

Two other probable conspirators were arrested but never tried, and two more, John Fessenden and Louis Miller, were riding with the brothers in the newly formed Christian gang. The most surprising conspirator was W.H. “Bill” Carr, an old-time U.S. deputy marshal, whom authorities charged with supplying Bob’s paramour with the very gun Carr had taken away from Bob when he took the outlaw into custody. Several “influential men” backed Carr’s bond, but before his trial, Carr “gave leg bail,” as the saying went, left town abruptly and was seen no more. Not so the Christian brothers. They were on the run, but they were very much in evidence across southeastern Indian Territory for the next couple of months. Even as lawmen sought their trail, the bandits embarked on a string of small-time raids on country post offices and general stores.

On July 28, the robbers held up the Wewoka Trading Company, called the “richest institution in the Seminole nation,” but left with only a couple hundred dollars in “provisions and equipment” because the only man who knew the safe combination had gone home for dinner. Other raids on local stores followed, until, on August 9, the gang ran into an ambush near Wilburton. Deputy Marshal F.J., sometimes called F.C., Stockton killed Fessenden, and gang member Foster Holbrook was captured. Twelve days later, outlaw John Reeves—one of those who had furnished weaponry for the Oklahoma City jailbreak—was arrested near the town of Paoli. Later tried as a conspirator in Chief Jones’s murder, he was sentenced to life.

On the twenty-third, the Christians shot their way past lawmen west of Purcell; although Deputy Marshal W.E. Hocker was wounded in the fight, the posse believed Hocker had gotten a bullet into Bob Christian. In the small hours of September 30, Louis Miller—another of the jailbreak conspirators—was jumped by lawmen near Violet Springs. Miller decided to fight and came in second.

The gang reappeared in Oklahoma County in early September, breaking into the railroad agent’s quarters in Edmond. And on October 6, they held up a St. Louis and San Francisco train east of Wilburton but rode off with only another measly haul. Their last hurrah came in December, when they robbed a mining company store in Coalgate, down in Choctaw country. This raid was another poor haul: a little over $200 in money plus “goods to the value of some $200.”

A month or so later, the Christian boys turned up in Seven Rivers, New Mexico, Oklahoma having become just too hot. The brothers assumed a couple of uninspired aliases and ended up in Arizona’s Sulphur Springs Valley.

Bill went to work breaking horses for the 4-Bar Ranch and soon acquired the handles of “202,” apparently from his weight, and “Black Jack,” from his dark hair and mustache (not to be confused with outlaw Black Jack Ketchum, for whom Christian is sometimes mistaken). His partner, an honest cowboy named Ed Wilson, said of Christian that “a finer partner never lived. Big strong, fearless and good natured…ever ready to take his part, no matter what the game might be.”

Black Jack loved to whoop it up over in the mining town of Bisbee, along the border, and Wilson recounted that the big puncher “could spend more money than fifteen men could earn.” Black Jack often said, according to Wilson, that “he had a good idea to get up [an] outfit and go train robbing.” He repeatedly urged Wilson to join him, but that honest cowpoke refused.

Others did not, however, and Christian soon raised another gang, including Texan Code (or Cole) Young, whose real name was probably Harris. Then there was Bob Hayes, who may have been another Texan, or maybe he was an Iowa hoodlum named Sam Hassels. Other gang members were Texan George Musgrave (who also called himself Jeff Davis and Jesse Johnson) and Jesse Williams (who may have been just another alias of Musgrave). Finally, add “Tom Anderson,” who was probably brother Bob Christian, and you have the gang known in the Southwest as the “High Fives.”

All of these ne’er-do-wells, according to cowboy Wilson, were “crack shots” who removed the triggers from their pistols and simply thumbed back the hammer “when in a tight place,” fanning the pistol. “The speed,” said Wilson, “with which they could shoot in this manner was simply amazing,” but we don’t know whether could they hit anything beyond ten feet.

With these trusty henchmen, and another hard case called “Three-Fingered” Jack Dunlap, on August 6, 1896, Black Jack robbed the bank at Nogales, right on the border. Some of his band stayed outside with the horses; the others—probably Jess Williams and Bob Hays—went into the bank. They had excellent luck at first; their mouths must have watered at the sight of some $30,000 in hard money, counted out and waiting for a rancher closing a stock purchase.

Right after that, however, things quickly began to come unstuck. According to one tale, the bank’s directors were meeting upstairs. Hearing a commotion beneath, they threw open windows and opened fire on the astonished robbers. Another story says the rout of the bandits was begun by a passing whirlwind that slammed the bank’s back door and scared the gang’s inside men out of a year’s growth.

More probably, as other versions relate, the problem was a single tough bank man, either president John Dessert or clerk Frank Herrera. Whoever he was, he was all wool and a yard wide. Alone in the bank, he still snatched a pistol and began to blaze away. He didn’t hit anybody, but his heroics were enough to drive the bandits out into the street, without their loot.

To add to their woes, either just before or just after the bank’s resident hero opened fire, a passerby also pulled his .41 Colt and opened fire on the confused robbers. This was customs collector Frank King, a very tough cookie, indeed.

Whatever the sequence of things really was, it convinced the gang that Nogales was no place to tarry. The inside men tumbled out of the bank in something of a panic, dropped their loot and fled, as cowboys said, at a high lope. The bank man was still firing behind them, though all he hit was the bank ceiling and an unfortunate horse parked across the street.

Customs collector King pursued, first on a buggy horse and then on a pony requisitioned from a passing cowboy, turning back only when the outlaws began to shoot at him. Undaunted, King raised a posse and pursued again—to no avail. Other posses took the field as well, including Bisbee riders led by Burt Alvord, soon to become a bandit in his own right. Sheriff Bob Leatherwood’s party, with Alvord and Cochise County sheriff Camillus Fly along, got very near the outlaws, who littered their back trail with abandoned food and cooking gear, and even a loaded mule, in their haste to reach the Mexican border. But as the posse closed in, the gang turned on them. In the ensuing firefight, one of the posse men died.

The Tucson Daily Citizen reported that the lawmen, led by Sheriff Bob Leatherwood, were ambushed in Skeleton Canyon. Deputy Frank Robson went down “at the first volley,” with bullets through his forehead and his temple. The deputy’s horse galloped off with him, dead or dying, and the waiting outlaws took not only the animal but also Robson’s money, watch and revolver.

Leatherwood jumped from his horse as the panicked animal bolted. Lawman Hildreth then killed Black Jack’s mount, but the bandit caught the sheriff ’s horse and managed to switch saddles, only to have the lawman’s animal killed before Black Jack could mount.

Hildreth’s horse also went down, but Hildreth, wounded, fought on, though the tree behind which he sheltered was filled with lead. Leatherwood, Fly, Alvord and another posse man named Johnson also fought back as best they could, but they were shooting only at puffs of smoke.

After the firing died away, the battered posse found their quarry vanished. The lawmen followed, reinforced by more posse men, including deadly man-hunter “Texas” John Slaughter (“I say, I say, shoot first and shout ‘throw up your hands’ after’”).

According to one version of the tale, Slaughter was not impressed with the posse’s actions thus far and said so. “I say,” he commented, “you’re a fine bunch of officers. If there was any ambushing to be done, why in the heck didn’t you do it?”

But Leatherwood wrote from a town across in Sonora on the eighteenth that heavy rains had washed out the gang’s trail, and Southern Pacific detective Billy Breakenridge reported that the robbers were back in the United States, holed up at the San Simon Cattle Company’s horse ranch.

The gang struck the San Simon railroad station and both the post office and Wickersham’s Store in Bowie. In between, they “liberated” horses whenever they needed new mounts, although in most cases they were careful to let the owners know where their stock was ultimately left. It paid to keep good relations with ordinary people when you were on the run—like paying for breakfast at the little Joe Schaefer ranch with several Bull Durham sacks of post office change. That sort of largesse made people feel better about you, and after all, it’s not hard to be generous with somebody else’s money.

The frustrated officers, including Jeff Milton, the bulldog Wells Fargo man, kept up the pursuit. Along the way, he and a deputy stayed a night at Brandt’s Store in San Simon. Brandt welcomed them, since he had already been held up once by the High Fives and feared they would visit him again. And while Milton was at the store, a cowboy came in, bragging about how Christian was making fools of the officers and how he himself “could run the officers out of the country with a smoking corn cob.”

It was not a wise thing to say around Jeff Milton. “Go up there,” he told the deputy, “and box his jaws. I’ll be a-watchin’ him, and if he beats you to the draw, I’ll kill him.”

“Sure,” said the deputy. “It’ll be a pleasure.” And he whopped the cowboy smartly under Milton’s watchful eye. “I didn’t see no smoking corn cobs,” said Milton afterward.

On a moonless night in October, the High Fives hit the eastbound A&P train at Rio Puerco trestle. It should have been a pushover, for the train obligingly stopped while the engineer inspected a faulty piston rod. The gang threw down on the train crew, shooting the brakeman in the hand when he came forward to see what the trouble was. But now, bad luck appeared again in the form of a passenger: deputy United States marshal Horace Loomis.

Loomis sensed something wrong up front, so he thoughtfully loaded his shotgun and stepped quietly out into the night. He saw the engineer uncoupling the express car as Code Young shouted orders at him. Without ceremony, the officer dropped Young, who regained his feet and snapped off a couple rounds from his pistol before the marshal gave him the second barrel. Exit Code Young. The rest of the gang, uncertain what had happened to Young, at least realized that something had gone badly wrong and galloped off into the night without their loot.

The gang went on with their small-time robberies, holding up a couple of stages and a series of isolated stores. As usual, these dinky little jobs produced only pittances of money, liquor and tobacco. There was a good deal of casual brutality connected with these robberies. Bob Hayes pistol-whipped one elderly country postmaster, for example, because he objected to giving up $5.50, all the money he had.

There wasn’t much profit in robbing these isolated stores, like the one in tiny Separ, between Deming and Lordsburg, New Mexico. After that strike, they ran into a posse at the Diamond A Ranch. The story goes that the gang arranged with sympathetic cowboys to display a white cloth on the corral when it was safe to visit. They hadn’t counted on the law moving in and detaining everybody at the camp, spoiling the signal system. And so, when Black Jack and Bob Hayes rode into camp, all unsuspecting, the officers rose up out of their hiding place in a salt lick and blazed away.

They blew Bob Hayes off his horse, quite dead, probably killed by the rifle of town marshal Fred Higgins of Roswell (although another version of the fight says he was eliminated by a Santa Fe conductor somewhere around Kingman, Arizona). Black Jack got away from the Diamond A, even though his horse was killed by the lawmen. The story goes that Christian, single-handed, heaved the dead animal up far enough to pull his Winchester clear and then shot his way out of the ambush. A posse man had shot five times at the outlaw leader at point-blank range, but Christian escaped unscathed, largely because of the bucking and twisting of his frantic horse. Milton and the other hunters could not close with the gang. However, in February 1897, after a train robbery in New Mexico went sour, Black Jack’s own paranoia moved him to kill one Red Sanders, whom he guessed had talked to the law. It was after that stupid and unnecessary murder that Christian moved south to hide out in a tangled, wild canyon, called Black Jack Canyon to this day. And in that desolate place, the law finally caught up with him.

As usual in the mythology of the West, there are a couple different stories about the end of Black Jack Christian. After the failed attempt on the A&P train at Rio Puerco, the gang hid out at a “goat ranch” near Clifton. They planned another strike, but an informer tipped off the law before they could move. Deputy Marshal Hall, the formidable Fred Higgins, posse men Bill Hart, Crook-Neck Johnson and Charlie Paxton laid an ambush in Cole Creek Canyon, down in Graham County.

Ironically, it was a lost hat that put an end to Black Jack’s career. Disappointed, the lawmen had folded up their ambush and started toward the ranch to ask for breakfast, but Fred Higgins turned back to look for his hat. At that instant, the posse saw three men on the trail behind them, already reaching for their weapons. The outlaws had not yet seen Higgins, however, and he got in the first shot. The three bandits broke for safety in the thick vegetation, but the posse saw one of them stagger before he reached cover.

The officers, accurately assessing the area as hostile and dangerous, wisely elected not to go crashing about in that heavy brush. Instead, they prudently withdrew to nearby Clifton. Later in the day, however, a cowboy named Bert Farmer passed down the same trail driving horses and stopped when the beasts shied at something near the trail.

It was Bill Christian, mortally wounded. He was taken to a nearby ranch, but he did not last long. Dying, he murmured that it didn’t matter “who he was or what his name might be.” A Mormon freighter brought into Clifton the bold bandit’s remains, tossed on top of a load of lumber. A lot of selfappointed experts ran to identify the body, and some of them, inspired either by ignorance or friendship for the deceased, identified the body as outlaw Black Jack Ketchum.

According to Southern Pacific detective and sometime Tombstone lawman Billy Breakenridge—who managed to confuse Christian with Ketchum—an ambush party led by Deputy Sheriff Ben Clark caught Christian’s gang about daylight on April 27, 1897, killing both Black Jack and gang member George Musgrave. Another source writes that only Christian went down, riddled with four slugs from the weapon of famous man-hunter Jeff Milton. Both accounts are at least probably partly wrong.

Musgrave seems to have survived the ambush in which Christian died. And Milton, a tough Wells Fargo man, was not part of the ambush party that killed Christian. Afterward, however, he ran down other High Five members, and it was Milton’s shotgun that finally did in Three-Fingered Jack Dunlap, journeyman villain and veteran of the bungled Nogales fiasco.

The two bandits who got away were probably Musgrave and Bob Christian. Christian surfaced in Mexico in autumn 1897, was arrested and escaped, then disappeared forever. Musgrave showed up later in Colorado and then got himself arrested in North Platte, Nebraska, in December 1909. He is said to have lived on in South America, dying in 1947.

One postscript remains. Black Jack Ketchum, mistaken for Black Jack Christian more than once, made an intriguing comment in April 1901, on the day he was to be hanged in Clayton, New Mexico. He knew Black Jack Christian, he said, and Christian was still alive. “Oh yes,” said Ketchum, “I have an idea where he is but I won’t tell.” And he didn’t. The secret, if there was one, went to the grave with Ketchum—both parts of him, for the shock of the drop parted him from his head, and he was buried in two pieces.

So passed the High Fives. Considering the amount of time they spent living rough and running from the law, and the nickel-and-dime scores their robberies produced, in the end, they were a remarkably unsuccessful gang of outlaws with next to nothing to show for their efforts.

Unless you consider the tally of the dead.