14

NED CHRISTIE

THE DOG TOWN MURDER

He never expected that his last photograph would show him roped to his own front door, eyes half shut, holding somebody else’s Winchester stuffed into his dead hands. After all, he had been a member of the Cherokee National Council, the equivalent among his people of a United States senator. He was a six-foot-four giant in an era when most men were ten inches shorter. He was ruggedly handsome, even in death, despite being blinded and scarred by lawmen’s bullets. But five years earlier, on a Wednesday in early May 1887, everything had changed for Ned Christie at a makeshift log bridge across Spring Branch Creek.

Back then, on a bright moonlit night, deputy U.S. marshal Dan Maples and his posse man George Jefferson were in Tahlequah, Indian Territory, looking for booze. And they weren’t thirsty. Maples had learned that two whiskey peddlers, Thomas “Bub” Trainor and Trainor’s crony, John Parris, were in Dog Town, a sizeable sin zone on the north side of Tahlequah. The lawmen meant to execute warrants that “the Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker had just issued in Fort Smith.

The marshals discovered that Trainor (whom some sources called “Bud”) and Parris were dining in the home of Nancy “Old Lady” Shell, who, like her contemporary Belle Starr, apparently considered herself a friend of any bold and courageous outlaw. Armed with this intelligence, Maples made a long-distance call from the newfangled telephone installed in the John S. Stapler general store just a year earlier to report his findings. And one of Bud Trainor’s cronies heard everything.

“Don’t shoot!” Maples or Jefferson yelled minutes later, for all the good it did them. Maples got off a few rounds as the bullets hit his chest, but the shooter in the trees across the creek got away, as a figure nearby silently watched the whole thing. Somehow, Jefferson escaped injury, but Maples died just after midnight without naming his killer.

That morning, on May 5, the law officers found the neck of a whiskey bottle and a piece of cloth next to the tree from which Jefferson said the assassin had fired. Nearby, the rest of the bottle was soon discovered—in the pocket of a jacket that locals said belonged to Ned Christie.

Ned was born not far from Tahlequah in Rabbit Trap eight years before the Civil War began. His father, Watt Christie, was a blacksmith who had been in the minority faction among the Cherokee that had sided with the Union. Watt was also an astute politician. Three of his sons eventually followed their father into tribal leadership.

Ned became a gunsmith and began serving on the Cherokee National Council in 1885, although he had killed another Cherokee the prior year in an alcohol-fueled brawl. Ned had been acquitted after a murder trial.

He immediately made a name for himself as a hot-tempered champion of national sovereignty who opposed the railroad incursions and the imminent tribal land allocations to individual Cherokees that some of his opponents called progress.

Two years later, the Cherokee Female Seminary, the first advanced education institution for women established west of the Mississippi, inexplicably burned to the ground on Easter Sunday in April 1887. The National Council was convened to determine what could be done. And that brought Ned to Tahlequah.

Despite his responsibilities, Ned spent his time there with a bad crowd. And sometime whiskey peddler John Parris was one of his Tahlequah cronies. On the evening of Wednesday, May 4, Parris and Christie went to the Nancy Shell house, on the north side of the Spring Branch Creek in Dog Town. She sold them a bottle of whiskey, using a piece of cloth ripped from her apron as a cork. Nearby, in the same house, the miscreant Bub Trainor tucked in for a solid dinner.

When he woke up the next morning, Ned discovered he was a murder suspect. The last thing he remembered was drinking with Parris and two others near the creek, a favorite campout spot for boozers who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for a night’s lodging. Some say Ned Christie received conflicting advice from Cherokee leaders. His own father, Watt Christie, may have advised him to stay and face the charges, while all accounts agree that Cherokee senator Ned Grease said that he should leave town. In some accounts, Christie insisted that he didn’t even have a gun with him that night. He stayed until the following Monday, May 9 and attended the opening of the National Council but then disappeared. He may have learned on Tuesday, May 24, when the National Council Session ended, that he was to be arrested.

Indeed, shortly after the May 5 Maples murder, arrest warrants had been issued in Fort Smith for Ned Christie, John Parris, Bub Trainor, Charley Bobtail and George Parris. All versions of these events agree that when Ned learned about this, he quickly returned to Rabbit Trap, his home some twelve miles east of Tahlequah, near present-day Eldon.

Cherokee high sheriff John Hawkins mortally wounded Bud Trainor’s father on June 20 during a gunfight in Tahlequah over the charges against Bud.

Oklahoma lore based on late-life interviews says that after his July 23 murder indictment, along with John Parris, Bub Trainor, Charley Bobtail and George Parris, Christie sent a message to Judge Isaac Parker in Fort Smith asking for bail, which Parker declined. Similar stories have Christie going through Cherokee religious rituals even as his family and friends in the secret Keetoowah Society organized a series of informers to sound the alarm when federal authorities came for him.

That summer, John Parris and Bobtail languished in the jail beneath Judge Parker’s courtroom in conditions so miserable that the place was called Hell on the Border.

Trainor had been on the run since the May 1887 Maples murder. A Fort Smith newspaper reported that his “gang” had tangled with the Vann gang on September 25 on Fourteen Mile Creek, near Fort Gibson. More certainly, he was formally charged with the October 8 robbing and burning of a store in Oaks, north of Tahlequah, before finally being arrested on the Maples murder charge in mid-November 1887.

John Parris turned state’s evidence after a July 20, 1888 hearing, claiming that he had seen Ned Christie kill a deputy U.S. marshal after an argument. A black freedman named Dick Humphrey was eventually added to the witness list.

That summer of 1888, in some accounts, deputy U.S. marshals tried to arrest him, but Ned had a commanding view of the approaches to his cabin and injured both of them.

Three months after the Maples killing, on August 1, 1887, Ned and his father, Watt Christie, both lost their seats on the National Council, even as support grew for the individual Cherokee land allotments both men opposed.

Christie was indicted in a Cherokee court on March 5, 1888, with two others for the Sunday, February 19 killing of Bear Grimmet, a Cherokee outlaw and bootlegger who had swiped Ned Christie’s illegal shipment of whiskey at a place called Bunker Station.

Trainor appeared in the Maples matter on March 25, 1888, and claimed in May 1888 that, while Maples was killed, he was having supper at the Nancy Shell place; in fact, Nancy “Old Lady” Shell and two others could testify accordingly, or so Trainor’s lawyer claimed. Yet by the last day of 1888, Clem V. Rogers, father of Will Rogers, and other Cherokees posted his bail, clearing the way for the accused arsonist to become a deputy U.S. marshal. Parker never commented explicitly about this appointment but once stated that he was “obliged to take such material for deputies as proved efficient in serving the process of this court.”

Five months later, in May 1889, Union army veteran Jacob “Blake Jake” Yoes was appointed U.S. marshal for the Western District of Arkansas, which included Indian Territory. Yoes made arresting Ned Christie a top priority and appointed his best deputy, former Confederate Henry A. “Heck” Thomas, to bring Christie in. Yoes reminded Thomas about the $500 reward for Christie (some $12,000 in modern money) and sent him to Rabbit Trap.

Along the way, Thomas and his fellow marshal L.P. Isbell of Vinita collected about a dozen other prisoners before arriving in Muskogee, where they met newly minted deputy U.S. marshal Trainor, against whom an indictment in the Maples murder was still pending.

The next morning, on Thursday, September 26, 1889, the dogs howled, and Christie climbed into his loft, loudly sounding the Cherokee death gobble as the posse approached, despite having told a neighbor recently that he was thinking about giving himself up. When rushing the fugitive’s cabin didn’t work, they burned the privy but held their gunfire as Nancy Christie ran out, just as Deputy Marshal Thomas directed.

The cabin fell silent at last after Christie’s young son James was shot in the back but somehow escaped. Since Thomas now assumed that everyone left inside was dead and Deputy Isbell was bleeding profusely from a shoulder wound, the posse returned to Fort Smith, not knowing that Ned Christie was blind in one eye, disfigured for life but alive.

His neighbors found Ned before the cabin burned to the ground. Dr. Bitting, who ran a gristmill nearby, treated Ned and James Christie while many of the same neighbors and others constructed Ned’s Mountain, a hilltop stronghold still visible as late as 1990 about a half mile west of the destroyed cabin.

According to the Muskogee Phoenix , Thomas claimed that “Christie is known to have killed eight men in his time, four of whom have been killed since the shooting of Marshal Maples.” Some versions of events have Ned becoming an outlaw who robbed area stores and challenged Heck Thomas to “come get him.” Heck didn’t try to do that, but on Tuesday, November 12, he scouted the new fort with a posse that included Bub Trainor and decided to fight another day.

Ned hid with his family in plain sight as the decade opened. U.S. Marshal Yoes became more and more frustrated as 1891 passed, while Ned Christie began to hear that he had committed every robbery and murder in the Cherokee Nation, like Pretty Boy Floyd, Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde some forty-two years later. Even Ned’s neighbors spoke of him then, and later, as an outlaw and bootlegger who robbed stores for miles around. That said, robbery charges against Ned Christie have never surfaced, although a single horse theft accusation in the Cherokee Nation was eventually dropped. Still, a $1,000 reward was offered for the capture of Ned Christie on October 15, 1891. Now it was a matter of time.

Stories of deputy U.S. marshals and others chasing Ned Christie through the Cookson Hills of present-day eastern Oklahoma abound, but if it happened at all, nothing concrete came of it. Deputy U.S. marshal David Rusk intended to change all that a year after the reward was offered.

Ned knew that the United States authorities were coming and transformed his burned-out cabin into a two-story fortress that soon would be tested. On the morning of Wednesday, October 12, 1892, a three-man posse sent by Rusk placed some dynamite against Ned’s Fort, only to watch the fuse burn out. Twenty-four hours later, the posse called it a day. Back in Fort Smith, U.S. marshal Blake Jake Yoes decided it was time for a different approach.

An eleven-man posse supplemented by some six more volunteers along the way left Fayetteville, Arkansas, on November 2 for Rabbit Trap, led by posse man Gus York, who knew the Christie neighborhood quite well. The posse was under the nominal leadership of deputy U.S. marshal Gideon S. “Cap” White, a Union cavalry veteran from East Tennessee. Deputy marshals Dave Rusk and Charley Copeland met them at the Arkansas border. Cherokee high sheriff Benjamin Knight came along to translate posse commands into Cherokee.

Since Ned Christie wasn’t scared of bullets, the posse requested that a cannon be shipped to them from an army post in Kansas. They traveled on through the night, reaching Rabbit Trap at four o’clock the next morning. But something was wrong; the dogs that had warned Ned about earlier attacks were gone.

While the posse discussed whether Ned was inside the fort, “Little Arch” Wolf came out of the house shortly after daylight, refused to surrender and ran back into the house, despite three gunshot wounds. Soon, the posse asked Ned in Cherokee to surrender, and after a gobbling battle cry, he allowed three women to leave as the posse suggested, leaving Ned, Charles Hare, Little Arch and a seven-year-old named Charley Grease to finish the fight. Eventually, a crowd that included the Christie women and Ned’s father, Watt, gathered nearby. Watt, who waited with them, refused to ask his son to surrender, telling the posse that he “could see no evil in his son.”

When the small cannon arrived from Kansas at about one o’clock, the posse positioned it on a tree stump and fired into Ned’s Fortress thirty-eight times without effect. Shortly after dark, the posse decided to use Christie’s own wagon as a makeshift siege tower, which two volunteers used to place a dozen or more sticks of dynamite against Ned’s Fort while the rest of the posse poured gunfire into the opposite side of the fort.

Later, some claimed that the explosion could be heard in Tahlequah; the dynamite blew Ned’s Fort apart and started a fire from top to bottom. Little Charley Grease and Ned Christie retreated to the root cellar after the explosion. And soon, Ned crawled out and began shooting as he ran toward the posse. He gave Wes Bowman a dark powder burn on his face that Bowman wore for life. But after Bowman and other posse members shot Ned Christie to death, peace descended on Rabbit Trap. One of the shooters was Sam Maples, son of the murdered deputy U.S. marshal. And even then, before daybreak, the mourning Cherokee women began to trill.

The posse captured young Charley Hare as he tried to escape from Ned’s Fort. Hare spent three years in prison for his part in the standoff. Little Arch, initially reported to have died in the Ned’s Fort fire, was arrested a year later and released from prison in 1903. Both Hare and Wolf were convicted of assault with intent to kill.

The Christie family fared even worse in the years that followed. Ned’s son James was attacked and decapitated in July 1893, even as Ned’s brother Bill languished in the jail at Watonga, waiting to be hanged. Ned’s old drinking buddy Bub Trainor was not around to see any of this happen.

Bub had continued his law enforcement career just long enough to doze in a drunken stupor through a gunfight between deputy U.S. marshal Bob Hutchins and outlaw Jim July Starr on January 23, 1890. And with that, he returned to bootlegging and perhaps even robbery before being shot dead on Christmas night 1896.

Dick Humphrey, a former Cherokee slave and the Maples murder witness named back in July 1888, never testified under oath. But in an interview the Daily Oklahoman published on June 9, 1918, long after Bub Trainor was dead, at age eighty-seven, Humphrey told a reporter what he had seen on Big Spring Creek from the Dog Town side, thirty-one years earlier.

Humphrey claimed in the interview that under a bright full moon, from a downstream vantage point nearby, he had watched Bub Trainor approach Christie, who was asleep with some other drunks. Trainor took off Christie’s coat, put it on over his own white shirt and shot deputy U.S. marshal Maples from ambush, as Humphrey watched from hiding.

Although no one knows for certain, most modern historians who have examined the case have expressed the view that whatever his other crime, Ned Christie was all but certainly innocent of the Dog Town murder.