Heck Thomas did not pursue his calling as a lawman for the money. His compensation was no different from that of any other man riding for Judge Isaac Parker—fees and mileage. The fees included two dollars for an arrest, a dollar a day while tracking down a suspect to serve a warrant, and fifty cents for serving papers. There was also an allowance of seventy-five cents per day to feed each prisoner. If a deputy thought he might need help, he had to pay for his own possemen. Ten cents a mile was paid to bring in prisoners. And as the Dalton brothers had learned, a deputy marshal earning his pay and receiving it were often two different animals.
Sometimes, there was reward money, but a deputy could not collect one offered by the government because that arrest was considered part of his job as a federal officer. A solid deputy who did his job well enough could earn five hundred dollars a year, so rewards from private interests, such as the railroad companies, were most welcome.
But Heck enjoyed the lawman’s life. This was even truer when he was given the opportunity to hone his detecting skills. In December 1887, a man named William Jones died in a boardinghouse in the Chickasaw Nation. After his burial, rumors persisted that this was not a natural death. Heck visited the boardinghouse and questioned the owner, Elsie James, and her daughter, Margaret. He became suspicious enough to have the body exhumed, and it was determined that Jones’s skull had been crushed. Elsie and Margaret, along with two accomplices, were arrested for murdering Jones to steal sixty-five dollars he possessed. Judge Parker sentenced Elsie to hang, but her sentence was later commuted to life in prison.
“He was of exceptional caliber as a deputy,” asserted Beth Thomas Meeks in her memoir, Heck Thomas, My Papa. “Often, those who volunteered for the job were as lawless as the men they sought. Inefficient and brutal, some had the habit of letting their prisoners escape if more money could be made that way. Others had a predominant taste for whiskey and a lack of scruples about taking human life.”
However, as Heck’s lawman career advanced, perhaps inevitably, his domestic life became troubled. His wife, Belle, was not fond of her husband being in such a dangerous profession, and especially one that had him away from home so often. And about home: She not only missed Fulton County in Georgia but did not care at all for Texas, coupled with having to raise four children on her own much of the time. The fourth one, Mary Joe, was born in Fort Worth in December 1883.
It did not get any better for Belle after another move, to Fort Smith. She did not like it any more than Fort Worth, and Heck could be off after outlaws for up to two months at a time. He was home often enough to help produce their fifth child, Lovick, who arrived in August 1888. To make matters worse, the family then moved out of Fort Smith to a place called White Bead Hill in the Indian Territory. They carried all their possessions in a covered wagon.
“We lived in a log house of four rooms and a kitchen,” his daughter Mary Joe recollected in a letter to her children in 1966. “No front door, just wide open with a bedroom on either side of a sort of hall. Wide planks that were not even nailed down. Some one lifted one of the planks once and I saw a hen lay an egg.”
White Bead Hill was a better location for Heck to be coming and going as a deputy marshal but not where a woman and five children should be left alone for long stretches of time. In a letter to her husband, Belle reports having “jerked the pistol from under my head” to fend off robbers who had entered the house one night. The letter concluded with a plea to Heck to “come home and stay with your darling all the time. Lovingly, Belle.”
And she had very good reason to worry that before long she would wind up a widow. An article subtitled “Twelve Murderers, Rapists and Horse Thieves Captured” in the July 20, 1887, edition of The Arkansas Gazette reported that “Deputy United States Marshal Heck Thomas came in today from Chicasaw [sic] country” with the dozen shackled miscreants.* “The marshal was out about two months, killed one man in attempting to arrest him, engaged in a fight with three horse thieves, and he also killed two horses while exchanging shots with other outlaws.”
Newspapers regularly reported on his lawing activities, sometimes in effusive ways. “Heck Thomas was one of the finest specimens of physical manhood one would want to see,” gushed The Vinita Republican. “He was one of those dashing, intrepid officers who was always alert; of undaunted courage and who attracted the most dare-devil young men in the country as his possemen … to see him in the field was a sight never to be forgotten.”
The closest Belle came to widowhood was in June 1887, when her husband and his posse went after the Purdy Gang in Oklahoma. The five men had held up a train six miles north of Muskogee and killed a cattleman riding on it. The gang also managed to steal $8,000 from a safe in the express car. They then jumped back on their horses and rode north toward the Cherokee Nation. The leader was Aaron Purdy, a moonshiner who had been arrested once before for selling whiskey in Indian Country.
Heck enlisted three men—Burrell Cox, Hank Childers, and Jim Wallace—to accompany him to track the Purdy Gang. The deputy marshal obtained information that Purdy had a still in a deep ravine at Snake Creek that was likely the bandits’ hideout. Incautiously, Heck, arriving at the site, rode out front and called for the hidden men to surrender. Seconds later, Purdy and his four comrades opened fire with Winchesters. Heck was hit in the right arm and left side, knocking him from the saddle.
Eagerly, the outlaws emerged, ready to finish off the deputy marshal. Advancing quickly, Cox, Childers, and Wallace let loose with their own fusillade. Purdy, struck several times, fell to the ground. The rest of the gang threw their weapons aside and surrendered. They were loaded into a wagon with Purdy, who was somehow still alive. A bleeding Heck was lifted back on his horse, and the posse went in search of a doctor. They rode first to Red Fork, sixteen miles away, and when one was not available there, they pushed on to Tulsa, another fifteen miles away, with Heck at risk of bleeding out.
Dr. H. P. Newlin treated Heck’s wounds (and Purdy’s). Heck had to stay in Tulsa until he was well enough to travel. While there, he was introduced to the Reverend George Mowbray and his wife, Hannah, and their daughter Matie, who was a schoolteacher. As Glenn Shirley portentously put it: “She was of medium height, neither robust nor heavy, yet showing unusual strength and suppleness in her prim, simple dress. She was still in her teens, but a full-grown woman. Her large, dark eyes met his, and they gazed up from what Heck recalled ‘the prettiest face I had ever seen.’”
It was at least awkward that Heck was a well-traveled and scarred thirty-seven years old and, of course, married with five children. He could not do much about the former, but the latter soon took care of itself: While Heck was away, Belle and the children had left. She was on her way home.
“Belle longed to return to Georgia,” explained Heck’s daughter Beth in her memoir, “and the culture of the old South. She wanted to rear her children as she had been raised. I am sure that Papa’s long absences from home and his life of constant danger were factors in her feelings also.”
For a time, Heck clung to the belief that Belle and the children had gone to Georgia just for a visit. But at Christmas 1888, he received a note from his wife stating she had enrolled the older children in school in Georgia and they would remain there. “In later years, Papa confided to my mother that he and Belle had never really gotten along well,” Beth reported. “‘Man hunting’ had gotten into his blood, and she never had understood or accepted that part of his makeup.”
Though he did not need much incentive, Heck became even more involved in being a lawman. His reputation rose with the number of outlaws he brought in. When he left on one expedition, the Fort Smith Elevator reported on Heck’s departure and warned criminals that they “had better begin hunting their holes.”
There were new holes to hide in after the land rush opened up more of the Oklahoma Territory. Heck was one of the many officers sent to try to block the sooners and then try to maintain some semblance of peace the first few days, which he described to Matie as “pandemonium.” He and the young minister’s daughter were now corresponding regularly. Heck was hoping to be assigned to the district that contained Tulsa, but Guthrie and the other towns created overnight as well as everywhere in between demanded too much attention.
That spring, Deputy Marshal Thomas was in the midst of trying to track down one murder suspect when he was directed to a small settlement fourteen miles north of Guthrie. A man named Stevens was squatting on a claim with two other men, who decided to eliminate Stevens with a bullet in the chest. He left a widow and four children. When Heck arrived, he arranged to have Stevens buried and by passing his hat around town managed to collect eleven dollars for Mrs. Stevens. But before he could embark on the trail of the two newer killers, another homicide was reported in Oklahoma City. And so it went.
Just riding and transporting took up time because Heck had a lot of territory to cover. He patrolled from Guthrie to Pauls Valley and Ardmore to Muskogee and at times transported prisoners via the Santa Fe and Texas Pacific lines. There also were still times when he had to take prisoners to Fort Smith if they had committed crimes in Judge Parker’s jurisdiction.
A few of Heck’s exploits made the newspapers. The August 29, 1889, edition of The Indian Chieftain told readers of the arrest of “the boyish murderer” Oscar Coulter. He had escaped a prison in Heck’s native Georgia and was hiding in a camp on the Canadian River south of Muskogee. His freedom was abruptly curtailed when Heck found him. “The young desperado’s hand flashed to his six-shooter as Heck stepped into view but upon looking squarely into the muzzle of the Winchester in the hands of the determined deputy, he changed his mind and gave up without further resistance.”
In the summer of 1890, Heck was assigned to the northern division of the territory, headquartered in Vinita in the Cherokee Nation. This didn’t necessarily mean less work, but it did place him closer to Matie Mowbray. There was no doubt the two were smitten with each other, age difference be damned. And it was also on one of his trips to Tulsa, that October, that Heck encountered Grat Dalton.
This was not the first time that he had crossed paths with the Dalton brothers. Heck had known Frank when he was a respected deputy marshal and occasionally had been invited to partake in one of the dinners Adeline prepared. Heck had been one of the officers trying to track down Frank’s killer, which the Dalton family appreciated. About Bob, Heck later recalled that he was “a bit of a dandy, much given to fancy boots and guns and known to be utterly fearless.”
When he met Grat Dalton in October 1890, Heck had arrest warrants for Bob and Emmett connected to their horse-stealing activities. Grat angrily told the deputy marshal that his brothers had done nothing wrong and warned him about lawmen having a vendetta against the Daltons, then stomped away. According to Glenn Shirley, “Heck watched him go with a deep feeling of regret. They were the only outlaws for whom he ever held any sentiment.”
Heck’s romance with Matie had to endure an awkward moment. Whenever he stopped by the Mowbray home in Tulsa, the reverend and his wife, Hannah, assumed the grizzled lawman was visiting them and that their daughter always just happened to be there. Finally, though, Matie announced that she had accepted Heck’s proposal of marriage.
The Mowbrays were immediately opposed, citing Heck’s age and dangerous occupation and, of course, low pay. Matie was undaunted, and the next time Heck got to Tulsa, they did not stay long, instead eloping to Arkansas City.
By this time, the Dalton brothers had had their California adventures and returned to the Oklahoma Territory to rob trains. Heck just missed his chance to confront them directly—he was one of the officers lying in wait on the first train that had pulled into Red Rock that June night, the one a suspicious Bob had let pass.
And then there was the next robbery, in July at Adair, that resulted in a dead doctor. For the rest of that summer and into the early fall of 1892, Heck and Fred Dodge were doggedly on the Dalton Gang’s trail. The latter, who hailed from Butte County in California, was thirty-eight years old and already had a long and distinguished career as a crime fighter. He had been an undercover detective for Wells Fargo in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Kansas, including Dodge City, and served as a peace officer in Tombstone.
In December 1879, Dodge, still with Wells Fargo, had recommended that Wyatt Earp be hired as a guard and messenger for the stage line. The two quickly became good friends, and Dodge supported Wyatt and his brothers in their troubles in Tombstone that led up to the gunfight at the OK Corral and afterward. He remained friends with Wyatt and Virgil Earp for the rest of their lives. During the Earp Vendetta Ride, it was the double-barreled percussion shotgun borrowed from Dodge that Wyatt used to kill Curly Bill Brocius in a shoot-out at Iron Springs on March 24, 1882.*
With no lull in lawman responsibilities, Matie was now experiencing what her predecessor, Belle, had week after week. Writes Beth Thomas Meeks, “For the next twenty-four years, [Matie] was to wait at home, wondering when and if her husband would ever return. ‘Home’ would be wherever his work took him.”
No doubt Heck missed his young bride, but he was certain he would find Bob and Emmett and their bandit companions. He even believed that because of his previous friendship with the family, the brothers, at least, would surrender without a fight. As he and Fred Dodge kept riding and reports of Dalton Gang sightings became more frequent, Heck knew they were closing in.
They were. Emmett would later write that Heck Thomas became the brothers’ “nemesis” and that they could feel him “pressing close.” September gave way to October, and the lawmen felt more confident. The Daltons still had many friends in the area but had begun to run out of safe havens, and even the staunchest friends were being tempted by the prospect of up to $40,000 in reward money.
Heck and Dodge believed they could be as close as only two days behind the outlaws. They had heard that the gang had been sighted some twenty miles from the Kansas border. It could be the Daltons would turn back, or they could be thinking of crossing the border to visit any remaining friends in Coffeyville. That looked like as good a place as any to confront the outlaws—if Heck and his fellow lawman could get there in time.