Lives of Lawmen

Forthcoming, probably from Amazon toward the end of 2019. This book collects a dozen stories about early-day lawmen active in Oklahoma or nearby.

The focus is not on famous lawmen like E. D. Nix, appointed in 1893 at the age of thirty-two and thus the youngest  U.S. Marshal of Oklahoma Territory, nor famous figures like those introduced in his 1929 Oklahombes like the three guardsmen Heck Thomas, Bill Tilghman, and Chris Madsen, nor other well known men he introduces. My taste runs to the unknown and the obscure, especially when they have walked on the dark side, outside the law.

The stories are all documented from old newspapers and the magnificent WPA collection called Indian Pioneer Papers. They are not fiction, except that I sometimes allow myself imaginative latitude.

Stories include:

1. "Amos McIntosh, Baptist Preacher." Amos, part of the noted McIntosh family, killed the freshly appointed Deputy U. S. Marshal Lee Atkins in Checotah in 1894. In his old age he built a church and became a Baptist preacher.

2. "Alec Boutwell, the Hangman." Boutwell is notorious as the sheriff who hanged forty suspected Union sympathizers in Gainesville TX in 1862. After the War he fled to Oklahoma and tried to keep his head down.

3. "Charlie Copeland Kills a Badass." As a young Deputy U. S. Marshal, killing a badass made Charlie's reputation. A study of early and late photos reveals it also transformed Charlie from an Indiana Quaker boy to a badass lawman. It's apparent in his eyes.

4. "Crockett and Wiley's Drugstore Duel." Recounts the shoot-out between two lawmen, Crocket Long and Wiley Lynn in Madill OK in 1934, in which they emptied their pistols into each other in an icecream parlor. Examines the kinship that explains their mutual hatred.  

5. "Knuckling Down in Fallis." Set in the present, this story tells of a former constable who uses his .38 to kill a sick cat, while the narrator remembers the marbles decorating a tombstone in a nearby black cemetery. Haunted by death, this story belongs to the genre of southern gothic.

6. "Marshal X and Bill Dalton's Grave." Examines the killing of Bill Dalton, and why it was attributed to "Marshal X" (D. E. Booker) rather than to Selden Lindsey, the marshal who actually fired the fatal shot.

7. "My Brother George." Retells the story of George Walker Pound, Deputy U. S. Marshal and later Sheriff of Tobucksey County, but this time the tale is told from the point of view of a smart-aleck younger brother, long dead.

8. "Tale of Two Brothers." Relates the stories of Lee and Perry Pound, both lawmen in Okmulgee county. Neither of these men slew any dragons, but Perry did something better. He married one, and it is she who is the source of the tale.

9. "Walking the Beam." Jim Hunter, born near Durant, tells his own story, gathered from the Indian Pioneer History collection. He compares the lawman's life to a man walking a beam high up on a construction site for a skyscraper. 

10. "The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin." Reviews the career of this early-day black lawyer known as B. C. Franklin, whose son John Hope Franklin became a famous American historian and helped write the Supreme Court decision that resulted in the desegregation of American schools. B. C. Franklin was involved in the struggles of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.    

11. "Bill Colbert, Unknown to the Last." Tries to weave a biography of this well known black lawman from the fragmentary data of his oddly undocumented birth and death.