Clouds over Stroud

 Stroud, 1900

Two preliminary statements about Stroud’s early history need to be made. The first is that the location of the town was moved a mile east in about 1898 to accommodate the railroad. The chapter in The History of Lincoln County begins with an account of the town up until sometime after 1895, when the town was located a mile west of its present site. This first and soon-to-be-abandoned town-site was dedicated on 24 July 1895 with a big picnic just east of the town. Then the railroad agreed to build a station if the town would change its location, and the moving began:

The store buildings were moved on low wagons that had solid, wood wheels. Two-by-twelve oak planks were placed under the wheels to form a track and the block and tackle method used to hitch the wagon along. Mule, horse, or oxen teams furnished the power. (LCOH 228-29)

On August 14, 1898, the first train steamed into Stroud. It was not only the railroad that was accommodated when the town moved a mile east. The whiskey selling saloons found themselves one mile closer to the thirsty souls in Indian Territory.  

The second preliminary statement is already implied: Stroud began as a whiskey town. The Oklahoma Historical Society site states the matter briefly:

Stroud originated in 1892 when James Wrexel Stroud built a store and post office on his homestead, located one mile west of the present townsite. A community developed there but soon moved to Stroud's present location in order to be on the route of the Arkansas and Oklahoma Railroad . . . Prior to 1907 statehood Stroud was one of Oklahoma Territory's notorious "whiskey towns." These were located along the boundary of and generally one mile west of Indian Territory, in which liquor was prohibited.

Equally brief is the entry for Stroud in the WPA Guide to Oklahoma. This is the book originally published by Oklahoma University Press in 1941 without the introduction by Angie Debo, which had been canceled. (Her essay has been restored in the edition of the book published by the University of Kansas Press in 1986 and cited here.) There we read:

Since Stroud was only two miles from the Indian Territory and was a large shipping point for cattle from the near-by Creek land, it attracted much illicit liquor trade. Whiskey, denied to the Indian by the government, was often hidden in supply wagons of groceries and commodities headed for [Indian] Territory; and the consumption of liquor by celebrating cowhands who had driven cattle to the loading pens was no small part of the town’s business. With the advent of statehood, however, Stroud’s nine flourishing saloons were closed . . . (225)

It is worth noting that the number of saloons agrees with the figure cited by Gumprecht (below).

The major source for these studies of Oklahoma whiskey towns remains Blake Gumprecht 1996 article in The Chronicles of Oklahoma. There he writes:

The towns of Prague and Stroud in Lincoln County developed as railroad towns and cotton marketing centers, but because of the proximity of each to Indian Territory, both also did a brisk whiskey trade. Bohemians from Texas and Nebraska settled the area around Prague when the Sac and Fox lands were opened for settlement, but the town was not developed until the Fort Smith and Western Railroad announced plans to build through Lincoln County in 1902. Surveyors platted the town site two miles west of the Creek Nation boundary around the planned location of the railroad's easternmost depot in Oklahoma Territory . . . .

The current site of Stroud developed when the St. Louis and Oklahoma City Railroad agreed in 1898 to build a depot one mile east of the town's original location. The new town site was one and one-half miles west of Indian Territory, prompting the chamber of commerce, shortly after the town's founding, to adopt for its slogan, "The Gateway Between Oklahoma and the Creek Nation." Relying heavily on business with residents from across the border, Stroud, according to several sources, had nine saloons in its early days. Fire insurance maps published between 1898 and 1904 show as many as seven. An Anheuser-Busch beer warehouse also was located there. Saloons even provided the raw materials for Stroud's first Sunday school, a tent that had originally been a saloon and gambling hall. Churchgoers assembled makeshift pews from beer kegs overlaid with wooden planks.

Consumption of alcohol by Indians was especially acute near Stroud, because of the town's proximity to the Creek Nation and the Sac and Fox Agency, two miles south. . . . in the year Stroud was founded, lawmen arrested forty persons for selling liquor to Indians on Sac and Fox lands. The Sac and Fox Agency, in fact reported the highest number of liquor prosecutions of any Indian agency in the United States that year. In 1904 the school superintendent for the Sac and Fox observed, "It is comparatively easy for an Indian to secure what whisky he wants in any of the small towns in the vicinity. Many of the towns are filled with tramps, who do not hesitate to buy whiskey for an Indian if they are promised a drink" (158-59).

Indeed, it must have been easy for the Indians to procure whiskey since for the white men who supplied them the matter was not merely simple. And it was also profitable.

The ways in which the business was carried on were various, as show in in interviews recorded in the WPA’s Indian Pioneer Papers from the mid 1930s. In the earliest period there was no organization at all, as described by Jeff D. Walker, born in Missouri in 1880. (The form of the interview is third person.)

Mr. Walker came to Stroud a few days after the opening of this territory to white settlement. The conditions in Stroud were confused. Many people milled around, drinking went on continuously, fights took place. It was many weeks before there was any semblance of order.

Mandy Starr of Avery, a three-quarter Sac and Fox who was born in 1871 in Kansas, gives an impression similar to Jeff Walker’s:

The country was rough, not only the territory but the people in it. Law meant nothing to an Indian if he decided to do something. There were several United States Marshals and deputies...but they were quite inadequate in dealing with the law problem.

The Indians and their squaws frequented the saloons, and many a merry party came away from there, singing, yelling war whoops, and so on. Men on horseback who had one drink too many would ride down the trail "shooting it up", and woe betide anyone who got in his way.

The third interview from the Pioneer Papers points to more organized activity, as told by Arnold McMullen, born 1870 in Missouri and living in Henryetta at the time of the interview:

There was a log cabin about three hundred yards west of the Whitehead No. 2 mines in 1903 or 1904. Mr. Merril lived there and sold whiskey. The United States Marshals knew that the whiskey was being brought to Mr. Merril in wagons from Stroud and Maud and they wanted to catch the ones who brought it to him. Grant Cowen was the United States Marshal and I believe Perry Pound [a constable and sometimes U.S. Deputy Marshal of Henryetta] was the one who helped him. The capture was made just southwest of a round hill just southwest of Henryetta. The whiskey had been concealed under a load of corn. In those days three shots meant that a load of whiskey had come and all drinking men understood it.

Marshall Grant Cowen was from Okmulgee and appointed to his office in 1904. Cowen was an effective marshal “with a  nose for whiskey.”  A July 1905 article in the Henryetta paper credits him with 108 arrests in the first eight months of his office--not just bootleggers but sometimes serious badasses. This figures to about two arrests per week. He’s staying busy but in Indian Territory, not around Stroud.

The final interview to notice is with Jessie McDermott of Hickory Ground Tulwa (town), Henryetta, place and date of birth not given. 

The towns of Ft. Smith, Keokuk Falls, and Stroud were known as Indian towns among the Muskogee-Creek tribe for these Indians made many frequent trips to and from these places. 

Those frequent travels between these towns were made mainly for the purpose of obtaining the whiskey for which these towns were noted. The early day Indians were very fond of the fiddle dances and four or six of the Indian men would go off in a bunch to these distant trading places to obtain the whiskey, for a fiddle dance was not ever complete unless some intoxicating drink was on hand.

It was always the custom for the Indians to have a little more than enough of drinks during any kind of celebration or festival of any sort. They observed the Christmas holidays also but they also took note of another set day which they observed by classing a day a week later than the usual Christmas day as "Old Christmas." This observance has almost gone out of use among the present Indians.

At this point Jessie McDermott goes off on a detour about place names, a subject that I for one find irresistible. Let’s take the detour. McDermott has trouble with his syntax and diction but the meaning is clear enough:

The non-English speaking full-bloods and some of those that could speak English never could fully pronounce some English words but they took what little pronunciation they understood within a word and broke it into what meaning they could into an Indian word.

In the proper word Stroud . . . the Muskogee-Creeks couldn't say the full word Stroud but they did recognize the latter part of the town name as nearly meaning to them as being "Trout" so that the name of the town was called and is still often so named by the older Indians as "Cha-lo Ta-lo-fa" which means "Trout Town."

Now back to Stroud--a.k.a.Trout Town--considered as a whiskey town. If this seems incongruous, just think of the trout as swimming in a river of whiskey. A lyric from “Rye Whiskey” might help us on our way: “If the river was whiskey and I was a duck/ I’d jump in the river and never come up.”

That the early economy of the town is founded on saloons is a matter, which we know from earlier towns in the present collection of essays, should be of concern to the city fathers, but saloons are profitable, so the Stroud papers offer no critical views of them. Instead, the initial sounds of protest (distress?) come from the Oklahoma Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Here is one of the earliest examples, from September 1899:

Mass Meeting in the interest of the Oklahoma Anti-Saloon League, at Stroud M. E. Church on Oct.2, 1899 at 8 o’clock P.M. This league [is] not denominational or partisan in any sense. No admission charged but subscription cards will be circulated for free will offerings for territory work. The friends and foes of the saloon are invited. Rev. D. W. Ross of Perkins will deliver an address.

Though the Anti-Saloon League calls itself nonpartisan, it was in fact a political party in and of itself and it enjoyed good health as long as there was any liquor to oppose. It was a key component of the Progressive Era, and was strongest in the South and rural North, drawing heavy support from pietistic Protestant ministers and their congregations, especially Methodists and Baptists. It concentrated on legislation, and cared about how legislators voted, not whether they drank or not. Founded as a state society in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1893, its influence spread rapidly. In 1895, it became a national organization and quickly rose to become the most powerful prohibition lobby in America, overshadowing the older Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Prohibition Party. Its triumph was nationwide prohibition locked into the Constitution with passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919. Unlike the other parties, this one is composed largely of women and provided them a forum for addressing public events. The voice of Carry Nation was already loud in Kansas, accompanied by percussive sounds of saloon mirrors and bottles shattered by her hatchet. Within a few years she would move her headquarters from Kansas to Guthrie Oklahoma. Such voices--the Anti-Saloon League, the WCTU, and Carry Nation--were all leading inevitably to women’s suffrage and national prohibition, both of which became Constitutional amendments by 1920. 

Meanwhile back in Oklahoma Territory, we read that August 25, 1901, was set apart by the Anti-Saloon league 

for a day when all the churches of the territory shall hold meetings to consider the temperance question. The members of the anti-saloon league are making strenuous efforts to control the liquor trade as far as possible in the territory and are contesting every license that is being issued for the running of saloons in any of the towns.

This opposition to licensing seems largely symbolic because saloons were perfectly legal, and all the license required was references showing the good character of the applicant --easily come by!--and the payment of a fee of perhaps as much as $200, depending on the town. 

It was precisely on this day, August 27th, that all hell broke loose in Stroud. The timing might be called coincidental, but as a historian, I don’t believe in coincidence. It’s merely a word for events whose timing we can’t explain. History has many cunning corridors, and the connections may lie buried out of sight. Racial tensions had always run high in Trout Town (and according to local informants would continue that way until World War II, when many blacks moved to the west coast for better jobs), but now the smoldering fires of racial antipathy burst into flame. The best early report comes from The Daily Ardmoreite for August 26 recounting events of the day before:

A mob of about twenty-five Stroud citizens was organized last night for the purpose of ridding the town of its colored population. The mob visited the various tents and houses occupied by the negroes and drove the twenty terror-stricken blacks from the town. Several shots were fired for the purpose of terrifying the exiles, but no attempt was made to injure. To discourage the negroes’ return, their tents and personal effects were destroyed and their houses overturned.

Destroy their tents, houses, and personal effects but don’t harm anyone? That doesn’t seem a likely scenario. The account feels pasteurized and sanitized. 

Four days later the Stroud Messenger gives a fuller account, though again we feel the hand of some rudimentary chamber of commerce putting a proper spin on the story. It does however bear the unflinching headline “the stroud mob”:

About nine-o’clock last Saturday evening a mob of white men--not business men nor even the class of men who work about the town by days labor, but that class who lay around town and have no visible way of support. An attack was first made on the frame house in the north part of town where several negro laborers were sleeping. Several shots were fired, the occupants had to run for their lives, two of which made their escape by running into an adjacent cotton field with nothing but their shirts on. The bed clothing and other contents of the house was taken out and burned after which the house was burned upside down and now stands in a wrecked condition wrong side up.

The reader will have noticed how the Messenger distances itself from the white rioters by dividing the town into those who do honest labor and those without visible means of support. Oddly enough when a similar expulsion took place in Sapulpa a few days earlier, the same division was applied but it following the colored line. Employed blacks were allowed to stay but all those without jobs were ordered to leave town. Back in Stroud: 

The next attack was on two Creek negroes on the street, one of which was knocked down and both were seen running up Main street almost scared to death with the howling mob at their heels. They succeeded in hiding themselves back of Graham’s livery barn until the mob went by them, when they took their horses out of the barn and hurried to the Creek line.

Again we note the difference between Stroud’s mob action and the similar one earlier in the week in Sapulpa. There the Creek blacks were allowed to stay in town, while the rest of the blacks were expelled.

Later the crowd went to a little house on Second street where they thought negroes resided, but after the door was broken in, it was found that it was not occupied. Some of the members of the mob kept up loud swearing while they marched along the street. Their attention to the fact that they must stop their swearing because a great many ladies were in that particular neighborhood. One fellow responded in thundering tones, “To H___ with the ladies.”

Throughout the south in 1900 white women were still revered for their “purity” (to which the chief threat was always the presence of blacks). The mores here produce a clashing of gears. It’s alright to burn and pillage black residences, but white women must not be exposed to vulgar language! 

About eleven o’clock the mob marched to Cloud’s addition where Fannie Walker resides in a tent on her lots. The tent had a floor in it and was turned over a time or two, dishes and other articles were broken, after which fire was set to the whole business and left to burn.

The whole evening’s proceedings wound up with a free-for-all fight in Gandy’s chilla [sic] room. Almost everything of value in the house was destroyed. Bottles and dishes flew through the room and it is fortunate that no lamps were broken or a fire would have started that would have burned over half of the town before it could have been checked.

I am sorry to have to report that I have not been able to ascertain what place of business is referred to as “Gandy’s chilla room.” The chilla is a North Indian pancake, but these would not have been allowed in a town as sensitive to ethnicity as Stroud. The likely culprit is chili misspelled. The Stroud papers do carry ads for J. S. Gandy’s Lunch Room,  which in 1900 boasted “Fresh Oysters, Celery, Lunches, Homemade Bread, Candy and Pastries.” They must have been providing a late meal for the revelers who had participated in what the Messenger called “the evening’s proceedings.” It would appear from the way they wrecked the restaurant that the revelers were drunk. Nothing is said about alcohol in the article, but mob violence unfueled by drink is hard to imagine. Thus the wreckage in Fannie Walker’s tent and Gandy’s Lunch Room. 

The long article in the Messenger now reaches its conclusion:

One officer with a 45 colts revolver could have stopped the mob, had any attempt been made whatever. A sign was painted and stuck up on one of the prominent corners in this city, which read as follows: “Nigger, Don’t let the sun go down on U.” 

The editors seem a little miffed at the lack of law-enforcement during the riot but they don’t ask the more fundamental question: if one officer with a .45 could have stopped the mob, why on earth didn’t he? The obvious answer is that there was  no will on the part of the community to stop the mob. Stroud already had a reputation as a “sundown town.” In the parlance of the day, a “sundown town,” was one that posted signs like the warning that ends the preceding quotation. No officer came because none was requested. This was the dark cloud hanging over Stroud.

The cloud did not lift right away either. Two years later some optimistic blacks were trying to run a restaurant in Stroud not far from the Blue Front Hotel. The end of this business venture was reported under the headline “Negroes Not Wanted” (Stroud Star, September 1903), salted with the pejorative terms typical of Stroud journalism:

It is two years since the few colored people that were then in Stroud were forced to leave. Since then we have not had any negroes living in the city, and it was not until about three or four weeks ago that a “coon” mustered up enough courage to try to live in Stroud. He opened up a restaurant on Fifth avenue near the Blue Front Hotel and tried to work up a trade among his people. There was considerable feeling against the man from the start, and we understand that some dealers in provisions refused to sell him anything.

The feelings of white folks were strong enough that eventually a stick of dynamite was used to drive the black entrepreneur out of town. 

I have cited the newspaper coverage of this riot and its aftermath at length for two reasons. One is that it is a clear prelude to the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 whose centennial is being commemorated in 2021, the year in which I now write. The small tremor in Stroud was a prelude to the major earthquake in Tulsa twenty years later. The second reason recalls us to the topic of whiskey towns. The presence of whiskey is only an inference, but it’s a strong one. Mob violence in rural America is usually fueled by drink, and probably this instance was also. The probability is heightened by the fact  that on the very day of the mob uprising, the saloons that provided the beer and whiskey were being threatened by the women of the Anti-Saloon League. The prophetic finger was writing on the wall: the day of the saloon was approaching an end. This would leave a lot of men thirsty and disgruntled. They looked around for someone to blame for this problem, someone to target, someone markedly different from themselves. They couldn’t very well attack the  women--public mores wouldn’t allow it. But black people were vulnerable. Blacks could be attacked. Indeed, the local mores encouraged it. 

After the race riot, the next report of Mayhem around Stroud is just business as usual, one white man getting drunk and killing another:

On last Friday John Grandstaff was shot and killed by Jay Bradburry at the Grandstaff farm 5 miles southwest of here. Bradburry is a renter on the Grandstaff farm and both men had been drinking that night. . . . Grandstaff who was quarrelsome when drunk drew a pocket-knife and attempted to drive Bradburry and his family from the house. He advanced toward Bradburry with the knife open in his hand and Bradburry shot him twice, the first shot taking effect in the neck and the second through the heart, killing him instantly.

There was a substantial and well regarded farming family living near Wellston named Grandstaff, but so far as I can learn the quarrelsome drunk in this story was no relation to them. 

The murder in the next story was already thirty years old when the article appeared in the Weekly Chronicle from Weatherford, but it provides a footnote to a killing that would take place in 1902. The story concerns two grandsons of the famous warrior Blackhawk, who were living near Stroud. (The Weatherford article originally appeared in the Stroud Messenger, but that issue is not online.)

The two living descendants of the famous warrior Blackhawk reside in this territory. Kackakack lives in Ponca township, Lincoln county. He has in his care the most precious heirloom, old Blackhawk’s tomahawk. Joe, the other grandson of the noted scalper, has been for some time among the Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas, studying their vernaculars. Joe is the only old bachelor of the Sacs and Foxes, and made himself notorious by killing his other brother about thirty years ago.

The notoriety belongs to the tomahawk as much as to the grandsons, since weapons of death exert their own enduring fascination. The old scalp lifter must have owned a passel of war-hatchets, and may even have been a little careless where he left them, for a search of the web reveals that there’s hardly a museum in Iowa and the surrounding states that doesn’t claim to own one. What gives the Stroud specimen a certain uniqueness, however, is that it became the subject of a 1920 monograph from the New York Museum of the American Indian and a photograph of it was published.

Tomahawk once owned by Blackhawk

The author of the monograph states that he bought the tomahawk from Frank Kent, an Iowa Indian residing northwest of Chandler, who had it from his wife’s father, Ben Holloway--both of whom play a part in a 1903 murder drama that starred a young man named Mitchell Robidoux (variously spelled), who picked up a hoe and smote his father-in-law Chief Daniel Tohee in the head with deadly force. A hoe is not a tomahawk--it has a longer handle and its uses are agricultural-- but it served its altered purpose well enough, and four days later Chief Tohee rode off to the happy hunting grounds and a few weeks later Mitchell Robidoux rode off to Lansing prison. Admittedly, this has little to do with the famous tomahawk, but we can’t be sure. The weapon may have had a will of its own and exerted its baleful influence from a distance.

In June of 1903 a man named Riley Hinds was shot and killed at a dance at Bert Musselman’s home about three and a half miles southeast of Stroud. It was a drunken brawl that took place at three o’clock in the morning and involved a third man named Reynolds. The three men, including the one who died and one who was severely wounded with a knife, were all brothers-in-law.  The Stroud Star’s report appends an editorial comment to its late June report on this drunken melee: 

From the above report taken from the Chandler Publicist  and from inquiries that we have made since we are unable to form any opinion as to whether to class the occurrence as murder or among accidents brought about by criminal carelessness, but it seems to us that a man ought to be able to go to dances or other gatherings with packing an accursed gun with him, and if he can’t he should as speedily as possible be made to undergo such penalty as his case may call for.

It is all very well to curse guns, which were certainly part of the problem, but the completed formula requires men--men without women, that is--and whiskey. That’s when the killing occurs, but as has been noted before the newspapers depended on the good will and advertising revenues of local businesses, and saloons were good business.

Later in the same month of June, The Stroud Star posted another social comment, this time in connection with the city marshal. “‘Uncle Ike’ Rush, our worthy city marshal, makes it a point to spare as much as possible the feelings of anyone whom his duty may require him to arrest, even if the prisoner be only a degraded Indian. He never marches a prisoner along Third street where he may be subjected to the gaze and the jeers of the idlers who are always on the alert for any excitement or scandal that may come up. The small boys who always have a knack for making themselves obnoxious when trials at the police court are in progress have been emphatically told that their presence is not wanted.” The humorous note here is that emphatically telling small boys not to do something is a good way of encouraging them to do it. The phrase “degraded Indian” leaves a bad smell in our nostrils, since we know who is responsible for the destruction of the Indians tribal ways which brought about the degradation of most of those who survived, but a threnody along the lines of Bury-My-Heart-at-Wounded-Knee would be out of place here. 

Though the old sad story is too familiar to be retold, the lives of individuals who emerge from that story are still of interest. Chief Moses Keoku, who had ceded the Sac and Fox lands opened in the land run of 1891, had died in 1903. In his early 80s at the time of his death, the old chief must have had many children, but curiously none of the are listed at his Find-a-Grave site, which probably indicates that their lives were ephemeral. The only child we know of is Charley Keokuk, whose whiskey fueled death warranted a substantial article in the Stroud Star in June of 1904, eight months after his father’s death.

Charley Keokuk is no more. He has gone to meet his forefathers in the happy hunting grounds and thus ends another chapter in the family history of the once famous Keokuks. Charley’s grandfather was a famous chief of the allied tribes of the Sacs and Foxes (it is from him that Keokuk, Iowa, took its name.) His father who died within the last year was likewise a very prominent man among his people . . . . The late Charley himself we are told was once a very able and distinguished Indian having received a first-class education which enabled him to enter government employ. Charley acted as interpreter for the government commission that negotiated the purchase of the surplus lands of the Sacs and Foxes some fifteen years ago. . . . The government has at all times shown great regard for the Keokuks and had not Charley allowed his passion for firewater to get the better of him his career would have undoubtedly ended far different from the manner in which it did. Charley during the last ten years or more led a very dissipated life becoming more and more debauched. The pace at which he went was a killing one and in due time he was compelled to reap the harvest he had sown. He often said that he would quit drinking and no doubt he will keep his word this time.

We break the obituary here to notice that it is well written and surprisingly respectful of its subject. No sneer at degraded Indians appears. However, the last sentence, though continuing the tone of respect, is slightly tongue-in-cheek, reminding us of W. C. Fields’ comment that he found it easy to stop drinking. He’d done it a dozen times. 

Charley always devised some way of getting liquor despite the fact that none of our saloonkeepers would sell him a drop, and whenever liquor could not be obtained he would fill up on patent medicines and essences [which usually contained about ten percent alcohol]. No human constitution could stand such continued abuse. Charley had been on a continued debauch for days and was last seen about 5 o’clock on Tuesday morning. A few hours later he was found dead near the Round Bale cotton gin. Undoubtedly he had wandered there in his semi-insane condition and was overcome by the effects of his excesses and died like a homeless dog.

His death may remind us of the drunken end of an even more famous Indian, one who is in all the history books as a hero for his role in planting the American flag on Iwo Jima. I mean the Pima Indian from Arizona, Ira Hayes. Of the six men involved in the flag raising, Hayes’s name is the only one still remembered widely because of the ballad about him memorably rendered by Johnny Cash. If Hayes and Charley Keokuk--and untold thousands of other Indians-- died drunk and homeless like stray dogs, it was because indeed they had no home--home in the sense of a cultural context to give them an identity and make their lives meaningful.

The end of the obituary states that Charley was buried beside his father, which would mean the Sac and Fox Tribal Cemetery. At present there is no memorial for him either at Find-a-Grave or at okcemeteries.org. When I’m done writing the present essay, I’ll put up a memorial for Charley Keokuk at Find-A-Grave. Please visit it. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/229560101/charley-keokuk.

Chief Moses Keokuk

The next noteworthy item in the Stroud calendar of crime keeps our attention turned to Indian affairs. The Stroud Star reported in late June of 1905 that an Indian had run amok.  Superintendent Kohlenberg called at the Sac and Fox Agency to investigate the killing of a man and a woman:

A buck by the name of Sam Moore succeeded in sending two of his tribe to the happy hunting grounds. Moore’s mind seems to have been unbalanced for some time and he had acted strangely. It seems that his deed was inspired by jealousy and whisky. The murdered woman was his wife and on the day above mentioned he attacked her with an axe. He struck her a blow in the neck almost severing the head from the trunk. The buck, an old man, tried to act as peace maker and his efforts met with the usual success that such endeavors have. The enraged red man turned upon him and dealt him a blow which put an end to the peace maker’s earthly career.

The slayer after he had committed his ghastly deed escaped for parts unknown. Searching parties traced him for two miles south of the village. Here he had divested himself of his clothing which was found in a water hole. From here he must have returned to the village for the tracks left by his bare feet on the soft ground were plainly visible. Arrived at the village, he broke into a house from which the owners were temporarily absent . . . . Mr. Kohlenberg seems to be of the opinion that the murderer committed suicide and that his body will be found somewhere in the vicinity.

The writer uses the term “buck” first to refer to the killer and then to the peacemaker who was slain. The same pejorative was of course frequently applied to black males. Thus Trout, the sundown town, maintained a sort of racial equality of pejoration. 

The next item in the calendar has the merit of supplying the name of a local lawman we have heard before as well as giving us some local color about the apprehension of a bootlegger.

Grant Cowen is developing an unerring instinct for nosing out whiskey. Last Wednesday morning he came down on the early train, and with Jim Henry had a merry chase of more than two miles after some law breakers. The rain poured down, but the track was fresh and they pushed on. They were on foot, but so were the fugitives. Out across the wet bottom lands, wading the creek, which was up to their arms, they caught their men with the goods. Willie Rogers and one Riddle were the lads. They had six quarts when arrested. Rogers pleaded guilty and was sent to jail. Riddle was discharged.

It also makes us wonder where Cowen’s priorities were. Six quarts doesn’t seem like much to justify slogging two miles on foot. Surely there were bigger fish in the bootleg-whiskey pond.

In May of 1905 the Anti-Saloon League was already thinking about how to have a safe and sober 4th of July.

The anti-saloon league is about to make a special effort to eliminate drunkenness and fireworks on the Nation’s birthday, July 4. If the league will add oratory to the list of evils to be eliminated it will gain the support of thousands of “long suffering citizens.” 

 The reader of today must try to imagine an older world before radio when oratory counted as a form of amusement, and families would bring picnic lunches and expect to spend the day listening to skillful speakers. Alcohol would tend to shorten the listeners’ attention span, just as the fireworks, if they came from the barrel of a gun, would shorten their lives. It is clear, however, that the editorialist isn’t thinking of firearms when he writes “fireworks.” Notably, over the next few days no killings were reported for Independence Day.

The next report comes from the Chandler News, copied from a missing article in the Stroud Star. 

 . . . Charles Hembrow inflicted a bullet wound upon James Brock from which he died early Sunday morning. The affair grew out of a raid which was made upon the honkeytonk Friday afternoon. The inmates of the institution were arrested by Marshal Campbell on a charge of prostitution. Among the women detained was the alleged wife of Brock. Brock became offended at the authorities on this account, and in the early evening made himself conspicuous about town by displaying and discharging his revolver, and threatening vengeance upon Campbell. 

The upshot of this confrontation was that Marshal Campbell got “Night Policeman Charles Hembrow” for backup, and in the ensuing gunplay at Foreman and Carlock’s saloon Brock was killed. The article ends with a clumsy obituary:

We are loath to speak harshly of this young man [Brock] who has met such a premature death, but a higher duty toward the living compels us to admit that he was a debased creature and received his death wound while attempting to commit murder. He was about twenty-three years old and came to Oklahoma from Forth Worth, Texas. He had been in Stroud five weeks.

It is not clear why the journalist is tiptoeing around Brock’s moral character, whereas usually a newspaper doesn’t hesitate to blacken anybody who is not laboring in a respectable trade and breaks the law. Indeed we may wonder how we are supposed to regard a man who lets his wife work as a prostitute. The notion of a “higher duty to the living” may make some readers uncomfortable, but in all charity, the extent of what can be said is that Brock was young and there may have been extenuating circumstances. 

Meanwhile, the Lord’s prohibition army continued its march, trampling down the vintages. The Stroud Star for April 1907 reported: “The prohibition question is rapidly settling itself in Payne county, Oklahoma, where the number of saloons has been reduced from 20 to 2, one in Stillwater and one in Ripley, and their license will soon expire.” There seems to be some truth in the supposition behind this report, that prohibition didn’t just suddenly arrive with statehood but was the result of the continued growth of anti-saloon forces over a period of several years.

Before statehood with its prohibition clause arrives, The Stroud Star for September 1907 treats us to the small headline “Another Killing for Stroud” and beneath it this story:

Last Saturday evening our city was again the scene of a shooting scrape in which a colored man was killed. As near as we can learn, the facts of the affair are as follows:

Eugene Bailey and Arnold Smith, two negroes, came into town from the Creek country Saturday afternoon and both became drunk before they started home in the evening. When about a half mile south of town, they began to quarrel about a revolver, and finally Smith secured it. Jumping from the wagon, he fired it at Bailey, shooting him through the abdomen; Bailey also jumped from the wagon and crawled under the fence, where he was found some time afterward. Smith shot several times into the air and started for the Creek country, but later changed his mind and came back to town. Meanwhile, the news had been brought to town and a party was sent out after the negro that was shot, which brought him to town. When Drs. Evans and Cowden dressed the wounds, it was seen that he could not live through the night and he died about 1 o’clock.

About 10 o’clock, Deputy Sheriff Joe Lilly went to arrest Smith. He was on the north side of the street in front of the Bon Ton Bakery, defying the officers to arrest him, when Lilly came up behind him and ordered him to hold up his hands; and when Smith refused, Lilly shot him in the head, the ball entering the jaw, just in front of the ear.

Smith was kept under guard, then taken to Chandler the next morning and turned over to the authorities. Bailey was buried Monday morning by his friends, but was exhumed and shipped to Louisiana for re-internment by his relatives.

In conclusion, it would appear that as a whiskey town, Stroud doesn’t rank very high for mayhem, certainly not in comparison with the wild towns of Pott County. Only a few of the killings around Stroud took place in or near a saloon. More than whiskey-fueled violence, the dark cloud over the early history of Stroud is cast by racism--by the shadow of that sign posted after the riot proclaiming that black people should leave town by sundown. 

. . . . .

Author’s Note

I must be forthcoming and confess my own ancient stake in Stroud. Though I was born and reared in Chandler, where two sets of my great-grandparents homesteaded, my roots in Stroud are a generation older. They come from my mother’s family, the Earps. Her grandparents, William and Mary Frances (Wright) Earp homesteaded about four miles northwest of Stroud, and my great-great-grandfather Martin Van Buren Wright (1837-1914) started a United Brethren church out in that area, with the school at Oak Valley serving as the church for fourteen years. In 1926 a gusher of oil came in on the William Earp land, and his widow (he’d passed away two years before) bought each of his eleven children a farm and a new A-Model with the money. Another part of the oil money was used to build a Church of God at 9th Street and Fifth Avenue and a home for the widowed Mary Frances a few blocks away. She would soon be cheated out of the rest of the money by Bible-toting city slickers who sold her worthless gold bonds. Mary died in 1961 at the fine old age of 98, and the church is still standing, though for many years now it has been used as a rest home. Martin Van Buren Wright lies in the old Black Cemetery with the shades of ancestral Earps and Wrights. The discovery well is still pumping, and the land still belongs to the Earp family. Every year I get a royalty check from the oil company for about $10. I give it to my teenage daughter to bank, and tell her that when she makes her debut in society she can bill herself as an Oklahoma oil heiress.