Ralston Requiem

The historical journey that the present book has traced across the whiskey towns of Oklahoma, first along the Canadian River and now back north across the Arkansas, reaches its end with Ralston. Whiskey towns still further north did exist--Ponca City and Kaw City--but Ralston was my goal when I set out, and with Ralston we are going to end our journey.

In the historical memory of Oklahoma, Ralston shines bright for two of her sons, one white, one red. Neither of them lived in Ralston, but both lived nearby in Skedee nine miles to the south, where they have a memorial. The red man was Chief Wah-she-hah, which in the Osage language means “Star-That-Travels.” During the Osage removal from Kansas in the 1870s, he was a tribal councilman, served as assistant chief in 1904–05, and was elected principal chief in 1912. In English he is known as Chief Bacon Rind. renowned for his silver-tongued oratory (in the Osage language, not English), and was said to have been the most photographed Indian of his day.

Chief Bacon Rind

The white man was Colonel (given name, not a title) Ellsworth Walters, who became a deputy U.S. marshal at age nineteen but gained distinction as an auctioneer. Self-styled as "the world's champion auctioneer," he is said to have sold livestock, real estate, and mineral leases in some twenty states. In 1916 he was hired by the Osage to auction mineral leases within the Osage oil fields. Walters conducted the public sales at Pawhuska beneath the Million Dollar Elm, the auctions often lasting ten hours or more and attended by notable oilmen. By 1928 Walters had earned around $157 million for the Osage tribe, and he presided over the lease auctions throughout the 1930s.

Today, the town  of Skedee (named for the Skidi band of the Pawnee) boasts a sculpture called “Bond of Friendship” showing the two men clasping hands. I will post full-length (and full dress or half dress) photos of the both men at the end of the present essay. 

RoadsideAmerica.com has eloquently described their friendship:

America's natives have often had rocky relations with their European conquerors. But shining from the gloom, like a ray of sunlight across a post-massacre Western prairie, is the warm-and-fuzzy -- and slightly lumpy -- monument of Ellsworth Walters and Chief Baconrind, friends forever. The lesson imparted here is that white and red can be harmonious -- if you just add a little green.

Baconrind was chief of the Osage Nation. Luckily for him, he was in charge in the early 20th century, when billions of barrels of oil were discovered beneath the Osage reservation. The Osage couldn't be kicked out -- as they had been from Missouri in the 1800s. The Whites had to pay to drill for the underground bonanza and, since this was the 1920s and not the 1620s, they had to pay in real money, not beads and trinkets. That's where Ellsworth Walters came in.

"Colonel" Walters was an auctioneer who made it his mission to get the best deal possible for the Osage. The boom town of Skedee was where he got it -- reportedly over a million dollars' worth of oil leases in a single day, auctioned to oil company founders and presidents who came here to bid in person. It was the apex of a 15 year run that saw the Osage reap $157 million from their good fortune, making them -- briefly -- the richest people per capita in the world. Just before the Depression hit, Osage County had the largest number of Pierce Arrow luxury cars in America; elegant vases were used to store vegetables, or as corn bins; and grand pianos were reportedly left on lawns year 'round.

In 1926, Ellsworth Walters had a monument, "Bond of Friendship," erected in the middle of a sprawling Skedee intersection -- with plenty of room for circling Pierce Arrows. Atop a blocky concrete pillar stands the Chief and the Colonel, facing each other, shaking hands. The work is primitive for such well-oiled honorees: the pillar is plastered cinder block around old oil pipes, while the Chief and the Colonel appear to be made of Play-Doh spray-painted silver. The distended lower half of the Chief, in particular, looks as if he's carrying a space-alien seed pod that is about to burst. Oklahoma newspapers at the time mocked the design.

A lengthy poem, penned by Walters, engraved into a marble slab cracked with age, tells the story of the monument and praises interracial harmony:

I will build for them a landmark
That the coming race may see
All the beauties of the friendship
That exists 'tween them and me...."

Unfortunately, the future audience that Walters imagined for his monument never materialized. Chief Baconrind, who owned a modern home but who spent most of his time in a teepee in the yard, died in 1932. His luck held even in death: the oil boom went bust in 1935. The railroad line into Skedee was washed out by a flood in 1957, and never rebuilt. According to the 2000 census, Skedee has dwindled to a population of 102. The flag pole behind the Chief and the Colonel looks as if it has been without a flag for many years.

The Bond of Friendship

The Bond of Friendship monument now towers over a virtual ghost town; its neighbors are a vacant lot, a collapsing food market building, auto garage, and long-abandoned service station, which still advertises gas at 49.9¢ a gallon. The lone stop sign in town is almost unrecognizable under many layers of spray paint graffiti.

The historian has a bond as well, a bond with the past promising to supply the documentation in which that past is imbedded or expressed. Ideally, a history can be a handshake over the abyss separating past and present, which is why if historians have original documents they present them. Which is why in these essays Gumprecht’s map of the whiskey towns keeps appearing. Gumprecht has little to say about Ralston, but what he does say is on target. Prohibition was a-coming, sure as Christmas, and it was ringing the death knell for the whiskey towns:

The example of Ralston is especially telling. The town's population declined by more than 20 percent between 1903 and 1910.  Saloons were replaced by a barber shop, restaurant, boarding house, and billiard parlor. One saloon building became a post office. Another remained vacant. Two years after the enactment of prohibition, in fact, there were thirteen vacant buildings in Ralston's business district. In 1903 there had been none.

Ralston with all its vacant buildings must have been a sad sight in 1910. It is not surprising that no photographs of it are preserved. The only photo from 1910 shows “the fine new bridge” celebrated on the first page of The Ralston New Era for September 1st.

The Ralston Bridge, 1910

It already looks ramshackle enough to be carried away by the next full flood.

In fact, a new bridge was built in 1927, so this one lasted about seventeen years.

James Klein’s Social History of Prohibition in Oklahoma (2003) is a Ph.D. thesis and his remarks are usually general. He mentions Ralston three times:

The Cherokee Strip, jutting into the Osage and Creek lands, also saw the rise of liquor communities. Ponca City, by 1903, had fourteen saloons, three breweries, and a whiskey distillery. The liquor industry provided the early economic basis for such Pawnee County communities as Blackburn, Cleveland, Jennings, Keystone, Osage, Pawnee, Ralston, and Sinnett. Again, Indians were frequent customers of the saloons in these towns (52-53).

If the reader is a bit vague about the location of the strip, the map below provides orientation. Notice

that to the east the Strip runs into the Osage Reservation, with the boundary formed by the northern twists of the Arkansas River.

Klein also discusses some of the smaller towns, locations which are not on Gumprecht’s frequently cited map:

Smaller Oklahoma towns also sported numerous saloons during the territorial period. Granite and Sayre each contained thirteen saloons just after the turn of the century, though the 1900 census does not list the population of these communities among those containing 2,500 people or more. The proportion of saloons to population in these towns, then, was less than one to two hundred. Lexington, along the Canadian River dividing Indian and Oklahoma territories, also contained less than 2,500 residents throughout the territorial period, yet supported eleven saloons in the 1890s. El Reno, with a stated population of 3,383 in 1900, contained twenty-one saloons in 1901, or one saloon for every 161 residents. The tiny community of Ralston, along the Cimarron River, which separated Oklahoma Territory from the Osage Reservation, supported ten saloons prior to prohibition statehood (250-51).

After the turn of the century, the petroleum industry began exploratory drilling at Red Fork, Cleveland, and Ralston, and soon this corner of Oklahoma was floating in pools of oil.

The opening of the profitable Glenn Pool, Cushing, and Healdton oil fields in the first two decades of the new century produced an oil boom in Oklahoma. These activities not only affected the region's economy, but also drew a large wage-earning population; various vice industries---including an illegal liquor industry--- took root in locales containing large numbers of wage earners to provide services that the more respected middle classes disdained (323-24).

I have frequently cited the great Indian Pioneer Papers collection, and now do so once again for Goldie Turner’s essay “The Establishment of Ralston.” Turner was a very active Pawnee County historian in 1930s when the interviews were being collected, and at least a dozen of them are under her name. 

Materials gathered from several sources, by Goldie Turner, Field Workers, July 22, 1937. Clipping from an early Ralston paper, given by Mrs. Spaulding.

On June 11, 1894, the United States Government issued a townsite patent to Walter McCague. The town as first called Riverside but was soon changed to Ralston.

In 1902 the Santa Fe Railroad came to Ralston. On June 17, 1902, J. O. Cales opened the depot as first agent. The first train came to Ralston under conductor McClinchey. No other railroad was ever built through here. This soon became a large shipping point. Mr. Cales had to have the assistance of seventeen men to care for the business, including a day and night cashier.An average of thirty tickets were sold daily. People drove over from Pawhuska to catch the early morning train. They would come over in the evening and stay all night. The hotel was full of people most of the time.

This was in the days before prohibition, and Ralston had saloons. On account of Indians the government would not permit saloons in Osage County so Ralston was often visited by many thirsty criminals and gamblers from the Osage hills as well as Indians and cowboys, from across the river.

At first there wasn't much government in the town of Ralston. Before a jail was erected the unruly drunks were tied up to trees with ropes until they sobered up. Of course any dangerous persons were taken to Pawnee and put in jail there.

The most commonly used ford that the Indians and cowboys used was a mile or two north of Ralston, although there was another ford closer to the town which was used when the water was low.

The railroad went no farther than Ralston from 1902 to 1904 until the railroad bridge was built across the river. There was a government operated ferry there for a few years but it didn't operate many years.

The first school in Ralston was a little frame one room building. There were no rural schools so that country children who attended would ride in on horseback. The first school opened in October and closed the last of December. The first year or two there was an enrollment of about eighty children each year. The first teacher was Mrs. Williams and the second teacher was Mrs. Whiles. . . . Their salaries were $30.00 a month the first term and $35.00 a month the next year.

The cowboys often came in and shot up the town but no one was ever killed during their forays.

At last at the end, the light of day shines through the dull clouds of the author’s prosing, for Ms. Turner has at last said something we can disagree with. No one was ever killed in the cowboys forays? As with many local historians working with events from decades past, Ms. Turner may mean only that she remembered no violent deeds, but she made the slippery assumption that her memory coincided with what actually happened in the past. As we shall see, it did not. Nonetheless it does seem to be true that, compared to other whiskey towns we have visited, the number of killings in Ralston was relatively few. Killings there were, however, though generally they did not occur within or on the doorstep of the saloons.

The first killing to be noted was a very early one, from August 1894, the year when Goldie Turner says the town was founded. It comes with lots of blood and a question that is still open. Did this 34-year-old  professional soldier kill himself or was he murdered? There are two newspaper reports, one from his initial burial in Ralston and the second probably about the time of his reinterment in Pennsylvania. Both are from the Times-Democrat in Pawnee. The first is captioned with the conclusion “A Soldier Suicides”:

Frank Devine, private B 3rd cavalry, U. S. army, suicided at Ralston last Sunday morning . . . . The company under command of Captain Johnson, for the past two months stationed at Pawhuska, Osage Nation, was enroute for Ft. Reno and had gone into quarters for the night at Ralston. A number of the soldiers obtained some whisky and spend the greater portion of the night carousing. Devine became greatly intoxicated and did not return from town to the camp until about 4 o’clock in the morning. The cook who was preparing breakfast noticed Devine come in and go to his bunk and shortly heard the report of a revolver and going to Devine’s bed found he had committed suicide by shooting himself in the temple. 

This article ends with the cook’s statement as though it were final, but the cook’s conclusion in legal terms was pure speculation. It avails little that the coroner’s inquest also returned the verdict of suicide. The military operates under codes of silence, and whatever Devine’s companions knew, they weren’t telling. 

Eleven months later, Devine’s father had arrived asking questions and behind him threat of the War Department. At least according to the Times-Democrat of July 1895, and now they are speaking of a killing:

The War department at Washington is investigating the killing of Frank Devine, a United States soldier, who was either murdered, committed suicide or accidentally shot himself at Ralston, Osage Nation, last August. Devine’s death was never made known, and his father came from Johnstown, Pa., to hunt his son up, as he could not get news from him. . . . At El Reno the father learned from one of young Devine’s company that he had accidentally shot himself and was buried at Ralston . . . . At Ralston the father learned that a coroner’s jury had decided that Devine committed suicide, but he also learned that it is the opinion of the people of Ralston that Frank Divine was murdered. . . . Citizens of Ralston say that at a certain spot in town there was a fight between the soldiers that night, and the next morning there was evidence of a terrible struggle, one large pool of blood, but as the company said Devine killed himself in camp, the bloody spot went unexplained.

And to this day Devine’s death remains unexplained. We are back to Old Testament times here, when a charge of murder could not be proved without two witnesses. Sherlock Holmes had blazed the path that forensic medicine would follow, but the latter was still in its birth throes. No witnesses came forward. The father took the body of his son back to their home in Pennsylvania  and buried him in Johnstown, where  his tombstone read: “Served 5 years. / No more the bugle calls our dear son.”

Old newspapers for Ralston in the databases don’t begin until The Free Press of 1900. The peace of their pages was daily interrupted by murder reports, a sensationalist fodder all newspapers required. A saloon killing in Kildare (Kay County) reported in a Ponca City paper was picked up The Ralston Press for November 1901. It tells of one Joe Donahue shot dead by the bartender in Close’s saloon when he demanded more drink without paying his tab. “Donahue made a move as if to draw a gun, when the bartender drew his and shot him in the forehead, killing him instantly.” That was the quick way with bill defaulters. 

Bloodshed closer to home was reported by The Free Press in May of 1902. This story too is about a barkeep, but his antagonist is not a customer but the saloon owner.  The killing happens fast at 5:30 in the morning and with no context:

Scott Foster, a Saloon keeper, attacked Charles Smith, a bartender, while Smith was in his room asleep, and chopped his head open with a hatchet and then with his own hand sent a bullet through his brain. 

The above is the first paragraph of the story proper, and it happens very fast indeed. Whoa, says the newspaper reader. What was on Foster’s mind?

It seems that Foster had been drinking and brooding over domestic trouble for several days and on the fatal morning he went to the room of Smith, and finding his victim asleep, without a word of warning, dealt him three blows on the head with the sharp edge of a hatchet, which he left laying on the bed, inflicting three terrible gashes. One cut penetrated the brain cavity, which alone would have caused death.

Although the article doesn’t say so, it seems clear that this is a story about domestic situation--infidelity between Smith and Foster’s wife. That seems the simplest explanation for what happens next.

About this time the report of a gun attracted the attention of the people in the neighborhood of the Foster residence and it developed that he had gone home, borrowed a gun under the pretense of wanting to shoot a dog; then he went up stairs, awakened his sons and told them to come down in the yard and he would “tell them all about it.” . . . . He went from the house to the stable, followed by his two sons, and when in the barn he layed down with a sack of grain for a pillow and fired the fatal shot . . . a ball from a 44 caliber Colts had plowed through his brain killing him instantly.

There is no certainty here but the wife’s infidelity seems the likeliest explanation for Foster calling on his two sons--he had four children --to witness his suicide.

The next year saw a very similar alcohol-fueled killing and suicide. Reported in the Ralston Free Press for January 1903:

George H. Price, who, with his wife and family came to Ralston about two months ago, shot and mortally wounded his wife and then killed himself last Monday.

Price was a carriage maker by trade and built a shot south of Main Street, in the block adjoining the river, and intended to locate here permanently, but family troubles, real or imaginary caused him to desert his family . . . .

The deed was actuated by jealousy. Price and wife have been separated for some time, owing to neglect of Price to his family. Mrs. Price was a comely woman and Price, brooding over his troubles, imagined that his wife had intentions of securing a divorce and again marrying. He was also a habitual drinker and had frequently threatened the life of his wife, though but slight heed was paid to his threats. This afternoon he went home in a semi-drunken crazed condition. He kissed his little children good-bye and then pulling a revolver, aimed it at his wife. His mother-in-law was present and grabbed his arm just as he fired, but too late, the ball entering the wife’s body at the pit of the stomach, ranging downward and inflicting a mortal wound. Then Price turned the weapon upon himself and fired, the ball entering his right temple, coming out at the left, killing him instantly.

The murder and suicide stirred the city from the fact that Price’s little children are left destitute of parental care, and the case is more distressing from the fact of the poverty of the family. Price was a carriage maker and while he received good wages, never gave any of it to his family, and hence an appalling case of destitution and misery exists, the home resembling a slaughter house and the terror stricken children presenting a pitiable spectacle in their poverty, rags, want and misery.

The spectacle of the pitiful children must strike even the reader jaded by reading too many similar stories in these pages. Yet when I take a step backward I am aware that the story reads like a tract for prohibition, illustrating what happens when a man drinks up his wages. Publishing such homely tracts as this was a powerful tool in the prohibition movement which at this time was gathering strength across the state. The power of some (many?) of the tracts came from their truth.

From this pathos we move to a more everyday killing. a Deputy U.S. Marshall killed while trying to stop a bootlegger. From The Ralston Free Press for October 1904. 

Deputy U. S. Marshal Tom Taylor was shot and killed in Pawnee last Saturday by a man by the name of Deloss, whom Taylor had under arrest for selling whiskey to Indians. From the information received it appears that Deloss asked Taylor to step into Cook Horton’s saloon as he wished to arrange for a bond and while talking Deloss pulled a gun he had concealed on his person and shot Taylor in the breast and dashed out at the back door. Taylor pulled his gun and fired three shots at his assailant and then fell to the floor and expired. Deloss ran to the east part of town where he was captured. Taylor as well as Deloss was well known here, where the latter was making his stopping place at the time of his arrest.

Deputy U. S. Marshals were low paid men with high risk jobs, and often they were family men. The reporter has nothing to say about the pathos of the man’s death, and I could find no other news articles about it. Requiescat in pace, Thomas Taylor.

The next item to attract our attention takes us a little ways outside Oklahoma Territory into the Osage Nation across the Arkansas River. It occurred in 1904, several years before the discovery of Osage oil and the murders described in Killers of the Flower Moon, which didn’t begin until about 1918.

Another tragedy was added to the history of the Osage Nation Monday night. Norris Watkins left here about 8 p.m. considerably under the influence of liquor. It appears that when he got home he found John Hagler sleeping in his house. The two men had had trouble and it is thought to have been renewed at this time, with the result that Haggler was shot with a shot gun, once in the legs and once in the neck ranging downward. It appears that he was shot in bed, after which he ran 72 steps before falling. Watkins went to Pawhuska, where he was arrested Tuesday and taken before the grand jury which is in session at Pawnee. Hagler’s body was brought here and buried in the Ralston cemetery Thursday.

Both men are well known here. Hagler had been in the employ of John Lamberson [sp?] for some time up till recently when he took a lease just beyond the Watkins place. Watkins has the reputation of being a bad man, especially when drinking . . . 

There was bad blood between the two men, and since a pistol was found in Hagler’s hand, Watkins pled-self defense. 

“Foul Murder” was the headline cry in The Ralston Free Press in January 1906 when Mrs. S. W. (Jennie) Burr was killed by Fred Proctor. The latter, “a cook and drunken bum walked into S. W. Burr’s restaurant and short order, at Readdy’s old stand, at 10:45 p.m. and fired five shorts into Mrs. Burr . . . killing her instantly.”

Mr. and Mrs. Burr recently bought out I. Readdy and took charge of the restaurant and short order business. They were most estimable people, making a host of friends. Mrs. Burr attended the tables and was a splendid woman. Last Saturday Proctor, who had been cooking in the restaurant was discharged. . . . 

About 10:50 Mrs. Burr was sitting on a stool near the front talking to Alf Jennings, a Mr. Southerland, and Bob Whitman, who works there. Proctor came in and walked near to Mrs. Burr and accused her of knocking on him on account of drinking. Mrs. Burr replied she had not done so, when he instantly flashed a gun and commenced firing at her. She ran toward the back of the room and at the second shot fell. He followed her up and fired three shots after she fell. . . .

Proctor ran into the alley and lay down in the gutter north of the National hotel, and was trying to reload his gun when captured by the Night watch Overstreet and others and rushed to jail.

It’s a sad event to make a feeble joke about, but cooks are famous for being short tempered, especially short order cooks. 

Had the three actors in this drama been living in Kanas, Proctor’s wife, if wife he had, might have received some compensation through a new law, reported in The Ralston Free Press for March 1906:

The supreme court of Kansas has held that where a man gets drunk on beer furnished by a brewery contrary to the law, and while full goes out and kills another man and as a result gets into the pen for life, the wife of the murderer can recover damages from the brewery company on the theory that the beer sold to her husband by the brewery company caused him to get into the penitentiary where he cannot support her and his family. In the case decided by the supreme court the husband got full on beer purchased from an Atchison brewery and in a drunken fight killed another man, on account of which he is in the penitentiary for life. The wife, who is deprived of his support, sued the brewing company and got a judgment for $5,000. The case was brought to the supreme court and affirmed.

I’m no legal eagle, but it seems to me it would be a better law if it provided for the wife of the person murdered. Though the breweries made so much money they could easily have compensated both wives, if wives there were. But getting money from the breweries would have been as difficult as suing big pharm today for passing out opioids as though pharmacies were vending machines.

But comparisons are not only odious, they can be dangerous. An editorial in the Ralston Exponent for March 1906 warns us against throwing stones, as it compares drinking habits in Pawhuska and Ralston.

While the people of Pawhuska look upon Ralston as a pretty tough town as far as drinking is concerned, we have it from good authority that as many, if not more, drunk men are seen on the streets of that town during Indian payment, as you will ever find in Ralston. If you people over there are jealous of our town, why in thunder don’t you say so. It occurs to us that it hasn’t been very many moons since our coroner, Dr. E. L. Bagby, was called to that town to hold an inquest over the bodies of half dozen or more men who met their death by drinking Pawhuska booze.

Now we admit that the quality of booze sold in Ralston is not the best in the world, but the goods sold here don’t require the services of a coroner.

Traditional wisdom tells us not to throw stones if we live in glass houses, but what do we do when our beloved Bowser starts to foam at the mouth and bite people? There were many mad dog scares in the years between 1904 and 1906, but the problem offered no perplexity. People were ordered to muzzle their dogs, or the marshals would shoot them. The dogs, that is. The Ralston Free Press reported 19 killed dogs in April 1906. Two months later the same paper reported that dog were now being taxed, and the tax was due in July.

Ben Cravens, whose story was told in the previous chapter, was just as recurrent as the mad dogs. To recapitulate briefly, he has a full history at his Find-a-Grave burial site (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/43760172/benjamin-s-cravens), full in fact to the point of repletion. Ben Cravens was a man of many talents. His criminal life began with bootlegging and from there advanced to armed robbery and murder. He was convicted and sent to the federal prison at Lansing several times but always escaped. In addition to being a bootlegger, he was an escape artist and a conman, and one of the parts he played best was that of respectability (see photo below). 

Ben Cravens

Pawnee county had a particular interest in Cravens because in one of his escapades he’d shot and killed county sheriff Tom Johnson. Apart from this detail, the two page spread in The Ralston Free Press for July 1907 provides nothing new except for the story of the boots Cravens borrowed for his wedding and a closer look at the scar left by the bullet that lodged under his scalp. As stated in the Cleveland chapter, Cravens lived until 1947 and died with his boots off.

Finally--and this will be the grand finale for this book--Ralston should be noted for having prohibited saloons a full two months before prohibition came in as part of the new constitution in September 1907. This event was noted by the Creek County Courier of Sapulpa:

Ralston, up by the Osage reservation, will soon have to abandon saloons, its inhabitants having voted against those institutions as nuisances.

“Nuisances” seems a remarkable understatement for the trail of mayhem and murder we have followed from the Canadian River up to this point on the Arkansas. Surely the good folks of Raston knew nothing of the history of its fellow whiskey towns.

For a final adieu, it seems appropriate to cite part of an ancient ballad called “John Barleycorn Must Die” that is as old as the cultivation of the barley plant. Like the domestication of wheat and Barley, its roots are lost in prehistory. The Scots poet Robert Burn made a famous version of the ballad in the 1700s, and in our own day the British rock band Traffic made a gold record of it. Of course all reports of John Barleycorn’s death are exaggerated (Mark Twain’s joke). The plant is perennial, and springs every year just as wheat and barley do.

As a boy Burns had been a ploughman, so his verses imaging the plants ploughed down with clods upon their head make a story told with a wink.  Spring rains dissolve the clods, and the barley awakes.

There was three kings unto the east,

Three kings both great and high,

And they hae sworn a solemn oath

John Barleycorn should die.

They took a plough and plough'd him down,

Put clods upon his head,

And they hae sworn a solemn oath

John Barleycorn was dead.

“Colonel” Walters