W. W. “Snake” Thomason

  W. W. Thomason was a well-known revenue agent working in Southeastern Oklahoma between the years 1910 and 1931. The newspapers of the day refer to him under various titles: Special Enforcement Officer, Indian Enforcement Agent, Deputy U. S. Marshal, Supervisor of Federal Prohibition, Federal Officer in the Indian Service,    

W. W. Thomason, 1907

and more colloquially “dry agent.” Among the best known gang-buster exploits of Thomason and his deputies were the shutting down of thirty stills in two weeks, and the killing of two farmers in Pottawatomie County, both veterans of World War I.

I first came across Thomason’s name about five years ago while researching the killing of Billie Grayson in Chandler, Oklahoma in 1941. Because her nude body was left in the local cemetery, interest was aroused in the case across the state but particularly in Lincoln county, where it happened. A young cub reporter for the Chandler newspaper named Betty Boggs supplied some of the best reporting. Of the overflowing courtroom, she writes:

Not since ‘Snake’ Thompson was tried here several years ago for a double killing in Pottawatomie county, has the courtroom been so packed. At least 85 percent of the spectators were women who busied themselves during the less exciting moments of the hearing with manicure sets or knitting needles. (Pounds 170)

If Snake Thompson filled the courtroom, I thought, he must be worth writing about, but it has taken me five years to get back to the crooked track he left in the dust of Oklahoma history.

For the first month of my present hunt, I searched for Snake Thompson (spelled with a medial “p”), but my results were incomplete. I feared that my essay would have to start with a hypothetical figure, his origins lost in the uncertain mists of the Indian rolls and his final fade-out in the darkness of obscurity. All I knew of him with any certainty was the large number of news articles about him in Oklahoma between 1910 and 1930, all of which

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consistently called him W. W. Thompson, with or without the moniker “Snake.” I should have cast a wider net. Then I would have found him in Time magazine in 1929 and discovered the correct spelling “Thomason” for his surname. As it was, I had to wait for the Oklahoma-born writer Mike Tower (author of The Outlaw Statesman: The Life and times of Fred Tecumseh Waite, 2007), to discover the answer. The alternative spelling opened up a new chapter on Snake, and I am grateful to Mike and will use it consistently, ignoring newspaper variants.

W.W. Thomason’s parents were Clement Clayton and Mary E. (Whitworth) Thomason of Benton County, Arkansas. His father (1849-1919) was born and died in Benton County, while his mother came from Missouri. She married Clement Thomason in Benton County, which was her final resting place. Thomason’s paternal grandmother, Martha Cates, came from Alabama, and she may well be the source of something choleric in the personalities of her son and grandson. For the son Clement, this impression comes from a single photograph, while for her grandson it comes both from photographs and the quick trigger finger ascribed to him in the newspaper articles. Certainly the face shown above is one in which there is no trace of humor. For those who recall Emile Bronte’s famous novel, it’s the imagined face of Heathcliff, the Byronic hero.

Thomason is missing from the 1880 census, and everybody is missing from the 1890 which burned. He first appears on the 1900 in Erath County in north-central Texas, where he is a blacksmith, which must have strengthened his physique. His next appearance is in Wewoka in 1907, which area will be his home base in the coming decade. In 1910 the census there is a bit garbled, giving his occupation as “optical officer” in the digital image, but the raw census shows “special officer” legibly enough. In 1920 he’s in

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Brown, an unincorporated community in Bryan County, thirteen miles northwest of Durant. In 1930 he’s living on West 12th Street in Oklahoma City and listed as a “Prohibition Agent” working for the federal government. In 1940, which represents the end game on the chess board of his life, he is living in Springfield, Missouri, and listed as a Federal Investigator with an annual income of $2800. This census also gives his schooling--“elementary school, 8th grade.” He’s still in the saddle, evidently, but he’s 67 years old, and his career as indicated in newspaper reportage is at an end.

Before moving on to the exploits in Thomason’s life as a “dry agent,” we may pause to consider his moniker “Snake.” My first thought was that it indicated he had Indian blood, since Snake is a common name among the plains tribes, who venerated the snake for its ability to renew itself by shedding its old skin. As a moniker in the white world, “snake” has very different connotations. It suggests the seductive wiliness of the serpent in Eden, and for most people evokes the pejorative “snake in the grass.” In Thomason’s case, the first appearance of the moniker that I can find comes in the Apperson American for February 1925 in an article that revels in slang language to describe a raid on bootleggers. As always with newspapers, however, a catchy phrase soon acquires currency and everybody starts to use it. Such seems to have been the case with “Snake” Thomason. It may be relevant that this coinage comes at a phase in the agent’s career when his raids are becoming deadly. Bootleggers are dying--as though bit by a poisonous viper--a matter to which we will come momentarily.

The first clear reference to the Thomason who will become Snake occurs in the Holdenville paper for December 1905. Holdenville is in Hugo county,

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immediately east of Seminole. The article is written in a jocular tone, since those arrested were all black and anyway everyone knew that while bootlegging was illegal there was no real harm in it. A bootlegger provided a neighborhood with a social center, and was often something like a down- home mayor. After first noting that the season is nearing Christmas--ho, ho, ho-- the writer names those arrested, who all happen to be “cullud gem’e n” and possessing less than five gallons of liquor. The officers were S. M. Douglas and W. W. Thompson, “the latter of Wewoka.”

Thomason had a new job description in 1910. He was working as an Indian enumerator for the census. According to the Oklahoma Weekly Leader (Guthrie) for May of that year he was picked for the job in view of the fact that “the Indians refrained from answering many questions for fear the enumerator’s visit had something to do with state affairs.” This was a reasonable caution in view of the history of past enumerations which resulted in the allotment system and the loss of tribal lands. Indeed, the Leader anticipates the eventual disappearance of native- Americans by stating that “this will probably be the last enumeration of the Redman as tribes.”

Thomason’s census work was merely an interlude. The Wewoka Democrat for February 1911 reports him back chasing bootleggers, apprehending one Emmett Henderson “in the act of disposing of a bottle of joy water to an Indian” and seeing him sent to jail in lieu of bail. In 1916 the January Shawnee Daily News finds Thomason working as a “Special U. S. Detective” in tandem with a deputy sheriff arresting a Wewoka “negro charged with robbing Kelly’s store.” There had to be some connection with illegal whiskey in this arrest for the Muskogee Times- Democrat for January 1917 notices no change in Thomason’s job description, when the “special enforcement

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officer” with a fellow lawman made a raid on a “Deep Two” drug store on South Second Street. The unusual name of the locale calls attention to itself. Comparable to the better known “Deep Deuce” of Oklahoma City, famous for jazz clubs and illegal liquor, this was is a black section of Muskogee (deep down on Second Street) where the liquor flowed and the dice were hot.

The social critic notices that so far the men arrested by Thomason have been indigent members of minority groups and the quantity of booze confiscated has not amounted to more than piddle. The next arrest noted in the newspapers portrays a “legger” of greater social mobility. The Nowata Weekly Star-Times for March 1919 reported that

Special Indian enforcement officers made an important capture at about 4 o’clock Wednesday afternoon when they captured W. W. Arack, who claims his home is in Oklahoma City, and an Oldsmobile car containing thirteen cases of whiskey. . . . Officers W. W. Thompson [and five others] were traveling near the south edge of the city in two cars when they spied Arack. The officers chased the booze hauler and when the latter found the officers were catching up with him he ran the machine into a field and attempted to unload the whiskey. After taking about six cases from the car Arack fled across the field and was chased about a mile by the officers before he was captured.

“Social mobility” means that Arack must have had an auto- mobile fleet and sturdy enough to navigate the 120-some miles between Oklahoma City and Nowata.

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Mention of cars, requires a sidebar on gangsters and film noire. It is a well known fact that the automobile radically transformed life in the United States, and the height of this big change came in the Roaring ‘20s. Though in Oklahoma the first use of an automobile in a bank robbery may have been Henry Starr’s double bank-robbery attempt in Stroud in 1915, the style quickly became a necessity. In 1968 Pauline Kael, the film critic for The New Yorker, published a collection of her reviews called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, summarizing in that phrase the basic appeal of movies. Though film noire provided the classic apotheosis of the gangs who ran the illegal liquor under Prohibition, the seeds of this narrative were planted by the journalism of the 1920s, stories in which the automobile played an increasingly central role. In film, the sub-genre of Depression Era bank robbing found its belated but iconic expression in Arthur Penn’s 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, with its grand finale of cars colliding to the accompaniment of a bluegrass breakdown and tommy guns .

The film critic Pauline Kael might have called this whole influential genre “Car Car Bang Bang.” “Kiss Kiss” had no role here, and would have none until the Motion Picture Production Code liberalized roles for women in the early 1930s. It is at least notable in passing that all of the exploits involving Snake Thomason belong to the genre of “Car Car Bang Bang,” meaning no women. Penn’s take is a sixties gesture romanticizing the outlaws, but one has only to compare the portraits of the killers Barrow and Parker to see the transformations produced by the film maker’s art. National prohibition in the United States ended in December 1933; the lives of Barrow and Parker in June 1934. Penn’s film, thirty-three years later, at the height of the social revolutions of the sixties, was their requiem.

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Geographical mobility is well illustrated by the next raid in which Thomason participates on February 26, 1920, for it took them to Coal County. The Lehigh News reports:

Monday morning Office Henry Coats of Centrahoma, accompanied by Deputy Marshal W. W. Thompson, at a place a few miles north of Coalgate, found a distillery in full operation. They arrested 3 men . . . . Besides the still, they found 30 gallons of new-made whisky and 135 gallons of sour mash, ready to be made into whisky. This is the third “moonshine” distillery these two officers have unearthed in the vicinity of Coalgate in the past month.

The exploration of Oklahoma geography continued the next day, taking place in Hanna in southwestern McIntosh County, county seat Eufaula, a hundred and twenty miles from Nowata. Keep in mind that Highway 66 had not yet come into existence in 1920, so that’s 120 miles over dirt and gravel portions of the Ozark Trail. In 1928 the U. S. Highway 66 Association celebrated the opening of the highway (much of it still unpaved) with a marathon footrace from Los Angeles to New York City, following Route 66 from Los Angeles to Chicago. The marathon was won by Andy Payne, a Cherokee from Foyil in Will Rogers County, who used the award money to pay off the mortgage on his father’s farm (Pounds 141- 42).

Captured at Hanna were five men and “a still found in full operation and over 300 gallons of mash was destroyed. Other stills were found in the same vicinity but the officers were unsuccessful in capturing the owners.” With 300 gallons captured in one fell swoop, the reader may rightly feel that Thomason, honing his skills, is

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gradually taking on larger bootlegging operations. I don’t speak of his colleagues, who were essential to the success of his operations, but clearly they needed the leadership and the non-local incentive that the dry agent provided. Local lawmen would have felt the resistance of their constituencies, but after the Volstead Act of 1920 Thomason represented the federal government.

Pickings were much smaller at Thomason’s next reported raid. In April 1920 The Hugo Democrat (Choctaw County just north of the Texas line) reported “Two stills were taken. The arresting officer said one of the stills was being operated and the other was hidden near by and small amounts of liquor were taken in the raid, together with ten gallons of mash, the officers said.” This article is of interest for what it tells us about Thomason. He is called the “Indian enforcement officer,” important for an understanding of his role in the Treasury Department. Though legally the situation of American Indians was ambiguous, for the nations had their own laws, it must have been felt that the federal government alone had the authority to override Indian law. Treaties going back more than a hundred years habitually referred to the Indians as the federal government’s children. The feds were unreliable parents who habitually broke their promises, but even so Indians continued to respect their standing in loco parentis. Parenthood, after all, reflected the laws of nature, and Nature was the Great Father and Mother of us all.

Although the newspaper reportage does not provide all the details, it would seem that Thomason was busy with his raids during this period. In September 1920 the Oklahoma Weekly Leader (Guthrie) reported:

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Thirty bootleggers and moonshiners caught in two weeks is the record of W. W. Thompson, federal officer stationed at Muskogee.

The one detail that can be added at this point concerns Thomason’s place of residence. The places ascribed to him vary so much that it seems evident that he is not being forthcoming about where he resided. Like the use of his alias “Thompson,” we may attribute this to Thomason’s concern to protect his wife and ten children from retribution. He didn’t want the bad guys to find them.

We may glide past a short article in the Ada Weekly News for December 1920 noting the confiscation of “one gallon of whiskey, fifteen gallons of mash, and the still.” The article calls him “Special Enforcement Officer” and uses the “Thomason” spelling of his name. Likewise, the next event reported in the Shawnee News-Star for May 1921 suggests that Thomason is still spending a lot of his time gathering minnows while the big fish swim free: “W. W. Thompson, deputy United States marshal of Seminole, brought three negroes from Wewoka having been captured making whiskey.” One notes the new place name of origin (Seminole) and a reference to an old and repeated one (Wewoka). It is unclear what importance should be assigned to Thomason’s differing role titles. Now he’s called a “deputy United States marshal,” but we cannot say whether this reflects a change in his job or just the laziness of the reporters for whom--as for the public at large-- the different titles meant much the same thing.

The next reference to Thomason, in The Vian Press (Sequoya County) for August 1922, is yet another variation, calling him “Supervisor of Federal Prohibition.” The story reports the capture of a “bad negro” who had killed a

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federal enforcement officer in Choctaw County. In October of the same year, various papers reported that

A record for number of men captured, number of stills destroyed, and number of gallons of moonshine liquor and mash confiscated is believed to have been made in Choctaw and McCurtain counties during September by W. W. Thompson, special federal officer, and his deputies.

Choctaw and McCurtain counties are in the far southeastern corner of the state on the Arkansas and Texas lines.

Thomason and his men next drove north to Osage County, where in November 1923 The Apperson American reported their achievement:

With the arrests of four men and the confiscation of a still, one of the most troublesome gangs of moonshiners in Osage county was broken up by federal prohibition officers, according to W. W. Thompson, prohibition agent at Fairfax . . . . Those arrested were Henry Cornett, L. O. Harmon, George Carney, and W. A. Stephens. . . . these men have been a source of trouble for some time, and although several raids have been made, the government has never been able to convict them. Cornett is said to have been the leader of the gang and to have been in federal courts several times.

These men may have been big-time trouble in Osage County, but the history books I have been able to consult pay them scant heed. The one exception is Henry Cornett, who rates a passing reference in Anderson’s 100 Oklahoma Outlaws, Gangsters, and Lawmen, 1839-1939 (p. 285).

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Probably their figures are overshadowed by “the Osage Reign of Terror,” a regime of orchestrated carnage which had begun about 1920 targeting the vast wealth of the Osage Indians. “In 1923 alone, the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million. The Osage were considered the wealthiest people per capita in the world” (Grann 6).

Since Fairfax is the seat of Osage County, it is noteworthy that the Apperson paper locates Thomason there as early as 1922. Newspaper locations of Thomason’s residence, as we have observed, are not reliable, but as will be seen the FBI files also locate him there in 1925.

Pursuing bootleggers in Osage County during this period, Thomason stood at the margins of the Osage Reign of Terror, for the murderers were often bootleggers by profession, a generalization which would apply to everyone except the “King of the Osages” William K. Hale of Fairfax, the wealthiest man and biggest land owner in the county--a real-life version of Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen only the latter didn’t hire men to commit a string of murders. Bootleggers could also be killers, and Thomason had encounters with some of them. Sapulpa’s County Democrat News for July 1924 reported on “Kelsie Morrison of Fairfax,” a big time bootlegger who was arrested and is in jail charged with robbing the Bristow Community Bank July 4. The car used in the bank transaction was a Buick belonging to boss William Hale, “well known resident and business man of Fairfax. . . . Hale said Morrison had been in the habit of driving his car, and that it was missing at the time of the robbery.” A predictable excuse that does not carry conviction.

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“King of the Osages” William K. Hale

Henry Grammer was another important criminal around Fairfax, one important enough to rate several pages and a photo in Grann’s Flower Moon. Grann mentions him in the same sentence with Morrison in characterizing the county sheriff:

he was cozy with criminal elements...he gave free rein to gamblers and to bootleggers like Kelsey Morrison and Henry Grammer, a rodeo champion who had once served time for murder and who controlled the local distribution of moonshine. One of Grammer’s workers later admitted to authorities, “I had the assurance that if I was ever arrested I would be turned out in five minutes.” . . .

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Grammer was a rodeo star who had performed at Madison Square Garden and had been crowned the steer-roping champion of the world. He was also an alleged train robber, a kingpin bootlegger with connections to the Kansas City Mob, and a professional

Henry Grammer

gunman (20, 86-87). Gunman or no, Thomason arrested him, as reported in the Pawhuska Daily Journal for December 1924.

W. W. Thompson, federal officer in the Indian Service, captured a complete still and liquor outfit in the west side of the county this week and took into custody [Henry] Grammer, against whom a

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federal liquor charge has been placed. Grammer is in the Osage county jail. The still was of 250 gallons capacity and complete for the manufacture of liquor in every respect. 600 barrels of mash were taken and destroyed.

A helpful book to cite here would be Dee Cordry’s 2005 Alive If Possible . . . Dead If Necessary, which examines Oklahoma outlaws of the 1920s, but since in post-retirement I no longer have a research fund with which to buy books, I had to ask Mike Tower (mentioned earlier) to send me some highlights. Some of them repeat the news clips cited above, but of particular interest is Mike’s statement that “in January 1924, fugitive Kelsie Morrison was found hiding in Dallas, Texas under the name of Lloyd Miller. He was wanted for assaulting Indian Enforcement Officer W. W. Thompson.” Tower said that he could find no mention of Morrison’s alleged assault on Thomason (Tower, email to the author), but Grann makes what is likely a reference to this event when he mentions that “Morrison had fled Osage County after assaulting a local Prohibition officer” (122). A more specific reference came later in he Sapulpa Herald for April of 1927, where we read that Morrison was “sentenced to nine years in the penitentiary as the result of wounding Snake Thompson, noted ‘two gun’ federal officer of Osage County.” If “two- gun Thompson” was an attempt to make an epithet for Thomason, it didn’t stick, for one with better adhesiveness had already been invented.

It was during this period of his residence in Fairfax, in the midst of the serpentine coils of the Osage Reign of Terror, that Thomason earned his sobriquet “Snake.” The name first appears in the The Apperson American for February 1925:

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“Snake” Thompson, Hicks, O’Graves, H. Roach, Joe Elvardo, J. E. Hirsh, Federal officers made a raid on DeNoya Tuesday and captured two “hot” cars, 13 ounce bottles of “dope,” enough “soup” to blow nearly every safe in the oil field, a quantity of auto accessories, dies, batteries, drills, and four men, one “Slim” Braley, who is suspected of being the ringleader of the gang.

The reasons for the bestowal of the epithet are unclear, but we can speculate that a surprise meeting with Thomason could be fatal. Also, it would appear that the journalist just cited was feeling the exuberance of the vernacular, witness all the slang words in quotation marks. To find a better reason will take us to a footnote by Grann, who remarks of the “private eye” (like the Pinkertons who tried and failed to find the Osage killers): “he might be a ‘miserable snake’ but he was also ‘the silent, secret and effective Avenger of the outraged Majesty of the Law when everything else fails” (57). According to Grann’s notes, the phrase “miserable snake” has an unexpectedly distant source in the Scotland-born, Ireland-reared New York police officer George McWatters’ massive 665-page tome Knots Untied; Or, Ways and By-ways in the The Hidden Life of American Detectives published in New York in 1872. McWatters wanted to rescue the reputation of the detective, but in the case of the Pinkertons it was too little and too early, and it fell through the cracks of historical memory.

The Pinkerton agency first became famous in 1861, when it foiled an attempt to assassinate President Lincoln, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries big business hired the Pinkerton Agency to combat the labor unions--infiltrating them and recruiting goon squads to intimidate workers. This thuggish behavior caused

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Pinkerton’s reputation to decline sharply among those sympathetic to the labor movement.

Speaking of declines, we might also pause for a sidebar on the town of De Noya, mentioned above in the clipping with the first appearance of the epithet Snake. Unsatisfied to be named after a prominent Osage citizen, De Noya acquired the more colorful monicker “Whizbang.” Located three miles northwest of Shidler, at its peak Whizbang had a population of 10,000 and was considered the rowdiest of the many oil field towns in Oklahoma. It was officially known as Denoya by the postoffice, which didn’t considered the name Whizbang sufficiently dignified. The name meant little to Clark Gable in his Oklahoma years as he worked on the oil rigs there, roughnecking and roustabouting his way through the oil boom of the early 1920s and acquiring the fine physique that would later contribute to his fame.

The origin of the name Whizbang is variously explained. It may refer to a bawdy cartoon and joke magazine called "Captain Billy's Whiz Bang" which was popular in the day. “Captain Billy's Whiz Bang was made famous in the lyrics to the song "Ya Got Trouble"
from Meredith Willson's 1957 Broadway musical The Music Man: "Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corncrib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy's Whiz Bang?" Another theory is that the Osage Indian residents imitated the sound of oil pumps and engines by saying "whiz-bang.

In its day the most colorful character in Whizbang was its sheriff, José Alvarado (actual name Bert Bryant), a Texan who had served in the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa. “During World War I he worked with General Alvarado of Mexico,” writes John Morris in Ghost Towns of Oklahoma, “and in the early 1920s came northward to

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the Oklahoma oil fields. Stories of his activities describe him as everything from a cold-blooded killer to a Robin Hood” (64-65). In August of 1927, Thomason cast his vote in this debate by supporting Alvarado when the state of Texas wanted to extradite him on a bank robbery charge. The same article in The Chickasha Daily Express which reported this argument related a reminiscence on the part of the governor:

the governor told how he was instrumental in freeing Alvarado for the slaying of Charley Houser, proprietor of a roadhouse at De Noya, after eye witnesses had declared Alvarado had killed Houser while the roadhouse keeper’s hands were in the air. Alvarado declared that he shot in self defense.

The governor, like Thomason, opposed the extradition. Thomason has been called “humorless,” but one gets the feeling that he may simply have liked the colorful Alvarado, a man with a gift for black humor.

In the gathering of evidence against King William Hale and his cohorts, a fledgling FBI was deeply involved and eventually they were able to bring the criminals to trial. Hale, however, though convicted, served only eleven years before being paroled and his killer-henchman Burkhart, twenty-three years. The FBI’s strongest suit in these early years was keeping detailed records. One of these mentions Thomason and in so-doing provides us with the only contemporary glimpse we have of the man. This derives from a 1925 FBI report written in Fairfax, which was not only the county seat of Osage County but also the site of the majority of the Osage Indian murders that took place:

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Fairfax, Rev. Tuck informed Agent Davis that Snake Thompson is a member of his church and is an honest, fearless, Christian man, and can be trusted, and no doubt will be willing to assist Agents of this Department If called upon; that he is arresting bootleggers every day, and sooner or later will arrest some witnesses in this case, as it appears that most of them are bootleggers and law violators.

Reverend Tuck was the minister of the local Methodist church. He moved to a larger church in Tulsa the following year, making him unavailable for further comment on his parishioner’s Christian qualities.

Any notions that the reverend may have had about Thomason’s piety would have been shaken by the next event in the latter’s career, involving the murder of two bootleggers in Pottawatomie County who happened to be well regarded farmers and respected veterans of the first world war. The killings took place in 1929, the same year whose autumn witnessed Black Thursday and the Great Crash, bringing on the Great Depression. The slayings and the subsequent trial mark the virtual end of Thomason’s career as a revenue agent, though as with any major earthquake, it will be followed by some tremors in 1930 and 1931.

The curtain goes up on the drama in April 1929 with the discovery of a gigantic still in Pottawatomie County. The Seminole Producer carried the story.

Frank Fox, former sheriff of Pottawatomie county, was arrested and held for several hours early Wednesday morning in connection with the operation of a gigantic still, confiscated late Tuesday night by federal prohibition agents in a raid near Earlsboro. . . .

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Prohibition agents described the still as of 550-gallon capacity, the largest ever found in Oklahoma and one of the largest in the country. It occupied the entire building, 80 x 40 feet, and it was in operation at the time of the raid. Several thousand gallons of “mash” were also found near the building.

My earlier book, called Whiskey Towns of Oklahoma 1889-1907, contains an essay on Earlsboro subtitled “The Town That Whiskey Built and Oil Broke,” which tells the story of the burg. It was a whiskey town because of its location in wet Oklahoma Territory only a half mile from the dry Seminole Nation. It’s vitality plummeted about 1927, when the oil boom left the town with only a fifth of its peak population, a deserted ghost of itself. In the twenty years between 1907 and 1927, it had navigated the treacherous waters between selling illegal whiskey to the Indians to selling illegal whiskey to the whole county and environs. The loss of a 550-gallon still would have spelled the end of its economic base.

The Snake Thomason story, however, has a different denouement. Within three months of the Earlsboro story, the focus of the news had shifted to the prohibition officers themselves, who were now charged with the murder of two bootleggers. In Pushmataha County, the July 1929 Antlers American reported:

The daily press carries the story that on last Thursday at Tecumseh . . . W. W. (Snake) Thompson and Jeff Harris, who were on federal enforcement duty here at Antlers and at Hugo during 1922-1923 had become involved in a serious charge of having shot and killed two overseas veterans in a situation bearing conflicting evidence as to their guilt . . . .

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While funeral services were held at a rural church this afternoon for James Harris, 34 years old, and Oscar Lowery, 34 years old, victims of a liquor-raid shootingThursday. W. W. Thomason, federal prohibition agent, and three men who were accompanying him at the time of the shooting remained in the county jail under murder charges filed by Randall Pitman, county attorney.

The phrase “overseas veterans” comes off a little vague, but further along the article becomes more precise:

James Harris and Oscar Lowery were brothers- in-law and neighboring farmers. Both were veterans of overseas service in the World War and they were accorded military funeral rites by the Shawnee American Legion post, which has gone on record by resolution as urging “the fullest prosecution possible of those responsible for the deaths.

Jeff Harrison told Pitman, the latter said, that he fired the two shots which fatally wounded the two farmers. He declared [that] James Harris approached him with a shotgun and that he fired in self-defense. The farmer before he died said he was shot after he had thrown down his weapon at the raider’s command. Lowery was shot as he started to run, Jeff Harris said.

Thomason and the three men accompanying him intimated they had stopped in the vicinity to investigate reports of liquor on another farm and that their visit to James Harris’s farm was extemporaneous. They had no search warrant for the Harris farm, they said, and had not previously planned to search it.

No liquor was found at the Harris place. Jeff Harris, Little and Williams had been

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working as prohibition undercover men, enforcement officers said, but were not federal officers.

This looks bad for the enforcement team: no search warrant, no liquor found, and two men dead. Clearly, their quickness on the trigger was becoming a liability.

With the two slain identified as veterans of World War I and thus local heroes, the story had legs and was quickly picked up by the national press. Time Magazine for April 15 ran the story:

On a farm near Tecumseh, 40 miles from Oklahoma City, lived James Harris. With him one day last week was his brother-in-law, Oscar Lowery. Both under 40, they had been in the Army during the War. Suddenly they looked up to see four men, all armed, coming across the field to the house. . . . When the four men left, Harris and Lowery were dying and the Treasury Department in Washington had another dry shooting on its hands.

W. W. Thomason, U. S. Prohibition officer for Pottawatomie county, veteran chaser of 'leggers among the Osage Indians, headed the procession that marched upon the Harris farm. With him were three "friends," not regular agents but deputized for this raid. They fingered their gun triggers menacingly. Farmer Harris, mistaking them for bandits, lifted his shotgun down from behind the stove, prepared to defend his home. One of the unofficial raiders was snooping under a chicken coop for a still when he caught sight of Harris and Lowery. He pulled the trigger on his revolver. Harris dropped. Lowery started to run. Shots followed him, brought him to the ground. Both men were dead by sunset.

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No liquor was found on the Harris farm. Raider Thomason had no search warrant to look for any.

Oklahoma officers arrested Thomason's "friends," lodged them in jail without bail on a charge of murder. Thomason himself "disappeared" for a day or so, only to give himself up, to explain that he had been "across the road" when the fatal shooting took place and knew nothing about it.

Bee Demonbru, Prohibition administrator for Western Oklahoma, hurried to the scene, made investigations, and interviewed neighbors on Harris's reputation. In Washington, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Seymour Lowman, in charge of Prohibition, was sorely troubled. He "supposed" that the agents had shot in self-defense. Within four weeks U. S. dry bullets had killed six persons. The Oklahoma shooting did not resound throughout the land as had those before it largely because Congress was not in session and the forum for bitter complaints against U. S. dry police was temporarily lacking.

The first thing that attracts the reader’s attention in this article is the reporter’s lack of objectivity. He has the officers fingering their triggers “menacingly,” and the farmers defending their homes as though he were employed by some right-wing Patriot News to recreate the Battle of Concord Bridge. If this wasn’t the shot heard round the world, it was certainly one heard around the country.

Four months later and well into the trials of the deputized lawmen, it was still echoing in Chicago, as the Tribune for November 1929 picked up the story and added a photograph. The caption calls Jeff Harris (left) a

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Jeff Harris (left) and Thomason

“gunman” and notes Thomason’s well-oiled excuse that “he was not there at the time.”

We may well wonder at the long legs this story has developed. In fact the killings came at a moment when President Hoover and U. S. congressmen were deploring the excessive number of deaths caused by dry agents across the country. National newspapers carried Hoover’s words in June 1929, just a month before the Tecumseh killings. “I deplore the killing of any person,” the President said. A safe enough thing to say, especially as he went on to blame the killings on “international criminals,” relieving the nation of any blame. It would appear that dry agents across the country were killing bootleggers in excessive numbers. Bootlegging, as common sense should have told them, was a victimless crime. The illegal whiskey was supplying consumer demand; it did not harm the purchaser. There seems no awareness of the truism repeated in the title of O’Brien’s essay on the Kansas Balkans and Osage County:

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“It may have been illegal but it wasn’t wrong” (O’Brien, passim).

The affair of the gigantic whiskey-still segued into the even larger Pottawatomie County “liquor conspiracy case.” The conspiracy trial of 1930 focused on 32 defendants who, it was charged, for three years engineered a flow of liquor into the oil fields of Pottawatomie county comparable in proportion to the prodigal flow of oil. Logic and hindsight both agree that there had to have been a conspiracy involving county officers and state politicians in order to process and distribute such a quantity of liquor.

The main story appeared the Daily Oklahoman for 10 Feb 1930, but rather than cite all of the names of the officers and politicians who were charged, in the interest of brevity it makes better sense to keep our eye on Thomason, for whom this is the last go-around. T. S. Eliot, in “The Hollow Men” written in 1925, anticipated that

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

In Thomason’s case, there was neither bang nor whimper. The Pottawatomie County “liquor conspiracy case” was not a one big bang but the prolonged rattle of small-arms fire, like fire-crackers on the 4th of July, and what it foretold was the end of national prohibition, as the Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 5, 1933. Though prohibition continued in Oklahoma, since it was written into the state constitution, the new amendment would have ended Thomason’s career as a federal prohibition officer.

A homage to the work of the dry agents appeared in The Daily Oklahoman for February 1930, under the title

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"Federal Sleuths Beat Death to Get Rum Facts," presenting the daring-do of the agents rather than the malfeasance of the indicted. Still the homage begins with a useful summary of the ill-done deeds:

Behind the scenes of the government’s prosecution of the conspiracy case, which already has resulted in 27 pleas of guilty, resignation of an assistant attorney general, and the bringing of 17 others to trial with 39 forced to flee for safety, are these agents.

In the list of brave agents in the field, Thomason’s name comes last, as the article builds to a dramatic climax.

W. W. "Snake" Thomason, dry agent assigned to the territory, carried on the actual work of catching liquor violators. He devoted most of his time to raiding stills, catching 14 in the county in a single month. He was well known because of his 20 years in the work and was exposed to considerable danger. Numerous plots on his life have been unfolded in affidavits obtained by the government. It was during the hottest part of the investigation that the unfortunate slaying of two farmers near Tecumseh almost defeated the government's program. . . Thomason now is awaiting trial on a charge of murder in connection with this case and a posseman is serving a 50-year term.

The upshot of the Pott County affair was twofold. First, as to Thomason’s deputy Jeff Harris, he was tried in Chandler Oklahoma, convicted of manslaughter, and in November 1929 sentenced to fifty years of prison (as reported inThe American Guardian, Oklahoma City). This is the “Snake

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Thompson” case referred to by Betty Boggs and mentioned in the first page of the present essay. It brought great crowds of people to the Lincoln County Courthouse, where the venue had been moved in order to secure a fair trial. Second, as to Thomason himself, since he was a federal officer he was tried in Federal Court in Guthrie. This trial may have drug through a crowd of witnesses, since it wasn’t concluded until June of 1930, when The Parsons Sun (Parsons, Kansas) in a single, well-stocked paragraph, reported:

W. W. (Snake) Thompson, veteran prohibition enforcement agent, was acquitted yesterday by federal court jury of a murder charge arising from the slaying last July 4 of James Harris and Oscar Lowery, World war veterans, during a raid on the Harris tenant farm home near Tecumseh.

In the case of the malfeasant lawmen, again we have the feeling that the small fish were captured while the big fish swam free. When a law officer killed someone in the line of duty, he was tried for murder and found not guilty in a pro forma operation. This process was typical of Oklahoma law and had been for decades. The subordinate officer would have also been treated leniently: the fifty year sentence was merely the court’s way of recognizing the gravity of the charge. Most likely, Jeff Harris would have been paroled after ten years. As for the fate of the big-fish bootleggers, it would be tedious to pursue them. It’s doubtful that any of them served time, but perhaps enough dirt stuck to them that they were not reelected to office.

Thomason died in the state of Texas, unsurprising since he had lived in that state for most of the first thirty years of his life and was married there. By the time of his

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death, even Oklahoma had repealed its prohibition law-- in 1959 under the reform-minded governorship of James Edmondson. Until then, as Will Rogers once remarked, Oklahomans continued to vote dry as long as they were able to stagger to the polls.

Rogers’ witticism has served me as an epitaph for too many of the bootleggers, killers, and badasses celebrated in my recent book, The Whiskey Towns of Oklahoma, so that for Thomason I am glad to find some memorial verses at the bottom of his tombstone that make the matter gentler and more personal.The inscribed lines are adapted from a poem called “Annette” by the Australian poet Robert Richardson (1850-1901). They were changed slightly by Mark Twain for his much loved daughter Susie’s epitaph in 1896, and since then they have entered the public domain, being used with many variations on countless graves.

Warm Southern Sun, Shine Bright, Shine Bright Green Southern Sod, Lie Light, Lie Light
Good Night Dear Heart, Good Night, Good Night

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Print

Sources

Anderson, Dan, and Laurence Yadon. 100 Oklahoma Outlaws, Gangsters, and Lawmen 1839-1939. Ed. Robert Barr Smith. Gretna LA: Pelican Publishing Co., 2007.

Chapman, Samuel G. Police Dogs in North America. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas Pub., 1990.

Cordry, Dee. Alive If Possible . . . Dead If Necessary. Oklahoma City: Tate Publishing Enterprises, 2005.

Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder, and the Birth of the FBI. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Morris, John W. Ghost Towns of Oklahoma. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1978.

No byline. “National Affairs: In Oklahoma.” Time Magazine. July 15, 1929, p. 14.

Pounds, Wayne. The Lonesome Death of Billie Grayson: Killings in Early-Day Lincoln County Oklahoma. 2nd edition. Columbia SC: CreateSpace, 2018.

_____. The Whiskey Towns of Oklahoma,1889-1907. Independently published by an affiliate of Amazon.com, 2022.

Online

“Clark Gable.” https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/ 1983/12/18/clark-gables-oklahoma-years/ 62820534007/. Accessed October 2022.

227

FBI. “Osage Indian Murders,” BU file no.62-6033., 1925. https://archive.org/details/OsageIndianMurders/ osageind10a/page/n1/mode/2up. Accessed Oct. 2022.

“FBI’s First Big Case: The Osage Murders.” A talk by David Grann with photos. https://www.history.com/ news/the-fbis-first-big-case-the-osage-murders. Accessed Oct. 2022.

Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder, and the Birth of the FBI. The online version is searchable, compensating for the lack of an index in the print version. https://xn--webducation- dbb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Killers-of- the-Flower-Moon_-The-Osage-Murders-and-the- Birth-of-the-FBI-PDFDrive.com-.pdf

McWatters, George S. Knots Untied; Or, Ways and By-ways in the Hidden Life of American Detectives, published 1872. https://archive.org/details/ knotsuntiedorway00mcwa/page/n13/mode/2up. Consulted October 2022.

O’Brien, Patrick G. et al. “‘It May have Been Illegal, But It wasn’t Wrong’: The Kansas ‘Balkans’ Bootlegging Culture, 1920-1940.” Kansas State Historical Society (Winter, 1988). https://www.kshs.org/ publicat/history/1988winter_obrien.pdf. Accessed Oct. 2022.

“Osage Murders.” Oklahoma Historical Society. Oklahoma Encyclopedia of History and Culture. https:// web.archive.org/web/20130729090945/http:// digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/O/ OS005.html. Accessed October 2022.

“Poem on Susy Clemens’ Headstone.” www.twainquotes.com. http://

228

www.twainquotes.com/headstone.html. Accessed

October 2022.
Silver, Alain. "The Gangster and Film Noir: Themes

and Styles. " https://www.academia.edu/

12447313/. Consulted October 2022. “Starr, Henry (1873–1921),” The Encyclopedia of

Oklahoma History and Culture. https:// www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php? entry=ST060. Accessed October 2022.

Tower, Mike. Personal email correspondence with the author. October, 2022.

“William Wesley Thomason.” Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/ 77523153/william-wesley-thomason: accessed October 2022.

1916 Apperson Jack Rabbit

“King of the Osages” William K. Hale

Henry Grammer

Sources

Print

Anderson, Dan, and Laurence Yadon. 100 Oklahoma Outlaws, Gangsters, and Lawmen 1839-1939. Ed. Robert Barr Smith. Gretna LA: Pelican Publishing Co., 2007.Cordry, Dee. Alive if Possible . . . Dead If Necessary. Oklahoma City, OK. Tate Publishing, 1905.

Chapman, Samuel G. Police Dogs in North America. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas Pub., 1990. 

Cordry, Dee. Alive If Possible . . . Dead If Necessary. Oklahoma City: Tate Publishing Enterprises, 2005. 

Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder, and the Birth of the FBI. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Morris, John W. Ghost Towns of Oklahoma. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1978.

“National Affairs: In Oklahoma.” Time Magazine. July 15, 1929, p. 14.

Pounds, Wayne. The Lonesome Death of Billie Grayson: Killings in Early-Day Lincoln County Oklahoma. 2nd edition. Columbia SC: CreateSpace, 2018.

_____. The Whiskey Towns of Oklahoma,1889-1907. Independently published by an affiliate of Amazon.com, 2022.

Online

“Clark Gable.” https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1983/12/18/clark-gables-oklahoma-years/62820534007/. Accessed October 2022.

FBI. “Osage Indian Murders,” BU file no.62-6033., 1925. https://archive.org/details/OsageIndianMurders/osageind10a/page/n1/mode/2up. Accessed Oct. 2022.

“FBI’s First Big Case: The Osage Murders.” A talk by David Grann with photos. https://www.history.com/news/the-fbis-first-big-case-the-osage-murders. Accessed Oct. 2022.

Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder, and the Birth of the FBI. The online version is searchable, compensating for the lack of an index in the print version. https://xn--webducation-dbb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Killers-of-the-Flower-Moon_-The-Osage-Murders-and-the-Birth-of-the-FBI-PDFDrive.com-.pdf

McWatters, George S. Knots Untied; Or, Ways and By-ways in the  Hidden Life of American Detectives, published 1872. https://archive.org/details/knotsuntiedorway00mcwa/page/n13/mode/2up. Consulted October 2022. 

O’Brien, Patrick G. et al. “‘It May have Been Illegal, But It wasn’t Wrong’: The Kansas ‘Balkans’ Bootlegging Culture, 1920-1940.” Kansas State Historical Society (Winter, 1988). https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/1988winter_obrien.pdf. Accessed Oct. 2022.

“Osage Murders.” Oklahoma Historical Society. Oklahoma Encyclopedia of History and Culture. https://web.archive.org/web/20130729090945/http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/O/OS005.html. Accessed October 2022.

“Poem on Susy Clemens’ Headstone.” www.twainquotes.com. http://www.twainquotes.com/headstone.html. Accessed October 2022.

Silver, Alain. "The Gangster and Film Noir: Themes and Styles. " https://www.academia.edu/12447313/. Consulted October 2022.

“Starr, Henry (1873–1921),” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=ST060. Accessed October 2022.

Tower, Mike. Personal email correspondence with the author. October, 2022. 

“William Wesley Thomason.” Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/77523153/william-wesley-thomason: accessed  October 2022.