Outlaw Glory: Whiskey Towns of Oklahoma

 

From Blake Gumprecht, “A Saloon on Every Corner”

Dear and gentle Reader, we are about to embark on a journey. “Embark” is the word since we will be following two rivers, first the Canadian, which crosses the state of Oklahoma east and west, and then the Arkansas, which enters from the northeast. I have posted Blake Gumprecht’s map as the frontispiece to this book, and chapter by chapter the reader should keep it close by as a guide to the places we visit.

The subject of this book in a word is outlawry, and we may begin by recognizing that at the turn of the nineteenth century, there was still a glory in outlawry. This had been true in the North America since the eastern journalistic establishment discovered the romance of the west and the profitability of dime novels and kindred genres of what would later be called pulp fiction.

Much of the content of dime novels came from “story papers,” which were weekly, eight-page newspaper-like publications, varying in size from tabloid to full-size newspaper format and usually costing five or six cents. They started in the mid-1850s and were immensely popular, some titles being issued for over fifty years on a weekly schedule. They are perhaps best described as the television of their day, containing a variety of serial stories and articles, with something aimed at each member of the family, and often illustrated profusely with woodcuts. This carries over into the newspapers of the period in focus here, between the land opening of 1889 and statehood in 1907 which brought in prohibition. Their eagerness for sensational stories reflects the appetites of their audience. As a social phenomenon, this is part of the background of the whiskey towns.

One of the first successful dime novels, 1861.

Behind or along side this foreground is the Gilded Age, which according to Vernon Parrington’s classic study, “heeded somewhat too literally the Biblical injunction to take no thought for the morrow, but was busily intent on squandering the resources of the continent. All things were held cheap, and human life cheapest of all. Wild Bill Hickok had forty notches on his gun and a row of graves to his credit in Boot Hill Cemetery” (15-16).

The eagerness for sensation resulted in a press that reveled in the “frightful,” “horrid,” “extraordinary,” and “unheard-of” (favorite adjectives). This is a genre with a long-history in North America that could be traced back to the Puritan execution sermon. Gathered together in a work like the Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s Pilars of Salt, these sermons became early American best sellers. This whole long history of an American sub-genre can be expressed in the words of Harold Schechter: “the appetite for tales of real-life murder, the more horrific the better, has been a perennial feature of human society.” Schechter’s own book True Crime: An American Anthology (2008) is a witness to this appetite, for it was published by the prestigious Library of America in its series of Literary Classics of the United States. It covers the field from the Cotton Mather to contemporaries like Truman Capote, Ann Rule, and James Ellroy. 

Also in the background is the figure of the social bandit as classically described by Eric Hobsbawm in his 1959 Primitive Rebels. The point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes--as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported. In the United States, the most famous example would be Jesse James and members of the James Gang. We’ll see this attitude in the whiskey towns of Oklahoma when we look at the reluctance of acquaintances and neighbors to help arrest even murderous outlaws like the Christian Brothers, or in the eagerness of a town like Wanette to attract Frank James to settle nearby.

Murder rates were high in many frontier communities. Mark Twain, in Chapter XLVIII of Roughing It, based on his residence in the mining boom days of Virginia City, Nevada, indicates three principal ingredients in the highly combustible cocktail: guns, booze, and a large population of young unmarried males who achieved social status in the age-old way of males, by proving their proficiency at killing. Says Twain, “a person is not respected until he has ‘killed his man.’ That was the very expression used” (Schechter 87). 

The period in which the whiskey towns flourished, from the land run of 1889 to statehood in 1907, coincided with the rise of the socialist party in Oklahoma, yet in exploring those towns the curious reader of contemporary newspapers  researching whiskey towns finds few references to this political development. Obvious enough if one thinks about it. Socialists were farmers, and given the fact that they were producers rather than urban proletariate, they were at first ignored by the Marxists who were the intellectual leaders of the socialist movement. Ignored, that is, until the great socialist newspaper editor and activist Oscar Ameringer visited Oklahoma in 1907 and discovered in Harrah the abject poverty and malnourishment in which these people were living. Ameringer’s closest approach to the riverine subculture of the whiskey towns occurs on his first visit to Harrah.

The speaker of the evening’s congregation arrived drenched, Ameringer relates, having come across the river from Kickapoo country. “When I asked him if he had come across in a skiff, he replied, ‘No, I hitched my team on the other side and swam across. I feared you might get sore not having a chairman.”

He had swum the swollen North Canadian in the only suit to his name.  No question but these people were American farmers, but not the kind I had known in the Pickaway plains of Ohio [Pickaway County, south of Columbus]. These people occupied an even lower level of existence than the white and black “water rats” of New Orleans (227-29).

The subcultures that grew up long the great rivers in the United States had always spawned murderers, thieves, and hooligans. The most famous are associated with the pirate caves along the Ohio River around 1800 and thereafter. They extended their domain south into the Mississippi, most famously around the Natchez Trace. The classical description of this subculture can be found in the pages of Huckleberry Finn, in Twain’s descriptions of villages like St. Petersburg and Dawson’s Landing. 

To bring the Pott County towns into closer focus, the Canadian River of the Oklahoma whiskey towns, whether its North or South branch, was not a great river. Shallow and wide like the more famous Platt River to the north, with its wide sand beds full of quicksand, it was never navigable. In full flood, however, it reached a width of a mile and half around Lexington and the Corner Saloon. And the majority of the saloons’ regular clientele were not farmers but the cattle proletariate (one branch of the Chisholm Trail passed within three miles of Young’s Crossing)--cowboys, shopkeepers, and the riffraff that have always followed the rivers. They represent, we might say, the dark underbelly of the urban and agricultural populations of the state. That, surely, is their interest. As readers, we tend to live “high on the hog” where the better cuts of pork are, but the tastiest bacon comes from the underbelly.

The drinking establishments are commonly called taverns, but the term flatters them, especially when we think of the fine old tradition of the English tavern whose clientele were families. The best photo we have of this poor American cousin is the Weitzenhoffer-Turk saloon in Lexington, which provides the cover to the present book. It is a substantial and prosperous business but the dress of its patrons and the rough and unpainted jumble of its exterior make it clear that it is no more than a groggery. Not a place a man would take his wife and children.

A very useful introduction to the “Hell’s Fringe” aspect of Pottawatomie County is provided by the prolific and popular Glenn Shirley. Shirley was not a trained historian, and he worked in the day before xeroxes and microfilm simplified the labor of research and made greater accuracy easy. Shirley had splendid energy as a collector of books, newspapers, and memorabilia about the Oklahoma frontier, so much so that he had to rent a separate house to hold his archive. The author of some twenty books and innumerable stories (the early ones being pulp fiction of the Black Cat variety) his best work may be West of Hell’s Fringe (1978). There he presents the following survey of Pottawatomie County:  

Unlike other sections of Oklahoma, where homesteaders found railroads and telegraph lines crossing a country devoid of inhabitants, the Pottawatomie area was untraversed by either, and its Indians, like the Seminoles and Creeks to the east and Chickasaws and Choctaws to the south, lived on farms, possessed cattle and horses, and derived considerable income from leasing land to the whites. The struggle to adjust differences with Indian landowners and establish communication and transportation facilities left Pottawatomie County settlers torn with internal dissension and at cross-purposes with territorial authorities. This and the fact that the country was bordered on two sides by the Indian Nations made it an easy rendezvous for law violators. Many outlaws in both territories found the saloon towns that sprang up along these boundaries convenient hangouts for cattle-and horse-stealing operations. (288-89)

Of course we recognize that by “saloon towns” he means what we are calling “whiskey towns.” And in the next paragraph he names some of them:

Two definite trails were used to move stolen livestock out of the country. Both entered the area almost due west of Tecumseh. One branched off north past old Shawneetown, leaving the county near Keokuk Falls. The other branched south, leaving the county near Violet Springs . . . By [1894] there were sixty-two saloons and two licensed distilleries in Pottawatomie. Although each town had its quota of liquor merchants, the saloons that thrived on the “jug” trade from Indian Territory and contributed to the county’s bloody chapter of thefts, highway robbery, and murder were at Keokuk Falls, Violet Springs, Young’s Crossing, and the Corner . . .

I said he names the towns but in fact only four. Shirley didn’t have the advantage of Gumprecht’s essay ("A Saloon On Every Corner: Whiskey Towns of Oklahoma Territory, 1889–1907" in Chronicles of Oklahoma, 1996) and his map, which forms the frontispiece of this book. It shows seventeen towns, though only seven are in or near Pott County. I write about some of the other towns, but there is no doubt but that the center of the whiskey trade was Pott.

Shirley’s great archive has proved useful for an humble historian like myself who lives on the other side of the world and has no access to the great libraries of the Anglophone world. When I can I go directly to the old newspapers, now available online, but books are another matter. The majority of books have never been digitalized and probably never will be. Typically, Shirley quotes liberally from his sources, and since often those sources are books that I can’t obtain because no Japanese library holds them, or they’re not online, or because their price is outside my budget, I will sometimes quote matter that comes from Shirley. If I do, I say so, and I keep in mind that his transcriptions can never be completely trusted. 

Shirley quotes Elmer T. Peterson writing “in the Golden Anniversary Edition of the Daily Oklahoman on April 23, 1939. I can’t locate this article and therefore wonder about the accuracy of the documentation, but the quotation is too apt to pass by:

[The badmen] were lousy loafers who refused to do their share of the back-breaking labor of pioneering, scum of the civilization that came to the far outposts to tame the wilderness. They lived by stealing from those who did the real work, murdering them if they resisted. The real building was done by obscure, leather-faced, toil-bent men and women who never dreamed of notoriety or whiskey-crazed gun-fights, except to uphold the marshals and sheriffs who stood off these criminal camp followers.

I respect the hard-working farmers--my ancestors were among them--but this book is about the Whiskey-fueled gunfighting and the men who dreamed of notoriety.

I have researched the old newspapers looking for articles describing killings involving hard liquor. In the case of less violent towns like Weatherford, the correlation is sometimes missing, but sociologists assure us that today 54% of violent crime perpetrators arrested in the United States had been consuming alcohol before or during their offenses. It can’t have been much different a century ago.

It was in writing "The Strangely Named Violet Springs and the City of the Dead” that I acquired an insight into my own enterprise in writing these evocations of dead men killed in the whiskey towns. I had put in a request to the University of Oklahoma Libraries for a scan of their file on Violet Springs and since I knew I could have a long wait I went ahead and posted the essay with an authorial note explaining that it was unfinished. I thought the file might contain a list of the dead but when it arrived it proved to contain only a single newspaper article from 1927, so I used that for an epitaph and to my surprise ended up writing the short meditation on earthly glory which now ends the essay.

The ending was unexpected but I didn’t think it inappropriate because it occurred to me that in spite of the squalid lives of the men who are my subjects, their quarrels were frontier Oklahoma’s version of Homer’s combats. At a certain level, however inarticulate, they too fought and died for glory—the glory of leaving a name, of being remembered, of being somebody with a reputation. 

Books that cover Oklahoma and western violence include Richard Hofstadter’s American Violence, which uses too broad a canvas to be useful to my purposes. Milner and O’Connor’s Oxford History of the West offers fine background but few close ups. The ever popular Glenn Shirley gets closer to my subject in his West of Hell’s Fringe (1978 ) but Shirley learned his craft writing for pulp crime magazines, and it shows in his taste for sensation and his hit-and-miss style of documentation. Dan Anderson and Laurence Yadon’s 2007 study, 100 Oklahoma Outlaws, Gangsters, and Lawmen 1839-1939 (ed. Robert Barr Smith) contains a chapter on the whiskey towns subtitled “Gunfights, Naked Men, and Debauched Women.” The last adjective implies a morality that I don’t accept. In addition, half the chapter is cribbed from Blake Gumprecht’s fine essay mentioned above.

Yes, the outlaws I describe wanted to be remembered like the man who shot Liberty Valence. Who? you say. That’s just a film. Alright then, because legend endures longer than film, the man who shot Jesse James. As the ballad has it, “the dirty little coward / who shot Mr. Howard” (Jesse’s alias). Probably none of us could name him without looking him up. And then there was the glory hunter who shot the man who shot Jesse. What was his name?

In most cases, most dramatically in Violet Springs, wannabe gunmen failed, and not even their names are left. As Thomas Gray wrote in his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” the paths of glory lead but to the grave,” and with so many anonymous and unmarked graves, I commemorated them with Yeats’s three-line epitaph that ends the late poem “Under Ben Bulben.” The beginning of it, appropriately enough for whiskey towns, evokes ghostly horsemen who “ride the wintry dawn.”

Yes, the devil of pride has tempted me, wanting to make me see this quest for glory as part of my own enterprise in writing about the whiskey towns and myself as the memorialist of their day and their demise. I would like to be remembered for the books I’ve written, but I know my fate will be a quick ticket to oblivion. Thus, at the age of seventy-five, if I could have a hand in writing my own epitaph, I too would choose Yeats’s lines: 

Cast a cold eye

On Life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!