July 7, 2014 · 9:09 pm

Bill Tilghman

Bat Masterson called Bill Tilghman “the greatest of us all.” Theodore Roosevelt said he would “charge hell with a bucket.”

Tilghman was one of the last of the old west lawmen. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he never crossed the line to the other side. Never even skirted it. He was everything in life that Masterson and the Earps and Wild Bill Hickock were in legend. He died in the line of duty at age seventy, shot to death by a corrupt a federal agent while trying to clean up an Oklahoma boom town.

Like many men of his time and place, Tilghman began as a buffalo hunter in the years after the Civil War, when the railroads were stretching across the prairie and cattle were trailing north from Texas. He found his way to Dodge City, where he opened a saloon, despite being a teetotaler, and got his first job as a lawman. It was also where he met Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp.

In 1889, he moved to Guthrie. Over the next few years, he, Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas became known as the Three Guardsmen, deputy U.S. marshals who arrested around three hundred desperadoes over the next decade and killed several more. Tilghman’s most famous exploit was the arrest of Bill Doolin in a Hot Springs, Ark., mineral bath.

Tilghman retired in 1910 and was elected to the state Senate, but resigned a year later to become Oklahoma City’s police chief. In 1923, Gov. Martin Trapp persuaded Tilghman to come out of retirement a second time, to accept a special commission as marshal of Cromwell, a notorious unincorporated community in the Greater Seminole Oil Field known as the “wickedest city in the world.” Cromwell had it all: prostitution, gambling, liquor and drugs. And one of the worst influences was a federal Prohibition officer named Wiley Lynn.

Lynn shot Tilghman twice on the night of Nov. 1, 1924, as they struggled for a gun. The old lawman died almost immediately. Typical of the times, Lynn was acquitted when several witnesses mysteriously disappeared; he and state Bureau of Investigation Agent Crockett Long shot each other to death eight years later in a Madill drug store.

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July 5, 2014 · 7:13 pm

Wheat harvest

Wheat harvest ended Thursday for Krehbiel Farms.

It was late this year. First it was too dry, then too cold, and finally too wet.  What came up, froze. What didn’t freeze, shriveled. What was left choked on the Johnson grass, bull nettles and sand burs fed by the late rains.

In other words, harvest was pretty normal.

Let’s not leave the wrong impression. Some of the yield’s were okay, especially on irrigated fields, and the rains that came too late to save the wheat were just right to give the peanuts and milo a good start and fill the farm ponds. To a large extent, that’s what farming is: growing as many plants and animals as soil and climate allow in the hope that something will pay out.

My eighty-three-year-old father and eighteen-year-old niece pretty much run the show as far as harvest is concerned. My father is the fidgety one, the one who can’t sit still when rain and high humidity keep the combines from running. He has to be doing something. He’s in his pickup, on the phone, declaring we’ll be able to cut by three this afternoon when he knows we won’t. He has been doing this his entire life and doesn’t know how to quit. He gets up at four or five in the morning, drives around to all the farms, looking for something to do or to have one of the hired men do.

He is eager to cut a series of small patches that he thinks can be knocked out quickly, but the cool moist air lingering behind the June rain keeps the moisture content of the grain far above the fourteen percent that is the maximum allowed. Grain harvested and stored when it is too moist mildews, turns moldy, invites insects. But my father keeps cutting samples, until he’s finished most of one field and decides going on is not worth the effort. The sand burs have taken over. Talk to somebody like Whole Foods, I say. Convince them sand burs are an organic health food, that they can be milled into a nutritious flour. Sand bur cakes. Yum.

My niece wants to run the farm some day and I believe she can do it. She is smart and self-assured and seems to have a feel for what she is doing. She watches and listens. Her father, my brother, was running things until the brain tumor. Like my father, my niece is on a mission. But not the same mission. Not exactly.

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June 22, 2014 · 5:30 pm

Granny was a serial killer

Nannie Doss did not match anyone’s image of a serial killer. A plain and rather scatterbrained grandmother, she might have never been caught had she not voluntarily agreed to an autopsy of her fifth husband, Samuel Doss, who died in 1954 after eating a bowl of prunes.

The prunes, it turned out, were poisoned.

Tulsa police quickly delved into Doss’ tangled life history, and found that 11 people with ties to her had died under mysterious circumstances. Doss insisted she only killed four of them — all men she had met and married through lonely hearts clubs after divorcing her first husband.

Doss said all four dead husbands had been given rat poison in their food or drink. Her third victim’s last words were said to have been, “I shouldn’t have had that last cup of coffee.”

Doss pleaded guilty to murdering Samuel Doss and died in prison. While she benefited from small life insurance policies on her dead husbands, Doss seems to have killed them mostly because they annoyed her. Samuel Doss, she complained, wouldn’t let her listen to the radio programs she wanted.

 

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June 18, 2014 · 10:09 pm

Henry Bellmon’s one-cent’s worth

One of the most important political debates in Oklahoma history occurred in Tulsa during the 1962 gubernatorial campaign.

The Democratic nominee, W.P. Atkinson, had survived a brutal primary and runoff in which he defeated former Gov. Raymond Gary by just 900 votes. Atkinson was a real estate developer who more or less built Midwest City after Tinker Field — now Tinker Air Force Base — was located on farmland east of downtown Oklahoma City in the run-up to U.S. entry into World War II. Atkinson was the mortal enemy of powerful Daily Oklahoman publisher E.K. Gaylord.

Gaylord found an ally in Republican candidate Henry Bellmon. Bellmon, a Noble County farmer, had revitalized the Oklahoma GOP. As state chairman, he pushed the party’s boundaries beyond the country club set that had dominated it for so long. He ventured into small towns and rural counties that had not had a Republican Party organization in decades, if ever.

A key component of Atkinson’s platform was a one-cent sales tax increase. During a highly-anticipated debate in Tulsa, Atkinson was asked by newsman Phil Dessauer what he would do if the Legislature refused to give him the increase. Atkinson replied that he supposed he would just have to go after waste, corruption and abuse.

Dryly, Bellmon wondered why Atkinson would not go after waste, corruption and abuse first.

Bellmon might have won the election anyway. Tax increases are never popular, and Atkinson was being hammered daily in The Oklahoman. And, as Bellmon had discerned, the state’s political foundations were shifting. But in political lore, that brief exchange in Tulsa is remembered as the turning point in an election that brought Oklahoma its first Republican governor.

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June 16, 2014 · 8:07 pm

The governor who hated horse racing

Vice laws seem to have been more ignored than enforced in early twentieth century Tulsa. Liquor, prostitution and gambling all flourished. According to one account, an early Tulsa mayor owned an interest in a brothel. A former police chief went to prison for shooting a federal prohibition officer.

Oklahoma’s second governor, Lee Cruce, was very much agin sin. When gambling was reported at a horse racing meet in Tulsa in April 1914, Cruce declared martial law and sent the National Guard under Adjutant General Frank Canton to enforce it.

The injunction that race organizers obtained against the state did not impress Canton. He was a tough character who, under his real name, Joe Horner, had killed at least one man, robbed a bank and escaped from jail. Changing his identity, he signed on with the cattle barons’ Regulators in Wyoming, then became a deputy U.S. marshal.

Acting on Cruce’s orders, Canton ordered the races cancelled. He was ignored. Ten horses were hurried to the post and the starting gun sounded. As the horses thundered down the stretch, several Guardsman assembled on the track and fired into them. The horses rushed right past them to the finish line.

But that was the end of the meet. Gen. Canton ordered his men to shoot to kill any man or animal that got near the starting line, and everyone knew he meant it.

Tulsa World Editor Eugene Lorton took to the front page of his own paper to assail Cruce.

“You are making an ass of yourself,” Lorton wrote. “You are an egotistical, law-defying, self-centered bigot. It was only through the unfortunate circumstances of having a lieutenant governor who is even less trustworthy in .. mental capacity than yourself that you escaped impeachment.”

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