Article By Mike Tower   

Cherokee Town is mentioned in several early gun battles. In 1882, Sam Paul was notified by a

cowboy, Frank Welch, from the lower Washita River Valley, that a wagon train had just passed

through Cherokee Town on it’s way west, and in that train were two men, a Smith and a Sam Ross,

who had stolen a horse from his employer, John Covey. Welch had followed their trail for several days

and finally caught up with them just shy of Cherokee Town. As Sam Paul was a corporal in the United

States Indian Police, the man came to Sam for help.

Sam quickly organized a posse which included his step brother, Tecumseh McClure, and his half

nephew, Fred Waite and told them to meet him at the Miller and Green General Store. As the posse

assembled in the back room of the store, the wagon train hove to in the front yard. One of the men

Welch was looking for rode all the way around the store and noted the unusual number of horses tied

outside. Returning to the front door, the man dismounted, pulled his Winchester and levered a round

into the breech. The man sauntered into the store with cocked rifle resting on his forearm. Sam Paul

peeked out, and not liking what he saw, like a turtle pulled his broad head back into the room filled

with his posse.

After casing the joint, the man, Smith, left and mounting his horse loped off west toward White

Bead Hill. Soon after, the rest of the members of the train pulled out in the same direction. As it was

nearly dark, Sam told his posse to meet him on the White Bead road at dawn, for he was sure the train

would go into camp in the bottoms of Rush Creek.

Sure enough, the next morning, after Sam had divided his posse to go out and hold every possible

trail out of the valley while he and Fred Waite checked out the road, the train was found, pulling out of

the creek bottoms.

The train was found by the cowboy, Welch, and Tecumseh McClure, but not before they had

heard several shots. Walsh suspected what the shooting was about and decided to ride up to the

wagon train. Once there, he confronted Old Man Ross and told him that if he wanted to see his son,

Sam, alive again then Ross had ought to pay him for the stolen horse. The old man had heard the shots

and knowing the wild streak in his son decided Welch’s terms made perfect sense and counted out the

coins and bills. Welch, then, turned his horse and loped off to have some lunch at Rainey’s White Bead

Hill Store.

Later, hunger satisfied, Welch started for home. Down in Rush Creek Valley he ran into Sam Paul

and Fred Waite who explained they had found a pair of riders, one in possession of a horse much like

that described by Welch, and called for them to halt. Instead, the pair started shooting at Paul and

Waite. The sound of bullets whizzing by their ears not being the friendliest sound in the world, Paul and

Waite returned fire, and one of the men dropped from his horse, newly deceased. The other had put

spurs to his pony and quickly out distanced the Valley boys. But, not to worry, the rest of the posse

was looking for the runaway cowboy now.

Sam Paul then wanted to know where the heck Welch had been during all the excitement, seeing

as how this whole thing had been his party. Welch explained what he’d done, much to the disbelief and

disgust of Paul and Waite. And, then Paul ‘invited’ Welch over to view the body while he sent

someone to round up the rest of the posse before another innocent got killed.

Welch confirmed the body was the man he knew as Smith and one of the rustlers. Walsh then

decided he was needed at home and left. Sam made arrangements for the body to be buried and sent

word to the nearest Federal Marshal, thinking the affair ended. However, the Federal Court thought

the shooting a bit fishy and sent out marshals with arrest warrants, and Sam Paul, Tecumseh McClure,

and Fred Waite all went to Fort Smith to stand trial for murder. McClure was released because all

agreed he was miles from the shooting. Fred Waite was released on a $2,000 bond which was posted

by Sam Garvin and Frank Murray, early settlers and intermarried citizens of the Chickasaw Nation.

Two of the witnesses called were: John Wantland, manager of the Miller and Green Store; and D. W.

Langdon. Langdon told the court he recognized the man known as Smith as one Walter James, a man

Langdon had met at McAlester when on the way to court to answer a warrant for larceny. The whole

case was later dropped because Sam was a duly constituted peace officer acting as prescribed by law

and policy and Fred Waite was a posse member acting as ordered. (Source: Criminal Defendant Case

File, NRFF-21-3W51-35691, United States District Court, Western District of Arkansas, Fort Smith

Division, National Archives Records Administration, Fort Worth, Texas)

Be sure to bring plenty of everything.

A rather humorous gun fight took place near old Cherokee Town in the early 1890’s. It seems

there was an arrest warrant out for a black named Johnson and Deputy United States Marshal E. H.

Scrivner decided to serve the warrant. To assist him, Scrivner took along an old boy by the name of

Tom Noah. Noah lived over by Cherokee Town and had had troubles with some of the black families

who lived in the area which stemmed from Chickasaw Citizens claiming land occupied by the black

families.

Following the Civil War, the Chickasaw Nation found itself with a larger Negro population than it

had before the war, nearly quadruple in fact. This was caused by hundreds of former slaves anxious to

get as far west of their former masters as possible. Most had limited knowledge of the geography of

the nation and were simply looking for the public domain lands they’d heard so much about. Coming to

the western part of the Chickasaw Nation they found lots of empty land, good water, and soil. As they

had been farmers for hundreds of years, this looked like paradise to them, and so they stopped, putting

up houses and plowing the land.

Well, the Chickasaws, not wanting their lands overrun by people they felt no responsibility for,

passed a law that said simply that no Negro could hold land in the Chickasaw Nation and that a

Chickasaw could pre-empt, or take over, any structure or farm the Chickasaw found in the Nation

which was in possession of a Negro. Needless to say this law caused a heck of a lot of trouble.

Anyway, Tom Noah, who was a good farmer, and a brave man, had evicted several families under

this law and had been shot at more than once.

E. H. Scrivner, if truth was known, was not a lawman in the same sense of the meaning as Bill

Tilghman, Heck Thomas, and some of those old boys. No, Scrivner used his commission to batter

down resistance to the will of his employer, Sam Paul, and to prey on the whiskey runners who

infested the Chickasaw Nation. Catching whiskey runners was a lucrative business for early marshals

because like the modern law concerning drugs, all property used in the manufacture and transportation

of whiskey was subject to confiscation. Unlike the modern law, which has the money derived from the

sale of such property going to the county or state law enforcement bodies, the old Federal law on

whiskey let the marshals keep the money from such sales as a bounty. And, it didn’t take the marshals

long to figure out that the money from the sale of wagons and teams could add up to some serious

pocket change in a hurry. Scrivner, from the records, seems to have been the bane of whiskey runners.

Which did not make him too popular with either the criminal element or the civilized element, for that

matter, because whiskey drinking was the major form of entertainment in the early Chickasaw Nation.

Anyway, the point is, that though not a stand up and shoot it out type of officer, Scrivner had been shot

at a few times too.

Johnson, the offender, Scrivner and Noah were chasing, had probably been, on occasion, one of

the parties shooting at the two men, for he was both a squatter and a whiskey runner. And, his

reaction, when the three ‘bumped’ into each other in the scrub brush of the Washita, was anything but

friendly.

The three men rode up on each other and were within less than 100 yards of each other when

shooting immediately broke out. The first casualties were the three horses. This meant nobody, even if

they wanted to, and all three really wanted to, was going to make a quick escape. So, they settled

down to some serious shooting, Johnson behind his fallen horse, Scrivner under a bank, while Tom

Noah hunkered behind a pitiful little ol’ chin oak.

All this whanging away at each other kept up for a couple of hours, with both sides discharging

close to a hundred rounds without hurting anything more than three innocent horses. Their fire was so

ineffective the squirrels, between the opposing parties, ignored the noise and continued with their

winter food gathering. Soon, the fire on the Scrivner side began to taper off.

Scrivner whispered over to Tom Noah that he was getting low on ammunition and was going to

sneak around and go off to Cherokee Town for a fresh supply. Tom was not too happy with this idea,

but he was not in charge of the expedition, so he agreed. Shortly thereafter, Tom noticed that he, too,

was getting a mite shy of ammunition. In fact, he was out and his pockets empty.

Not knowing what else to do, he hollered over to Johnson that he had no more bullets and

proposed that they end this thing. Johnson told Noah that was fine with him and for Noah to just step

on out in the open. Noah, not liking the less than friendly sneer in Johnson’s tone decided that was not

a real good idea and tried to burrow under his itsy bitsy chunk of oak tree while bullets continued to

gouge out chunks and splinters.

After a while, everything grew still. After a long while, Tom Noah peeked out of his burrow and

finding nothing more harmful looking than flies buzzing around the newly deceased horses, crawled on

out. It didn’t take long to confirm that he was truly alone. Johnson had slipped off into the woods and

was long gone. So, Tom decided to go find out what was keeping Scrivner---seemed to him that half a

day was long enough to walk the mile and a half to Cherokee Town and get back. Image Tom’s

surprise when he found Scrivner, the next day, at Pauls Valley...

(Source: Pauls Valley Deomocrat and Indian and Pioneer Files)

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