"I Came Here Not To Talk, But To Die": The Story of Outlaw Cherokee Bill

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Say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote. And we return to Our American Stories. Up next, a story from Art T. Burton, arts and author who writes about an often overlooked group of people in the Western frontier, African Americans. Today he'll share with us the story of one of the most feared outlaws in the Indian territory, Cherokee Bill, who terrorized the area for two years. But before we talk about Bill, let's talk about his father, George.

Let's get into the story. George is very interesting because he was from Selma, Alabama, and his mother was not enslaved, but she was a concubine of Thornton Golsby, who was a very rich plantation owner. He was into banking. So when the Civil War started, not being a slave, George was hired by the Confederate Army. It was actually at Gettysburg, and I guess at Gettysburg he felt it was a good time for him to leave the Confederate side and went to the Northern side and was at the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. George went back to Selma, but there were some issues because some of the Confederate soldiers recognized George as being at Appomattox in the Union, and they threatened to kill him. And he left and went to the Indian territory, actually, and joined the 10th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, which was an all-black regiment.

Tain ranked very quickly. He became a sergeant, one of the top sergeants in the 10th Calf. After being there a while, he did meet a young lady named Ellen, and she was a laundress for the 10th Calf, and they got married. And later on, that regiment was relocated to Fort Concho in Texas, and that is where Crawford was born. But George got into a little problem at Fort Concho. They were next to a town named San Angelo, and some of the Buffalo soldiers were having a real hard time.

Many times they would go to town and go to the saloons. They were being harangued by the Buffalo hunters and the cowboys. And this one particular time, a soldier's stripes were cut off his uniform and his pants, and he was roughed up and beat up, and he went back to the post at Fort Concho and told what happened. And the story goes that George allowed the Buffalo soldiers to get access to their weapons. And they went back to San Angelo and shot the town up pretty good, including the saloon where the incident had happened. And George decided that he needed to leave the Army at that point, and he went AWOL. He left her with four little kids, Clarence and Luther Crawford, and his sister. So that's kind of like the background of the story about Crawford Goolsbee.

And his name is not Goolsbee, it's actually Goolsbee, but people call it Goolsbee because it's spelled G-O-L-D-S-B-Y. I guess him and his father didn't get along that well after he got a little bit older. Got jobs, odd jobs around Fort Gibson, and then he started cowboying, so he was a cowboy.

The problem occurred when there was a dance in town, and a guy started picking on his brother, his little brother, and he didn't like it too much. And he tried to intercede, and there was a fight. Now, Crawford was pretty big. He was about almost six feet tall and probably weighed somewhere around 190, 200 pounds, so he was kind of stocky. Well-built young man, but he got beat up. The next day after he got beat up, he caught the guy coming into the livery stable, and he shot him two or three times.

He thought he killed him, but he didn't, and then went on the dodge. In the Indian Territory, he called it going on the scout when you were trying to get away from the law. And that's where his whole outlaw career kind of jumped off. Crawford had earlier worked with a couple of young men known as the Cook brothers. Bill and William Cook, Crawford took up with them, and they had decided to do some things that was not legal, selling bootleg whiskey and stealing horses and such. And in 1893, the Cherokee Nation received an $8.5 million payment for the sale of the Cherokee outlet. That was land that the Cherokee Nation had once owned.

Payments were made to citizens at selected towns, and the Cook brothers in Crawford requested their share of the land payment. The Cooks had a good friend named Effie Crittenden who agreed to pick up their shares because they couldn't go in and pick up their money because they had warrants for arrest from the Cherokee authorities. And Effie was also the manager of a place known as the Halfway House. It was a stagecoach station between Tahlequah and Muskogee.

And on June 15th, Effie went to Tahlequah. She had an estranged husband who was working as a guard for the payment. He read the names on her press she gave the Cherokee treasurer, and Dick Crittenden knew that two of the men had outstanding warrants.

Crawford Goldsby for attempted murder and Bill Cook for larceny. And he realized that they would be waiting at the Halfway House, the stagecoach station, for their monies. And he told the authorities about it. And so they gave Effie the monies that they were owed. Little to her knowledge, she had been followed by a fairly large posse.

Before they got there, though, these young men, I guess, they were fairly very enterprising. There was a stagecoach that did stop at the house, and it was robbed by them while they were there waiting for their monies. And as Effie got to the Halfway House, Crawford was outside the stagecoach station and he seen the posse coming. There proceeded to be a very hellacious gunfight that took place.

They got away. One of the cooks, not Bill Cook, but his brother, did get wounded in the fight, but Cherokee Bill did kill one of the Cherokee lawmen. After the outlaws got away, Effie was interviewed by the lawmen, and she was asked, was Crawford Goldsby a member of the outlaws that they just had the shootout with? And she said, no, it wasn't Crawford Goldsby, but Cherokee Bill was here.

And after that, Crawford Goldsby was always known as Cherokee Bill. He was 18 years old at that time. He said that he could shoot from his waist on a level and hardly miss his target. He would also brace the rifle butt against his leg and work the lever very fast.

It could sound so fast, it sounded like a sewing machine. He said he shot it like that to scare people. He said for accuracy, he always put the rifle to his shoulder. But he also loved to have shootouts with lawmen, and that's very interesting because most outlaws never loved to have shootouts, but he really never turned down a good shootout if he could have one with the lawmen. He was very colorful. They said he used to wear a white hat with a red band on it, and he wore jingle bob spurs, and he had studded chaps, leather chaps with metal studs on it. So he was a very colorful guy.

He used to like to be like a peacock, I guess you could say. And we've been listening to Art T. Burton tell the story of Cherokee Bill and his father, George. And my goodness, what a story George had, an African American fighting for the Confederates, and then also finds himself one day in Gettysburg where he changes teams.

And then is at Appomattox. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Cherokee Bill is told by Art Burton here on Our American Story. I hoped my depression would just go away after a while. Same.

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Say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote. And we return to Our American Stories and our story with Art T. Burton on Outlaw Cherokee Bill. When we last left off, Art was telling us about how Bill turned to a life of crime after committing an attempted murder after a fight. Bill would soon link up with the Cook brothers, and that's where things went even further south.

Let's continue with the story. It originally was known as the Bill Cook Gang, and Cherokee Bill became the worst element of that gang and the most feared member of that gang. The gang was made up of white, black, and Indian, for the most part, youth, young men. The size of the gang would change over the months.

Some men would drop out, some would join. The original members of the gang were Line Gordon, George Sanders, and Henry Munson. All black Indian freedmen, Curtis Dason, Jess Snyder, Elmer Chicken Lucas, who were white men, and Sam Verdigris Kidd, Mack Williams, Jim French, and Bill Cook were Cherokee mixed-bloods.

So it was a very diverse gang. The boldest and most brazen robbery by Cherokee Bill in the Cook Gang occurred on the day that the gang robbed the Lincoln County Bank and Chandler. There was a barber named J.B. Mitchell who was sitting in front of his establishment and cried out, The Daltons are in town.

They're robbing the bank. Cherokee Bill hollered for him to shut up, and Mitchell rose up from his chair. He was still hollering. And Cherokee Bill took his Winchester rifle and shot him at 200 yards. After Cherokee Bill shot the barber, there was approximately 100 gunshots fired by the gang after they robbed the bank of $107.50. The gang rode west of town, and they rode into a timber, and they had a gunfight once they got into the timbers. One of the members of the gang was captured by the posse, and the rest of the gang escaped into the hills.

October 9th, the gang split up. A few followed Bill Cook, and the rest of the gang went with Cherokee Bill. On the night of October 22nd, 1894, Cherokee Bill and three outlaws looted the small town of Watova. The gang robbed two stores and the post office of $400. Cherokee Bill took the first storekeeper as a hostage to the second store and then took the two storekeepers to the post office. A few days later, Cherokee Bill robbed the town of Tallalah. Bill started on one end of the main street and robbed every business on the street. Then he and his gang rode out of town. In my research looking at gangs, this is the only time where I've known outlaws to go into towns and started one end of town on main street and robbed every business on main street.

This is unprecedented. Cherokee Bill next struck at the small cattle town of Lenapa in the Cherokee Nation not far from the Kansas border. The money and valuables amounted to $600, which was a lot of money back then because the average wage for a person could be $100 a year, so $600 was quite a bit of money. A man by the name of Ernest Melton from Paris, Texas was working across the street at a restaurant. When they heard shots being fired, they all rushed to the window to see what was happening. Cherokee Bill glanced at the window and saw Melton staring at him. And just for nothing at all, Cherokee Bill took his Winchester rifle and shot Melton in the head, killing him instantly. After this robbery, the federal court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, put up a $1,300 bounty dead or alive on Cherokee Bill. This came to catch Cherokee Bill was plotted by U.S. Marshal George Crump and Deputy U.S. Marshals Bill Smith and George Lawson.

And they were very dedicated to trying to bring Cherokee Bill in. They say Smith and Lawson found out that Bill was sweet on the niece of former Deputy U.S. Marshal Ike Rogers. And they met with Rogers and devised a plan for Cherokee Bill to be invited to Rogers' home, while his niece Maggie Glass was there. Rogers procured the assistance of a good friend, another Cherokee Freedman named Clint Scales, to assist with the capture.

On January 29, 1895, Cherokee Bill arrived at Rogers' home. And he spent a good part of the evening visiting with Maggie, who he truly had a crush on. Then he played cards with Rogers and Scales all night up to 4 o'clock in the morning. All the time, Cherokee Bill kept his Winchester in his lap and never gave Rogers his change.

At breakfast, it began to appear as if the plan was not working. After eating, Ike sent Maggie to a neighbor's house to buy a couple of chickens. Bill decided he wanted to smoke and leaned over the fireplace to light his cigarette. Rogers seized the moment, hit Cherokee Bill over the head with a fire stick. The blow knocked Cherokee Bill down, but not out.

Rogers and Scales followed the plan. Rogers and Scales fought Bill for 20 minutes until they were able to get a pair of handcuffs on him. Cherokee Bill was finally captured. Even after they got the handcuffs on him, Cherokee Bill was so strong, he broke the handcuffs.

But Clint Scales had a double-barrel shotgun. And kept the gun on Cherokee until they got him to the town where they met up with Bill Smith. Parker, Judge Parker, the hanging judge, as people like to call him, said Bill was the worst criminal that he'd ever come before his bench. And Judge Parker was there from 1875 to 1896, so he seen a many a bad outlaw. Bill was indicted for the murder of Ernest Melton.

He pled not guilty. And he was represented by a defense attorney named J. Warren Reed, who was one of the top defense attorneys that worked the Fort Smith Court. Cherokee Bill was found guilty of murder, and June 25, 1895, was set as his execution date.

But lawyer Reed found 14 errors in the trial proceedings and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Parker issued a state of the execution date so the Supreme Court could look at the appeal. And on July 26, 1895, someone smuggled a pistol into the jail for Cherokee Bill to attempt a jailbreak. At 7 p.m., the jail guard, Campbell Eoff and guard Lawrence Keating, entered the part of the jail known as Murderer's Row, where they kept people who was being incarcerated for murder. And it was the responsibility of Eoff and Keating to ring the prisoners in for the night.

Paper was jammed in the keyhole to lock the row of sales. To keep it from locking, and Cherokee Bill jumped out of his cell and told them to throw up and give me that pistol. Instead of obeying, Keating reached for his own revolver, and Cherokee Bill shot him instantly, and it was a fatal wound.

A 15-minute gunfight ensued with no further injuries, but also no resolution. Henry Starr, another Cherokee who was in jail for murdering a deputy U.S. Marshal, offered to speak to Bill and get his gun. The guards agreed, and Starr took his opportunity and went to Bill's cell and convinced him that it was useless to continue. I guess Cherokee Bill thought about it for a while, and he eventually gave his gun over to Starr. Supposedly Starr had made some comments that Cherokee Bill's mother would not be very happy about the circumstances, and that was one of the things that convinced him to give up his gun. But now he had another murder charge on him. The trial lasted three days, and Judge Parker set the new execution date as March 17, 1896. On his execution day, Cherokee Bill showed no sign of fear.

While standing on the gallows, he was asked if he had anything to say, and he replied, I came not here to talk, but to die. He's buried not far from his companions, Jim French and the Verde Greek kid. His niece stated that Cherokee Bill probably would have had a different life if he had an opportunity to get a better education, very similar to the day where many people who fall into a life of crime probably would have had a different outlook on life if they had got a better education. Cherokee Bill is pretty much analogous to Billy the Kid, but they've made, I guess, somewhere in the area of 50 movies in Hollywood about Billy the Kid. There's never been a movie made about Cherokee Bill as yet. But Cherokee Bill became the most famous outlaw in the history of the Indian Territory. And a terrific job on the storytelling by Monty Montgomery, and a special thanks to R.T. Burton for sharing with us the story of Cherokee Bill. His book is Cherokee Bill, Black Cowboy Indian Outlaw.

Pick it up at artburton.com. And by the way, what a thing he managed with the Bill Cook Gang, because it was the first integrated gang. We had blacks, whites and Cherokees of mixed blood and pure, all in the same place, causing mayhem. He splits up and ends up in the end facing Judge Parker. He was found guilty of murder on execution day.

His final words were, I came here not to talk, but to die. The story of Cherokee Bill here on Our American Stories. Week after week, Xfinity Flex unlocks access to premium networks and apps so you can try fresh entertainment for free each and every week. Catch the season premiere of Outlander from Starz. Journey through the sounds of Black Music Month with pics from Lifetime Movie Club and Revolt. Celebrate Pride Month with stories from OutTV and HearTV. Then kick back with nature scenes from Music Choice Relax.

And jam all June with iHeartRadio's Songs of the Summer Radio. Discover new shows and movies for free, no strings attached. Say free this week into your Xfinity voice remote. For each person living with myasthenia gravis or MG, their journey with this rare condition is unique. That's why Untold Stories Life with myasthenia gravis, a new podcast from iHeartRadio in partnership with Argenics, is exploring the extraordinary challenges and personal triumphs of underserved communities living with MG. Host Martine Hackett will share these powerful perspectives from real people with MG so their experiences can help inspire the MG community and educate others about this rare condition. Listen to find strength in community on the MG journey on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Whether you're hosting a party or just cleaning the house, turn it up and rock out with iHeartRadio in room-filling sound. Learn more about Roku Streambar today at roku.com. Happy streaming!