A Very OK Podcast
Episode 5: “Soldiers, Ranchers and Outlaws (1866–1907)”
July 21, 2021
Episode Transcript
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson, and I am sitting here with Dr. Bob Blackburn. Bob, how are things going for you today?
Dr. Bob Blackburn: Well, Trait, going very well. I just saw a rough cut of a documentary this morning that’s amazing. I’m working on books and museum exhibits, so in retirement, I’m having a blast. And it’s good to be with you again today.
Thompson: Well, and you just got back from playing a little golf in Colorado, didn’t you?
Blackburn: I did. My board of directors, your board of directors, now, was so generous. They gave me a retirement gift. And some of that was a few days at Broadmoor Resort that was owned for many years by the Gaylord family, OPUBCO here in Oklahoma City. But I got to play golf there. And you know, about every third round is decent. I happened to have one of those decent rounds on Broadmoor and had a blast. Met Annika Sörenstam, who was playing there that day. So it was a good outing.
Thompson: Well, that sounds exciting. Did you get to play golf with her?
Blackburn: No. I would not have done very well. I would have choked if I had tried to play with her. (laughter)
Thompson: Well, I just got back a couple of weeks ago. My wife and I sent the kids off to the grandparents, and we headed out west. We went to Olympic National Park in Washington, and we had such a great time. You know, Olympic National Park is a really unique area because it’s got really three different ecosystems. It’s got rainforest, it’s got the beach, the beach climate, and then it’s got mountains. And we did some great hiking. Hiked up in the mountains. There’s still snow in the mountains. In fact, one of the hiking trails we were on was almost, we got about two and a half miles in, and it was completely covered with snow. We had to turn around and come back, and then we had some beach time. But the best part about it was while things were, while the temperature was hovering around 100 degrees here in Oklahoma, we were wearing sweatshirts and jackets there in Oregon. The temperature was in the 50s and 60s, so it was a nice, good vacation for us. But I was glad to get back to Oklahoma.
And of course, I’m always glad to be sitting down with you and talking about history, and we’ve got a great topic today. We are talking about Oklahoma and the frontier and its relation to what happened at the in the American West, and talking about cowboys and cowgirls and all the people that made Oklahoma what it was back in those frontier days. And in a few minutes, we have a great interview we’re going to do with Art Burton, who is a scholar of Black cowboys and outlaws and Buffalo soldiers. And you and I love movies, and we always like to talk about movies, and it’s always great when we can tie our love of movies into our podcast topic, and what better movies to talk about than Westerns? Do you have a favorite Western that you like? Is there something you like to watch over and over and over again? And what do you think in that genre?
Blackburn: Well, it fits into our theme today of cattle trails in the cattle industry, and probably has to be other than Shane, which is not very Oklahoma, but the one that’s more oriented in Oklahoma has to be Red River. That is a great movie. The dramatic tension, John Wayne plays the bad guy in a way, in that movie, and it shows the diversity of the of the cowboy life. There were Latinos. There were white people. There were African Americans. It just showed the diversity of that frontier community and the decisions that had to be made, and the conditions of trying to get a herd of cattle from central Texas to Kansas and going across the rivers. And, you know, they would say one of the most dangerous was the Red River. And, of course, that lent its name to that movie. But that’s one of my favorites. And I’ll never forget with the cowboys getting ready to start off all the whooping and hollering, and I still like to mimic that occasionally.
Thompson: Well, you know, Red River was made in 1948, and I will agree with you. I think it’s one of John Wayne’s best pictures he ever made, and it’s one of my favorites, too. But, you know, when you talk about history, now that movie, if you remember one of the major plot points in that movie, and it’s in fact the point and I hope, I hope since we’re looking at this many, many years after it’s made, I don’t have to give a spoiler alert on this, but one of the biggest plot points in the tension pieces is the group of cowboys decides when Montgomery Clift’s character, decides he’s going to take the herd from John Wayne because they were going up to Missouri. And this movie takes place right after the Civil War, when it was customary to take the herds up to Missouri. But there were roving bands of farmers who did not like the cowboys coming through their area with the cattle because of the diseases the cattle brought, particularly tick-related diseases. And so it was a dangerous place to go. So they take the herd from John Wayne, and they decide they’re going to go up through Kansas instead. They had heard about Abilene and the new railhead up in Abilene, but they had never seen it before. And that’s a big thing. You know, Abilene comes online in the mid-1860s, and that’s the big plot point in Red River, which is, of course, a fantastic movie. And then if you think about the movie City Slickers, you remember in City Slickers, there’s that part where they’re starting out the herd. And of course, this is all the people from all over the country who’ve never driven or heard before in their life. And they say, you know, we should really whoop and holler like they did at the start of Red River. And they’re kind of like, and one guy starts it, and then everybody does it and they get into it.
Blackburn: So that’s part of popular culture now.
Thompson: Absolutely.
Blackburn: That phrase alone.
Thompson: I watched that movie, City Slickers on the plane not too long ago. And I think that’s kind of a new Western classic, if you will. One of my favorites is Rio Bravo. That’s one of my all-time favorite John Wayne movies and doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with cattle culture or ranching in the frontier, but it does have a lot to do with, you know, Rio Bravo was the answer to High Noon. The director of Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks, didn’t like that in High Noon, the sheriff kind of goes around asking for help, and he’s kind of a pathetic figure, and he can’t get anybody to help. He said, well, the sheriff wouldn’t have, he would have just faced off with these guys, and he wouldn’t have, he wouldn’t have been asking everybody and begging for help. And so in Rio Bravo, everyone, some of John Wayne’s friends are trying to help him. He pushes him away, said, no, I don’t need your help. I don’t need. So he ends up with Walter Brennan, which in my opinion, one of the great character actors in American history. And he ends up with Ricky Nelson, which is a pop star who is starring in the movie, and then Angie Dickinson. So and everybody loves Angie Dickinson. And so those were his main helpers as he’s, oh, of course, we can’t forget Dean Martin, Dean Martin’s character. So, “The Dude.”
Blackburn: When I was growing up in the ‘50s, Westerns dominated television. There were only three networks at the time. Some of our young listeners may not be able to comprehend that, but only three channels, networks. And if you looked at the rundown for all of the shows at that time, probably half would have been Westerns. And of course, one of my favorites was Rawhide and Rowdy Yates. Clint Eastwood, that was his first big role, and he was this cowboy. He was kind of a big, strapping, good-looking guy. He was the scout. Go ahead, find a way to get across that river. Go see if those Indians are going to demand more ahead of beef to cross their reservation. And Rowdy was kind of one of those characters that I was drawn to. And when me and all the neighborhood kids would go out and play, you know, everyone wanted to be Rowdy Yates, and that was, that helped impress on us almost this Western culture was very much a part of my youth. And then people just older than me who grew up with Hopalong Cassidy and William Boyd, who played that character is from Tulsa, by the way. You know that the Western genre was very important in expressing something about America, all the way from the ’40s through the ’60s.
Thompson: Well, and then in 1989. This is what I consider my favorite Western. It’s not a movie, it’s a miniseries. Lonesome Dove, and Lonesome Dove was written by Larry McMurtry. It was a book. Originally, McMurtry wrote it as a movie script. He wanted to get it made as a movie, and then he couldn’t get much interest in it, and so he expanded it into a novel. It became one of the great novels of the American West at that point. And then they made it into a miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall, which I think I mentioned it on this podcast before, but Robert Duvall is one of my all time favorites, and I’d pay to watch that guy read a phone book. But that movie and that script was based on a real-life relationship between Oliver Loving and between Charles Goodnight. And so, the scene at the end, once again, hope I’m not giving too much away. But you know, if you haven’t watched it by now, you know the time is run out. But the scene at the end where Tommy Lee Jones’ character, Call, takes Robert Duvall’s character’s body back to Texas, Augustus McRae’s body back to Texas to be buried. That’s based on a real-life story that happened. Goodnight brought Loving’s body back to Texas to be buried, and that’s based on that true story. But once again, cattle drives, and they come up through Oklahoma all the way up through Nebraska, and then on into Montana in that cattle drive.
Blackburn: The Loving/Goodnight trail went through the Oklahoma Panhandle, and we can pretty well trace where it was because the land surveys were being done about that time. And so they pretty much where the trail was. And it was really the last of the trails that went through Oklahoma, starting back with the Texas Road going up to Missouri. Texas Road established 1821, same time as the Santa Fe Trail, connecting settled Texas, settled Missouri. And if you wanted to take cattle to market where they were worth more than they were on the open Plains, you took them to St. Louis, and that would have been first. And then later, as the tick fever, Texas fever, as they would have called it up here at the time, pushed it farther west, then you get to the Chisholm Trail, then the Great Western, and then the Loving/Goodnight would have been the last of those open trails where there was enough open range to drive cattle cross country.
Thompson: So we had really the first cattle drive started in the 1840s. And in the 1840s, Texans started driving some of their cattle into Louisiana, into New Orleans and Shreveport. In the 1850s and 1860s, you get more drives that start going north, like you said, from Texas along that Texas Road or the Shawnee Road. The farmers in Missouri and Kansas did not like the cattle coming through because of the diseases. Then we have the Civil War, and the Civil War comes along, and it pretty much stops all of the cattle drives because everyone’s either fighting the war or just trying to hold on to what they have at home. Veterans come back from the Civil War into Texas. Their cattle are spread all over the place, and that’s where you get the term maverick. You have cattle that are basically unclaimed. There’s approximately five million cattle just roaming the land free with no ownership. People start rounding them up, and then the cattle drives start resuming, and they’re going to Sedalia, Missouri. About 250,000 cattle cross the Red River into Indian Territory in 1866. And then Abilene, Kansas, opens up in 1867. And you have those other trails that start to come in the western part of Oklahoma. You have the Western Trail and the Chisholm Trail. Can you talk a little bit about, because we know that at that time, Native Americans were controlling different parts. What was it like to drive cattle through Oklahoma at that particular time? And what role did the Native Americans play?
Blackburn: Well, you know, popular culture would make it look like all the cowboys were coming from the south and just crossing through. But actually, many of the American Indians were cowboys themselves and were making a living. One of my favorite stories was Clem Rogers, the father of Will Rogers, the great American 20th-century pop culture hero, movie star, writer, philanthropist, community leader. But his dad, Clem, grew up before the Civil War. He was running a ranch between the Verdigris and the Grand Rivers in the 1850s. So he was out there on the frontier. Cherokees had pretty well defeated the Osage by that time, and so they had access to that land, very rich grasslands and that’s limestone substrate there. And so the grass is very high in protein. And Clem is doing well. And right before the Civil War, he wanted to take a herd of cattle to market. Well, there was no market in the Indian Territory. Everyone had their own cattle. You didn’t really want to go south because the grass was not very good. And the farther south you got, the worse the grass got. And so he was going to take it north. He ended up with a couple of other cowboys from the Cherokee Nation, would have been Cherokee cowboys, drove a herd of cattle from what is now close to Oologah. Talala was the actual little village. Drove it from there to St. Louis through open-range country in the 1850s and did well. Of course, as you said, the Civil War disrupted that. But he got back into cattle ranching after the war and remained a cowboy. And his son, Will, always said that Clem was the best horseman he had ever met. He says if they were riding across the prairie on their own ranch in the 1880s and ’90s, he said his dad could ride comfortably all day long, cover twice as much ground as almost any other cowboy. And so I think we get this impression that the cowboys were just all of these rambunctious young white guys who ended up in the West. But really, a lot of the American Indians were cowboys themselves.
And one last story there, the great-great-grandfather of Tom Love, who started Love’s Country Stores and Travel Stops. We all know about that today. Well, his great-great-grandfather, Robert Jeremiah Love, was a cowboy in the Chickasaw Nation during the Civil War. Survived. He was an orphan, came out of it, became a cowboy, started a ranch, and he made his fortune, not by driving cattle to market in Kansas, but by selling beeves to the Santa Fe Railroad construction crews as they were building the Santa Fe across Red River, and another crew was coming south from Coffeyville, or, excuse me, Ark City, and they met in the Chickasaw Nation, and he made a fortune, enough money selling cattle to those crews to start the town of Purcell, and start a bank, the Chickasaw National Bank, the cotton gin, and became a community leader because of cattle.
Thompson: Wow. You know, speaking of Clem Rogers, and we’re going to talk with Art Burton a little bit about the African American influence in cowboys and the culture of the West. But Daniel Walker was a Cherokee Freedmen, and he became one of the most accomplished African American cowboys working in the Cherokee Nation prior to statehood. And Clem Rogers hired him to work on the ranch right after the Civil War, and Walker is credited with teaching Will Rogers some of his famous rope tricks. He said that Walker “was one of the best rider and ropers who ever worked on the Rogers Ranch, and he taught Will Rogers a lot of what he knew.” And, of course, Will Rogers took it to the whole next level, I’m sure. But without Daniel Walker, maybe we never have a Will Rogers. And that’s pretty, pretty interesting to think about. You know, so, one of the things when we talk about, you know, the trail life and all of these cattle going through Indian territory, I think movies in some ways have mythologized, you know, what that was like. And I think the life of a cowboy sort of seems like a romantic notion. And, you know, we forget some of the hardships that cattle drives, that when you’re on some of these, especially these big drives, the hardships that you have to go through and, you know, looking through everything you have to go through, usually cowboys, there were about 15 to 20 cowboys on a cattle drive. Some of the important jobs were you had a horse wrangler. So you had a remuda of horses because cowboys would go through six to 10 horses, usually for the whole drive. You know, we tend to think of cowboys just having that one horse that they like to ride all the time. But there were many, many horses. And then you had, of course, your chuckwagon cook. You had different job responsibilities. So up at the front of the of the drive, you had your trail boss, and the trail boss would survey the route and he would go out and seek water and where the good grazing was. You had the most experienced cowboys riding on point. The other riders were the swing and the flank riders, and then the crap job on the on the cattle drive was if you’re riding in drag because you got to eat the dust of 3,000 head of cattle going up the range. I pulled a quote here from a book from Andy Adams, and this book is called The Log of a Cowboy, and it was published in 1903. And so a fair word of warning to our listeners, because some of the language in this book is outdated, and some of it is racist language. But this book has been characterized as being one of the most authentic narratives of cowboy life that was ever written. And I have a quote here because we don’t think today about what you had to endure going up the, you know, lightning storms, stampedes, flooded rivers, and all those things. So this quote talks about the Salt Fork River, and the Salt Fork was in Oklahoma. And they talk about having to get across the Salt Fork River on the cattle drive. And he says, I’ll start here with the quote, “Trouble never comes singly, however,” and he was referring to they had just dealt with a stampede. “and when we struck the Salt Fork, we found it raging and impassable, nearly from bank to bank. But get across we must. The swimming of it was nothing, but it was necessary to get our wagon over. And there came the rub. We swam the cattle in 20 minutes time, but it took us a full half day to get the wagon over. The river was at least 100 yards wide, three quarters which was swimming to a horse. But we hunted up and down the river until we found an eddy, where the banks had a gradual approach to deep water, and started to wrap the wagon over, a thing none of the outfit had seen done, though we had often heard of it around campfires in Texas. The first thing was to get the necessary timber to make the raft. We scouted along the Salt Fork for a mile either way before we found sufficient dried, dead cottonwood to form our raft, and then we set about cutting it. But we only had one ax, and we were the poorest set of ax men that were ever called upon to perform a similar task. When we cut a tree, it looked as though a beaver had gnawed it down. On horseback, the Texan shines at the head of the class, but in any occupation which must be performed on foot, he is never a competitor. There was scarcely a man in our outfit who could not swing a rope and tie down a steer in a given space of time, but when it came to swinging an ax to cut logs for the raft, our luster faded. Cutting these logs, said Joe Stallings, as he mopped sweat from his brow, reminds me of what the Tennessee girl who married a Texan wrote home to her sister. ‘Texas,’ she wrote, ‘is a good place for men and dogs. But it’s hell on women in oxen.’”
(laughing) And that’s a bit of the colorful stories that you’re in store for if you decide to read that book.
Blackburn: You know, Trait, one of the things that Andy talks about quite a bit in that memoir is the weather. And a lot of people don’t realize it, but really, you could only drive the cattle if you had this, the source of food for the cattle, because they had to survive. They could only go a few miles a day, and they were eating as they were going. Otherwise, they’d lose too much weight. They would lose value. So you had to have green grass.
And so as we in Oklahoma know, you only start getting the green grass in April and May. And of course, that’s the rainy season, right? And so, as they finally can say, let’s get the herd together down in central Texas, and that’s a large area where they’re gathering these herds. And as they start north with the green grass, they’re also hitting the worst weather of the entire year. And the Cimarron was always considered the most dangerous. And it’s very salty. It’s very broad. It’s one of those prairie rivers rather than an eastern river, where you have pretty well-defined banks. These prairie rivers, even here in Oklahoma City with the North Canadian, the banks of the river go from about North 10th Street to South 20th Street, and you can kind of see the banks. And then the channel would move on these prairie rivers. Well, when it would fill, then it would literally be miles across. So it’d be like taking cattle across a lake, and then a very swift current was dangerous. You’d get the quicksand, the timber that’s coming down the river with the floods. And so they were moving these cattle at the most dangerous time of the year, and then with lightning and tornadoes, adding that to just the daily hard work that these cowboys, it’s amazing that so many cattle would survive and that it wasn’t more deadly than it really was.
Thompson: Yeah. There’s a story in the book, The Log of a Cowboy, another one, where they talk about trying to get across the South Canadian, and they talk about the cattle bogging down, and they had to get down in the river and basically dig the cattle out of the mud, or what they called the quicksand. And there’s a pretty, pretty rough story in there about they were trying to dig one cattle out, and they had the rope on, and they pulled the cattle out and ended up leaving the leg behind of the cattle, and they ended up having to shoot the cow because it, you know, of course, wasn’t going to survive and it was in pain. But it was certainly not just, you know, sometimes we get the picture from the movies we watch of the cowboy riding along, strumming the guitar, and, you know, the, the old doggies just sort of wandering along the trail. And it’s certainly wasn’t like that. It was a very hard and harsh life. You know, one of the things that I think gets lost in translation sometimes is this era of the cattle drive and sort of the golden age of cattle, when people were just making money hand over fist, taking them up to the northern railroads and then shipping them off. It only lasts about 20 years. And I wonder if you could talk about the economic condition and what’s going on as we get to that 1886, 1887 timeframe when this, when everything starts to transition?
Blackburn: Yeah, of course, that would have been the transition of communally owned land in the Indian nations and public land in the West. So with the General Allotment Act of 1887, about this time period, Congress passes that and says, we’re going to force all of the tribes to take their communally owned land. We’re going to take the public lands, give each Indian a little bit of parcel of land, and open it up for non-Indian settlement. So that’s all really beginning. The first land run would be 1889. And so from that point on, Oklahoma is generally converted from public, or communally owned land, to private land. And people are building fences, and they don’t want those cattle coming through. That really begins a slow transition. You still have some areas of western Oklahoma that’s open range. There was some land in Woodward County, for example, which would have been the western part of the Cherokee Outlet opened by land run in ’93, that was still open range in 1902 and 1903. So the range cattle industry would survive somewhat. It was a gradual transition. And then finally, as you get into the 20th century with statehood, and the cattle trails are long gone, people are still driving cattle. This time, not to Kansas to the railheads, but to the local railheads. So you might have a ranch in Osage County, and then they would be driving the cattle to the railhead, where they could load them on to the railroad cars to ship them at that time, either Kansas City or south of Oklahoma City.
1909, the packing plants open here becomes a real market for cattle on the Southern Plains. So they’re not going as far, but they’re still shipping it. And there’s one cowboy in popular culture, one of our favorites. We’ve talked about him before, Ben Johnson Jr., who is being trained as a cowboy in the 1930s by his dad, Ben Johnson Sr., who is foreman of the Chapman Bernard Ranch in the Osage. And some rich oil men from Tulsa create this huge ranch; some leased, some owned. And it’s some of the best cattle, some of the best horses in the entire country. And they are there, along with some other ranches that have a stream of revenue from the Wild West shows. They could take these cowboys who were trained on the cattle trails and open range and then on the ranches, and then to use those skills on the stage and then taking some of the Indians from Oklahoma who need a little stream of income and taking these people on tour. So the 101, the Miller Brothers, Pawnee Bill, and this whole period of transition of cattle and cowboys and land and markets changing, it’s all evolving through this entire time period until today. We still have some great ranches in Oklahoma, the Cattlemen’s Association, until recent years—maybe they still do it—have the The Range Round-Up, where real cowboys come out and compete against each other on the skills they still need to use today.
Thompson: Why do you think that this period has so captured people’s imaginations? You know, movies, songs, stories, books, plays, the whole nine yards, you know? What do you think about it as just so captures people?
Blackburn: Well, of course, the heart of any art, whether it can, whether it’s a visual, two-dimensional art, or a movie, or a song, there has to be dramatic tension. And with the cowboy story, you not only get dramatic tension with all of the challenges, but you get this rugged individualism. And if you look at American history and especially Scots-Irish culture, going back to the Scottish Highlands, this admiration for the rugged individual, we see that in Oklahoma today, with don’t mess with a gun on my hip. Don’t tell me what to do with my house. You know, you get this very strong individual element. It’s not so much about we are a village. What can we do for each other? Hey, you know, they’re strong enough to stand on their own and survive. Well, that admiration for the rugged individual defines the cowboy image. Out there on the horse, dealing with nature, dealing with all these other forces around them, really beyond the scope of law enforcement and public safety, not counting on the community for protection, but on their own skill sets to make friendships with the other cowboys, to work for a good rancher who’s going to take care of his folks. These rugged individuals are there. And then, of course, Americans’ love of horses. You still see that in our culture today. So, between the love of horses, the open range, the rugged individual, this whole idea of dramatic tension and survival, it really is, it’s captured the American imagination.
Thompson: And still does to this day. They are still making Westerns, albeit not as often as they used to. But it is still a popular genre. Well, you know, Bob, transitioning, we need to talk to Art Burton. And you’ve known Art for quite a long time, and tell us a little bit about Art and your relationship with him.
Blackburn: Well, I had the good fortune on my dissertation when I was working on a PhD, was a history of law enforcement in Oklahoma since 1803, and I brought it all the way up at that time, 1978, when I finished. But I went through each of the jurisdictions. So Indian law-ways, Indian law enforcement, US deputy marshals. Well, Art, in the 1980s with connections in Arcadia, and his grandparents started doing research into Black and Indian law enforcement. And he found me, and we started communicating. And I told him that my historical interests were going more towards urban history at that time and economic development. And I said, I’m not doing much on law enforcement. Please, take that and run with it. Dee Cordry, an OSBI agent at the time, was doing some law enforcement history. Glenn Shirley was the veteran, but Art was taking it in a new direction that I especially supported. He wanted to really focus on the Indians and the African Americans who were part of this story of frontier law enforcement, the cowboy image. And of course, I was an advocate for really doing more with African American history in particular, as well as Indian history. And Art was willing to do it. He had the ability. He was a good scholar. He would try to peel back the onion and get beyond the mythology that really surrounded almost all outlaw and lawman history at the time, and he would make sure that he had enough sources before he would write. And so I respected him as a historian and as an African American himself, having come from the culture, understood better than most other historians, really the importance of race in our history. And it was personal to him, and it was a family issue. And so he brought not only the scholarship but the passion. And to me, history is best when there’s passion behind it, and we can find ways to tell stories through the lives of people, personalize it. And that’s what Art was able to do, and is still doing today.
Thompson: Art T. Burton received his BA and MA in African American Studies from Governors State University. He was a history professor at Prairie State College and South Suburban College, and works as an administrator in African American student affairs at Benedictine University, Loyola University Chicago, and Columbia College Chicago. He retired in 2015 after 38 years in higher education. In 1991, Burton wrote the first book on African American and Native American outlaw lawmen in the Wild West. It is titled Black, Red, and Deadly: Black and Indian Gunfighters of the Indian Territory, 1870–1907. In 1999, Burton wrote the first book on African Americans who were scouts and soldiers in the Wild West. The book is titled Black, Buckskin, and Blue: African American Scouts and Soldiers on the Western Frontier. In 2007, he wrote the first scholarly biography on an African American lawman of the Wild West, and the book is titled Black Gun Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves. His book Cherokee Bill: Black Cowboy and Indian Outlaw was released in 2019. And I should also add that Art will be coming to the Oklahoma History Center on Thursday, July 29, at noon for a book signing for this book on Cherokee Bill. You can preorder the book at store.okhistory.org. Art Burton, welcome into the podcast. We are very glad to have you with us today.
Art. T. Burton: It’s good to be with you today. I stay in Oklahoma mentally all the time, so it’s good to talk to people in Oklahoma.
Thompson: Well, fantastic. You know, I just want to jump into this right now, and just talk a little bit about your interests, and what drew you to the subject of the historic West, and talking about some of these great characters that you’ve written your books about?
Burton: Okay, I grew up in Chicago, and my mother was from Arcadia, Oklahoma, and I would go to Arcadia every summer to visit my grandparents, uncles, and aunts. And I had quite a few cousins who were into the rodeo cowboy scenario. And my people also owned land, and cattle, and horses around Arcadia. And so it was like it was like going to the Land of Oz from Chicago every summer.
Thompson: I can only imagine.
Burton: Totally different scenario, and Arcadia was very small country town and people would ride horses up and down the streets all the time, and it was just like going to the Old West. And back at that time, Western programs and movies were pretty abundant, you know? And so I thought it was just a very unique scenario where you had a predominantly Black town where you had so many Black horsemen. and cowboys. and cowgirls that, you know, you didn’t see in the regular media. And it was just fascinating for me. And so as I got older, I just, you know, started wondering, what role did African Americans play on the Western frontier? And so that was pretty much the kickstarter for that whole interest.
Blackburn: Art, thank you for joining us today. You and I go back to the 1980s, when you first started researching law enforcement and lawmen and outlaws. I had completed my dissertation on the history of law enforcement in Oklahoma in the ’70s, and at the time, my memory is very clear on this, is that Glenn Shirley was writing books about lawmen and outlaws in Oklahoma, but Glenn wrote from the perspective of kind of a detective novel kind of approach. And here you came in as a scholar, and I recognized that quickly, as you started asking the right questions and pursuing some of these stories that had really been included, maybe as a marginal story. But you said, no, these are stories that we can really focus on and learn more about the history of lawmen and outlaws and criminal justice, but also featuring some of those stories that have been overlooked for so many years.
So, in my opinion, in historiography of Oklahoma history, you’re one of those important individuals who says, no, there’s more we can do and started uncovering some of those. Can you say a little bit about your research on that first book, where you were taking kind of the broad perspective on many of the Indians and the African Americans? And of course, those cultures kind of blended and overlap somewhat.
Burton: Yeah, I was completely blown away. I did my last two years of high school in Arcadia, Oklahoma, and I graduated from, you know, Arcadia High in ’67. And I didn’t get any Oklahoma history at that time. And when I was inspired to originally just do some research on Bass Reeves, I had to go back and look at the whole Oklahoma history from the inception of the Trail of Tears up through the Civil War, and I didn’t know that they had Civil War battles in Oklahoma. That was fairly new to me at the time. And when just looking at the frontier, Oklahoma, there’s no state in the United States, in west of the Mississippi, that has the frontier history that Oklahoma has, bar none. Hollywood has made many movies about different parts of the Wild West, but Oklahoma was the real Wild West, if you look at it from a historical aspect. I was just flabbergasted that this history had been left out of the popular telling of the Wild West. It’s Oklahoma, the history of Oklahoma is very unique in terms of a lot of things that happen. And if you look at African Americans with the 40 Black towns/communities in Oklahoma, that’s very unique, nowhere else in the United States. And it’s, I was just, you know, just I’m still fascinated with Oklahoma history to the utmost because there’s nothing like it nowhere in the United States.
Thompson: I think you’re absolutely right about that. And it’s one of the reasons we wanted to start this podcast is because there’s so many stories that haven’t been told, and we want to get them out there to a wider audience. You mentioned you mentioned Bass Reeves, and you talk about a fascinating character. He was born into slavery. He became one of the most celebrated lawmen in Indian Territory when he worked for Judge Parker’s court. Can you talk about him? Just his accomplishments as a person, and, you know, one of the things about him is he still hasn’t really hit the mainstream, which is really surprising to me.
Burton: Yeah. Well, he’s slowly getting there. Texas Monthly magazine just did a 10,000-word article on Bass Reeves, and it is reverberating around the nation right now. And True West magazine did a feature on him in their February issue, and they have four articles of which I wrote. I’m very glad.
Thompson: Very nice.
Burton: Yeah, they did a very good feature on Bass Reeves. Bass was a phenomenon, and I think he can be an inspiration and a role model for law enforcement today. And he worked approximately 32 years, from 1875 up till 1907, statehood. He’s the only lawman that I found that worked that long in pre-state Oklahoma in a continuous basis. And he did this, he started with the Fort Smith Court in 1875, working with Judge Isaac C. Parker. He worked there until 1893, and he worked at the Paris, Texas, court, which had jurisdiction over the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nation from 1893 up to 1897. Then he was transferred to the Muskogee Court, and he worked there until the statehood in 1907, and he was very unique because he worked in disguise many times. He arrested thousands of men and women who broke federal law in the Territories. He escaped numerous assassination attempts on his life. They were singing songs about him during his lifetime. I mean, he just was that popular. And he knew most of the people in the Territory that he had homesteaded and built homes, and he became very popular. And he was very good at catching the criminals. If you tried to run from him, he would catch you. If you tried to hide from him, he would find you. And if you tried to have a gunfight with him, you know, he would kill you. So, Bass was very unique. He was 6’2”, about 190 pounds. They say he could whoop any two men with his bare hands.
He came out of slavery as a slave, and so he was illiterate. And they used to read his warrants off to him, and he would memorize them, and he would carry out as many as 30 warrants at a time. And if you asked him for a specific name, he could peel through the warrants and pull out the one you asked about. And he never brought the wrong person in due to the fact that he was illiterate. It was very unique situation. And, you know, he just had a very unique career.
Blackburn: You know, you mentioned something there that it, we need to learn these lessons because right now in Oklahoma, with the McGirt case of the US Supreme Court, we have this issue of overlapping jurisdictions. And we also then have the issues of race in the criminal justice system and how do you deal with both. With that one story of Bass Reeves, you get the multiple jurisdictions of the Indian nations, the federal law enforcement. You then get into county law enforcement in parts of Oklahoma after 1890. And so Bass really represents that. And then, of course, the role of racism in criminal justice system. He learned to navigate it. It was never easy. He was always under pressure, and the spotlight was always on him. But yet he found a way to work with others. And of course, what we’ve got to do in America today, and in Oklahoma as well, is find a way to have this dialog, to find a way that we can all work together in a cooperative way for a common goal, which is public safety. In that one story that you provide, we have many lessons that can be applied today.
Burton: Right. That’s true, actually, maybe a little naive, but I think Bass Reeves could probably help heal the United States in terms of some of these issues that are going on today. And so that’s why I’m hoping that if there’s some popular type of productions made on Bass, that they’re done well and tell the story correctly, because I think he has that opportunity to do that.
Blackburn: Art, you probably remember this, but Morgan Freeman was interested in doing a movie about Bass Reeves, and he called me one day. I was editor at the time, before I was director, and he said, can we come by and talk? And I said, yes.
Thompson: What’s it like to hear that voice on the other end?
Blackburn: It was wonderful. And he showed up, and he had the writer who had written the script for Dances with Wolves. It was this script writer, and so they showed up in my office. I took them downstairs at that time in the old historical building, and Art, you’ve used these same records, but I pulled the microfilm up of the Indian Territory and the Freedmen, and we started going through all the records, and Bass was there in some of these records. And I just had a great day with Morgan Freeman. He wanted to play the role of Bass Reeves.
Burton: Yeah, he did actually. I’m working with Morgan now. He’s too old to play Bass, but he wants to produce a serial on cable television on Bass. And so he’s working on that very hard.
Thompson: I think we just broke some news here today on the on the Very OK Podcast. We have a little news about that. That’s fantastic. You’ve done some incredible writing on the Buffalo Soldiers, and I’d really like to talk about their work. You know, we had the 9th and 10th Cavalry in Oklahoma. What was the nature of their work here? What was life like, the daily life like for a Buffalo soldier in Oklahoma?
Burton: Well, you know, back then, Oklahoma was really the frontier. And as the US military had the obligation to take care of many duties on the West, and they had the four Black regiments, the 9th and 10th Cav. and 24th and 25th Infantry. All those units served time in the Indian Territory, Oklahoma Territory, pre-statehood, and they were stationed at Fort Gibson, Fort Sill, Fort Reno, Fort Supply. I think Fort Arbuckle, before it closed. And they were very aggressive in doing their duty. They kept people out of the Territory that, you know, tried to come in early. They tried to protect the Native Americans that were on reservation-type status in western Oklahoma for a while. The 10th actually built Fort Sill. And from what I understand, Fort Sill is the only existing frontier fort that is standing in a complete, you know, existence.
You could see the whole fort, and the whole fort was built by the 10th Cav., and Henry Flipper, the first African American to graduate from West Point, Fort Sill was his duty, first duty station. And there’s a great story about how the commander at Fort Sill, I think it was Davidson at the time. When Flipper got there, he told Flipper they was having problems with malaria, and it was a swampy area and knew Flipper had majored in engineering and told him to drain the swamp. And Flipper looked at it, and he drew a ditch, they called it, that ran uphill, and the commander told him it wasn’t going to work because water wasn’t going to go uphill. But Flipper knew what he was doing as an engineering student, and he drew the ditch to drain the swamp, and is now a national historic. I don’t know, they call it monument or some type of thing. It’s called Flipper’s Ditch there at Fort Sill, and you can still see it in its existence. But the Buffalo Soldiers, they were very active. There was not many major battles in the Indian Territory.
The Creek Indians did have a thing called the Green Peach War in the early 1880s, and the 9th Cav. captured the insurgents and took them back to the Creek Nation, and was stationed for a while at Fort Gibson until that thing cooled off. But they dealt with outlaws in the Territory. They dealt with Texans coming up, stealing cattle and horses, and they were just very active in Oklahoma during that time period. And I was glad when I wrote my second book, Black, Buckskin, and Blue, I was very happy to write as much as I could find about the Buffalo Soldiers being active in the Oklahoma and Indian Territories as possible.
Blackburn: Well, and Art, as a graduate of Oklahoma State University, proud Cowboy, I always like to talk about one of their main duties in the 1880s was kicking Sooners out of the Unassigned Lands, and we had some great photographs of some of the Buffalo Soldiers escorting all of these white Boomers out of the territory and really enforcing the law and very, very unpopular with the people from Kansas and Missouri and other states trying to seek land. But they did their duty, and they faced those struggles, and I’m sure they faced the issues of racism with these frontier communities. But they did their duty, and they served this country very loyally for many years.
Burton: Yes, they did. Yes, they did. I have an uncle, I was told, that was in the 10th and went after Pancho Villa in 1916. So I have a link to the Buffalo Soldiers that’s fairly direct, but yeah, I think, you know, that the Buffalo Soldier history in Oklahoma is part of that great Oklahoma frontier history that, you know, people need to know about.
Blackburn: And I like to always take that story back to the First Kansas Colored Regiment during the Civil War that General Blunt assembled in Kansas. They fought many engagements in Oklahoma during the Civil War but won the Battle of Honey Springs. I’ve given that speech probably a thousand times over the years. But, and that was the beginning. Many of those soldiers that were in that First Kansas Colored Regiment that helped win battles in in this region, re-enlisted and stayed in service because to them, that was a paycheck. It was something honorable. It was a sense of service and duty. And for people who were almost excluded from the American dream in a lot of ways, it’s amazing to me they were still willing to serve and to stand up for their country.
Burton: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. I remember when the movie Glory came out, I thought it was a good movie, but I think the movie about the First Kansas and the Battle of Honey Springs would have been a much better movie. There was a deputy US Marshal, an African American Deputy US marshal named Bynum Colbert, who actually started as a deputy before Bass. I know a lot of people want to say Bass was the first, but he wasn’t the first Black deputy marshal. And Bynum started around 1873, and he was, I believe, about he was a USCT veteran. He was from the Choctaw Nation, but he was in one of the Arkansas USCT units. And then he enlisted in the 10th Cav., and he was in 10th Cav. almost 10 years. And then he joined the, you know, deputy marshal service out of Fort Smith. And he worked up until 1896. He worked a long time, but his name was Bynum Colbert, and he’s one of those soldiers that later became a deputy US marshal.
Blackburn: And ironically, one of, there’s another Colbert from the Choctaw Nation who would become Chief Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court— Tom Colbert, an African American from the old Choctaw Nation. And so there’s probably some connection there on service and public safety.
Burton: Right. Right. Wow.
Thompson: I want to talk about your most recent book, Art, and that’s on Cherokee Bill Goldsby. And what made you want to write about him?
Burton: Well, I wrote about Cherokee Bill in my first book, Black, Red, and Deadly, and there was so much misinformation about his genealogy, and about what he did that I thought I would go back and try to clean that up and clear up misinformation.
But one of the things that really hit me like a ton of bricks, though, is that you can go to New Mexico, and you can go all over the state and they’ll drop Billy the Kid on you everywhere you go in New Mexico. And Billy the Kid was not nearly as charismatic, colorful, and a true outlaw is Cherokee Bill. And I did an article for Wild West” magazine for their June issue that came out, and I did a comparison between Cherokee Bill and Billy the Kid, talking about who was the most outlaw. But Cherokee Bill was the most famous outlaw of the Indian Territory. He stuck up trains, banks, and stagecoaches, and he was eventually, you know, executed for his crimes in Fort Smith in 1896. But there’s no colorful outlaw you can find anywhere in the Wild West than Cherokee Bill Crawford Goldsby. His daddy was in the 10th Cav., by the way, as a master sergeant.
Thompson: I saw in my research that he was born at Fort Concho, and I grew up near San Angelo, Texas. And so that I’m very familiar with Fort Concho down there.
Burton: Yeah. His dad was actually involved in that incident in Fort Concho, where the Buffalo Soldiers shot up the saloon after it was some infractions between the soldiers and some townsfolk. And his father, Goldsby, went AWOL after that incident so the Texas Rangers wouldn’t arrest him. And some people said that the commanding officer Grierson winked at him and told him, you know, get going. He didn’t want him to, you know, be adjudicated in Texas law at that time. So, that’s a very interesting story. But, yeah, Cherokee Bill was born at Fort Concho, and his mother was an authenticated laundress with the 10th Cav. at that time, also at Fort Concho.
Thompson: What are some of those lessons that you might have learned in your writings that we could apply today, or we could learn from today?
Burton: The one thing that’s overall for me, is that the pioneers in Oklahoma are very hardy people, very trusting people, in aspect of they trusted people who had, you know, went by their word. They could trust their word. And they were generally good folks, the settlers were nice. The outlaws were folks that the lawmen had to deal with and bring them to bear. But you probably couldn’t find any hardier people than the folks that settled on the frontier in Oklahoma, and they were basically good, God-fearing American citizens that were trying to find a better life for them and their families. And so I think that that is the overarching story of the Oklahoma frontier, be they Black, Indian, or white, that these were folks that were just trying to make a living as best as possible, and they were just good people for the most part.
Thompson: Are you working on any other new books or projects right now?
Burton: Yes, I am. I’m looking at Muskogee because from my research, I think Muskogee was one of the wildest of the wild towns in the Wild West, and it’s been overlooked. And so that’s part of my research I’m doing now is on Muskogee and some of the individuals and incidents that happened around the town during the frontier.
Thompson: Well, we’re all going to look forward to that for sure. And you are going to be here, once again, at the History Center in Oklahoma City at on July 29 at noon to sign your books. And I encourage everybody who’s listening to us go to store.okhistory.org, buy that new book on Cherokee Bill. You’re going to love it, and come out and see us on July 29th and meet Art and have him sign your book. And Art, it has been such a pleasure to talk to you today. We are thrilled to have you on the podcast, and we can’t wait to have you here in person.
Blackburn: Thank you, Art, for being part of this, and thanks for dedicating your scholarly career to telling these stories and sharing those with people. That legacy will always be here after we’re long gone.
Burton: Right. Well, thank you. I love Oklahoma, and I love Oklahoma history. So anything I can do. Actually, I will be speaking a little bit about Cherokee Bill when I sign my books, also. So hopefully people can come, you know, hear a few words I have to say about Cherokee Bill.
Thompson: We are going to be very excited about that. And so we thank you so much, Art. Have a great rest of your day, and we will talk to you soon.
Burton: All right. You have a great one. Thank you.
Blackburn: Thanks, Art.
Thompson: Well, Bob, that was a great conversation with Art, and I certainly can’t wait to meet him when he comes to the History Center on July 29th.
Blackburn: And I think the public will be pleased, not only with the book that is coming out, but he’s a good speaker, and he knows how to communicate these stories, and he’ll talk about people. And that’s what the public really wants to hear, taking our history in and really interpreting that through the lives of some of these pioneers.
Thompson: Well, as always, I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today, and I can’t wait to talk to you next month on our next podcast episode.
Blackburn: Thank you, Trait. Good job.
Thompson: You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by Ryan Green. I encourage you to go out and like us and subscribe to us on whatever podcast app that you use, and please rate us. And if you liked what you heard today, please go recommend us to a friend, and we’ll see you next month for our next episode.
