In the vast landscape of the American Western Frontier, countless stories of courage, struggle, and survival remain largely untold, especially those of African Americans who helped shape this rugged era. Today, we delve into one such remarkable narrative, beginning not with the infamous outlaw himself, but with his father, George. Born in Selma, Alabama, George’s early life defied convention; not enslaved, he served with the Confederate army before bravely defecting to the Union, even witnessing the surrender at Appomattox. His return home was met with threats, forcing him to seek a new life in the Indian Territory, where he joined the revered Tenth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, known as the Buffalo Soldiers, rising quickly through their ranks. This journey of resilience and defiance took a dramatic turn at Fort Concho, where an incident defending his fellow soldiers against harassment led George to go AWOL, leaving his young family, including his son, the future Cherokee Bill, to forge their own difficult path.
It was in the shadow of this challenging upbringing that Crawford Goldsby, later known as Cherokee Bill, began his own legendary and violent career across the Indian Territory. Left by his father, he took on odd jobs and learned the ways of a cowboy, but a fateful fight defending his brother led to his first act of violence and a life on the run. Quickly finding companions in the notorious Cook brothers, Crawford began his descent into the world of crime, dealing in bootleg whiskey and stealing horses. It was during a botched attempt to collect land payments at the Halfway House stagecoach station that a desperate shootout erupted with lawmen. In the chaos of that intense gun battle, Crawford Goldsby cemented his new identity, forever becoming the fearsome Cherokee Bill, an outlaw whose name would soon strike terror across the land.
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George is very interesting because he was from Selma, Alabama, and his mother was not enslaved, but she was a concubine of Thornton Goldsby, who was a very rich plantation owner. He was in the banking, so when the Civil War started, not being a slave, George was hired by the Confederate army and 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 Tenth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, which was an all-Black regiment.
Ranked very quick well.
He became a sergeant, one of the top sergeants in the Tenth Cav. After being there a while, he did meet a young lady named Ellen, and she was a laundress for the Tenth Cav, and they got married. And later on, the 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 an incident had happened, and George decided that he needed to leave the army at that point, and he went AWOL and 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 Goldsby. And his name is not Goldsby, it’s actually Gooseby, but people call it Goldsby 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, he got 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, he was about almost six feet tall and probably weighed somewhere around a hundred ninety to two hundred 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 were not legal, selling bootleg whiskey and stealing horses and such. And then, eighteen ninety-three, the Cherokee Nation received an eight-point-five-million-dollar payment for the sale of the Cherokee.
Outlet, and that was land that the Cherokee Nation at once.
Payments were made to citizens that selected towns, and the Cook brothers and 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 ’cause 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 fifteenth, Effie went to Tahlequah. She had her strange husband who was working as a guard for the payment. He read the names on her request. 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’d been followed by a fairly large posse before they got there, though as these young men, I guess they were fair, they 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 saw 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 a 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 eighteen 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. He could shoot 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 a very interesting case.
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 as told by Art Burton here on Our American Stories. And we returned 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 Lion Gordon, George Sanders, and Henry Munson, all Black Indian freedmen. Curtis Dason, Jes Snyder, Elmer Chick and Lucas who were white men, and Sam Verdigris, Kid McWilliams, 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 and the Cook Gang occurred on the day that the gang robbed the Lincoln County Bank in Chandler.
And 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 two hundred yards.
After Cherokee Bill shot the barber, there were approximately one hundred gunshots fired by the gang. After they robbed the bank of one hundred and seven dollars and fifty cents, 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 ninth, the gang split up.
A few followed Bill Cook, and the rest of the gang went with Cherokee Bill. On the night of October twenty-second, eighteen ninety-four, Cherokee Bill and three outlaws looted the small town of Wewoka.
The gang robbed two stores and the post office, and four hundred dollars.
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 Talala. Bill started on one end of the main street and robbed every business on the street, and then he and his gang.
Rode out of town.
In my research looking at gangs, this is the only time the way 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 Lenapah in the Cherokee Nation, not far from the Kansas border.
The money and valuables amounted.
To six hundred dollars, which was a lot of money back then because the average wage for a person could be a hundred dollars a year, so six hundred dollars 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 thirteen-hundred-dollar bounty, dead or alive, on Cherokee Bill.
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 twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety-five, 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 until four o’clock in the morning. All the time, Cherokee Bill kept his Winchester in his lap and never gave Rogers his chance to surprise him 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 firestick. The blow knocked Cherokee Bill down, but not out. Rogers and Scales fought Bill for twenty minutes until they were able to get a pair of handcuffs on him. Cherokee Bill was finally captured, and even after they got the handcuffs on him, Cherokee Bill was so strong he broke the handcuffs, but Clint Scales had a double-barreled shotgun and kept the gun on Cherokee Bill until they got him to the town where they met up with Bill Smith.
M. Parker.
Judge Parker, the Hanging Judge, as people like to call him, said Bill’s the worst criminal that he’d ever come before his bench, and Judge Parker was there from eighteen seventy-five to eighteen ninety-six, so he’s seen a many a bad outlaw. Bill was indicted for the murder of Ernest Melton. He pleaded not guilty and he was represented by a defense attorney named Jay 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 twenty-fifth, eighteen ninety-five, was set as his execution date, but lawyer Reed found fourteen errors in the trial proceedings and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Parker issued a stay of the execution date so the Supreme Court.
Could look at the appeal.
And on July twenty-sixth, eighteen ninety-five, someone smuggled a pistol into the jail for Cherokee Bill to attempt a jailbreak. At seven p.m., the jail guard Campbell Eoff and guard Lawrence Keating entered the cellblock known as Murderer’s Row, where they kept people who were being incarcerated for murder, and it was the responsibility of Eoff and Keating to ring the prisoners in for the night. A paper was jammed in the keyhole to lock the row of cells 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, Cherokee Bill shot instantly, and it was a fatal wound. A fifteen-minute gunfight ensued with no further injuries, but also no resolution. Henry Starr, another Cherokee who was in jail for murdering a deputy 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 seventeenth, eighteen ninety-six. 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 Verdigris 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 this day where many people who fall into a life of crime probably would have had a different outlook on life.
If they had gotten better education. Cherokee Bill is pretty much analogous to.
Billy the Kid, but they’ve made, I guess, somewhere in the area fifty 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 Art 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 split 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.
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