Cherokee Bill on the Outlaw Trail

Crawford Goldsby, alias Cherokee Bill, and his mother. Fort Smith National Historic Site.

Of all the outlaws hanged on the gallows at Fort Smith, probably the best known is Crawford Goldsby, alias Cherokee Bill. This account comes from a site bulletin of Fort Smith National Historic Site.

Early life

Goldsby was born on February 8, 1876, at Fort Concho, Texas. His father, George Goldsby, was a buffalo soldier of Mexican, white and Sioux descent; his mother, Ellen Beck, was half Black, one-quarter Cherokee and one-quarter white. Two years later George abandoned his pregnant wife and their son. Ellen went back to Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, and sent Crawford to Indian schools in Kansas and Pennsylvania. He returned to Fort Smith and worked odd jobs until his first trouble with the law, in 1893, when he was 17.

A "wild hand"

On September 29, Goldsby went to a harvest dance at Fort Gibson to see Maggie Glass, a 15-year-old girl he was infatuated with. There he got into a fight with a man named Jake Lewis, who easily got the better of him. Humiliated in front of Maggie, Goldsby turned up at Lewis's farm the next morning meaning to kill him. Lewis was shot twice but survived to press charges.

By then Goldsby was calling himself Cherokee Bill. The name apparently came from his Cherokee ancestry and his time at the Indian school in Cherokee, Kansas. According to the site bulletin, in Cherokee culture "Bill" meant "wild hand" — someone not to cross.

With the Cook Gang

After the attack on Lewis, Cherokee Bill joined the Cook Gang, a band of outlaws led by Bill Cook that terrorized the Cherokee and Creek Nations in 1893 and 1894. Their crimes began small — whiskey charges and horse theft — and grew into train robberies, stagecoach holdups and bank theft:

The murder of Ernest Melton

On November 9, Cherokee Bill and two other gang members held up a store and post office fifteen miles south of Coffeyville, Kansas. Ernest Melton, a painter, was watching the robbery from the window of a restaurant across the street. Cherokee Bill shot him. As the site bulletin quotes it, "The ball struck Melton below one eye and came out the back of his head, killing him instantly."

That killing was the crime for which Cherokee Bill would hang at Fort Smith — though the road to the gallows would take several more twists and turns for the lawmen there.

Sources

• National Park Service, Fort Smith National Historic Site: "Cherokee Bill: On the Outlaw Trail (Site Bulletin)."
• The source dates Goldsby's first trouble with the law to the summer of 1893 but then describes it as happening on September 29; this page gives the year only.