9/7/1895 - Notorious Oklahoma badman, Nathaniel Ellsworth Wyatt, better known to the marshals trying to bring law-and-order to the Indian Territory as Zip Wyatt (he will also go by the alias' of "Wild Charlie" and "Dick Yeager"), passes away in the Enid, Oklahoma city jail after losing a gunfight to a posse early in the previous month near Skeleton Creek, Oklahoma (his mortal wounds come compliments of the marksmanship of deputies, Ad Polk and Tom Smith).
Zip
The second of eight children to be born into the post-Civil War family of John T. Wyatt and his wife, domestic servant Rachel Quick, Nathaniel spends his youth in Indiana (in the Sugar Ridge Township of Clay County), before moving southwest, into the Indian Territory that will become the state of Oklahoma, as a teenager of seventeen. He and his family soon settle in the Guthrie region of the future state (north of town in an area known as Cowboy Flats on Antelope Creek) where Nathaniel easily slips into the life of an outlaw, with training coming by way of a renegade father notorious enough at drinking, fighting, and general carousing about that he earns the nickname, "Old Six-Shooter Bill," and an older brother, Nimrod, a professional gambler known as "Six-Shooter Jack" (he will be killed by an unhappy poker player in a Texline, Texas saloon in 1891). And there are the friends he makes while riding for the Wyeth Cattle Company, a pair of cowboys that are extremely handy with a gun, Bill Doolin and Bitter Creek Newcomb. Early in his nefarious career on the wrong side of the law, Nathaniel acquires his own moniker, being called "Zip" for his ability to slip away from the law during his cattle rustling days. In his twenties, Wyatt is a handsome man about six feet tall with dark brown hair and hazel eyes.
Guthrie - 1889
Doolin
Wyatt's mother dies in February of 1890 and a year later, his primary female influence becomes his new wife, Annie Bailey, the 17-year-old daughter of a boatman operating a ferry running transport across the Cimarron River. Wyatt is 24 and believed to be the culprit in the botched robbery of the Santa Fe railroad station of Wharton that results in death of a night telegrapher Charles Smith without charges being filed against Zip (the take of nothing and his escape from a warrant being filed for his arrest further contributing to his nickname). The couple settle near the town of Mulhall (about thirteen miles north of Guthrie) and have a daughter, but a quiet city life is not to be in Wyatt's future, and drunk one evening in June of 1891, he decides to have some fun shooting up the streets that have grown up around a Santa Fe railroad station on the Oklahoma plains. Spurring his horse about, despite being tipsy, Wyatt decimates the windows, hitching posts and flower pots of the town with his pistol work; actions which cause several citizens to begin firing at cowboy in protest ... so Zip shifts his gunfire to Mulhall's defenders, wounding two before galloping north out of town. The miscreant very well known in the region, a warrant for Wyatt's arrest is soon issued by a Guthrie grand jury, but the cowboy avoids it's consequences by first hiding out on the Cleo Springs horse ranch of a former rustling partner named Matt Freeman (he repays the kindness by beginning an affair with Freeman's wife, Jennie. Then he moves even further north and begins outlawing in Kansas. His first crime is the robbing of a Greensburg livery business owned by A.D. Roberts of several items of riding gear ... his next, is murder.
Mulhall Train Station
Investigating the theft, 41-year-old Deputy Sheriff Andrew Winfield Balfour tracks the culprit ten miles further north to the community of Pryor's Grove, which is hosting a horse race and a carnival. Identifying Wyatt as the man he is looking for, with his gun in hand, Balfour attempts to arrest Zip, but the outlaw pulls a concealed pistol and shoots the lawman in the stomach, severing the man's spine and killing him almost instantly (the deputy leaves behind a wife and six children) while suffering two bullet wounds to his left hand and arm (high above, Darius Schuster is performing his high-wire act on a tightrope and bicycle as "The Great Gamboni" when the shooting takes place ... crying "Murder!" the gunplay unbalances Schuster and the man falls, incurring a number of injuries that will keep him from ever performing on a high-wire again). Now a murderer of lawmen, a $1,000 reward is placed on Wyatt's head and he heads even further north (and east), hoping to find refuge back in Cory, Indiana with his Aunt Lydia and Uncle Tom (the McGriffs). Safe for awhile, his hunters are no fools though and eventually the law shows up in the form of Captain Charles Hyland of the Terre Haute police, Sheriff John Hixon of Oklahoma's Logan County, Vigo County, Indiana Sheriff James Stout, Deputy U.S. Marshal Willis B. McRae, and Terre Haute copper William J. "Peggy" Smith. Hideout surrounded, at dawn, McRae and Smith slip into the house and surprise Wyatt who draws a .48 revolver, but drops it to the floor when Smith pushes a shotgun into Zip's stomach (along with telling the outlaw, "I'll blow ye to smithers!") is enough to dissuade the killer from getting into a gunfight in front of his uncle, aunt, and the couple's teenage son, Oscar. Returned to Guthrie, the cowboy goes on trial for his Mulhall gunplay, while Kansas officials wait to put him on trial for Balfour's murder. Knowing he is guilty of killing the lawman and most likely will have his neck stretched if he remains in the clutches of the authorities, Wyatt escapes his cell, but is soon captured and returned to a barred existence. The cowboy however has a Plan B, and during a "Come to Jesus" prayer service at the jail by the Salvation Army on New Year's Eve, December 31, 1892, Wyatt breaks into the jail's sewer system and crawls through the muck to freedom.
The Guthrie Jail
Now for the most part using the alias Dick Yeager, Wyatt returns to the Freeman ranch and puts together a gang of crooks and thieves that will terrorize the Oklahoma Territory for the next two years. Wyatt's first recruit is a Kansas desperado (Freeman out of the picture, Wyatt is now openly living with his former friend's wife) and former El Reno policeman named Isaac "Ike" Black, and Black's wife, Belle. The women will dress like cowboys most of the time and will serve the gang as secret scouts, will coordinate procuring any supplies the group needs, and will relay messages to various members of the group. For gun hands, along with Black, the gang will acquire a group of gun thugs that go by an assortment of bandit nicknames ... Jim Umbra, Mexican John, Rattlesnake Charley, Indian Bob, and an assortment of other Indian Territory scum. Making their base of operations the wild Glass Mountains of northwestern Oklahoma (the region is full of bat caves and has also been frequently by the Dalton Bothers and Bill Doolin and his Oklahombres), the gang selects an easy target for their first operation and rustles the untended horses of a band of Cheyenne Indians. Instead of easy pickings though, the warriors of Chief Henry Roman Nose come after their purloined ponies, retrieve their mounts, and push the outlaws back into their wilderness hideout. Rustling out, the gang then begins a bloody two years in which they rob stores, farms, ranches, and post offices, and are blamed for most of the crimes that take place in the territory (the members of the Doolin gang also are blamed, sometimes rightly so, for the same lawbreaking).
Belle & Jennie
Chief Henry Roman Nose And His Wife
And sometimes the blame falls exactly where it should. In November of 1893, the gang hits Hightower store and the post office of the town of Arapaho, escaping back into the hills with $750 in cash and a large supply of blankets to get the group through the winter. The town of Todd gets the Wyatt treatment in 1894 in a botched robbery that nets the bandits no money, but compliments of Zip's quickness with a gun, also takes the life of Blaine County store owner Edward H. Townsend (who dies in front of his wife and children as he tries to keep the outlaws from entering his business), a territorial lecturer for the area's Masonic Grand Lodge (not amused, the Masons up the reward for Wyatt's capture by another $300). 1894 also sees Wyatt murdering Dewey County Treasurer Fred Hoffman during a robbery, and there is a failed train robbery near Wharton that costs another citizen his life. Robberies, killings, and lots of bat cave hiding that as the group scatters from the law, allows Wyatt the opportunity to freelance his services to Bill Doolin's murderous gang for a raid on the Army payroll being carried by the Rock Island Railroad. Working with Doolin, Dynamite Dick, Little Dick West, Charlie Pierce, Tulsa Jack, Bittercreek Newcomb, and Red Buck, for his thirty minutes of effort, with rifle at the ready and pistol drawn, Wyatt covers the train from an embankment above where the iron horse stops, then moves through the passenger cars behind a negro porter carrying a grain sack that the beset travelers are encouraged to throw their jewelry, watches, and cash into, assisted in the purloining by Pierce (Pierce and Newcomb have less than a month to live before being betrayed by Dunn Family of Pawnee, Oklahoma). Noticing former U.S. Marshal William Grimes among the passengers, Wyatt accepts $1.40 from the man for the grain sack and tells him to tell U.S. Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen that he sends his regards the next time he sees him. Fleeing from the train, the outlaws each earn a cut of over $35,000 in plunder (refusing at first to open the door to the bandits, the express car messenger is wounded in the left leg, right wrist, and right arm by random rifle bullets that persuade him to change his mind and let the outlaws in), and Wyatt receives the added bonus of having lawmen across the territory think he's dead when fighting off a posse a few days later, lawman kill William "Tulsa Jack" Blake (the posse that does Tulsa Jack in is led by Madsen). Money pocketed and posse avoided, Wyatt returns to the Watonga-Okeene area to rest up before his next robbery. The reward for bringing in Wyatt either dead or alive has now been raised to $5,000!
Grimes
Madsen
That Ain't Zip!
Unwilling to wait for another call to action from Bill Doolin, Wyatt organizes a raid on the general store and post office of Fairview, Oklahoma. The raiders are comprised of himself, his girlfriend Jennie, Isaac Black, and Isaac's wife, Belle and ride out of town on the night of 6/3/1895 with cash, coins, supplies and three stolen horses. Heading back to their hideout in the Gyp Hills, the gang makes camp in the hills, where the following day, they are jumped by a posse consisting of U.S. Deputy Marshal Gus Hadwinger, U.S. Deputy Marshal J. K. Runnels, Woods County Sheriff Clay McGrath, and Woods County Deputy Marion Hildreth. In the all-day gun battle that ensues during a torrential rain storm, the outlaws become separated from their women (arrested, both women will go a trial for the robbery, but will be acquitted for a lack of evidence) before slipping up a nearby canyon to safety with Wyatt suffering a bullet wound to his left arm and Black taking a piece of lead in his left side Lawmen now flooding into the region (over 1,000 men will participate in a hunt lasting over 100 days), the bandits move from hiding place to hiding place, but inevitably bump into men looking for a major reward payday for bringing in the pair. On July 23rd, the pair have managed to reach the outskirts of Guthrie, but there they decide their lady friends are too well protected to rescue from the jail, and Wyatt and Black head back towards the Gyp Hills. On the run and out of supplies after weeks of dodging lawmen, weary and not thinking straight, the pair sneak into the town of Oxley at night and pilfer a post office and store, a robbery that nets them a few supplies, tobacco, and $35 in cash, but also alerts the authorities where their prey is located. Distancing themselves from their latest "caper" by only six miles, a posse finds the weary outlaws camped near Salt Creek the next morning and another gun battle takes place in which Wyatt takes another body wound, Black is creased by a rifle bullet to the head, and lawman Frank Pope is shot in the right leg. Bleeding and barefoot, the outlaws manage to escape the posse, but are now afoot, a situation they resolve by stealing two of the lawmen's mounts, then later in the evening moving out of the hills and through the lawmen's perimeter by stealing another horse and a cart, and posing as posse men, strike out for the North Canadian River with Wyatt putting the lawmen at ease by playing a French harp mouth organ the entire time the outlaws are exposed to their pursuers. Luck almost now totally dissipated, on the 29th of July, the men again duel a posse (this time in a running gun battle lasting twenty-five minutes) before escaping and making their way to an abandoned shack about four miles east of the small town of Cantonment (now just Canton, about fifty miles) where they hope to rest a little before renewing their flight. On Thursday, August 1st, the authorities once more find the outlaws.
Cantonment
Shack quietly surrounded as the outlaws eat a cold supper, when the men step outside arguing about who is entitled to the last portion of tobacco, Woods County Deputy Marion Hildreth (still chasing the men) yells at the pair to surrender, an order the pair immediately answer by firing their Winchesters at the posse. Fire met by fire, one lawmen is wounded, but the bandits get the worst of the gunfire, with Black struck in the head by a bullet that kills the outlaw (besides his clothes and weapons, Black is in possession of $1.50 in coin, a picture of his wife, Belle, and a paper with the words to two ballads written upon it), and another round that strikes Wyatt in the chest near his right nipple and then furrows halfway around Zip's body. Retrieving the rifle he drops as he is hit, Wyatt screams "Marion Hildreth, you have killed the best man in Oklahoma," as he sprints into a nearby cornfield, Seriously wounded, Wyatt tramples through the tall stalks of corn and runs east over a sand hill, moves through another cornfield and then comes upon the home of a young doctor. Wounds hastily treated, and a new mount procured at gunpoint, despite the doctor's admonition that he can't ride with his wound, Wyatt sets off on the doctor's little buckskin horse and heads east. Pains worsening as he rides along, Wyatt makes it seven miles before the doctor's pronouncement comes true. Turning the doctor's horse free, the outlaw begins walking, but soon encounters a farmer on the road driving a lumber wagon. His pistol convinces the man to take him to a ford across the Cimarron River. Wading across the river's wet, Wyatt spots a teenager driving a cart on the other side and soon has another reluctant driver carrying him onward ... at full speed for twenty-five miles. Reaching Garfield County, Wyatt release the boy and continues his flight, first driving forward in the cart, then mixing riding with walking as he reacts to his wounds and the condition of the horses he steals, all the while pursued by posses that keep getting bigger and bigger.
Bob Boze Bell Illustration For True West Magazine - The Fight On The Front Porch - Black Is Hit While Wyatt Fires His Winchester
Black
The long chase almost over, a 40-man posse tracks Wyatt to Turkey Creek, but then peels away from the trail to ride into the nearby town of Hennessey for supplies and fresh mounts. Ready for trouble, the lawmen receive information that the outlaw has been spotted crossing the Rock Island Railroad tracks about five miles south of the town of Enid; at Waukomis they telegraph the Garfield County sheriff to send assistance to the region's Skeleton Creek Valley where Wyatt has reportedly stolen a horse from a farmer named John Daley. Multiple posses now combing the area, five miles south of the town of Marshall, on the hot summer morning of Sunday, August 4,1895, lawmen find the big stolen roan horse of farmer Will Blakely grazing in a bend of Skeleton Creek ... alongside the horse they also find bloody tracks into the nearby cornfield of farmer Alvin Ross. Quietly, two posses' (by this point in the hunt, a large portion of Oklahoma's Anti-Horse Thief Association are involved) members merge and surround the area. Taking charge, Garfield County Sheriff Elza Thralls sends forward three volunteers, deputy's Ad Polk and Tom Smith (the third man's name is lost to history, when frightened by the prey's reputation with a gun, turns back before Wyatt is found) to find out what the cornfield might conceal. Creeping through the corn stalks, the two deputies discover a worn out Wyatt sleeping on a sandy mound where no corn will grow, the outlaw's right around his Winchester rifle and his left hand next to his cedar-handled Colt revolver. Guns at the ready, Polk calls out, "Throw your hands up, we've got you!" His eyes instantly snapping open, Wyatt grabs his guns, but as he does, both deputies fire and score hits on the outlaw ... only an inch apart, Smith's round tears through the outlaw's stomach, while the bullet from Polk's 40-70 Winchester turn's Zip's pelvis into a ruin, a shatter of roughly fifty splinters of bone. Despite his wounds, Wyatt gets off a couple of shots that miss their targets before he is overpowered by Smith, Polk, and other lawmen that have come to the deputies aid. At the end, the outlaw waves a single arm over his head and croaks "enough" in surrender.
Cornfield Capture From Police Gazette
Wyatt's Rifle
The hunt finally over, it takes an hour to carry Wyatt out of the cornfield and place him in a wagon for further disposition and a jaunting ride to a small church in the town of Sheridan (where doctors treat the bandit's wounds as best they can), then on to Hennessey, before finally jailing him in Enid ... a long journey made even longer by the fact that the lawmen argue with each other the whole way as to who should receive the reward for Zip's capture (a jurisdictional nightmare, the Sheridan men think they deserve the reward, Kingfisher County wants the money, the capture was made in Logan County, and the officers holding Wyatt at the church are from Garfield county) and where the badman should stand trial. Listening to the various arguments from his resting place in the church, Zip whispers to a nearby deputy guarding him, "If you'll give me my six-shooter for about two seconds, I'll stop the argument." No gun supplied to Wyatt, it is eventually decided that the reward money should be split among the posse men from Sheridan and John Daly, the farmer that spreads the last alarm after his encounter with Zip. As to the site of the trial, the doctors put a quick kibosh to any idea of a locale ... Wyatt's wounds are mortal and the outlaw has only days left to live. Before the end comes though, Wyatt seems to enjoy the continuous stream of visitors to his Enid cell, talking up his exploits and claiming to have killed eleven men in fair gunfights. The first man to stop by Wyatt's cell is U.S. Deputy Marshal Ed Kelley (he knows Wyatt well from having arrested him several times as the former police chief of Guthrie), with hundreds more following in the days ahead, many bringing homemade meals for the outlaw. Even "Six-Shooter Jack," John T. Wyatt, Zip's father, puts in an appearance. Eventually though, Wyatt's wounds curtail the visits. The jail a hot box of agony, Wyatt's guards try to provide him with a modicum of relief from the heat by hanging wet blankets on the jail's cells and window, along with keeping him liberally dosed with morphine. As the days pass though, nothing can hold back Wyatt's body slowly shutting down and the outlaw's cell smells of the gangrene that comes from his wounds, he stops eating and his only sustenance is cold milk as he becomes little more than a skeleton covered in bed sores and in almost constant pain drifting in out of consciousness, with the local paper following his daily woes as if they were reporting on a baseball game. Arriving at the inevitable ending, on Wyatt's last day the doctor attending him asks, "Is there anyone you wish to see or anything you wish to say?" To which the grinning outlaw replies, "Nobody to see, Doc, an' nothin' to say," before drifting into a final unconsciousness. Nathaniel Ellsworth Wyatt, the thirty-one year old outlaw also know as Zip Wyatt, Dick Yeager, and Wild Charlie dies with his boots off in Enid, Oklahoma on September 7, 1895, at 12:06 in the early morning of Friday, however his story continues on past his leaving. .
Downtown Enid
Awaiting The End
The day after Wyatt's death, his sister shows up at the Enid jail to claim her brother's possessions, but nothing is forthcoming from the Sheriff because the outlaw's personal effects have already found new homes, his infamous Winchester going to posse member Tom Smith, the outlaw's watch vanishing entirely, and the sheriff deciding Zip's pistols are his. Upset by the unauthorized transfer of Wyatt's property, the family turns away from claiming Zip's body for burial, so the county steps in and on Sunday, September 9th, 1895, the bandit goes into a cheap pine coffin and is buried in an unmarked pauper's grave, attended on the last journey of his mortal remains by casket maker Dan C. Bass, grave digger James McMillen, and Bass' little black dog. Later, as the town of Enid grows, the cemetery where Wyatt's remains are buried is dug up and the graves moved to other sites around town to make way for a school and playground. Wyatt is missed in the transfer to a new resting place and still resides where he was put in 1895 ... and it is said that on hot August and September nights he can be seen wandering the area, asking for a cool glass of milk. Before the burial though, there is another bit of business that Wyatt must endure. Wondering at the magnitude of the outlaw's internal wounds, Enid doctors Champion and Woods conduct an autopsy on Wyatt's body and find a rifle slug that has gone through the inner half of the outlaw's femur and pubic bone and has come to rest just above his pubic arch. The other bullet is the one that turns Wyatt's pelvis into a shattered mess before coming to rest close to his vertebrae column. Additionally they find that the inner lining of Zip's stomach has turned black; explaining the desperado's agonies during his last days, Wyatt has been decomposing for several days before his death ... an extremely hard way for even an outlaw to go!
Nathaniel "Zip" Wyatt
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