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Another Look at Ned Christie
Regina McLemore
A single night of drinking led Ned Christie from the respectable life of a Cherokee statesman, to a five-year war with the U.S. Marshals and infamy as a notorious outlaw.
THE WAUHILLAU COMMUNITY LIES at the edge of the Ozark Mountains in what was once called Indian Territory, in Adair County, about fifteen miles east of Tahlequah, Oklahoma. According to Gene Norris, Senior Genealogist of Cherokee Nation, Wauhillau, Cherokee for eagle, was named for respected Cherokee elder, Katie Eagle Goback. She was the mother of Lydia Thrower Christie, wife of Watt Christie. Watt Christie, a survivor of the Trail of Tears, served as a Cherokee Nation Senator and was a well-known member of the Wauhillau community. His son, Ned Christie, and his battle with Judge Parker and the U.S. Marshals, would bring unwanted fame to the Christie family and to the community named for his grandmother.
Like his father, Ned was a blacksmith, as well as being a gunsmith, and like his father before him, he served his people as a Cherokee Nation Senator. He was a close advisor to Chief Dennis Bushyhead and was known for his fiery speeches against the encroaching whites and attacked their plans of building railroads across Indian Territory. He resisted the idea of allotment and strongly supported Cherokee sovereignty. Some Cherokees still maintain that Christie’s outspokenness against the whites and their ideas made him a ready target for elimination.
He was generally well-liked, and many favorable comments about Christie from those who knew him can be found in the University of Oklahoma’s “Indian Pioneer Papers,” an oral history collection that spans from 1861 to 1936. Further study of these interviews and other sources reveal that Ned Christie was no saint. He was known to have a hot temper, especially when he was drinking. Christie was charged with manslaughter in the liquor-related 1885 death of a fellow Cherokee, William Palone. The tribal government in Tahlequah tried and acquitted him.
Christie’s taste for whiskey was the catalyst for his trouble with Judge Parker. Although newspaper and other accounts of what happened on that day of May 4, 1887, vary, common facts can be found in most of them. Ned Christie rode to Tahlequah that day for an overnight stay before he was expected at a Cherokee Council meeting the next morning. That evening, he, and some companions visited one of the local bootleggers, Old Lady Shell, who sold Christie a bottle of whiskey. Since she didn’t have a cork for the bottle, she tore a piece from her dress to use as a stopper. Sometime during the evening, Christie’s companions left him, passed out, asleep in the bushes by a branch which flows close to the town of Tahlequah.
That same day Dan Maples, Deputy United States Marshal, and one of his men, George Jefferson, were on the job in Tahlequah, investigating the growing illegal whiskey operations in the area. After a day of searching for possible suspects, Maples and Jefferson headed back to where they had camped for the night. As they crossed the branch, Jefferson caught the glint of a gun, hidden in the trees. He shouted, “Don’t shoot!”
But the assassin fired. Maples got off a few shots before he fell, after being struck in the chest. One shot broke a whiskey bottle, located on the person of his killer. The bottleneck fell near a tree, where it would be found later. Jefferson, assisted by others who heard the shots, took Maples to a nearby residence where he was treated but died the next morning.
When Christie awoke, some friends told him he was a suspect in the murder of Deputy Marshal Maples. They advised him to leave Tahlequah until things had settled down. Killing a white man was punishable by death. Claiming his innocence, and saying he didn’t even have his gun with him the night before, Ned refused to leave.
When the Cherokee Council met that morning, Ned attended but was soon informed the United States Marshals had issued warrants for him and some other suspects. Saying, he knew Judge Parker would hang him if he turned himself in, Christie rode off to Wauhillau to hide out near his home. He didn’t know that one suspect, Bud Trainor, a well-known local criminal, had testified that Ned Christie was the man who shot Deputy Maples.
A five-year war between Ned Christie and the U.S. Marshals soon ensued. At times, Ned seemed to toy with the marshals. With his reputation as a crack shot, he could have shot to kill many times but limited himself to shooting the hats off their heads or to blowing holes in their hats. William Winder, a white man who lived in the Wauhillau community, described Ned as “a very honest and honorable Indian.” They were on friendly terms, and Ned sent a messenger to bring Winder to his place. According to Winder, Ned wanted him to warn the new Deputy Marshal, Curley Creekmore, who had sworn he would catch Ned. “I don’t want to hurt him, but he better stay out of these woods and stay with his loving wife and children.”
During this time, Christie repulsed numerous attempts by the U.S. Marshals—including the legendary Heck Thomas and Bass Reeves—to capture or kill him. Christie’s widespread network of family and friends alerted him when lawmen were in the area and supplied him with provisions.
Even though Thomas failed to bring Christie in, he came very close to killing him. He wrote an eyewitness account of the encounter in a letter to his superior, Marshal Yoes, which was printed on October 4, 1889, in The Fort Scott Daily Monitor. …” Myself and Deputy United States Marshal L.R. Isbell, accompanied by three men as posse, attempted to capture Ned Christie…” He went on to tell how when Christie’s dogs raised an alarm, they all rushed the house, calling on Christie to surrender in English and Cherokee. They heard him moving in the loft of the house, and a shrill war cry rang out, accompanied by gun shots leveled at them through a hole in a gable.
NED CHRISTIE AND BROTHER JIM CHRISTIE.
After returning the fire, Thomas tried to talk again. “We then told him to come out or we would burn his house, and he replied by opening fire on us. We then fired a small workshop near the house, hoping the smoke would drive him out…. While waiting for the smoke to drive Christie out, Isbell exposed his shoulder, getting a ball through it, shattering it very badly….I then told him to get behind a bigger tree, and I fired into the house rapidly to get Christie’s attention….”
Believing a running figure was Christie, Thomas called out for him to hold up, and, getting no response, fired. The figure turned out to be a boy, whom Thomas had shot in the lungs and both hips. The boy crawled away in the high weeds as the main house caught fire.
Thomas made a decision to leave because…” we had been here two hours and momentarily expected to be bushwhacked. We could not leave Isbell, who was very faint….”
Thomas learned later that Christie was in the burning house when they left, shot in the forehead, the ball entering into the brain cavity. After sharing this information with Yoes, he concluded by saying, “I have Isbell in a hotel in Tahlequah, but it is not safe to leave him alone. Christie has five brothers left, so it may be some time before I can see him safe.”
Author Ken Frates in the article, “The Atonement of Ned Christie,” discussed the conflicting information a writer encounters when researching Ned Christie. Although most Cherokees believed he was innocent, in the eyes of the law, he was a wanted criminal for killing one marshal and wounding another. Christie was soon blamed for every robbery and every unsolved crime in Indian Territory. His exploits brought him notoriety, and he was featured in dime novels and other publications as a bloody outlaw who terrorized both whites and Indians.
Historical accounts vary as to which family members and friends were present at different attacks upon Christie. Some believe his son was the boy who was wounded during the house burning. Others, like Frates, believe it was Little Arch Wolf, his nephew.
NED CHRISTIE’S HEADSTONE, DECORATED WITH FLOWERS AND GIFTS, TO THIS VERY DAY.
When his friends carried him from his burning house, unconscious, having been shot through the bridge of the nose and through one eye, they took him and Wolf to a safe place. Both Christie and Wolf survived with the help of a local white doctor and a Cherokee medicine man.
After a short respite, a new two-story Christie house went up. This one was more fort than house and stood on top of a hill in a position which afforded a clear view in all directions. The structure soon gained the local name “Ned’s Fort,” and withstood more assaults from the marshals. They seemed to decide more militant measures were called for, so they brought in heavier weapons ordinarily reserved for the military.
When twenty-five lawmen arrived at Ned Christie’s home shortly after dark on November 1, 1892, they brought rifles, ammunition, black powder, several boxes of dynamite—and a field cannon. Author Julia Galonska paints a vivid picture of what happened during the last battle between Christie and the United States Marshals in her article, “The Death of Ned Christie.”
Gunfire was exchanged between Christie and the marshals for over twelve hours, amounting to some 2,000 rounds of ammunition. The air was thick with cannon smoke after 38 rounds were spent but did little damage. They tried doubling the powder charge to blast out a wall, but this only split the barrel of the cannon, and put it out of business. Shortly after midnight, they came up with a plan that would work. The men fashioned a rolling oak-plank shield to allow one deputy to approach the cabin, and when close enough, to run forward with six sticks of dynamite. The dynamite blew out an entire wall of the fort and ignited a fire that completely engulfed the structure. When Ned Christie leaped through the burning house and ran out, with his two .44s blasting, they shot him down.
Eli Whitmire, an acquaintance of Ned’s and a fellow Cherokee Senator, told what happened after Ned’s death. He said the deputies strapped his corpse to a door of Ned’s house and carried it to their camp for pictures. They hauled the remains to Fort Smith where Judge Parker offered his thanks. The body was propped up near the Fort Smith Courthouse so that spectators could gawk at it and take more pictures. It stayed on display until the corpse was placed on the train to Fort Gibson where Watt Christie collected his son’s body. Ned was laid to rest in his family’s cemetery in the community named for his grandmother, Wauhillau.
On June 8, 1918, in The Daily Oklahoman, it was revealed that former slave Richard Humphrey had witnessed the murder but had waited many years to tell his story out of fear of the murderer.
On his way from work that night, Humphrey saw Bud Trainor stoop over Ned Christie, who was passed out in the bushes. Trainor took off Christie’s jacket and put it on over his clothes. Humphrey watched as Trainor stood behind a tree and shot Maples. After the shooting, Trainor ran to Christie and threw the coat over him. He tried to rouse Christie, but he only walked a short distance and fell over asleep again. Trainor ran away.
The day after the shooting, some men found the broken neck from the whiskey bottle near the tree where the assassin had hidden. Tied upon the broken neck was a strip of cloth from Nancy Shell’s apron. A short distance away, they found Christie’s jacket with the shattered remains of the bottle in the pocket.
A small strip of material and a few pieces of glass. How little it takes to ruin a man’s reputation and end his life.
—Regina McLemore is a retired educator of Cherokee heritage. Her great, great grandmother, Susie Christie Clay, survived the Trail of Tears in 1839. Traveling in another detachment was Susie’s cousin, Watt Christie, destined to become Ned Christie’s father.
