LONG DUSTERS AND BURIED SILVER (Part 1)

[Trlewis48]

LONG DUSTERS AND BURIED SILVER©

The Wild Bunch of Oklahoma Territory

By T. R. Lewis​

(Before you get into this one, a quick word about the book. It's inspired by my new book, yet to be published, titled: The Billion Dollar Hunt - Treasures You Can Find! This story isn't one of the chapters, but it's built the same way every chapter in the book is, and most of what's in the book runs a lot bigger than this cache. Every legend in the book is priced out in today's terms, using $5,000 a troy ounce for gold and $100 a troy ounce for silver, so you're seeing what these old caches are worth now, not the nominal dollar figure from whatever decade the story happened in. Most treasure books point you at "the hills west of town" and stop there. Every story in the book comes with actual GPS coordinates, pulled from USGS and GNIS records, for the town, the landmark, or the search zone the legend is tied to. That's not the same as marking an X on the ground. It's a real starting point instead of a general direction.)

NINE MEN DOWN AT INGALLS
The morning of September 1, 1893, started quietly in the little town of Ingalls, Oklahoma Territory. Farmers hitched their wagons. A blacksmith lit his forge. Inside the O.K. Hotel and the Ransom and Murray Saloon, a group of young men played cards and drank coffee, in no hurry to be anywhere else. They had been in town for weeks. The locals knew who they were and mostly looked the other way, because the strangers paid cash for everything and never caused trouble in the streets.

Twenty-seven deputy marshals thought differently. Marshal Evett Dumas Nix had learned that most of the gang had been living openly in Ingalls for weeks, gambling at the Ransom and Murray Saloon and paying their hotel bills in cash. Nix organized a large posse of deputy marshals and Indian police and sent them toward the town under cover of darkness. They spent the night camped along a creek outside Ingalls, and by mid-morning two wagonloads of lawmen rolled quietly toward Main Street. A local boy on a pony spotted the wagons and rode ahead to warn the gang, but it was already too late to matter. Within minutes, gunfire tore through Ash Street, and a fight that had been building for months was over as quickly as it began.

By the time the smoke cleared, three deputy marshals lay dead or dying, a bystander was killed by a stray round, and eight or ten horses lay dead in the street. One outlaw was captured. The rest, including their leader, rode out of Ingalls and into legend.

That leader was William "Bill" Doolin, a former cowboy turned bank and train robber, and the men who rode with him called themselves the Wild Bunch. Newspapers called them the Oklahombres. For three years they robbed their way across Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and the twin territories that would soon become the state of Oklahoma, and lawmen chased them the entire time. Doolin's gang left behind a body count, a folk-hero reputation, and a story that still pulls treasure hunters into the red dirt hills of Oklahoma: the tale of the gold and silver he buried and never lived to spend.

FROM COWHAND TO OUTLAW
Bill Doolin was born in 1858 on a small farm near Big Piney Creek in Johnson County, Arkansas, the son of sharecroppers Michael and Artemina Doolin. At twenty-three he drifted west and found work as a cowboy on the H-X Bar Ranch in Indian Territory, owned by a Texas cattleman named Oscar Halsell. Halsell liked the young Arkansan enough to teach him to read, write, and do arithmetic, and eventually made him an informal ranch foreman. For a decade Doolin worked cattle across the territory and built a reputation as capable and trustworthy, a strange resume for a man who would become one of the most wanted outlaws in the American West.

His path changed on July 4, 1891, in Coffeyville, Kansas. Doolin and some cowboy friends were drinking in public when local lawmen tried to confiscate their beer, since Kansas was legally dry at the time. A gunfight broke out. Sources disagree on how serious it was: several accounts describe two officers wounded, while the National Park Service's own history of the Fort Smith federal court, which later tried several of Doolin's associates, describes the lawmen as fatally shot. Whichever version is accurate, Doolin fled Coffeyville a wanted man. Not long after, he joined the Dalton Gang, a band of outlaw brothers who had already built a name for themselves robbing trains. Doolin rode with the Daltons through a string of holdups, but he was not present on October 5, 1892, when the gang tried to rob two banks in Coffeyville at the same time. Armed townspeople cut the raid to pieces. Four of the five Dalton gang members died in the street. Only Emmett Dalton survived, gravely wounded and bound for prison.

Some historians believe Doolin was the sixth man that day, the rider who held the horses in an alley and slipped away when the shooting started. Emmett Dalton never named him, and the identity of that sixth man has never been confirmed. What is certain is that Doolin escaped the disaster that destroyed the original Dalton Gang, and within weeks he had recruited a new band of his own.

THE WILD BUNCH RIDES
Doolin's new gang opened for business on November 1, 1892, robbing the Ford County Bank in Spearville, Kansas. Three men rode up in the early afternoon. One held the horses while two others walked in with revolvers drawn, put a gun to the cashier's head, and cleaned out the till. They rode off with cash and more than fifteen hundred dollars in treasury notes while armed citizens fired at their backs. No one was hit. It was a clean escape, and it set the pattern for the next four years: fast, planned, and violent only when someone got in the way.

One gang member, Oliver "Ol" Yantis, made the mistake of hiding at his sister's house in Oklahoma Territory after the Spearville job. A posse tracked him down within the month and killed him in a shootout on November 29, 1892, making him the first of Doolin's men to die. It would not be the last.

In March 1893, Doolin married Edith Ellsworth, a preacher's daughter, in a secret ceremony at Kingfisher. The couple later had a son, Jay. Marriage did not slow him down. On June 11, 1893, the gang held up a Santa Fe train near Cimarron, Kansas, blasting open the express safe with dynamite and getting away with a thousand dollars in silver. During the getaway, lawman Chris Madsen put a bullet in Doolin's left foot, an injury that would trouble him with rheumatism for the rest of his life. The gang outran the posse and slipped back into the territory they knew best, the rough country around Ingalls.

By the time federal marshals came looking for them there in September, the Wild Bunch had built something close to a hideout with a town attached. Ingalls tolerated them, in part because they were generous with stolen money, and in part because nobody wanted to be the one to turn them in.

HOW THE GANG OPERATED
The Wild Bunch earned a second nickname, the Oklahoma Long Riders, from the dusters its members favored, long canvas coats that covered a rider from neck to boot and could hide a rifle or a second pistol without printing through the fabric. The coats also kept trail dust off a man's clothes during a long ride, which mattered to a gang that prided itself on looking clean and respectable when it walked into a bank in broad daylight. Doolin planned his robberies with more care than most of his contemporaries. Gang members typically scouted a target for days before a job, memorized escape routes across country they knew better than any pursuing posse, and kept fresh horses staged along the way out of town.

That discipline showed in the gang's survival rate during actual robberies. Across six major jobs between 1892 and 1895, the Wild Bunch lost no member killed or captured during the robbery itself; every death or arrest connected to the gang happened afterward, in a hideout, a bathhouse, or a farmhouse, when lawmen finally caught up with a member traveling alone or with only one or two companions. The one clear exception was the Battle of Ingalls, where the gang was caught resting in what it believed was a safe town rather than committing a robbery, which is part of why that single morning produced more bloodshed than every one of the gang's actual heists combined.

THE BATTLE OF INGALLS
The gunfight that made Ingalls famous began around ten in the morning. Deputy Marshal John Hixon led the posse of twenty-seven men into town, and the first shots came when lawmen spotted "Bitter Creek" Newcomb standing outside the saloon. Newcomb was hit and badly wounded but managed to escape on horseback. From there the fight spread across the length of the main street.

Doolin killed Special Deputy Marshal Richard Speed in the opening exchange. "Arkansas Tom" Jones, alone in an upstairs hotel room, shot Deputy Marshal Thomas Hueston, who died the next day; Hueston, ironically, had helped kill Ol Yantis the previous November. Bill Dalton, brother of the outlaws destroyed at Coffeyville and now riding with Doolin, shot Deputy Marshal Lafayette Shadley, who also died from his wounds within twenty-four hours. A stray bullet killed bystander Young Simmons as he tried to take cover, and another local man, known around town as Old Man Ransom, was hit in the leg but survived.

Deputy Marshal Jim Masterson eventually pinned Arkansas Tom Jones inside the hotel and threw dynamite to force him out. Jones surrendered, wounded, and became the only member of the gang captured that day. Dynamite Dick Clifton was hit but managed to stay in the saddle and escape with the rest. When the smoke cleared, three deputy marshals and at least one civilian were dead, several more were wounded, and Bill Doolin's gang had ridden out of Ingalls still mostly intact. Newspapers across the country called it one of the bloodiest gunfights of the entire outlaw era, and it turned Doolin from a regional bandit into a national name.

CATTLE ANNIE, LITTLE BRITCHES, AND A ROBIN HOOD REPUTATION
Part of what let the Wild Bunch survive as long as it did was the network of ordinary people willing to help them. Two teenage girls, Anna McDoulet and Jennie Stevens, better known by their outlaw nicknames Cattle Annie and Little Britches, attached themselves to the gang and rode the territory watching for lawmen. When a posse got close, the girls would ride ahead and warn the men, buying them time to scatter before deputies arrived. Doolin himself is credited with giving Jennie Stevens her nickname. Both girls were eventually captured and served time, becoming minor celebrities of the outlaw era.

Doolin also had ties with Henry Starr, a Cherokee outlaw who operated his own gang out of a hideout seventy-five miles northeast of Kingfisher, Oklahoma Territory. For a stretch of time, Doolin and his closest partners worked under Starr's protection, using the same rough hideout country to plan raids and disappear afterward. When Starr was arrested in 1893 and held for trial at Fort Smith, Arkansas, Doolin's gang lost one of its safest bases of operation and had to rely more heavily on the goodwill of towns like Ingalls.

That goodwill was not accidental. Doolin cultivated a reputation as something close to a folk hero, a Robin Hood figure who spent freely in local businesses and never robbed the small farmers and shopkeepers who lived around his hideouts. Modern historians are careful to note there is no documented evidence he ever gave money away to the poor the way the legend claims. What is well documented is that Doolin paid his bills in cash, tipped generously, and never let his gang rob the towns that sheltered them, a business calculation as much as generosity, since a hideout only works if the people living there have a reason to stay quiet.

Not every robbery went as planned. On April 1, 1894, the gang tried to rob the store of a retired deputy U.S. marshal named W. H. Carr at Sacred Heart, Indian Territory. Carr was shot in the stomach during the attempted holdup but managed to fire back before he went down, wounding Bitter Creek Newcomb in the shoulder. The gang fled empty-handed. It was a rare failure for a crew that usually planned its jobs with care, and it showed that even a wounded, retired lawman could cost the Wild Bunch a robbery.

REORGANIZING AND ROBBING
The gang scattered after Ingalls but did not stay quiet for long. Doolin, Newcomb, and Charley Pierce visited the Dalton family in Kingfisher to pay their respects after the Coffeyville deaths, and there they persuaded Bill Dalton to join them permanently. On January 23, 1894, the reorganized Wild Bunch robbed the Farmers Citizens Bank in Pawnee, Oklahoma Territory, though the haul was disappointing: only about two hundred and sixty-two dollars. Six weeks later, on March 10, they hit the Santa Fe railroad depot at Woodward, Oklahoma Territory, and made off with more than six thousand dollars, by far their richest job to that point.

On May 10, 1894, the gang staged one of its most violent raids at the bank in Southwest City, Missouri. Seven riders came into town in broad daylight. Two stood watch on the sidewalk, three walked into the bank with sacks, and two more held the horses. Doolin put a gun on the cashier and the bank's owner while his men filled the sacks with thirty-seven hundred dollars, missing an additional five thousand dollars in bank notes bundled nearby. As the gang fled, more than a hundred shots were exchanged with armed townspeople on Main Street. Former state senator J. C. Seaborn was killed in the crossfire, one of the few civilian deaths directly tied to the gang outside of Ingalls.

Marshal Evett Dumas "E.D." Nix, growing desperate to stop the bloodshed, assigned three of his most capable deputies, Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen, and Heck Thomas, to hunt the gang full time. Lawmen and outlaw-watchers came to call the trio the Three Guardsmen, and their pursuit would eventually end every outlaw career connected to Bill Doolin.

THE THREE GUARDSMEN
Marshal Nix's decision to put Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen, and Heck Thomas on the case full time changed the shape of the manhunt. All three men were already seasoned lawmen with reputations of their own. Tilghman had worked as a buffalo hunter and a Dodge City deputy before coming to Oklahoma Territory. Madsen was a Danish-born former cavalry soldier who had served in the French Foreign Legion before joining the U.S. Army and later the marshal service. Heck Thomas had ridden with Texas lawmen chasing the John Wesley Hardin gang years earlier and had a reputation for never giving up a trail.

On March 20, 1894, Nix sent the three men written orders that left little room for interpretation. He told them he had selected them for the job specifically because he trusted their ability to manage desperate men, and he wanted the Wild Bunch brought in alive if possible and dead if necessary. The directive worked exactly as intended. Over the next four years, the Three Guardsmen accounted for more Wild Bunch deaths and captures, directly or through the posses they organized, than any other law enforcement effort connected to the gang. Chris Madsen personally led the posse that broke up the Dover robbery and later hunted down Dynamite Dick Clifton. Heck Thomas killed Doolin himself at Lawson. Bill Tilghman captured both Doolin and Little Bill Raidler without losing a man in either arrest, a rare accomplishment against a gang that had already killed three federal marshals at Ingalls.

THE SLOW COLLAPSE
The gang's momentum began to break in 1894 and 1895. Bill Dalton split off to run his own small crew and was killed by an Anadarko posse near Elk, Indian Territory, on June 8, 1894. On May 2, 1895, bounty hunters known as the Dunn brothers shot and killed both "Bitter Creek" Newcomb and Charley Pierce in Payne County, Oklahoma Territory, collecting a reward for each. Newcomb had fallen for a young woman named Rosa Dunn, called the Rose of Cimarron, and it was her own brothers who turned him in.

On April 3, 1895, the remaining members robbed a Rock Island train at Dover, Oklahoma Territory, hoping for a fifty-thousand-dollar army payroll locked inside the express safe. They never got it open. Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen and a posse arrived by special train and surprised the gang before they could finish the job, killing William "Tulsa Jack" Blake near Ames, Oklahoma Territory, in the fight that followed. The gang settled for robbing passengers of cash and jewelry instead, a haul worth a fraction of what they had planned to steal. It was the last robbery conducted by the Wild Bunch as an organized group.

William "Little Bill" Raidler was shot and captured by Bill Tilghman on September 6, 1895. He survived his wounds long enough to be paroled in 1903 but died the following year. George "Red Buck" Waightman, considered the most reckless and unpredictable of the bunch, was killed near Arapaho, Oklahoma Territory, by a Custer County posse on March 4, 1896. One by one, the men who had ridden into Ingalls together were being hunted down one at a time.

CAPTURE, ESCAPE, AND A LAST STAND
By late 1895, Doolin's foot wound had worsened into chronic rheumatism, and he traveled with his wife to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a resort town famous for its mineral bathhouses, hoping the hot water would ease the pain. He registered under the alias Tom Wilson and kept a low profile. It did not last. On January 15, 1896, Deputy Marshal Bill Tilghman found him soaking in a bathhouse and arrested him without a struggle. Tilghman brought his prisoner back to the federal jail in Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory, to await trial for the Ingalls killings.

Prosecutors offered Doolin fifty years in exchange for a guilty plea. He refused, telling Tilghman afterward that fifty years was too long to sit in a cell. On the night of July 5, 1896, Doolin and a dozen other prisoners broke out of the Guthrie jail, Dynamite Dick Clifton among them. Doolin made his way through the rough country known as the Cimarron Brakes toward Lawson, Oklahoma Territory, where his wife and young son were staying with her family.

Deputy Marshal Heck Thomas got word of the hideout and led a posse to the farm on the night of August 24, 1896. When Thomas called for his surrender, Doolin raised his pistol and fired twice. A blast from Deputy Bill Dunn's shotgun and rifle fire from Thomas's men cut him down before he could fire a third shot. He was thirty-eight years old. Doolin was buried in the Boot Hill section of Summit View Cemetery in Guthrie, close to the outlaw Elmer McCurdy, at coordinates 35°53'45"N, 97°24'12"W.

The rest of the gang did not last much longer. Dynamite Dick Clifton, recaptured and escaped a second time, was finally killed near Checotah, Indian Territory, on November 7, 1897, by marshals under Chris Madsen. Richard "Little Dick" West, the last man standing from the original Wild Bunch, was killed in Logan County, Oklahoma Territory, on April 8, 1898. Arkansas Tom Jones, the one man captured at Ingalls, served time, was eventually pardoned in 1910, and lived another fourteen years before he was shot and killed by police in Joplin, Missouri, in 1924, while robbing yet another bank. By the close of the 1890s, every man who had ever ridden with Bill Doolin was either dead or behind bars.

COUNTING THE TAKE
Add up the documented robberies and the Wild Bunch's haul looks almost modest next to its body count. The Spearville bank produced seventeen hundred dollars. The Cimarron train robbery brought in about a thousand dollars in silver. Pawnee yielded a slim two hundred and sixty-two dollars. Woodward was the gang's biggest single score at more than six thousand dollars. Southwest City added another thirty-seven hundred, and the passengers robbed at Dover accounted for fifteen hundred more. Added together, the documented take across the gang's four-year run comes to somewhere near fourteen thousand dollars, a real fortune by 1890s standards but nowhere near the sums attached to bigger legends like the James-Younger Gang.

Using standard inflation conversion based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, fourteen thousand 1890s dollars carries the purchasing power of five hundred thousand dollars today, since a single dollar from that era is worth about thirty-eight dollars now. That comparison is useful for understanding everyday buying power, but it is not the method this series uses for treasure valuations. Following the series-wide convention of pricing historical gold at five thousand dollars a troy ounce and silver at one hundred dollars a troy ounce, the picture changes considerably.

Throughout the years the Wild Bunch operated, the United States dollar was legally defined as 1/20.67 of a troy ounce of gold, a peg that had held since the 1830s and would not change until the gold standard was abandoned in 1933. Except where a source specifically documents a robbery's coin as silver, this chapter treats 1890s-dollar amounts as gold-standard dollars for conversion purposes, since that was the legal basis for the currency itself regardless of which specific coins or notes changed hands. At that rate, one 1890s dollar converts to $241.90 in modern gold-value terms. The one clear exception is the Cimarron train robbery, which multiple sources specifically describe as a haul of silver rather than gold or paper. A standard 1890s silver dollar contained 371.25 grains of pure silver, or about 0.7734 troy ounces, which converts to $77.34 per face dollar at the series' hundred-dollar-an-ounce silver price.

Applying that method to each job: Spearville's seventeen hundred dollars converts to $411,000. The Cimarron silver haul of one thousand dollars converts to $77,000. Pawnee's slim two hundred and sixty-two dollars still comes to about $63,000. Woodward, the gang's biggest score at six thousand dollars, converts to $1,451,000. Southwest City's thirty-seven hundred dollars comes to about $895,000, and the fifteen hundred dollars taken from Dover passengers converts to $363,000. Added together, the documented take across the gang's four-year run, worth about fourteen thousand dollars in 1890s money, converts to approximately $3,261,000 in modern gold and silver value, a larger figure than the inflation-only comparison above and a better match for how this series values every other treasure legend in the collection.

What the gang never got was the prize they wanted most. The fifty-thousand-dollar army payroll locked in the express safe at Dover converts to $12,095,000 at the same gold rate. Chris Madsen's posse arrived before the gang could blow the safe open, and the Wild Bunch rode away with nothing more than passengers' pocket money. It stands as the single largest sum the gang ever came close to and the one that got away.

THE FORTUNE HE NEVER SPENT
By the summer of 1895, the Three Guardsmen had killed or captured most of Doolin's gang, and Doolin himself fled first to New Mexico Territory, hiding out with Richard "Little Dick" West. Late that year he and his wife, Edith, made their way to the town of Burden, Kansas, a farming community in Cowley County roughly forty miles southeast of Wichita, sitting at 37°18'54"N, 96°45'19"W. Edith had family in the area, and the couple settled there under an assumed name while Doolin waited out the heaviest part of the manhunt.

Exactly what that stay looked like depends on which account is followed, and the two most detailed versions do not fully agree. A local Kansas history source describes the Doolin family camping in a tent pitched near a spring about a mile and a half west of Burden, on a farm belonging to a man named Johnnie Wilson. Doolin, posing as an impoverished homesteader who had not yet found his own land, took the name Thomas Wilson and made regular trips into town for supplies driving a rundown wagon, playing the part of what the account calls a played-out Oklahoma boomer. True West Magazine, by contrast, describes Doolin purchasing a small plot of land with a wood-frame shack on it near Burden and retreating there with his stolen money between robberies, keeping the property secret from everyone, including most of his own gang. Both versions agree on the alias, the general location, and the purpose, a hideout Doolin's own men did not know about, but they disagree on whether he was squatting as a tenant on someone else's farm or had quietly bought land of his own. No property deed or court record settles the question either way, and this chapter presents both versions rather than choosing one, since the underlying sources do not agree.

What both accounts agree on is more important for the treasure itself: Doolin's friends and fellow outlaws knew he had buried his share of the gang's robbery money, but none of them knew exactly where. In December 1895, Doolin left Burden and crossed into Arkansas to soak his rheumatic foot in the mineral baths at Eureka Springs, where Bill Tilghman arrested him the following January. Doolin was jailed at Guthrie, escaped that July, and fled back toward Burden before lawmen intercepted his trail and pushed him east into Oklahoma Territory, where Heck Thomas's posse killed him at Lawson on August 24, 1896, barely seven weeks after the jailbreak. He never returned to Burden and never told anyone, not even Edith, precisely where he had put the money.

According to True West Magazine's research, no one located Doolin's secret Burden residence until twenty years after his death, around 1916. By then the shack, or the tent site, depending on which account is accurate, had long since collapsed or vanished, and the land had grown over with weeds and brush. Searchers who worked the property once its location became known found nothing. Despite repeated searches over the century since, Doolin's cache of buried gold and silver coin has never been recovered, and no credible published account claims otherwise.

One more thread of the story deserves a skeptical look. Some retellings claim Doolin's total take across his outlaw career reached as high as $175,000, and a newer figure circulating in less rigorously sourced online summaries puts it closer to $165,000. Converted at the series' gold-standard rate, those lore figures would represent something like $42 million and $40 million in modern value, sums wildly out of proportion to the documented robbery total of $3.26 million calculated earlier in this chapter. True West Magazine, the source that documented the Burden hideout in the first place, explicitly calls the larger figure lore and notes that Doolin in fact lived frugally in his wood-frame shack rather than spending like a man sitting on an eight-figure fortune. That detail cuts hard against the idea of an enormous, buried hoard and fits far better with the well-documented robbery already laid out in this chapter. Readers should treat any six-figure nominal total for Doolin's buried fortune as folklore layered on top of a real but smaller sum.

That Burden site sits just across the state line in Kansas, which raises a fair question for anyone tracing the money back to Oklahoma Territory. The likely answer is that Doolin chose a hideout close to home turf but just outside the territory where every deputy marshal in Guthrie could recognize his face on sight. The theater of his crimes, his marriage, his other hideouts, and his death all belong to Oklahoma. Only the Burden site itself sits a short ride across the border, a detail worth knowing before anyone plans a search there instead of in Oklahoma proper.