The story of a ghost town

If you want to find a sweet innocent Joe amidst the carnage, you'd have some trouble.  When finally the smoke--that's gun smoke-- had cleared, the total dead and dying was seven--three lawmen who'd come to town to arrest the Dalton-Dooley gang, a bunch who'd made little Ingalls, Oklahoma, their home; three lawmen and three locals who innocently (mostly) got mixed in with the storm of lead thrown by the gang (from the tavern) and that thrown by the law (into the tavern). 

If you're following the story here and I'm telling it plain and simple, then you may have noticed that the listing of dead that day, September 1, 1893, included no outlaws, only lawmen and by-standers.  Those lawmen were after notorious hoodlums who shot up banks and trains for a living--and a good living it was, too.

Now if you're from Oklahoma or know American history, then that date, September 1, 1893, has you thinking--"say, when was that big land rush?--wasn't that about that time too?"

Yes, it was: the lawmen raided Ingalls two weeks before 100,000 wildcat Easterners poured over the line set by the government to keep people from what was called The Cherokee Strip. Therefore, you must be thinking, as was I, that the dirty streets of Ingalls must have been dead as dust, right? Two weeks later, had to be flooded with hungry homesteaders.

Missed again. Figure this into your calendar: the line holding people back had enough holes to allow some land-hungry folks to cross it, willing to buck the law. Those people quick jumpers were called "sooners": they'd sooner break the law to  get good land.

When the government wagon rolled into town, five armed lawmen crouching in its belly, their arrival wasn't strange--it wasn't the only wagon full of strangers just then..

"Young Simmons," was a kid who twice happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. First, on Main, outside the livery. When the government men showed up, they talked with Young Simmons at the same time Bitter Creek Newcomb, one of the crooks, took his sorrel over to the livery to get a shoe tightened. Dick Speed, a Special Deputy U. S. Marshall, and father of three little boys, asked Young Simmons who that guy was, just then coming out of the livery.

Young Simmons, only fourteen, arched an eyebrow, as if Speed was a fool. "Why that's Bitter Creek Newcomb," he said, and he wasn't lying, just astonished. In town, Bitter Creek was a celebrity, and the guy didn't even know.

Dick Speed picked up his Winchester and fired a shot; for the record, that was the first shot in a night full of gunfire. 

About the time the gun shots ceased, Young Simmons caught a bullet when he departed the saloon that took all the fire. Wrong place, wrong time. 

Ingalls had made celebrities of the Dalton-Dooley Wild Bunch, living off the fat of their robberies, treating them in Robin Hood fashion, thinking of them as grade A citizens of their new little burg. Maybe  they were, but mostly they weren't.

While all of them, that night, escaped into the long, open stretches of Indian territory, every one of them would eventually meet a fate not far distant from young Ned Simmons'.

Ingalls, today, is an honest-to-goodness ghost town.