Mike Cox - Finding the Wild West: The Great Plains: Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas

A crossroads in the Cherokee Nation looked like a good place to start a business, so William J. (Jeff) Reed built a store and a log cabin for his family there in 1890. The next year, when the government approved a post office at his store, he named it Ada for his daughter. Sales picked up considerably when the Frisco Railroad arrived in 1900 and the town grew from there.

The Night the Lights Went Out in Ada

The Old West and twentieth-century technology intersected at 2:00 a.m. on April 19, 1909, when suddenly Adas electric grid and telephone system went dead. A mob led by some of the towns most respected citizens had cut off power and communication and then proceeded in the dark to the county jail, where four murder suspects lay asleep in their cells. The vigilantes easily took charge of prisoners, ordered them to dress, and marched them to the nearby vacant Frisco Livery Stable where they were hanged from the rafters. They had been accused of killing popular Ada resident A. A. Gus Bobbitt, a rancher and deputy US marshal. Later that day Justice of the Peace H. J. Brown ruled that Joe Allen, B.B. Burrwell, Jim Miller, and Jesse West came to their deaths by strangulation by a rope tied around their necks administered by the hands of unknown persons. Of the four accused, the best known was Miller, a professional hit man known for or suspected of killing a dozen people. A religious man despite his violent occupation, Miller did not fight for his life. All he asked was that his hat be placed on his head after he was gone. After the four quit kicking, someone obliged his final request.

The frame structure on Main Street where the mass lynching occurred has long since been razed and the old Pontotoc County courthouse and jail were replaced in 1926. But in 1997, the Oklahoma Outlaw and Lawman Association (now defunct) placed a shiny black granite marker on private property not far from the scene of the quadruple hanging. Engraved at the bottom of the marker, beneath 119 words describing the lynching, is the notation that it had been erected As a memorial to the end of the Old West and the struggle for law and order. There it stood, to the annoyance of many locals who would just as soon not have Ada remembered for a lynching, until it was placed in storage in 2009. In 2015 the marker was moved to the Box X Cemetery (5251 County Road 1470; GPS coordinates: N34 51.37, W96 48.37), 9.2 miles northwest of Ada.

In the 1870s a buffalo hunter named Frazer hollowed out a dugout near Bitter Creek in what was then Greer County, Texas. He left when the buffalo did, but a small community that bore his name remained in the vicinity of his dugout. When a flood swept over the settlement in 1891, a new town was laid out on higher ground. Someone familiar with Latin suggested the place be called Altus, meaning high. The town grew as a railroad and agricultural center, with cotton-growing initially driving the economy. Altus has six buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Western Cattle Trail from Texas to Dodge City entered Oklahoma at Doans Crossing in Jackson County. Some nineteen million cattle splashed across the river at this point until the crossing was abandoned in 1895. The Museum of the Western Prairie (1100 Memorial Dr., Altus; 580-482-1044) covers the full range of southwest Oklahomas history, including the story of this old cattle highway. A historical marker summarizing the history of the Western Trail stands just off US 62, two miles east of Altus. Another historical marker is located southwest of Tipton on County Road East 159.