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The Shadow of the Rope

Fort Smith, Arkansas
March 17, 1896

When Crawford Goldsby stepped out into the cool March air to meet his end, he was barely twenty years old. To the hundreds of spectators craning their necks for a view, he was "Cherokee Bill," the terror of the Territory, a cold-eyed killer who had slaughtered men for profit and for sport. They saw a villain. They saw a beast.

But the story of Cherokee Bill does not begin with the rope. It does not begin with the murder of a painter in Lenapah, or the brazen jailbreak at Fort Smith that left a brave guard dead in a stone corridor.

It begins in the heat of Texas, with a Sergeant’s chevron ripped from a uniform. It begins with a boy watching the dust settle on the horizon where his father rode away, never to return. It is the story of a "good boy" sent to Indian School who learned that the white man’s world had no place for a man of his complexion, and that the Indian nations were crumbling under the pressure of expansion.