James M. Redwine

Osage County

A Thousand Words

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I was born in Pawhuska, Osage County, Oklahoma where I spent my first 19 years (1943-1962). Osage County is adjacent to Tulsa and Tulsa County. The Tulsa race riots of 1921 were never mentioned during my 12 years of public education and one year at Oklahoma State University.

I served as a judge in Mt. Vernon, Posey County, Indiana from 1981-2018. Until March 14, 1990 the lynchings of African Americans that took place on the courthouse campus on October 12, 1878 were unknown to me and never brought to my attention.

Upon being made aware of the Posey County murders I began to search for more complete information. A friend of mine, Glenn Curtis, who was born and raised in Posey County advised me he had seen a photograph of the 4 young Black men hanging from locust trees outside the courthouse door. He told me he remembered the elongated necks, swollen tongues and cue ball sized eyes of the hanging bodies. I have searched for a copy of that photograph since 1990.

October 12, 1878 Mt. Vernon, Indiana Courthouse Campus

My friend, Doug McFadden, who was also born and raised in rural Posey County told me that his grandfather told Doug that the day after the lynchings Doug’s grandfather watched as white citizens used the hanging young Black men for target practice. And while there was no photograph taken of the young Black man Daniel Harrison, Jr. who on October 10, 1878 was burned to death in the fire box of a locomotive in Mt. Vernon, another Posey County native friend of mine, Basil Stratton, told me that his grandfather, Walker Bennet, was an eyewitness. Walker told Basil that as a young boy he was present and saw several white men, including Walker’s father, force Harrison into the steam engine. Basil’s grandfather told Basil he never forgot the Black man’s screams and the smell of his burning flesh.

I have long thought that a photograph of the lynchings might be the evidence needed to finally get a memorial to the victims erected on the Posey County Courthouse campus. And yesterday my friends, Liz and Jeff Miller of Posey County, emailed me a copy of just such a photograph. Jeff and Liz received the copy from our mutual friend and historian, Ray Kessler of Mt. Vernon. Ray told me when we spoke by phone last night that he got the photograph from Karen McBride Christensen of Indianapolis who retrieved the picture from Georgia’s Emory University archives. I do not, as yet, know how it came to be there. Because of its graphic nature I have not attached it to this newspaper article. However, it did call me to reprise an article on race relations I first published July 4, 2005. Gentle Reader, as recent events may lead one to conclude the issues discussed in that article remain raw in our national psyche today, I offer it once more for your consideration.

 

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO U.S.!

LET’S HAVE A PARTY AND INVITE EVERYONE!

(Week of July 4, 2005)

The United States Supreme Court has occasionally succumbed to popular opinion then later attempted to atone for it.  The Dred Scott (1857) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1892) cases come to mind as examples of institutionalized injustice with the partial remedy of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) being administered many years later.

In Dred Scott, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that American Negroes had no rights which the law was bound to protect as they were non-persons under the U.S. Constitution.

And in Plessy, the Court held that Mr. Plessy could not legally ride in a “whites only” railroad car.  The Court declared that laws that merely create distinctions but not unequal treatment based on race were constitutional.  SEPARATE BUT EQUAL was born.

Our original U.S. Constitution of 1787 disenfranchised women, and recognized only three-fifths of every Black and Native American person, and even that was only for census purposes.  Our Indiana Constitution of 1852 discouraged Negro migration to our state in spite of Posey County Constitutional Convention Delegate, Robert Dale Owen’s, eloquent pleas for fair treatment for all.

Were these documents penned by evil men?  I think not.  They were the result of that omnipotent god of politics, compromise, which is often good, but sometimes is not.  Should you have read this column recently you may recall that I strongly encourage compromise in court, in appropriate cases.

However, as one who grew up in a state where the compromise of the post Civil War judges and politicians led to the legal segregation of schools, restaurants, and public transportation, I can attest that some compromises simply foist the sins of the deal makers onto future generations.

When I was 6 years old, my 7 year old brother, Philip, and I made our first bus trip to our father’s family in southern Oklahoma.

We lived on the Osage Indian Nation in northeastern Oklahoma.  It sounds exotic but our hometown, Pawhuska, looked a lot like any town in Posey County.

In 1950 our parents did not have to worry about sending their children off with strangers except to admonish us not to bother anyone and to always mind our elders.

When mom and dad took us to the MKT&O (Missouri, Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma) bus station it was hot that July day.  Oklahoma in July is like southern Indiana in July, WITHOUT THE SHADE TREES!

My brother and I were thirsty so we raced to the two porcelain water fountains in the shot gun building that was about 40 feet from north to south and 10 feet from east to west.

Phil slid hard on the linoleum floor and beat me to the nearest fountain.  And while I didn’t like losing the contest, since the other fountain was right next to the first one, I stepped to it.

“Jimmy, wait ‘til your brother is finished.  James Marion! I said wait!”  Dad, of course, said nothing. He didn’t need to; we knew that whatever mom said was the law.

 “Mom, I’m thirsty.  Why can’t I get a drink from this one?”

 “Son, look at that sign.  It says ‘colored’.  Philip, quit just hanging on that fountain; let your brother up there.”

Of course, the next thing I wanted to do was use the restroom so I turned towards the four that were crammed into the space for one:  “White Men”, “White Ladies”, “Colored Men”, and “Colored Women”.

After mom inspected us and slicked down my cowlick again, we got on the bus and I “took off a kiting” to the very back.

I beat Phil, but there was a man already sitting on the only bench seat.  I really wanted to lie down on that seat but the man told me I had to go back up front.  And as he was an adult, I followed his instructions.

Philip said, “You can’t sit back there.  That’s for coloreds.  That’s why that colored man said for you to go up front.”

That was the first time I noticed the man was different.  That was, also, the point where the sadness in his eyes and restrained anger in his voice crept into my awareness.

As a friend of mine sometimes says, “No big difference, no big difference, big difference.”

And if all this seems as though it comes from a country far far away and long long ago, Posey County segregated its Black and White school children for almost 100 years after 600,000 men died in the Civil War.  In fact, some of Mt. Vernon’s schools were not fully integrated until after Brown was decided in 1954.

And, whether we have learned from our history or are simply repeating it may depend upon whom we ask.  Our Arab American, Muslim, Black, Native American, and Hispanic citizens, as well as several other “usual suspects”, may think the past is merely prologue.

Sometimes it helps for me to remember what this 4th of July thing is really about.  It’s our country’s birthday party; maybe we should invite everyone.

There is nothing equal about separate.

Pugh Or Phew?

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JPeg Osage Ranch

Peg and I recently moved from Posey County in southwestern Indiana to Osage County in northeastern Oklahoma. The acculturalization for me was fairly seamless as I was born in Pawhuska, which is the county seat of The Osage. As for Peg, she was born in Schenectady, New York and has lived north of the Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Mississippi River her whole life. She is what we of the Oklahoma persuasion would generally classify as a “Yankee”. For Peg, the move from the land of corn, soybeans and concrete has been, well, let’s just say more interesting. And our log cabin out on the prairie thirty miles from the nearest Walmart occasionally poses new challenges for her. Oh, we do have a Dollar General about five miles away, but there’s one of those everywhere so that does not assuage Peg’s concerns.

As Peg becomes accustomed to being called “Ma’am” and getting to frequently use her high beam headlights on the uncrowded highways she is often confronted with the ambiance of a life lived among creatures she used to assume lived in zoos or within the confines of the Tallgrass Prairie Nature Preserve or the 3,700 acres of the marvelous Woolaroc Museum with bison and other animals only 7 miles from our cabin. Imagine her reactions when she began to encounter hawks, eagles, deer, wild turkeys, cattle, armadillos, scorpions, coyotes, opossums and raccoons right outside our door. Actually she has habituated quite well to most of Mother Nature’s creatures even when they pushed their way into our personal space. Unfortunately, our most recent visitors have been a family of skunks. That’s right. What the French zoologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte (1803-1857) classified as Mephitidae, which means stink.

When Pepé Le Pew was cavorting on the cartoon movie screen in search of love while spouting off in a French accent, the skunk came across as cute and lovable. However, when our own skunk family took up residence under our cabin and spent their nights defending their territory by spraying copious volumes of malodorous ink at the opossums challenging for the same space, Peg called for Terminix. The nearest office was in Tulsa fifty miles away.

Now we have live traps baited with some kind of cat food and cement poured into every cranny around the base of our cabin. Each night the skunks find a new way to burrow, chew or claw their way back under our home.  Gentle Reader, please imagine city girl Peg’s reaction to the wafting of odiferous waves of stench up through the floor and into her rugs and clothing. That’s right. It ain’t pleasant.

On the positive side we probably do not need to worry about any visitors wanting to stay even the traditional 3-day limit. As for Peg, she now understands why I bought a shotgun when we decided to move west.

Last Of The Buffalo Hunters

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Barbed Wire Fence in “The Osage”.                    

Before he served our country in Viet Nam my friend Jimmie Reed worked on his dad’s ranch in Foraker, Oklahoma. Jimmie and Bill Moon and I played football for the Pawhuska, Oklahoma Huskies and graduated together in 1961. The summer between our junior and senior years Jimmie’s father, Phil Reed, needed some fence built and Jimmie volunteered Bill and me to help. Mr. Reed paid us $7.00 per day plus a hamburger at lunch time at the old Foraker store.

One typical Osage County July day Mr. Reed and Jimmie came into Pawhuska at 6:00 a.m. and picked up Bill and me to work. If you have never had the experience of building barbed wire fence across a pasture of unyielding Osage County sandstone where shade is illegal, may I advise you to maintain your current status. We were equipped with bales of barbed wire, wire cutters, wire stretchers and, surprisingly to me as a town boy, sledgehammers and long iron pikes. Oh, we had manual post hole diggers but they shrank in fear when encountering two inches of top soil over two feet of rock.

About the only way to drive a metal fence post deep enough to hold stretched out wire was to first stand on the tailgate of a pickup and make a hole by driving down an iron pike with a sledgehammer. Then we had to drive a post into the hole.

That particular bucolic summer day on the prairie as I dodged the zooming grasshoppers and wondered how I was going to pay Jimmie back later by beating him at snooker at the local pool hall if we made it to dark, a cowboy from the nearby Boots Adams ranch drove up and spoke to Mr. Reed. Mr. Reed who was usually calm and laconic got agitated. I overheard him tell the cowboy something had to be done right away. Mr. Reed used a couple of emphatic words I had never heard him utter before.

Gentle Reader, you are probably wondering why Mr. Reed and Boots did not simply discuss the matter via their cell phones. Well, in 1960 a pickup was the cell phone. Anyway, the cowboy took Mr. Reed’s comments back to Boots. Here’s what it was all about.

Boots Adams, who was once the president of Phillips Petroleum Company headquartered in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, used to regale eastern dude money men with the great golden west by introducing them to cowboys, horses, cattle and the small herd of buffalo he kept at his ranch. We called them buffalo before the Nature Conservancy opened shop and made us say bison.

Buffalo/Bison

It turns out bison and cattle are kind of like Democrats and Republicans. They generally do not play well together. So, Mr. Reed told Boots’ cowhand something had to be done when the cowhand said seven of Boots’ buffalo had broken out and were causing havoc among Mr. Reed’s cattle.

Well, Boots’ cowboy hurried back to Boots with Mr. Reed’s concerns then returned. I heard the cowhand say, “Boots said to just shoot ‘em”. Actually, Boots used somewhat more colorful vernacular. As for the cowhand he produced several rifles and ammunition and told Mr. Reed that Boots was sending a flatbed truck with a wench to meet up with us where the buffalo were roaming.

Mr. Reed, Jimmie, Bill, the cowhand and I jumped into the two pickups and flew off to hunt buffalo! It was not long before we found the burly beasts ambling around Mr. Reed’s pasture as though they belonged there. And just as the politically incorrect buffalo hunters who used to kill herds of buffalo from a train’s flatcar, we removed the seven marauding behemoths.

Please do not castigate us, the last of the buffalo hunters, for protecting the cattle. It was a job that had to be done. And it sure beat building fence. I wish Jimmie and Bill, and Mr. Reed too, were still here to fill any gaps in my recollection. On the other hand, I know wherever they are they are cooler than in The Osage in July and are perhaps still chasing after some mystical buffalo instead of pounding down fence posts.

Nothing’s Plenty For Me

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The First Load, not The Last!

For those of you who read last week’s Gavel Gamut and are wondering about Peg’s and my cinematic futures let me report we have not yet received a call from Martin Scorsese. I know he has been busy. We remain both confident and hopeful. However, as we await stardom life goes on. Specifically, what we have going on is the interminable saga of our move from JPeg Ranch Hoosier in Posey County, Indiana to JPeg Osage Ranch in Osage County, Oklahoma.

Peg and I bought a cabin in Osage County last December. Our plan was to vacation there occasionally as we have numerous family members in Oklahoma. What we have discovered is the truism of the ancient admonition, “Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” And as our modest treasure has ever so increasingly been “invested” in the cabin we have slowly shifted our focus to the Tall Grass Prairie. Let me say the simple pleasures described by Laura Ingalls Wilder in her Little House on the Prairie books have been put in jeopardy by our transition.

We are in the throes of our tenth round trip of 1,200 miles with a loaded trailer and pickup.  (This time we have graduated to a U-Haul, my guess is Atlas Van Lines is in our future). At first we amused ourselves with the bucolic image of The Beverly Hillbillies with junk piled high as they headed west. After a couple of trips the analogy became too apt. Now we feel more closely aligned with the fate of Sisyphus. We are not sure why, but it seems the completion of one trip only guarantees we must start another. And what we have discovered is that no matter what household item we need in one place is always in the other. We now have duplicates of everything from can openers to skillets.

Peg and I used to wonder how other people had such difficulty with everyday tasks such as how does one keep track of where they put what. Now we get it. However, the question we now most often ask one another is, “Why did you ever buy that?” We are continually discovering items that have not surfaced in years, many still in their original packaging. Of course, we must pack and move them anyway. This phenomenon has tested our ability to refrain from asking one another, “Can we just throw that away?”

I have found that a great deal of what Peg holds to be indispensable is really superfluous. And I resent her attitude about many of the items in my Man Cave; wait until we start on the junk in her Girl Cave. She does not understand that I might need some of what she calls worthless items someday. I suggest we ask the husbands of the world to fairly judge what should be placed in the Conestoga and what should be dumped along the trail.

What Peg and I do agree on is the mystery of how over thousands of years we have gone from maintaining what is truly essential to accumulating thousands of items we forget we have. George Gershwin’s old song goes:

♫ I got plenty of nothing

And nothing is plenty for me.

I got no car.

I got no mule.

Got no misery. ♫

Porgy and Bess (1935)

Well, paring down to the essentials is a fine thought but I must end this column as Peg is calling out to me to load another box onto the trailer.

Hang Together Or Separately

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You may already know Peg and I bought a log cabin in Osage County, Oklahoma. Our home in Posey County, Indiana is a converted barn with 4,000 square feet of finished space and our barn/home also has a barn. Our cabin in Oklahoma is 2,000 square feet and we had to add a barn. Four thousand square feet of stuff does not smoothly fit in 2,000 square feet of space. However, my suggestion to Peg that we simply leave everything but our toothbrushes was not kindly received. Ergo, we are in the process of triage. I have learned the hard way to not suggest which items are disposable. My role is to take down and re-hang not to judge what should be preserved.

Benjamin Franklin and his wife, Deborah, lived much of their married life separated by the Atlantic Ocean as Ben served as Minister to France while Deborah refused to accompany him. But they managed to raise three children and stay married for many years. I suspect their marital success was in large part due to staying put in one house most of their marriage. When Ben’s famous quote, “We must hang together or we will surely hang separately”, is cited most people probably assume Ben was talking about our Revolution from Great Britain. I propose he was giving marital advice. You know Ben was famous and got rich for his advice column Poor Richard’s Almanac. Why not accept that he was an early Ann Landers?

What I think Ben meant was, if you and your spouse wish to avoid all out warfare, you should never engage in moving and especially not in what should be hung and where. For example, when I was sixteen my parents moved one block to a different house. Our family had three pictures on the walls. One was a black and white 8” x 10” photograph of our immediate family and the other two were Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (not the original) and some European’s creation of a blond-haired Jesus. All three were taken down by my mother and put back up by my father. No argument, no stress.

On the other hand, Peg and I have countless photos of us, of our three kids and their spouses, of our seven grandkids, some of whom already have spouses, and one great-grand kid. We have knickknacks from family vacations, from gifts and from school projects. Every wall in our Indiana home/barn is festooned with something. And Peg demands all of it must be hung in our much smaller Oklahoma cabin. Of course all our furniture has to be carefully placed somewhere too. Well, you see the dilemma.

We are gingerly adjusting to this new strain of “Cabin Fever”, but there is a constant simmering of strife just below the lip-biting surface. My position is usually reasoned and rational, but Peg’s is often influenced by emotion. For example, yesterday we spent over an hour negotiating if a forty-pound mirror should be saved and, if so, where would it go? Peg’s position was it is a family heirloom and my response about it not being from my side of the family was not charitably received. The mirror now hangs in its new location.

Peg and I have now made nine trips to the cabin with items crammed onto a trailer and in a car (SUV) and a pickup. We have about two more trips to go. Each trip takes about twelve hours each way and requires a day to load and another day to unload. The nitty gritty of what goes where will consume the remainder of our lives and marriage.

Now, if you Gentle Reader, wish to be a modern day Ben Franklin marriage saver, feel free to give us a hand and bring a truck!

 

A Tale of Two Counties

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Posey County, Indiana
Osage County, Oklahoma

 

 

America is a wonderful country from the amazing amalgam of cultures in cities such as Miami, New York City, San Francisco and Portland to the majesty of Yellowstone and the Mississippi River. We are truly fortunate to have the privilege to live here. As for Peg and me, we are most familiar with two counties in two states, Posey County, Indiana and Osage County, Oklahoma.

Of course, the basic element of all inhabited areas is the same, the inhabitants, and those inhabitants are more alike than unalike wherever we live. I have found this to be true from Russia and Ukraine to Palestine and Bahrain as I have taught judges from several foreign countries and from every state in America. Of course, I have also physically visited a few places around the world. It has been my great pleasure to discover practically everybody I meet is interesting. I understand why Will Rogers who grew up near Osage County, Oklahoma said he’d never met someone he didn’t like.

But just focusing on Posey County, Indiana and Osage County, Oklahoma, the two places Peg and I call home, I find much to admire in both. In Posey County the soil is so rich and the people are so industrious that enough wheat, corn and soybeans are produced to feed much of the world. And Osage County’s Tallgrass Prairie and hardworking cowhands furnish the accompanying beef. One need never go hungry if he or she spends time in either county.

I hope I have made it clear that I truly appreciate the county where I was born and the county where I have earned a living. On the other hand, just as there was a serpent in the Garden of Eden, both Posey and Osage Counties fall a little short of perfection due to the foibles of Mother Nature. I suppose life just requires that we occasionally find half a worm in an apple. Let me explain.

Neither Posey nor Osage County has unbearable weather. Each gets a couple of snows each year and each has a hot July and August along with a rainy spring and fall. Both experience tornadoes. For Posey County, Big Creek and the Ohio and Wabash Rivers occasionally flood as does Bird Creek in Osage County along with the Arkansas and Caney Rivers. But all in all the climate for both counties is fairly salubrious. In fact, the weather in both helps make them more interesting and for Indiana it gives citizens something besides basketball to talk about and for Oklahoma it expands the topics beyond football. Both states used to discuss politics but recently most rational people do not broach that topic.

However, it is not the occasional weather phenomenon that keeps paradise just out of reach for both counties. No, it is Mother Nature’s diabolical sense of humor. Let’s take up spring in Posey County first. You may know that Osage County, Oklahoma has thousands of roaming buffalo (bison). Well, just to make sure Hoosiers remember who dictates what happens in heaven, each April, May and June millions of biting/blood sucking buffalo gnats (flies) descend on Posey County much like the Biblical hordes of locusts. And like beachgoers after the movie Jaws it simply is not fun to be outside.

But Osage County has its own flies and to add to Mother Nature’s amusement She has supplied Osage County with several varieties of scorpions. Gentle Reader, should you never have been stung by a scorpion, as I have in Oklahoma, trust me, it is an experience you do not want. Peg, who is a born Yankee who spent her childhood in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and northern Indiana, has now learned to shake out her boots in the morning to be sure some scorpion has not chosen them as a residence. And the ubiquitous sand rock of Osage County appears to be a scorpion’s version of the Garden of Eden where the scorpions play the serpent’s role.

I guess what it comes down to is both Posey County, Indiana and Osage County, Oklahoma are wonderful places to live. But don’t forget to channel Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen and wear screening over your head and carry a fly swatter in Posey and shake out your boots in The Osage nine months out of the year.