“ALL THE NOTORIOUS DALTON boys served as peace officers in the Indian Territories at some time. The best of us was my brother Frank who was murdered by whiskey runners on a Sunday morning in November of 1887. He was a marshal working for Judge Isaac Parker in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations of what would become Oklahoma, and he was paid a paltry two dollars for every criminal he hauled into the federal court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, with any necessary burials being deducted from his paycheck. So he could not have been anticipating much extra spending money when he and Deputy Jim Cole got word that the Bill Smith bunch were selling hard liquor to the Indians out of a nester camp in the Arkansas River bottoms.

They rode through canebrake from three in the morning till five. Marsh fog splashed away from the horses’ shoes. Then the sun lifted and they saw in the green morass a white tent with walls of mud and hickory logs. My brother Frank and Deputy Cole picketed their horses and crept up so close to the camp they could burn their hands on the cooking embers, and there espied the bootlegger Lee Dixon in a sleeping bag and Baldy Smith himself, in a black suit on a stained mattress with a chub whore out of Tupelo who called herself Mrs. Smith. The officers did not notice young Bill Towerly squatted down near the horse tie-ups drinking a cup of grainy coffee.

Frank stood up and walked toward the tent with a warrant in his hand that charged Smith with larceny and introducing. He stomped his boot heel on the board floor and Smith raised up his head from sleep and the two men talked for a minute and Lee Dixon got up on his elbow and rubbed his eyes and stared at Jim Cole.

Then Smith fired a derringer at my brother’s stomach. Frank groaned and dropped down to his knees, holding the front of his coat, and he cocked his Peacemaker and shot Smith in the neck, and cocked it again and shot Smith’s whore in the heart and Deputy Cole shot the man in the sleeping bag as he was hunting for the Dragoon he kept hidden under his pillow.