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Al Spencer & Gang

 Part 1

The following information was compiled by David Murray of Inverness, Scotland, in 1996:

The bulk of this article, concerned mainly with the activities of Al Spencer and his numerous associates in the early 1920's - and regarded more as a tentative exploration rather than anything like a definitive study - is based on reports taken from contemporary newspapers, ie. Tulsa Daily World, Bartlesville Morning Examiner, Bartlesville Daily Enterprise, Pawhuska Daily Capital, Pawhuska Daily Journal, and the Osage County News. For, although the outlaws got a lot of press coverage in their own times, not much seems to have been written about them since. In "A Dynasty of Western Outlaws" by Paul I. Wellman, he included a short and not very accurate account of Spencer, concentrating mainly on the Okesa train robbery. Arthur H. Lamb's "Tragedies of the Osage Hills" included a number of episodes largely based on excerpts from the contemporary press. The memoirs of Henry Wells were published in a small volume entitled "Outlaw's End", but while Wells was undoubtedly an associate of Spencer in several of his exploits, his later accounts of them tended to vary with each telling, and much of what he said has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

And, apart from two or three fairly poorly researched articles, which have appeared in various magazines, that appears to be that.

As Henry Wells was an established outlaw long before Al Spencer was heard of, and is generally regarded as having been Spencer's mentor-in-crime. We will start with him. He was the subject of "Henry Wells Out-lived Them All" by Arthur Shoemaker, printed in True West magazine of February 1990, an article based largely on heresay and on quotations from Wells himself, some of which conflict with his recollections as written in "Outlaw's End."

From the two sources, however, it would appear that he was born on a farm in Lee County, Virginia, about 1881, and raised as a youth in Wheaton, Missouri. He left home due to some trouble over a girl, so he said, and made his way to Oklahoma where he worked for a couple of years in the expanding township of Bartlesville. After a knife fight, in which he apparently injured two men, he took himself off to be a cowboy in the Osage country. Within a few years, by now married to a nurse from Oklahoma City, he had established himself in a cabin tucked away in Lost Creek Canyon, southwest of Okesa, a flagstop on the M.K.T. railroad, and was employed as a cowboy by Charles Johnson, who ran a spread between Bartlesville and Pawhuska.

From late 1914 onwards, northern Oklahoma suffered an unprecedented series of bank robberies. Officially, a number remained unsolved, but several were known by the authorities to be the work of experienced and well known outlaws. Behind many of them was reckoned to be the influence of the famous Henry Starr, an inveterate bandit since the early 1890's and lately paroled from the Colorado penitentiary in September 1913. Now, middle-aged, Starr was actually revered in outlaw circles, not merely because of his impressive career of banditry, but because of his personal qualities of intelligence, leadership, courage and loyalty. Unfortunately, as these qualities were directed against the laws of his country, he was also a common criminal; and, to his discredit, he was probably at least partly responsible for leading astray many young men who might otherwise have stuck to the straight and narrow.

One of his aides was Henry Wells' employer, Charles Johnson, an expert rider and roper, who doubled up in bank robberies when the notion took him.

According to Arthur Shoemaker, Wells claimed to have taken part in thirteen or fourteen bank robberies which, given his reputation, may well have been the case. Certainly one of the first in which he was involved, at least according to his own memoirs, was that of the Avant State Bank in the Oklahoma oil town of Avant on Friday, January 29, 1915. Four men, he said, took part in the robbery, one taking charge of the horses at the edge of town while he, Charles Johnson and another man strolled to the bank wearing overalls and carrying lunch pails, posing as ordinary workmen.

They entered the bank just after 2 p.m., held up the president, the cashier and a customer, locked them in the vault and helped themselves to whatever booty was available, $1,700 according to the newspapers, $5,000 according to Wells. By the time they were through, the horse-holder had brought the horses round to the rear of the bank. As they escaped, however, Johnson's horse broke a leg. Leaving it where it lay, presumably, he ran to an oil rig, smeared himself with oil and was ostensibly working away when a pursuing posse came along. When they asked if he had seen the bandits, he told them he had, then directed them off in the wrong direction.

The victims of the robbery were able to come up with only one bandit description: a large dark complexioned man with black eyes and long black hair, armed with a Winchester and two revolvers. Johnson was arrested in Kansas four days later but was quickly freed when bank staff were unable to identify him. On March 12, Claude Sawyer, a member of Henry Starr's entourage, was picked up at Muskogee as a suspect; but, evidentially, he was also later released. Henry Wells, himself, apparently came under no suspicion.

A few weeks later, Wells was in action again. At the behest of a man named Albert Hickman, he attended a meeting at Hickman's home southeast of Newkirk, attended also by Bill Putnam and C.C. "Big Boy" Currie, both well-known outlaws and pals of Henry Starr. Hickman had drawn up plans for the robbery of the Farmers National Bank in Kaw City, Osage County, and when he presented them to the trio they duly agreed to carry out the job.

At 2:15 p.m. the following day, Tuesday, April 6, 1915, they presented themselves at the chosen bank. Some farmers were near the door, arguing as to whose cows gave the best milk. Recollected Wells: "I said to the rest of the boys as we walked into the bank 'let's see how much milk this here cow will give' and laughed purty loud. There was three men in the bank," he continued, "and they was scared stiff when they saw our smoke-poles. It was as easy as fallin' off a log. Why, they nearly begged us to take the money and get out."

Press reports said that President John Hoefer and assistant cashier A. W. Sanderson were forced to gather up the available cash - some $2,015 - and were then forced into the vault. The dial was spun, but because of the frequency of recent bank robberies, Hoefer had been in the practice of leaving the dial mechanism disengaged, with the result that he and Sanderson got free virtually as soon as the bandits had gone.

The robbers rode openly across country towards Pawhuska with three car-loads of citizens after them. At one point, shots were exchanged and Wells' horse was shot. He climbed up behind Currie and they escaped into a stand of black jacks. The posse, evidently deciding that they had done enough for the day, returned to town.

On August 12, while attending the trial at Chandler of his boss, Charles Johnson, for his alleged part in the Stroud bank robbery, Wells was arrested and charged with the Kaw City job. At his trial at Newkirk on October 7, defended by the same John R. "Jack" Charlton who had earlier defended Johnson, he was acquitted after producing several witnesses who testified that he had been elsewhere at the time of the robbery.

Wells' next recorded robbery is difficult to write about, mainly because he and the press gave accounts which were similar in some respects and different in others. The venue was Wynona, an Osage County hamlet, which boasted two stores, a pool hall, two or three dozen residents and a single bank.

According to Wells, he visited the place to buy a wolfhound, found that the people selling him the dog were about to be foreclosed by the bank, and decided in revenge to rob it, to which purpose he enlisted the aid of an Arkansas penitentiary escapee named Arch Kitterman.

"When we hit town," recalled Wells, "Kittimer (sic) and me hitched our horses in the alley behind the bank. The bank president lived in the rear of the bank and there was a hardware store a couple of doors down from the bank on the same side of the street. As we went into the bank, I noticed a couple of men standing across the street give us the once over. I never thought nothin' about it at the time, so we jest barged on in. The banker saw our guns and lit out for the rear of the bank. Kittimer corralled the cashier, the only other man in the bank, an I chased the president. His wife was making a raisin pie and she had a panful of raisins in her hand when I come in at the door. I jest herded them both in front of me - all the time eating raisins out of the pan that the banker's wife was holding. I was never scared or shaky in a job in my life and I allus tried to laugh and joke with my victims - unless they wanted to put up a fight."

When they left the bank, however, they ran into a barrage of gunfire from he onlookers across the street, having alerted the township to the fact that their bank was being robbed. Both their horses were shot and a bullet tore through Wells' hat, narrowly missing his head. As they fled on foot, Wells still carrying his sack of loot and firing back with his Luger pistol, another bullet tore off one of his spurs.

"I was getting plenty sore at these people," he recounted. "One of them killed a horse for me and lost me a good Stetson hat, and now this boob ruined a pair of hand-made spurs that I was might proud of."

They fled across a freshly ploughed field and took refuge in a thicket; however, shortly after, (they) were forced to surrender as the townsfolk closed in around them.

So much, anyway, for Wells' account. He said the holdup took place in the Spring of 1916, but newspapers of the time reveal that the same First State Bank was held up shortly after 2 p.m. on Tuesday, November 2, 1915, by two overall-clad bandits aged about 28 and 23, one sporting a Colt automatic, the other a Savage automatic pistol. They hitched their horses behind the pool hall, went into the bank and held up cashier T. R. Williams, his wife and bookkeeper Walter Leonard. Some $1,299 in currency and silver was bundled into a white cloth sack and the bank people bundled into the vault. They got free very quickly and raised the alarm.

Using wire cutters to snip a fence east of town, the bandits headed for the hills. A posse of citizens went after them, but changed their minds after a few minutes, electing instead to wait for the arrival of Sheriff Harve Freas from Pawhuska, by which time the bandits were well away from the scene, believed to be ensconced in the relative safety of the Osage hills.

Whether or not the different accounts referred to the same robbery, Wells and Kitterman were arrested for it. They pleaded guilty in court and drew ten years each in McAlester Penitentiary. Conviction took place on December 5, 1916, and Kitterman served only three or four years before being paroled, only to be killed in a shootout with police at Colorado Springs, Colo., in 1920.

Ethan Allen Spencer, commonly known as Al, was born near Lenepah in Nowata County, Oklahoma, on December 26, 1887, and was thus easily old enough to have been taken by his daddy to Fort Smith for Cherokee Bill's hanging in 1896, had Spencer senior been so inclined. When he was a teenager, such notorious "old time" outlaws as Bert Casey, Ben Cravens, and the Martin-Simmons gang were still skulking about the state. He came of a law-abiding farming family, and in his own youth and early manhood, like so many others, farmed and cowboyed in various districts of northeastern Oklahoma.

Although it can be assumed that he was never a goody-goody, he seems to have been fairly late getting involved in serious crime, and in fact was a married man with an infant daughter, and in his early thirties, before he became embroiled with the law.

In 1916, he was arrested in Nowata County with four charges of cattle theft against him. That his bond was set at $10,000 would suggest that he already had a dubious reputation. Whether he skipped bond, or simply managed to wangle his way out, he was free over the next two or three years, in which time he graduated from stock-theft to car-theft and burglary.

In 1919, along with Nick Lamar and Bud Lawler, he burglarized Durnell's Ready-To-Wear store at Neodesha (sic) in the southern part of Wilson County, Kan., fencing the proceeds via George Tolliver of Coffeyville and Roy Majors of Independence, both well-known crooks. The William J. Burns Detective Agency was hired to track down the robbers, and operative H. O. Brown soon uncovered the Tolliver-Majors connection. When Majors was picked up, he spilled the beans and directed the officers to Spencer's half-sister's home near El Dorado, Kan., where most of the stolen goods were recovered.

Brown next intercepted a telegram from Spencer - going by the name of Cook - to Tolliver, asking him to send $200 to La Junta, Colo. A return telegram was promptly sent to "Cook" telling him the money would be sent to the post office in La Junta. When Spencer went to the pick up, he was arrested by Burns operatives and whisked back to Kansas, where in due course he was convicted of the Durnell robbery and sentenced to five years in Lansing Penitentiary.

However, Nowata County still wanted him for "the larceny of domestic animals", and an interstate deal was worked out whereby he was returned to Oklahoma, pleaded guilty to the stock theft charges, and on March 8, 1920, started a term at McAlester Penitentiary, the length given variously as three years and ten years, but maybe something more like 3-10 years.

The Oklahoma outlaw community being what it was, it is not unlikely that Wells and Spencer knew each other before they reached McAlester, but whatever the case, they got to know each other pretty well inside. Spencer also made other acquaintances who were to figure in his later life, notably the future Public Enemy, Frank Nash, at the time serving a sentence for murder, and most immediately a six-foot, sixteenth-part Cherokee named Silas Meigs, known as "Puck", an abbreviation of his Indian name. According to a newspaper account of his career, it started when fellow pupils at the Park Hill Mission School egged him into burglarizing the homes of some of his teachers, a prank which landed him in reform school.

After his release, he stole some cars, then stuck up and robbed the assistant postmaster at Park Hill as he was returning home from a poker game. For this, he got fourteen years in McAlester. Allegedly, he was not very bright, but was astute enough to earn himself trusty status, and a job in the milk-house, outside the prison walls. Towards the end of 1921, he simply strolled away to freedom, Henry Wells gaining him a 15-hour start by telling the prison officials that he was probably away drinking at a "chock joint" frequented by the trustees.

Part 2