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Al Spencer & Gang

 Part 4

 The Gentry, Ark., bank robbery - possibly the only bank holdup that Spencer pulled in that state - appears to have been the brainchild of one Carl Reasor, a veteran of the Spanish-American War who lived with his wife and four children at Rowe in northeastern Oklahoma, fairly close to the Arkansas line.

"The plan" said Henry Wells, "was to take two cars down there and stash one with Oklahoma license plates this side of the line and take the other one into Gentry to rob the bank. We was going to drive the car out a few miles from Gentry and then take to horses to get over the hilly rough country. That way, they couldn't trace us, because they wouldn't find out about the horses until it was too late..." Reasor's contribution was to supply the horses, and to map out the best escape route from Gentry back across the line. Which being said, Gentry was literally only a few miles from the Oklahoma border.

Towards the end of January 1923, under the name of Clifford, (Al) Spencer rented a 50-acre farm in Delaware County, Okla., adjacent to Arkansas, leaving it in charge of his part Indian half-brother, Campbell Keys, who, he explained to the owner of the property, was a dope-head undergoing a cure, and needed the isolation. Subsequently, Spencer (alias Clifford) made several trips to the farm accompanied by his girlfriend, ostensibly to see how Keys was getting on, but actually to complete plans for the Gentry robbery.

The identify of the actual bank robbers is, as usual, slightly controversial, but only slightly. (Arthur) Shoemaker names them as Spencer, Wells, Gragg and Bud Ewers, but how he came by this list is anybody's guess. Wells, who gave a vivid account of the robbery, listed them as "me an' Al Spencer an' Ralph White an' Nick Lamar an' some more boys"; but, as his tale progressed, it became clear that he was referring to the gang as "they" rather than "we", and there is no reason to suppose that he was present. In fact, from identifications by witnesses, subsequent confessions and reportage by the press, if is fairly certain that they were Spencer, Nick Lamar, Big Boy Berry and Ralph White, with a fifth man to look after the horses. He was named by Wells as Si Fogg, but could have been an elderly Indian outlaw named Red Cloud Scruggs, who was later implicated in the robbery by Big Boy Berry, and was killed in a holdup later the same year.

Lamar and Berry have been mentioned before. Both were hard-bitten badmen in their mid-thirties: Berry, a World War I veteran who had reportedly served nineteen months in France; Lamar, a native of Atlanta, Ga., and one of Spencer's earlier criminal associates, like Spencer, had been imprisoned for the Kansas store burglary in 1919; however, he had escaped after three years and was rumored to have taken part in several Spencer holdups.

Ralph White is a more elusive figure. He was fairly often referred to in the press, and on occasion was described as Spencer's "right hand man". If this was true, however, it was not a relationship that lasted very long.

About noon on Saturday, March 31, 1923, the bandits drove into Gentry in a new Studebaker car, which had been hijacked in Bartlesville three nights before from a businessman named W. C. Smith.

While White stayed at the wheel, the other three walked into the First National Bank. President Marion Wasson, cashier J. Napp Covey and three others were ordered to raise their hands; and, while Berry and Lamar held them at pistol-point, Spencer bustled about scooping up whatever currency and silver he could find, a grand total of $2,053 and sixteen cents. In the midst of the proceedings, a female employee managed to push an alarm button with her foot and within seconds armed citizens wer converging on the bank.

Shoving their victims into the vault, the gang "lit out with lead flying at 'em from every corner." With all their planning, however, they hadn't thought to cut the telephone wires leading out of town, and the news of the holdup was quickly broadcast ahead of them. As they approached the hamlet of Bloomfield, two or three miles west of Gentry, a crowd of officers and civilians armed with rifles and shotguns stationed themselves behind a stone wall fronting the village store.

"When Al and the boys reached there," related Henry Wells, "Winchesters and shotgun slugs tore into the car from behind the stone walls. Nick Lamar was the first man out with a bullet in his shoulder and his legs all shot to hell. They slung plenty bullets theirselves and I bet they's some of them old timers down there still carrying bandits' lead. Ralph White got shot in the side and arms and Al got a slug through the fleshy part of his right arm. They got past the store still right side up and come on to where they had the horses hid. Well, here's where trouble hit hard. The boys didn't have anything but iodine to doctor their wounds with and nothing but strips of their clothes for bandages."

About eleven miles west of Gentry, and now well within Oklahoma, the gang abandoned Smith's badly shot-up and bloodstained car (which was returned to its rueful owner in this condition a day or so later) and hauled themselves painfully onto the waiting horses. On their subsequent ride across country, they had to stop every few minutes to rest and tend their wounds, and it was several hours before they reached Carl Reasor's home. A doctor was summoned but had still not arrived when two Delaware County Deputy Sheriffs turned up, accompanied by Sheriff George Maples of Benton County, Ark.

Spencer and White appeared at the door of the house and loosed a barrage of shots at the officers, wounding Deputy Ben Smith and narrowly missing Maples. The officers scattered for cover, and seconds later, the outlaws burst from the rear of the house and escaped into the brush, leaving fresh bloodstains behind them. When the officers got into the house a few minutes later, without further bloodshed, they arrested Reasor, Campbell Keys and a young man named George Tibbs; and, in a barn nearby, they found a Cadillac stolen in Bartlesville a couple of weeks before. To avoid red tape, Reasor and Keys were whisked at once across the state line and lodged in jail at Bentonville, Ark.

The bandits, meanwhile, had presumably retrieved their horses, for according to Wells they had another painful day in the saddle before hiding up the second night after the holdup in the graveyard of a small town on the Grand River. Spencer, evidently the least wounded, walked into town and, explaining to inquisitive townsfolk that he had been on a fishing trip and had wrecked his car, telephoned Stanley Snyder at Bartlesville.

In the interim, his companions had managed to scrounge four dozen eggs from a local farmer. Recalled Wells: "When by the time Al got back the boys had built a fire and boiled and et all them eggs, they was that hungry. Al shore was sore when he found out they hadn't saved him any."

A few hours later, Stanley Snyder and another shady character named Pat Durkin arrived in a big Packard sedan and transported the woebegone crew back to the Osage.

Over the following months, robberies continued to plague Oklahoma banks. A number were in the Osage Hills area and were tentatively credited to the Spencer circle -- such as those at Hockerville and Fairfax, and three successive holdups at Barnsdall -- but, only two further major crimes were fairly definitely ascribed to Spencer, and one of them destroyed whatever regard the residents of the Osage might have held for him.

If Spencer was indeed guilty of the Pawhuska post office raid, it was an unusual job for him -- the first night-time robbery he had attempted for certainly several years. As with most after-dark robberies, the facts were confusing if only for the fact that it was difficult for witnesses to see exactly what was going on.

At about 11 o'clock on Monday evening, April 16, a boisterous group of several men and two women, apparently late-night revellers, drove into Pawhuska in two large touring cars and parked near the post office. When Deputy U.S. Marshal Tom Walton went to have a word with them, a pistol was stuck in his face and he was ordered to lie down in the street as, shortly after, was Harry Foster, a driver for the Yellow Cab Co. Without more ado, two or three of the robbers broke into the post office building while three men and two women stayed outside, the men stationed at various points around the vicinity.

Some time after midnight, Star Taxicab driver Kels "Shorty" Harrison locked his cab up for the night and began strolling home, being joined on the way by Bob Wilkerson, son of a former chief of police, and himself a special officer with the Pawhuska department. Chatting casually, they reached the post office and prepared to go their separate ways. As Harrison turned, however, a robber stationed behind a tree shouted at him to stop, then blasted him with a shotgun. Harrison fell with several pieces of No. 4 buckshot in his lower body, then got up and staggered for a block before falling again. Wilkerson, in the process of drawing his pistol, was also shotgunned, several pieces of No. 4 taking him in the arms and legs, and one severing the femoral artery in his left groin.

"You ignorant bastard" one of the women reportedly screamed at the shooter. "You've shot two innocent men and now there'll be hell to pay." Seconds later, a tremendous explosion rocked the post office, shattering windows, wrecking the inside of the building and blasting the inner door of the safe off so violently that it hit the ceiling and landed thirty feet away. At the same time, the inner door was buckled inward in such a way that it couldn't be opened.

The blast brought local residents to their doors and into the streets "in various stages of undress" and the robbers on guard outside began loosing off their firearms at random. As many as fifty shots were fired, many of them lodging in the walls of nearby houses and several narrowly missing the townsfolk. So intense was the gunfire, apparently, that the area round the post office was wreathed in smoke.

Empty-handed, the robbers inside rushed from the post office, the whole gang piled into their cars and they roared off in the direction of Bartlesville.

Harrison and Wilkerson, both critically wounded, were rushed to the hospital. Within a couple of days, Harrison was well enough to sit up in bed, smoking a cigar and "conversing rationally with those about him," but Wilkerson died several hours after being shot. What made his death particularly tragic was that he was only twenty-two, and had been due to be married the following day.

Within half-an-hour, Sheriff Cook of Pawhuska was on the trail of the gang, accompanied by Osage County assistant county attorney, L.A. Justus, Jim Jenkins, Harry Mays, Scotty Harrison, John Henderson and Indian Officer A. M. Boyd. Their difficulties compounded by the fact that it was dark, they cast about here and there, heading first towards Kansas, then southward again and finally, after several hours, concluding that they had no idea where the outlaws had gone. They were planning to go into the Osage Hills when they were joined by J. W. Robinson of the Pinkerton Agency in Bartlesville and A. B. Cooper of the Burns Agency in Kansas City, and, shortly afterwards, by Bartlesville officers John Creed and Harve Parrick.

The newcomers, it was reported, suggested that they had an idea who the robbers were; with nothing else to go on, the Pawhuska men agreed to go along with them; and, so it was that at about 5 p.m., roughly seventeen hours after the post office affair, the combined posses descended on the Ward home, located three miles south of Ochelata.

Creed and Parrick were in the house questioning a couple of women occupants when a bullet crashed through the ceiling from the attic above. They and the other officers responded by sending a barrage of shots into the attic until there were yells of surrender and Ed Shull and Clarence Ward emerged, the latter's right femur shattered by a rifle bullet. With them were found two high-powered rifles, a Luger automatic pistol and about 1,000 rounds of ammunition, ample corroboration of the already-known fact that they were not the most upright citizens.

It was later rumored that Campbell Keys had been in the attic as well, but somehow escaped detection; but, quite naturally, this was pooh-poohed by the posse.

Ed Shull (alternatively given in the newspapers as Schull, Shell and Schell) was a suspect in at least two bank robberies, and wanted for the wounding of Pawhuska officer T. E. Van Noy a few months before. He insisted plaintively that he had fired at the posse "merely to scare them away," and that he had only set eyes on Al Spencer once in his life. As to the post office raid, he knew nothing about that. After considerable squabbling between the Bartlesville officers and the Pawhuska men, he was taken to Pawhuska; but, within hours, he was spirited back to Bartlesville when it became obvious that a lynch-mob was building up. According to the Pawhuska Daily Capital, he was a badly-frightened man by the time he was lodged in the comparative safety of the Washington County jail in Bartlesville.

Anxious to avoid being involved in the Pawhuska affair, Shull made a written confession to the recent Caddo bank robbery in Bryan County. Six days after his capture, acting presumably on information supplied by him, A. B. Cooper, officers Creed and Parrick and Julius Payne of Vinita raided Sol Wells' home near Okesa and arrested Earl Holman.

The pair were taken to Bryan County where Shull was quickly convicted and, owing to his confession, given a mere five years' imprisonment. Holman was tried at Durant on July 24, convicted and sent away for thirty years.

Shull's light term drew from the Osage County News the comment: "Instead of letting the Osage County officials force a confession out of him on the charge of being connected with the Pawhuska post office affair, the officials of Washington County seemed anxious to let the Caddo officials take Schell and give him a light sentence. Why this attitude we cannot tell, but it seems queer to the people of Pawhuska and Osage County . . . "

In reporting the capture of Shull and Ward, Sheriff Cook praised his own men above the others in the posse, claiming that it was his high-powered rifles that had won the day. The Osage County News later went as far as to say that the Bartlesville men had actually "tumbled over one another" in their anxiety to get out of the line of fire when the shooting began. The Bartlesville Daily Enterprise responded in equally vituperative style, pointing out that Creed and Parrick had also been armed with high-powered rifles, and claiming that it was the Osage County men who had shown the white feather. But, all this was only a manifestation of the more-or-less continuous rivalry and bickering that went on between the various counties, their officers and their newspapers.

Clarence Ward, who allegedly had been "a good, honest, industrious country kid" before being corrupted by his wife into "a desperado, and a dangerous one," was too seriously wounded to face any legal proceedings and, indeed, his shattered leg later had to be amputated. Although a suspect in several Al Spencer robberies, as mentioned previously, he was charged with the Caddo job following Shull's confession, but was freed on $10,000 bond due to his weak condition. When his case was called, he failed to turn up for trial. When it was found that he was still suffering badly from his wound, this was overlooked and his bond was reinstated. What became of him has yet to be ascertained.

While it was not officially established who had pulled the Pawhuska raid, and who had killed Bob Wilkerson, within a few days the general opinion was that it had been the work of Spencer and his cronies rather than Ward and Shull. A crook named Riley Dixon (later one of the Okesa train robbers) was named as a suspect, as were Big Boy Berry and Ralph White, and for a while the latter was suspected as Wilkerson's actual killer. Eventually, however, following statements by various captured outlaws, the finger of suspicion pointed at Spencer himself, which certainly doesn't conflict with the description that the killer had weighed around 145 pounds and had several days' growth of sandy-coloured beard. That being said, the view was also expressed that Spencer always contrived to be where the money was; and, that if he had acted true to form, he would have been one of those inside the post office, rather than on guard outside.

Following the capture of the Caddo robbers, other outlaws soon found themselves in the toils.

On Saturday morning, April 21, driving a Cadillac stolen recently in Tulsa, Spencer, three other men and a woman bought supplies at a country store near the Post Oak schoolhouse, then drove east towards Wayside and stopped to rustle up breakfast at Post Oak Creek. Word of their presence was relayed to Bartlesville, where Sheriff Andrew Henderson got together an expeditionary force and set off in pursuit. They soon found the Caddy abandoned on a farm at Coon Creek, four miles southeast of Wayside, and a man was spotted running off across country about a quarter-mile away. In the car were blankets and camping gear, hair clippers an safety razors, food, an overcoat with buckshot holes in it and another with the name R. White marked on it, and various firearms including a folding Mauser rifle known to have belonged to Spencer for several months, and believed to have been used in the attacks on Chief Gaston's home at Bartlesville.

Numerous other officers and civilians joined the Henderson posse to scour the area and late in the afternoon, about two miles from where the car was abandoned, a member of the Anti-Automobile Theft Association found a man lying on the ground behind a fallen log. Plainly exhausted, he offered no resistance although armed with a rifle and a .38 revolver, and a belt of cartridges round his waist. He turned out to have a number of buckshot wounds on his back and elsewhere, a partly due to a scar on his neck was quickly identified as Nick Lamar.

A couple of weeks later, Friday, May 4, officers at Amarillo, Tex., stopped a Nash car and arrested the occupants, who transpired to be the much-wanted Big Boy Berry, a convicted Texas horse-thief named Carl Priss, and Al Spencer's girl friend, Goldie Bates. The car was found to have been hijacked from a man in Ochelata, Okla., the evening before the Pawhuska raid.

The trio were returned to Oklahoma where Priss and the girl were freed soon after, no evidence being found to connect them with any current crimes. There was some debate as to what to do with Lamar and Berry. Both were suspected in Oklahoma bank robberies, where the penalty for bank robbry was five to fifty years. In Arkansas, the maximum penalty was twenty-one years, but what tipped the balance was that, presumably, to avoid charges in the Pawhuska affair, the pair confessed to the Gentry robbery and were duly handed over to Arkansas.

In the Benton County circuit court at Bentonville on June 2, 1923, they were convicted and consigned to the State Penitentiary; Berry for 7-10 years, Lamar for 15-20 years.

As to the others involved in Gentry, Campbell Keys, arrested with Carl Reasor after the robbery but later freed due to lack of evidence, was finally picked up at Nowata in September 1923 after evidence had been found positively linking him with the robbery. He was ostensibly being taken to Jay to face auto-theft charges when his escort "strayed' over the state line into Arkansas and bumped into none other than the Sheriff of Benton County, very conveniently armed with a warrant for Keys. Without further ado, the Oklahoma officers handed him over, thereby saving themselves and Arkansas a lot of extradition paperwork.

Subsequently, Reason and Keys were convicted as accessories in the Gentry robbery and sentenced to three and five years, respectively.

Ralph White, the fourth member of the actual robbers, appears to have parted company with Spencer about this time; and any rate, there was no real suggestion that he was mixed up in the Okesa train robbery. He survived the final dissolution of the Spencer entourage and for some months managed to keep a low profile; but, on September 13, 1924, he was arrested after a shootout with Sheriff Cook and several deputies near Pawhuska. Two others arrested with him, Blaine Nichols and Roscoe Smith, were later freed -- although, when arrested, the trio had been driving a stolen car. White, badly wounded in the battle, was turned over to the Arkansas authorities, having been positively identified as one of the Gentry gang. As with others already mentioned, the final outcome of his case has yet to be uncovered.

Wrote the Pawhuska Daily Capital on July 21, 1923: "The robbing of banks in Osage County is reaching a place where it is a notorious disgrace. Something should be done to stop this pastime on the part of criminals that are making this county their rendezvous . . . Would it not be sensible just for a few weeks for the officers now working on the capturing of manufacturers of booze to take a vacation from that duty and go out and capture a bank robber, or two? This paper does favor a strong and aggressive move to stop the sale of liquor; however, it does seem that too much time is spent in the chasing of booze hounds at a time when the banks are being robbed . . . This flirting of the bank robbers with the officers here should stop . . . It is common talk that the rendezvous of the bank robbers is near Okesa, and that place is within twenty miles of this city. If a civil army must be organized, then let's have it."

The question of why Spencer, operating within a fairly limited area and never, apparently, straying far from the Osage, should not have been killed or captured so far, is a good one, and no doubt complex. One reason that he had evaded capture was the inability of the various authorities to work together, and another may well have been the greater than normal proportion of outlaws and outlaw-sympathizers who inhabited the Osage at that time, most of them presumably happy to help each other out when the going got rough. Yet another must have been the sheer risk involved. Spencer had more than once announced that he would never be taken alive, which implied, of course, that he would fight to the death if cornered. Many must have reckoned that the dangers were not worth the potential rewards.

Rewards themselves were always a tricky problem. At the latter part of his career, rumor had Spencer worth thousands of dollars, dead or alive, but the reality was less impressive. An article published at the start of 1923 commented:

"According to City, county and state officers, the alleged rewards being offered over the country for the capture of criminals are more or less of a joke. In a few cases, you get the reward but in most cases you can sit and whistle while waiting for it . . . There are many things to be considered in the capture of outlaws besides the reward, and before you go out to look for Spencer bear this in mind. When you are alive, you are here; and, when you are dead, there will be no rewards offered for your return."

The same article suggested that at that point, February 1923, the rewards offered for Spencer totaled no more than $500, a similar sum previously offered by the State of Kansas having had a ninety-day limit attached to it. Besides which, it added, institutions normally only paid out rewards on the conviction of criminals, and as the same criminals were usually only tried, convicted and imprisoned for one offence at a time, it could be years before rewards were paid out.

By July 1923, Spencer's hide was officially worth considerably more, the Benton County Bankers' Protective Association offering $1,000; the post office department $200; the Arkansas State Bankers' Association $500; the National Surety Company $100; and, the Fidelity & Deposit Company of Maryland $100. A grand total of $1,900 -- still not really worth the risk of being killed or seriously injured.

When, following the Okesa Train Robbery, the rewards for Spencer finally reached genuinely substantial proportions, it was a different story altogether. (Okesa Train Robbery - Next!)

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