Jack R Stanley

Massacre At Going Snake Jack R Stanley

The Oklahoma Indian Territory, known as The Nations, was a place of four laws - the unwritten laws of nature, the moral laws of man, the laws of the Indian tribes settled there, and the US federal law. The last was administered through the "hanging judge's" court in Ft. Smith. The Five Civilized Tribes had their own courts, Indian Police, and judges within their allotted districts. To cover the whole 70,000 squares, Judge Isaac Parker had US Marshal Mace Truax and his band of Deputy Marshals. They confronted the renegades of all tribes, the whites, the blacks, the Mexicans - the outlaws, rapists, murderers, whiskey runners, and spoilers of any stripe. Some offenses straddled both tribal law and US law. Such a case led to the Massacre at Going Snake.