Ancestry Magazine

Years later when I decided to see if I could prove or disprove the family legend, I asked my older sister about The Outlaw (she always knew everything). She told me his name was Cole Shoemake. Then she confessed that she didn’t know any details about him nor exactly how we were related.

Thus began a search that has extended across many years and into diverse records. I started in my hometown’s library where extracts from old newspaper accounts of the Muskogee (Oklahoma) Daily Phoenix revealed:

Marriage records at the courthouse in Muskogee show that Cole married Daisy Emma Hulse in 1912, but they were divorced at the time of his death, at least according to one newspaper article.

In the 1920 federal census, Cole Shoemake is in LeFlore County, Oklahoma—in jail. When initial searches for Cole turned up negative in the 1910 Oklahoma and the 1900 Indian Territory censuses, it became apparent there was not going to be an easy way to identify his parents. Likely Cole would have been enumerated with one or both of them or with other family members in 1900 as a boy of about fourteen years of age, assuming his age given in 1920 census was correct.

Cole’s two marriage applications in 1911 and 1912 (both to Daisy Hulse) in Muskogee County gave no indication as to his parentage. On the 1 October 1911 marriage license application, the age of Cole is given as twenty-one. Nine months later, on 30 June 1912, their second marriage license application lists his age as twenty-five. (Why two marriage licenses? Evidently Daisy was a bit under age at the time of the first application, though she claimed to be eighteen—one is left to speculate about what happened in 1911.)

Based upon the 1920 census and the two marriage applications, Cole was born anywhere from about 1885 to 1890. The Five Civilized Tribes (sovereign nations) of Indian Territory did not issue birth certificates, so unless there was a birth announcement published in a local newspaper, finding a birth record was not likely. Births were not routinely published in any of the early newspapers in the Cherokee or Creek Nations of Indian Territory. To add to the quandary, it was not known whether Cole was even born in Indian Territory; however, since our Shoemake family was mixed-blood Cherokee and lived in the Canadian District of the Cherokee Nation, logic suggested that was where he was born. Moreover, the newspaper refe-rence to his uncle, Dick Shoemake, a Muskogee County deputy sheriff, firmly linked Cole to our family.

Genealogical records for people whose ancestors resided in what was one of America’s last frontiers—Indian Territory in the time period of 1880 until 1907 when it became part of the State of Oklahoma—are scant to say the least, particularly for white and mixed-blood families. Our great-great-grandfather, William Henderson Shoemake, was a mixed-blood Cherokee. In 1883 he was officially readmitted to the rolls of the Cherokee Nation. In 1908 he died in Muskogee County, Oklahoma. His probate re-cords, finalized in April 1910, named his eight children, his surviving wife, and his two grandchildren—Coleman Shoemake and Lela Shoemake. These papers show that Lela Shoemake, age twenty-three, was living at Howe, Oklahoma, and Coleman Shoemake, age twenty, whose residence was “in prison.”

My first thought was “in prison—where?” Oklahoma was a new state at that time, and its first state prison, located in McAlester, Pittsburg County, didn’t open until October 1908, but in the 1910 census, Shoemake wasn’t listed there. So where was he?

His grandfather’s 1910 probate re-cords said “prison,” not jail. A nebulous clue in the history of Oklahoma prisons divulged that during its territorial days, Oklahoma sent its prisoners to the Kansas Penitentiary at Lansing in Leavenworth County. When the 1910 census finally was every-name indexed, success at locating The Outlaw came. Had I thought to look in Kansas, I might have found him sooner as it is one of the states that had a Miracode or Soundex index for that year, but that’s hindsight.

In the 1910 census, Cole is shown as a twenty-four-year-old prisoner at this U.S. penitentiary, born in Oklahoma (father born in Oklahoma and mother born in Mississippi). Just to add to the confusion, he is shown as “white,” which is not uncommon for mixed-bloods, especially for one who was probably less than one-sixteenth Cherokee.

Luck often plays a part in our genealogical research. When a friend mentioned that the early prison records of Leavenworth, Kansas, were going to be made available online at RootsWeb.com (thanks to the work of the staff and volunteers of the Central Plains Region, National Archives in Kansas City), I decided to see what I could find in them. Many genealogists joke about finding a horsethief in the family, but the possibility was quickly becoming less remote than I had originally thought.

One day I blithely typed in Shoemake at http://userdb.rootsweb.com/groups/ and selected the Leavenworth Prison records. There he was. I learned that it was a civilian (rather than military) case with a 1905 date and that the jurisdiction was Indian Territory and the offense was larceny (horse stealing). I also found a record number and, under Photograph, a label of “true,” meaning there was a photo available.

I wrote to the National Archives in Kansas C ity for the file and picture. Ten dollars and two weeks later, I received the case file—a gold-mine including a plead-ing letter to the warden from Cole’s maternal aunt Alice Matthews asking for Cole’s release and explaining how Cole was an orphan, having lost both parents at a tender age. The file also included the names of the people who had written to Cole, their relationships to him, and the post office, state, and date from which their letters to Cole were mailed, as well as his prison photo [image on page 62].

Armed with the names of his relatives and their whereabouts in the 1905 to 1910 time frame, a search in census records helped throw additional light on The Outlaw. However, tossed in was some frustration, too, as I couldn’t find a number of individuals, particularly Cole’s sister, Lela, who has disappeared without a trace. She evidently had married at least twice, but her trail in Oklahoma went cold.

The availability of the World War I Draft Registration shed more details on Cole Shoemake. There he was, registered on 12 Sep-tember 1918, an in-mate in the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, Greer County, Oklahoma. His birth date is re-corded as 7 April 1885, and his nearest relative was his wife, Daisy Shoemake. His physical description was given as tall, slender, with blue eyes and black hair.

Eventually a search in the Dawes Rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes turned up a gold mine of genealogical data on Cole’s grand-father’s entire family and divulged more information about The Outlaw, whose full name was Eddy Cole-man Shoemake. This in turn enabled me to identify his parents and all four grandparents and as-certain that technically he was a half first cousin, twice removed.

Cole’s father, William C. C. Shoemake, was the only child by the first wife of William Hen-der-son Shoemake, and he died be-fore Cole was three years old. Cole’s mo ther, Viola Windham, remarried in 1889 and had four children by her second husband before she died sometime between 1897 and 1900. Cole was orphaned by the time he was fifteen, and the Indian Territory in the early 1900s was a wild place in which to grow up.

Like many genealogical trails we explore, finding some answers often leads to more questions and mysteries. And, so, I’m back on the hunt, this time for The Outlaw’s sister—to find out where she disappeared to and what happened to her in the Oklahoma hills of the early twentieth century.