Cold Case Files: Three dance attendees wound up dead in the street and no one was ever arrested for their murders

On Friday night, September 14, 1894, a dance filled the house of a young man named John Sieboldt. The place sat a short walk from his father’s home, about seven miles from Muldrow in the Sequoyah District of the Cherokee Nation and some twenty miles west of Fort Smith.

By Saturday morning three men lay dead in the yard with empty pistols. Two more bodies were found under the house. No one was ever charged.

The file, such as it was, closed before the week ended.

Deputy United States Marshal Wes Harris was a white man and an adopted citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He had ridden posse with Deputy Marshal Jim Cole. That night he carried a warrant for a man known only as Bush. With him was his posse, Frank Faulkner, twenty-four years old.

The Cherokee Advocate later said Faulkner came from a good family but was a bad man when liquor had hold of him. He had left the country months earlier because he knew that if he stayed he would kill somebody or get killed. He had been back less than a week.

Also dead in the yard was Charley Benge, a Cherokee well known in Fort Smith, where he had once ridden as a posse for the federal court.

Whether he came as a guest, as another officer, or as a man standing with Bush was never written down in a way that survived.

After the shooting, John Sieboldt and his cousin Bean Sieboldt rode several miles to Webb’s store, bought cartridges, and spoke to the storekeeper. Their manner showed trouble. Asked what had happened, one of them said there had been a little trouble, that four of the bullies were laid out, and that they thought they would keep out of trouble by leaving. They were not seen again.

Deputy Marshal Jim Cole rode out from Fort Smith on Saturday morning. The three named dead were still in the yard. Harris had been shot once in the chest and still gripped his empty pistol. Faulkner had been shot seven times. His empty pistol lay about ten yards from his body, and Cole noted he had also taken shotgun fire.

Benge had been shot once through the body, his empty pistol still in his hand. Cole also found two other bodies under the house, which matched the Sieboldts’ remark about four men laid out.

Cole found only one man who admitted being at the dance: young Sieboldt’s father, too drunk to remember the fight. The women, Cole reported, did not seem able to tell anything about it. No other witness would talk. No indictment followed.

Faulkner was buried the next afternoon at Lee’s Chapel Cemetery in Muldrow. He was not the same man as Judge Franklin Faulkner of Akins, the Trail of Tears teamster who died in 1885. West Harris’s grave has never been identified. Bush’s full name, the names of the two men under the house, and the exact order of the first shots never made it into a published official file.

The Cherokee Advocate in Tahlequah printed the story on September 26, 1894, drawing on the Fort Smith News Record. That clipping, together with the reconstruction kept by the Oklahoma Law Enforcement Memorial, remains the core public record.

This was Cherokee Nation land in 1894. Federal deputies from Judge Isaac Parker’s Fort Smith court had jurisdiction over United States citizens and certain crimes. Cherokee courts had jurisdiction over Cherokee citizens. A dance that mixed an adopted citizen, a Cherokee former posse, a wanted man named Bush, and a local family left Cole with empty guns, five bodies, and silence.

Old grudges were presumed. That is all the papers would say.

What a modern file would still lack is plain enough. There is no surviving warrant text naming Bush, no autopsy, no photograph of the yard, and no statement from John or Bean Sieboldt after they left Webb’s store. The facts that remain are a Friday night dance seven miles from Muldrow, a warrant for Bush, five dead, three empty pistols in or near the hands of Harris, Faulkner, and Benge, shotgun wounds in Faulkner, two cousins buying cartridges and disappearing, and a deputy from Fort Smith who could not make a witness talk.

That is the Sequoyah Tragedy as the record stands. Anyone with family papers, a Sieboldt Bible, a copy of the Bush warrant, or a lost extra from the News Record in mid September 1894 would still be adding the first new page in more than a century.