Stone Gardens: A US Deouty Marshal who fathered a future Adair County Sheriff is buried near Hulbert
In the hills east of Hulbert, where Cherokee County folds toward Adair County and the old Flint District of the Cherokee Nation, neighbors in 1938 still spoke of Waller Ferguson as a man who had outlived the world that made him.
He died on February 10 of that year after a long illness, eighty-one years old, the father of Sheriff John W. Ferguson of Adair County and a former deputy United States marshal out of the federal court at Fort Smith
Tthe Adair County Democrat printed the notice that remains the fullest public account of his life.
He was born on March 26, 1856, in the Gentryville country of northwest Missouri. The newspaper of his death placed the birth in DeKalb County. Family memorials name Gentryville in Gentry County. The two counties share a line, and the Ferguson household moved enough in those years that both claims can stand.
His father was Elder Thomas Robert Ferguson, a physician, a Christian Church preacher, and later a Confederate soldier. His mother was Eliza Jane May, born in Barren County, Kentucky, in 1828.
Thomas Robert, born in Indiana about 1819 or 1820, was the son of William Ferguson and Nancy Ross. The elder William had farmed, served under Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, and stood at New Orleans. Thomas Robert studied at the state university in Bloomfield, read medicine in Springfield, Illinois, under a Dr. Darlin, and finished at McDowell College.
In 1840 he joined the Christian Church and was soon ordained. In 1841 he married Eliza Jane May of Macon County, Illinois. The young couple left Indiana for Springfield, then settled in Buchanan County, Missouri, where the household grew through the 1840s and 1850s.
Waller was one of a large brood. Sisters included Nancy, later Purdy; Katherine, later Moose; and Anna Elizabeth, later Dannenberg. Brothers included George and James Sequoyah Ferguson, the latter born in 1867 and given a name that already hinted at the family’s coming tie to the Cherokee country.
Eliza Jane died on March 28, 1871, at forty-three, and was buried at Bethel Cemetery near Cosby in Andrew County, Missouri. Waller was fifteen.
The next year, 1872, he came into the Indian Territory. His father would serve the Southern army under General Sterling Price, endure capture and exchange more than once, and after the war take his practice and his pulpit to Washington County, Arkansas, near Spring Valley, where he died in 1888 and was buried in Joyce Cemetery as a Confederate veteran of Company F, 8th Battalion Missouri Infantry.
No roster of schools survives for Waller. The record of his adult years lists him as a farmer.
Literacy in that household would not have been rare. His father was a college-trained physician and an ordained minister. What the boy carried south in 1872 was a Missouri farm education, a preacher’s household discipline, and the unsettled habit of a family that had already crossed Indiana, Illinois, and two Missouri counties.
The Cherokee Nation he entered was still a sovereign government with its own districts, courts, and census. Waller appears on the 1880 Cherokee Nation census in the Tahlequah District and on the 1890 census in Flint District, occupation farmer, blood listed as adopted white.
On October 6, 1876, he married Allie E. Saunders, also recorded as Elsie Elizabeth Saunders. She was born on May 18, 1863, at Murphy in Cherokee County, North Carolina, daughter of Lemuel S. Sanders and Vianna Raper, and she carried one-sixteenth Cherokee blood.
The Dawes Commission later enrolled the household at Stilwell: Waller as an intermarried white, Allie by blood at one-sixteenth, and their son John W. at one-thirty-second. Waller’s parents are named on the card as T. R. Ferguson and Eliza J. Ferguson. Allie’s parents appear as S. S. Sanders and Vivienne Sanders.
Two children were born of the marriage, John William, in 1881 or early 1882, and a daughter, Grace, who did not outlive her father.
The work that fixed his name in the county memory was the badge. While the western half of the present state of Oklahoma still answered to the United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, Waller served as a deputy United States marshal. That court, seated at Fort Smith, held criminal jurisdiction over the Indian Territory for felonies committed by or against United States citizens.
After 1875, the bench belonged to Judge Isaac C. Parker. Deputies rode a country of some seventy-four thousand square miles. They were fee men, hired as needed, paid for arrests, mileage, and the delivery of prisoners.
The work paid poorly, often no more than a few hundred dollars a year, and it killed more than sixty-five deputies during Parker’s tenure. Outlaws used the Nations as a refuge.
Tumbleweed wagons crawled the roads collecting prisoners for the Fort Smith jail. The 1938 obituary does not attach Waller to a famous gunfight or a named gang. It says only that he served when the area was under the Fort Smith court and that he made many friends.
That restraint is useful. Most deputies of the era left no legend, only a name on a voucher and a reputation in the settlements they rode.
He was not a stranger in Cherokee public life. A later sketch of his son noted that Waller Ferguson was active in Cherokee affairs and that John’s uncles had sat in the Cherokee Senate.
The family had married into the Nation, enrolled with it, farmed in Tahlequah and Flint, and stayed when allotment and statehood remade the map. After the federal courts were planted inside the Territory itself, beginning with Muskogee in 1889, the Fort Smith reach shrank.
Waller’s later years belonged to the farm. Census takers found him in Wauhillau Township, Adair County, in 1910, and at Stilwell in 1920. By 1930 he was living in the Stilwell household of his son.
John W. Ferguson became the public face of the next generation. Born in the Cherokee Nation, educated in its schools and at the University of Arkansas, he served as Stilwell city marshal, chief of police for a dozen years, deputy sheriff, justice of the peace, highway maintenance superintendent, registrar, and finally sheriff of Adair County.
In 1912, while he was city marshal, Cole Younger wired ahead and asked him to hire a team and buggy so the old outlaw could look once more at a spring northeast of town where the James and Younger band had camped after the Civil War.
The son was a Democrat, a Baptist, a Mason, and an Odd Fellow. When Waller died, the headline named him first as the sheriff’s father.
The old man was a Baptist. His last years were spent on a farm. He was survived by Allie, who lived until May 19, 1947, and by John, who died in 1961.
He was buried in plot 49 at Pilgrims Rest Cemetery in Adair County.
What remains is a life that crossed the last open years of the Cherokee Nation without becoming a dime novel.
A Missouri boy whose father healed, preached, and wore gray came into the Territory at sixteen, married a North Carolina Cherokee girl, farmed the Flint and Tahlequah country, pinned on a Fort Smith deputy’s commission when the federal court still claimed the Nations, raised a son who would wear a sheriff’s star after statehood, and died on a winter day in 1938 within a short ride of the ground he had worked for more than sixty years.
The record does not say how many warrants he served or how often he sat a night watch over prisoners bound for the river and the Fort Smith jail. It says he served, that he made friends, and that when the riding was done he went back to the farm and the church.
In a country that remembers Bass Reeves and Heck Thomas by name, that quieter close is the more common end of the deputy’s trade.
