True Crime Chronicles: A stoic condemned Choctaw murderer went to the grave with Jesus on his lips

On the last day of May in 1882, a correspondent from the Fort Smith Herald rode the fifty-five miles west from Arkansas into the Choctaw Nation and reached the Sans Bois Courthouse just after half past ten. Three hundred people had already gathered there, half of them women and children.

Inside the courthouse Reverend Willis Folsom stood preaching from the first verse of the Twenty-third Psalm, speaking entirely in Choctaw. The words were unintelligible to the visitor, yet the faces of those who understood showed the force of them. Seated to the preacher’s right was a man who sat unusually straight, his attention fixed.

He wore a plain suit of jeans, a calico shirt, and brogan boots pulled on over the legs of his trousers. That man was Reuben Lucas, thirty-four years old, five feet nine or ten inches tall, about one hundred fifty pounds, light in complexion, with high cheekbones and a high square forehead.

He did not look like a bad man.

When the sermon ended, Lucas’s brother offered a fervent prayer. Lucas joined him, hands raised above his head. Afterward they sang a hymn in Choctaw, Lucas’s voice among the others: “I would not live always, I ask not to stay, Where storm after storm Rises dark o’er the way.”

Other men led in prayer at intervals. Each time Lucas prayed aloud with them. Then it was announced that he would speak. For five minutes he addressed the crowd in Choctaw in a clear, distinct voice that held those who understood him. Folsom afterward interpreted. Lucas said the trouble had been brought on by drinking too much whiskey.

He had always known it was wrong, yet he had kept on, and this was the result.

He was ready to die. He only hated to see his friends weeping and told them to stop. At first he had dreaded death, but since he had put his trust in Jesus Christ and God had pardoned his sins, the time had dragged slowly and he was glad his hour had come.

He knew there was a reality in religion because he had experienced it, and it had driven away all fear. He had known no fear since his sins were pardoned. He advised his friends to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and not to live as he had. His salvation was sure, and he wanted his people to meet him in heaven. He would have said more, but he was ignorant and uneducated, and he would say farewell.

As he spoke the last words he took his hands from his coat pockets for the first time and locked them behind his head.

Edward McCurtain, a prominent Choctaw whose store Lucas and the dead man had left together months earlier, then spoke. He advised everyone to forget the past. When Reuben was killed, for whom he was very sorry, the demands of the law would be satisfied and all parties should be.

A hymn was sung so that Lucas’s friends could give him the parting hand. Everyone present did so. Lucas stood holding his hymn book in his left hand and extended his right. Women of his own tribe and white women offered him cheering words as they clasped his hand. He only bowed pleasantly and continued to sing, showing no appearance of emotion.

He was then taken into a back room and shown the coffin he himself had ordered made. From there he went to the jailhouse, where he was dressed in a nice suit of black cloth, a white shirt, a black cravat, a black fur hat, and a pair of calf boots.

Sheriff W. W. Carney, a Choctaw, met him and read the death warrant in English. Deputies Thompson Cooper and P. H. Roony conducted him to a blanket spread nearby to serve as his deathbed. He laid off his hat, raised his hands toward heaven, and invoked the aid and blessing of the Deity.

When he finished he sat on the blanket, buttoned his coat, felt for his heart with his right hand, and pinned a small piece of white paper over it as a target. A white bandage was drawn around his eyes.

The two deputies took his hands and stretched them out to either side. Sheriff Carney advanced to within about four feet, drew a forty-four caliber Colt’s improved pistol from his side, dropped to his knees, and fired at seven minutes past twelve.

Reuben Lucas was no more.

They placed him on his back. For about four minutes he groaned audibly. His aged mother came and sat beside him, placed her hand upon his body, and wept. His brother and a cousin stood over him. Eight minutes after the shot he was pronounced dead. His friends took the body at once and started with it toward his former home, where he was interred.

Thus ended the career of as brave a Choctaw as ever died at the muzzle of a pistol.

The particulars of the murder, as they were known that spring, were these. Lucas’s confession had been written in Choctaw and had not yet been translated. On December 17, 1881, he and Thompson McKinney left McCurtain’s store together. Both men had been drinking. About twelve miles from the store Lucas got McKinney off the road and murdered him most brutally by shooting him twice through the body.

McKinney was buried in the traditional Choctaw cemetery at Skullyville. His headstone lists his date of birth and death and one o other word. "Murdered".

Afterward, it was supposed he robbed him, for he was later seen with money. The killing was thought to have occurred about three o’clock on a Saturday. The body was not discovered until Tuesday. Lucas came in of his own accord, surrendered to the sheriff, and pleaded guilty.

He said he would rather die by law than be killed by McKinney’s friends, and that in their attempt to murder him there might have been other lives lost. It was best for one man to die than many.

In the Choctaw Nation of that era the courts handled crimes committed by one citizen against another. Hanging was reserved for the most degrading offenses; the ordinary sentence of death was carried out by a single shot, usually aimed at a mark the condemned man himself placed over his heart.

The practice mixed older customs of blood satisfaction and personal stoicism with the language of Christian redemption that missionaries and Native preachers had carried into the Nation after Removal.

Crowds gathered, hymns were sung in Choctaw, and the condemned often spoke of whiskey, of wrong, and of readiness.

Sans Bois itself was a rural county of farms and open range, its principal features the creek and the mountains that still bear the name, its courthouse a modest building set among the settlements of people whose parents and grandparents had walked the Trail of Tears from Mississippi.

Thompson McKinney, the man Lucas killed, was the son of an earlier Thompson C. McKinney who had come over that trail, settled at Lukfata, kept a store, and raised cattle. The younger man had married Lizzie Hancock.

On the day he died he was simply one more man who had drunk too much at a country store and walked out with a companion who, hours later, decided to kill him.

Lucas had looked, the Fort Smith correspondent wrote, like anything else but a bad man. He had ordered his own coffin, dressed himself carefully for the last time, pinned the paper target with his own hand, and sung the hymn while strangers and kin alike shook that hand.

When the Colt spoke at seven minutes past noon he groaned, his mother wept beside him, and eight minutes later the law of the Nation had been satisfied. His friends carried him home.

The whiskey, the two shots on a December afternoon twelve miles from McCurtain’s store, the untranslated confession, and the quiet acceptance at Sans Bois all remained.