True Crime Chronicles: Business disputes led to broad daylight assassination of early Westville business leader

In the winter of 1914 Westville (Adair County) sat at the rail junction where two lines crossed, a modest Cherokee Nation holdover turned Oklahoma boom spot of merchants and allotments.

Pat Dore had shaped part of that growth. Born Patrick J. Dore, he arrived as the town took form and rose quickly: postmaster, merchant, landowner who platted the Pat Dore Addition so more families could build on the flats north of the tracks.

By his forties he carried weight in local politics and beyond. In June 1912 he traveled to Chicago for the Progressive Party convention and stood guard outside the Roosevelt rooms, a sturdy Oklahoman who kept the crowds back while the former president worked the delegates. Newspapers back home noted the assignment with pride; Dore returned to Westville a man whose name traveled farther than most in Adair County.

Tandy Folsom lived a few miles away in the same Goingsnake District country where he had been born in 1877. A Cherokee citizen with land and family ties that reached back through the removal era, he had minor children whose affairs fell under court-appointed guardianship after the Dawes allotment process left property questions unresolved for many families. The court named Dore guardian of those children.

What began as routine administration soured into private grievance. Folsom believed the handling of sales, rents, or improvements on the children’s parcels crossed into personal gain. The record never spelled out exact figures, but the resentment hardened.

On the afternoon of February 27, 1914, Dore stood in front of the Westville post office talking with acquaintances. Folsom approached from behind, raised a pistol, and fired once. Dore fell without exchanging words. The shooter made no attempt to flee.

Within hours he sat in custody while word spread that the killing traced straight to the guardianship dispute.

The trial opened in Stilwell the following month. Adair County District Court drew spectators from across the county; the case against Tandy Folsom for the murder of Pat Dore lasted three days. Defense lawyers offered two lines: emotional insanity brought on by years of frustration, and concrete irregularities in how Dore had managed the children’s property.

Witnesses described Folsom as a quiet man of ordinary habits until the guardianship matters boiled over. The prosecution presented the shooting as deliberate and unprovoked. On March 26 the jury returned a verdict of guilty.

The judge sentenced Folsom to life imprisonment in the state penitentiary at McAlester. No successful appeal altered the outcome; the conviction held

.Folsom entered prison in his late thirties. Surviving records show a man of the same name and Cherokee Nation birth year died in 1952; whether parole eventually freed him or whether prison records and civil records merged under the same name remains unclear from public documents.

Dore’s wife, Nolia, continued in Westville for years before moving to Arizona. She died in Tucson in the early 1940s and lies in San Xavier Mission Cemetery. Pat Dore himself was buried in the community he had helped lay out. Exact plot details do not appear in digitized cemetery indexes or contemporary obituaries; local custom placed prominent citizens in the Westville City Cemetery or nearby family ground, but no marker inscription or funeral notice survives in open sources to fix the spot with certainty.

The case closed with the sentence, yet it lingered in county memory as a collision of two kinds of claim: the newcomer merchant who built additions and guarded national figures, and the Cherokee father whose children’s land passed through hands he no longer trusted.

Westville kept growing along the rails, but the February afternoon in front of the post office marked the point where guardianship paperwork turned fatal and the town lost one of the men who had given it an extra block of houses and a story that reached Chicago.