True Crime Chronicles: Deadly Warrant - The Craig County killing of Deputy Marshal "Ike" Gilstrap at Big Cabin

US Deputy Ike Rogers

Bullets chewed the cabin’s planks and keened through the twilight. Outnumbered and leaking life, the survivors melted into the night to summon aid. Hours later, torches flaring, they stormed back.

The cabin was empty and Gilstrap lay as he fell--gut-shot and gone, desecrated by a coward’s parting shot: a pistol pressed to his lifeless eye and fired point-blank

The wind howled across the oak ridges of Indian Territory on the night of March 12, 1906, carrying the scent of pine and gunpowder to a lonely cabin 25 miles southeast of Vinita. There, U.S. Deputy Marshal Isaac L. “Ike” Gilstrap rode straight into a hail of bullets.

He had come for justice. Instead, he found a grave.

The trail began over a year earlier, on February 20, 1905, when Deputy J. Henry Vier, a veteran lawman renowned for his cool head in the crossfire, was gunned down near Salina during a routine arrest. Vier had cornered three bootleggers when one drew first. Vier crumpled with three slugs in his chest, his badge catching the dying light in the dust.

The killers melted into the hills, leaving federal courts in Muskogee seething for vengeance.

The suspects: a shadowy trio of local outlaws, echoes of the infamous Cherokee Bill gang, men who spat on the law as brazenly as the Daltons or Doolin boys in their heyday

.Gilstrap, a Missouri man transplanted to the Territory, with a wife and young daughters waiting in Vinita, claimed the warrant as his own. He gathered a lean posse, including fellow Deputy Charles Bailey, and two sharp-eyed Cherokee scouts, and tracked fresh sign through creek bottoms and bramble thickets to a weathered hideout near Big Cabin.

Gilstrap, Colt revolver drawn, stepped toward the sagging door. No parley. No mercy.

A shotgun thundered from the shadows within. The blast shredded Gilstrap’s chest, hurling him backward and Bailey caught lead in the shoulder, staggering into the underbrush.

Bullets chewed the cabin’s planks and keened through the twilight. Outnumbered and leaking life, the survivors melted into the night to summon aid. Hours later, torches flaring, they stormed back.

The cabin was empty and Gilstrap lay as he fell--gut-shot and gone, desecrated by a coward’s parting shot: a pistol pressed to his lifeless eye and fired point-blank

.The three fugitives scattered like spooked coyotes. One fell short of freedom, cut down in a federal ambush near Claremore months hence, his corpse strung up as a stark admonition.

The others dodged the noose until 1908, when U.S. Marshals collared them in irons and hauled them to Muskogee. The trial devolved into farce: saloon tales of their drunken brags, shell casings etched to their weapons, Vier’s crimson warrant brandished like a holy relic.

yet, in a gut-punch that rocked the Territory, both walked free. Jurors with hissed rumors of threats or bribes in their ears, spoke the acquittal. No price was ever exacted for Gilstrap’s blood.

Ike Gilstrap left a widow bowed by grief and daughters who matured on Vinita’s hushed prairies, his Colt revolver handed down as a haunted heirloom.

His name endures on the U.S. Marshals Service Fallen Officers Memorial in Fort Smith, etched among the 120 souls who bled out the frontier’s wild heart.