Chapter 70

Crow Ridge
Tulsa, Indian Territory

When Miranda first started teaching at the new school building in the fall of 1884, she started a tradition that she kept up as long as she taught school there. Each Friday after school classes ended, she and Grandmother would move the desks and tables back to the sides of the one room school building and teach dance steps to the students. They had an arrangement with Bill and Jack Robertson to come to the schoolhouse and play music while they taught the students to dance.

The Robertson brothers had joined a small band a few years back that played in the Tulsa community building on Saturday nights. Adalee and Cadalee would join their husbands as they played with the band. They talked their sisters, Hadalee and Nadalee into going with them to the social dances and soon other members of the Crow family would make appearances at the Saturday night socials.

Miranda had insisted that Eli and the other men begin to learn the dance steps too, since Eli had promised the women another trip; maybe even to St. Louis or New Orleans sometime in the future, when they got everything going. So it was that Eli, Duncan, Moses, Joe, Jefferson, Howard, Doc, and Jon David learned to dance with their wives.

Then came James, Leon, Albert, and soon after, Smitty with Corrine. Hadalee and Nadalee were there with Cadalee and Adalee learning to dance. They had heard Doc and Lettie talking about it and Lettie asked the two nurses to come take lessons. Since there were plenty of men there with no partners, Lettie stepped in and asked James and Leon to dance with the two Cherokee nurses. It wasn’t long before the two couples were some of the more accomplished partners at the social dances. The Crow family and friends learned the dance steps and practiced until they were confident in themselves. At first, the men wouldn’t admit liking the dance lessons, but soon they were planning big family parties and get-togethers at the community building where the local businessmen sponsored the dances.

To make the dances more attractive to the family crowd, there was no alcohol served or even allowed on the premises. There were no guns allowed in the building and no shooting of firearms on the premises. Thus a family could attend the social dance, stay four to six hours and not have to worry about their children’s safety.

On most nights at the community building, Miranda and Grandmother would hold dance classes during band breaks and teach the younger crowd new dance steps. More times than not, there were adults who joined these short dance sessions, complaining when they ended too soon.

Those who wanted to learn more, were invited to the schoolhouse on Fridays after school to learn and practice dance steps until they felt they could master the dance floor without an accident or an embarrassing misstep that always caused a few laughs.

At first, both girls and boys liked the waltz steps the most, and requested the Robertsons to play waltzes when given a choice. The next favorite and soon to be the most enjoyable of their dances was the two-step (deux pas), which like most dance steps coming out of the early 1800’s, originated from the waltz on the ballroom dance floors back east.

With banjo, fiddle, and guitar, the Robertson brothers most often played the slow rhythm in 3:4 time much like a waltz. The boys liked this dance because it was a partner dance where they didn’t have to hold a girl close and become embarrassed by their reactions to her body heat and her closeness. The girls liked the two-step because they could get their beaus to dance to nearly all the tunes, fast or slow. The two-step was a dance that fit them all.

During the spring, summer, and fall months, the Crow family and all their many friends made the Saturday night socials a regular outing. The women and girls wore new dresses ordered from the finest catalogs, accompanied by the men dressed either in their best buckskins, or for the oil men from back east, a newly purchased three piece suit.

The old community building had actually started out as a barn that had been converted to a meeting hall with a smooth wooden floor installed but wasn’t well suited for dancing. It wasn’t long into the first year of attending the social dances, that Rose and Miranda cornered Eli and asked if he could help raise enough money to build a new community building, since the Saturday night socials were so popular.

Eli decided to do it up right and told the Franklin brothers to get with his main carpenter who’d built most of the big ranch spread across the river on Crow Ridge. They were told to plan a big one and not to spare the costs. Eli was going to pay the total cost of construction as payback to the town of Tulsa for all it had meant to him and his family over the years.

The new community building was officially opened on the Saturday night before Thanksgiving, 1888.

The place was packed and the dance floor was full for each dance that night. There were one hundred and ten people who had registered at the door. The admission was free for opening night with families from far and wide taking advantage of it.

There had never been any real trouble at the Saturday night socials in all the years they’d had them. The most that ever came about was a gripe when someone bumped another couple too roughly as they had a good time kicking up their heels. Nearly everyone knew everyone else and the younger generation who went to school, knew each other and got along well.

As the younger ones grew older and showed more responsibility, they were allowed to attend the dance socials without their parents on the Saturday nights their parents couldn’t make it.

There were always a lot of young people on the dance floor and around the walls of the huge meeting hall. The Young Bucks and the Crow girls went to nearly all the socials and made lots of friends over the years.

Some of the braver boys they met even asked the Crow girls to dance.

Tulsa Community Center
Tulsa, Indian Territory
December 7, 1888

The Young Bucks and the Crow girls were decked out for the special Friday night social. This was to be a youth dance and Christmas party sponsored by the local businessmen, especially for the young folks who lived in and around Tulsa.

The Bucks wore new buckskins and moccasins. They had made a pact to wear their hair long and braided the day they became blood brothers. Even Isaac who had no Indian blood, wore his hair long just as his Indian brothers since that day.

They were blood brothers, and they were even more inseparable than before. At times Kit and Ruby felt as if they had to compete for the attention of Eli and Isaac, though they never complained openly.

Tonight, they had hitched the buggy horses to the Crow family surrey to escort their sisters to the social. The Bucks had always saddled their horses and tied them behind the buggies, no matter if they went alone or with their parents.

They took this habit from their dad and the former marshals. They felt like they were even more vulnerable without horses since they had to put their Colt revolvers in their saddlebags before entering the dance hall.

They had been at the Christmas social only a couple of hours when Ezra nudged Little Eli and nodded toward the front door.

There stood the same young man dressed as a Texas Dandy, who had confronted them at the river a few years back, asking the whereabouts of Marshal Crow. As the other Bucks were made aware of his entrance, they continued partying with their sisters while keeping an eye peeled for the man.

A few minutes later, Ezra kicked Little Eli’s foot and nodded once more toward the door. There were three more men dressed the same as the first one. The Bucks shared a look and knew it was time to get their sisters out of there.

Before they could tell them it was time for them to leave, Kit, Ruby, Lilly Beth, and Lee Yu stood to go use the facilities.

“Kia, as soon as the others come back, we need to get out of here. There’s liable to be trouble with those fancy pants dudes by the door. We’ve had a run-in once before with that tall man with the ugly mustache. Tell Michi so she’ll know and both of you have all the handbags in your hands when the others return,” Eli leaned over and whispered as he nodded and pointed to the men.

“Do you think they’ll cause problems? Will they start a fight?” she asked.

“Not if we leave now. We’re not going to have a confrontation with them while our sisters are at risk. We’ll leave now and take this up another time.”

“I don’t see them now; do you think they may have left already?” Kia whispered as she and Michi looked around the room filled with people.

“I doubt they left that fast. There are a lot of people here and it’s easy to stay out of sight if a person wants to,” he told them as he and the Bucks kept watching for them.

Kit and Ruby came back in a hurry, nearly running with their long dresses lifted to keep from stepping on their floor length hems.

“Eli, there are some men back there trying to talk Lilly Beth and Lee Yu into dancing with them. One of them even asked them to come sit at their table,” Kit said as she leaned over.

“Let’s go, Bucks.”

“Kit, you and the others get your stuff together, we’ll meet you at the front door,” Eli said as he and his brothers turned and hurried through the crowd to the rear of the building where the facilities were located.

When they turned the corner to the wide hallway, they saw Lee Yu and Lilly Beth all but pinned against the back wall as they tried to walk past the four men. Just as Eli was about to step up and tap one of them on his shoulder, Ezra swung his right fist at the one who had his hand on Lee Yu’s wrist, blind-siding him with a crushing blow to his right eye.

The man never knew what hit him as his head was slammed against the wall from the blow. The other three men quickly turned to face the Bucks. The one who had ridden across the river to confront them, recognized the Indian boys.

“Well, well, we meet again and this time you’re not wearing guns,” he grinned and flicked his mustache with his thumb and forefinger, just as he and his two remaining friends started toward them.

Micah and Caleb quickly bent forward, stepping to the side as if ducking away from the impending fight. Just as the three Texans moved toward Isaac, Ezra, Pike, and Eli – Caleb and Micah came up from their crouch, both swinging from the floor with a hard right, catching two of them blindsided, landing a solid blow to the temple of each man. The two men went to the floor like wet rags as their brazen, mustachioed friend now stood alone.

“I’ll get you yet, you low down stinking Indian Bas...” the Waco Kid started.

That was all he managed to say as Eli swung at him, hitting him in his mouth with his right fist, followed by two rapid lefts to his jaw, then a right–left combination to his breadbasket that doubled him over and spun him around. Eli pounded his fists over the man’s kidneys with lefts and rights until he crumpled under the blows and slumped backward against him. Eli pulled him around and pounded him to the floor with lefts and rights to his belly and ribs. When the man hit the floor, Eli rolled him onto his back, pouncing on him as he pounded his face to a bloody pulp while his brothers tried repeatedly to make him stop so they could leave.

“Let’s go, Eli. We’ll settle this later. We need to get the girls out of here and home safe,” Micah said as he tried to pull his brother off the unconscious man. Little Eli had the look of a madman as he shook Micah off and hit the man twice more in his face as hard as he could swing his fists.

Still sitting astride the man’s chest, Eli slipped a pocket knife out of his pouch and whittled both sides of the man’s long bloody mustache off his swollen, bloody lip. He stuffed it in the man’s open mouth, his broken nose bleeding on the long curly mustache; blood and snot dripping from it onto the floor.

After they’d gotten their sisters safely outside and in the buggy, Eli and Ezra tightened the cinches on their saddles and mounted up while Isaac ran over to the hitching rails to see if he could spot the horses the Texans had rode in on. He saw four of the fancy saddle rigs that looked just like the one they had seen when the man had cussed them and called them names down by the river. The four horses were tied next to one another.

Isaac ran back to jump into the buggy just as Caleb turned it toward the river. He looked over and nodded to Eli and Ezra when they split, one riding in front of and one behind the surrey. They rode out of Tulsa across the wagon bridge over the Arkansas, then turned to ride out toward Crow Ridge.

“You girls go on in the house, we’ll put these horses up and be in later. It would be better if you didn’t talk about what happened over there tonight. The folks may not let us go back by ourselves again if they hear of this,” Eli told them, then hugged Kit and kissed her goodnight.