Volume 10 , Issue 31

1896 - Bad Day At Blackwell, OK

On December 4, 1896, at Bert Benjamin's ranch near Blackwell, Oklahoma Territory, before dawn, a posse slipped into position around a shack in which two men suspected of planning a robbery of the town's bank were holed up.

When they emerged at sunrise, Deputy Sheriff Alfred Lund bellowed, "Throw up your hands!" Instead, the suspects reached for their guns. As the first shots rang out, three members of the posse (half the total force) took to their heels. Lund stood his ground, wounding one gunman, killing another and inadvertently riddling one of Bert Benjamin's livestock.

The wounded man proved to be a hardcase named Ben Cravens, but the dead man seemed an even bigger prize. Since he was missing three fingers, the lawmen confidently identified him as the vicious outlaw Dynamite dick Clifton, who was said to have lost the same number of appendages during a gunfight. It turned out that the dead man had been invested in a ntoriety of which his corpse was unworthy. As a newspaper commented later, he was only a petty thief named Buck McGregg.

Despite this disapoointment, the press managed to find a happy note; it reported that Blackwell's encounter with crime had caused a marked advance in the local real estate market.
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