Volume 11 , Issue 28

Oklahoma's Frank Canton (Joseph Horner)

Have you heard the story of Frank Canton, alias Joseph Horner, born 1849, died September 27, 1927? General Frank M. Canton was a picturesque frontiers man, veteran law enforcement officer of the Old West, colorful soldier of fortune, first adjutant general of the state of Oklahoma, and prototype for the fictional western heroes of Novelists.

Very few knew that the true name of the man they honored was Joe Horner and that his "picturesque, colorful" history included a criminal career marked by convictions for bank and highway robbery, desperate jail escapes and indictments for cold-blooded murder.

Frank Canton was accused of killing a number of men, but he spent most of his life trying to kill Joe Horner, the man he had been in his youth. He was successful that almost another half century passed after his death before the story of Horner came to light.

While in Nebraska, he officially changed his name to Frank M. Canton and vowed to give up his outlaw ways.

Frank M. Canton was well known as the Adjutant General of the National Guard of Oklahoma, appointed to this position directly after Statehood in 1907, by Charles N. Haskell, the first Governor of Oklahoma.

A native of Virginia, he had gone as a child with his parents to Texas, and later worked as a cowboy on one of the first cattle drives north up the Chisholm Trail through the Indian Territory to Abilene, Kansas, in 1869. His work in charge of cattle drives later took him farther west, and his career as a peace officer began with his appointment as deputy sheriff in Custer County, Montana, while employed as field inspector for the Wyoming Stock Raisers' Association with headquarters at Miles City, Montana, during a "cattle rustlers' war" in that region.

He settled at Buffalo in 1880, was elected sheriff of Johnson County in 1882, and was reelected in 1884. Shortly after the opening of the Cherokee Outlet, he came to Pawnee where he was commissioned deputy sheriff by Rank Lake, first elected sheriff of Pawnee County, Oklahoma Territory, who had formerly sewed as a deputy under Sheriff Canton in Wyoming.

During the gold rush to the Klondike in 1897, Canton went to Alaska in the employ of the North American Trading and Transportation Company with headquarters at Circle City where he was appointed Deputy United States Marshal.

On his return to the States two years later, he accompanied a Government relief train to China with supplies for the Americans during the Boxer uprising. Canton traveled to Oklahoma, and became a respected U.S. Marshal under Judge Isaac Parker, based out of Fort Smith, Arkansas. He worked with other famous lawmen such as Heck Thomas, Chris Madsen, and Bill Tilghman during that time. In 1895, Canton joined a posse that tracked down Bill and John Shelley, who had escaped from the Pawnee jail and barricaded themselves in a cabin across the Arkansas River.

According to the book, The Cowboy, 1849-1873> ... "Joe Horner died in August 1879. The desperado and outlaw disappeared, not only from the Texas penal system but from the earth itself. The Man who had murdered him, a man calling himself Frank M. Canton, would spend the remainder of his days trying to eradicate the memory of Joe Horner forever."

It was not known how or why Canton chose the name he assumed. there were speculations that he reversed the name of his friend Milton Franklin Lake to come up with "Frank. M." There was speculation that he may have taken his last name from the town of Canton, Van Zandt county, Texas, or he may simply have liked the sound of it.

Canton was active in widely separate sections of the country .. Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Alaska -- during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth.
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