Volume 17 , Issue 43

An Old Gang of Horse Thieves Story

It was a Thursday, 19 April 1909, page 5, in The Beaver Herald, out of Beaver, Oklahoma, that we found this story entitled: "An Old Gang of Horse Thieves." The story unfolds out in Texas county, in "No Man's Land" during the early pioneer days of 1885. Maybe you might have heard this before through your pioneer ancestors.

Found on Newspapers.com

One day the first of the week Lyman Savage was telling about some of the pioneer days of Texas county. Into his recollection came the remembrance of one of the old time horse thief gangs that infested the old territory of "No Man's Land" about 1885. The gang's headquarters were at Sod Town, an old stopping place, long since disappeared and forgotten, except in the memory of the real old timers of the country. Sod Town was located in the southeastern part of what is now Beaver county. The real rendezvous of the thieves was a couple miles from town. The gang was composed of something like fifteen members, five of which were brothers, named Chitwood, and who were in reality the leaders of the band. These brothers were outlaws from Kansas, somewhere up in the Medicine Lodge neighborhood and were familiar with practically all the sections within a radius of five hundred or a thousand miles.

At times they had as high as fifty and seventy-five horses, some of them as fine specimens as you ever saw. One evening a vigilance committee from Kansas slipped into the Chitwood home, which was a couple of miles from Sod Town and in the absence of male members of the Chitwood family, ordered the mother of the boys to prepare supper. They had arms of all descriptions and while waiting for the meal stacked their tools of warfare in a corner. A young brother happened to be at home and sneaking out, rode off to warn the brothers. The leader of the gang immediately started for home and upon his arrival found the committee at supper. He used the but end of a rifle and put the whole bunch to of commission in short order, sending them home minus their firearms. He afterwards called at Mr. Savage's place of business and offered him any kind of fire arm he might desire in styles manufactured since the war. Lager on bad luck seemed to get in its work on the gang. Kit Chiswick, the leader, was overtaken in a storm and his feet frozen, which afterwards left him a cripple. One day he and his father and two others of the gang were jerked by the authorities. The evidence against the Chitwoods and one member was insufficient to convict in the opinion of those prosecuting, but in the case of the fourth member it was different. They hauled him up to the scaffold, the boards of which was a cracker box, and after allowing him to say his last good bye, kicked the box from under him, and he was left to die by strangulation.

The team, wagon and effects of the Chitwood's were confiscated on general principles and they were ordered to leave forthwith, which they did. This was one of the mean gangs of the wild days of "No Man's Land" and its passing was noted with considerable gratification by all who knew of it. This was the only hanging that ever occurred in "No Man's Land," according to the best of Mr. Savage's recollections. The name the man hanged had escaped his memory in the lapse of subsequent years, although he was of the opinion that Fred Tracy of beaver would remember it. When the indignant citizens ran the last of the gang out of the country Mr. Tracy was among the number who helped rid the community of the members and the pleasure it afforded the citizens had not likely been entirely forgotten. ~ Guymon Herald.
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