Volume 16 , Issue 30

The Dalton brothers & Dalton Gang

The Dalton brothers, there were ten of them, will always be remembered for the misdeeds of the four bad ones, Grat, Bob, Emmett, and Bill. They rode across the Cherokee Strip a Century ago and provided a never-ending source of stories for the news papers of the day.

While most of the Dalton family led honest and sedentary lives in the Kingfisher area. The three brothers were credited with shootings and robberies from one end of the country to the other.

The rumor that the Daltons might be headed for a particular town struck terror in the hearts of its business men. Those who claimed to know said one good reason why the Daltons were the way they were was be cause of their bad blood.

Adeline Younger Dalton, mother of the clan, was the aunt of another family of out laws, the Younger's. Her nephews, Cole, Bob, and Jim, rode the out law trail in the fashion of some more of their relatives, Frank and Jesse James.

The Dalton boys were the sons of James Lewis and Adeline Younger Dalton, who had brought them out of Missouri at the start of the Civil War and settled the family on a farm near Coffeyville, Kansas, just north of the Indian Territory. It was a wild and law less frontier town where the young boys grew up on the tales of their out law relatives.

When the new Oklahoma Territory was opened in 1889, the Dalton family joined the land rush and the father and older sons obtained claims near King fisher, Oklahoma.

Four of the sons served as deputy marshals from time to time while the fifth moved to Montana and eventually to California. Bill Dalton served with the State of California two terms. Charles, Ben and Littleton Dalton took claims near Kingfisher. Henry Coleman Dalton participated in the Cherokee Strip land rush and took a claim near Enid, Oklahoma.

One son, Frank Dalton, was a Deputy US Marshal who was killed in the line of duty in 1887. Frank had been the most stable of the brothers, well grounded and mature, and by all accounts Frank kept his brothers in line. They respected him, and had at times rode with him in posses. When killed, Frank had been tracking a horse thief in the Oklahoma Territory. When he located the suspect on November 27, 1887, he confronted him and a shootout erupted, resulting in Dalton being killed, two outlaws being killed, and his deputy being wounded. One week later, on December 3, 1887, the suspect was tracked by other lawmen, and another shootout erupted.

In that second shootout, Deputy U.S. Marshal Ed Stokley shot and killed the suspect, but Stokley was also killed during the gunfight. Sam Wingo was a US Marshal who ran with the gang robbing after he shot the wrong man in Arkansas, and escaped custody in a subsequent shoot out with deputies. Perhaps hoping to avenge their brother's death, the three younger Dalton boys -- Gratton "Grat" Dalton (b. 1861), Bob Dalton (b. 1869), and Emmett Dalton (b. 1871) -- became lawmen. But in 1890, the boys moved to the other side of the law.   |  View or Add Comments (1 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

---