HISTORY: I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang by Leonce Gaiter

I Dreamt I Was in Heaven

– The Rampage of the

Rufus Buck Gang

By: Leonce Gaiter

 

Rufus Buck gang. Rufus Buck was half-black and half Creek Indian. The rest of the gang was composed of one African-American, and three full-blooded Creeks.
Rufus Buck gang. Rufus Buck was half-black and half Creek Indian. The rest of the gang was composed of one African-American, and three full-blooded Creeks.

 

In the summer of 1895, terror gripped the Indian Territories (today's Oklahoma).  The youthful, multi-racial Rufus Buck gang was on the rampage, terrorizing and assaulting anyone in its path.  Their goal: to expel whites from Indian Territory.  Gang leader Rufus Buck was half-black and half Creek Indian.  The rest of the gang was composed of one African-American, and three full-blooded Creeks.

The idea of a multi-racial gang banding together in 1895 may seem strange, but turn-of-the-century Indian Territory was a multi-racial place.  A new novel by Leonce Gaiter entitled I Dreamt I Was in Heaven – The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang explores the Buck gang rampage amidst the rainbow of ethnicities on both sides of the law in the lawless Indian Territory.

"I had first read about the gang almost twenty years ago," says author Gaiter, whose novel Bourbon Street was published by Carroll & Graf and whose nonfiction has appeared in publications from "The New York Times" to "The Huffington Post."  "The story immediately grabbed me.  The novelty of a 19th century multi-racial gang that some say were teenagers seemed remarkable.  It was also remarkable to me that their aim was to end the theft of Indian Territory.  They were fighting back.  You don't hear many stories in American history of the black and brown victims fighting back."

With further research, Gaiter learned more about the complex relationship between black freedmen and the Creek Indians dating back one hundred years.  In 1895, black freedmen towns dotted the Indian Territory.  Blacks were lawmen as well as outlaws.  The novel portrays the famous outlaw Cherokee Bill (aka Crawford Goldsby), who was half-black and devoted to the African-American grandmother who raised him. One of the Territory's principal deputy U.S. marshals was a black man named Bass Reeves.  The Buck gang's first victim was a black lawman.

"Once you get into it," Gaiter says, "and start reading about Indian outlaws like Ned Christie being hunted down by the lawmen of the Indian Creek Lighthorse, the infamous white 'Hanging Judge' Isaac Parker working directly with the black U.S. deputy marshal Bass Reeves as they hunt and prosecute, black, white and red outlaws—it's kind of dizzying.  And then you add the fact that more and more whites were flocking to the Territories.  That's because the U.S. government was instituting policies that would guarantee that the Indians would lose their land.  It was just an amazing period, and the story of the Rufus Buck gang reflects a large swath of it."

 Gaiter hopes that the novel will help loosen up African-Americans' view of their own history.  "We've fallen into this ditch in which our history is defined by others and limited to views of us as saints and victims.  We are infinitely more than that.  I think it's dehumanizing to accept such a limitation that's been slapped on us by others.  The Buck Gang was a product of its time, and they were no saints.  Their cause was just, but their methods were abhorrent.  They are, however, a great piece of history and a fantastic window onto an incredibly compelling and tragic American era."

via bookreview.name

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The Story Behind the Story:

“I Dreamt I Was in Heaven,”

by Leonce Gaiter

(Editor’s note: In this 24th installment of our “Story Behind the Story” series, Northern California author Leonce Gaiter delves into the background of his new novel, I Dreamt I Was in Heaven: The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang [Legba Books], which melds crime and western fiction to convincingly recall an infamous historical rampage. Gaiter grew up as an “army brat”--rootless, restive, and disagreeable. 
He began writing in grade school and continued the habit through his graduation from Harvard. He moved to Los Angeles and put his disagreeability to work in the creative and business ends of the film and music industries. His non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Washington Post, and Salon. His thriller Bourbon Street was published in 2005.)

About 15 years ago a coworker dropped a newspaper clipping on my desk. It showed a photograph of five young men of wildly varying shades of brown, circa 1895. The lengthy caption identified the youths as members of the notorious Rufus Buck Gang, a multiracial band of teen outlaws--one black, three Creek Indians, and Rufus Buck, their half-black, half-Indian leader--who rampaged through Indian Territories for 13 days in 1895 with the stated purpose of reclaiming Indian lands from U.S. settlement. The clipping also explained that on the day of Rufus Buck’s hanging, a handwritten poem entitled “My Dream” was discovered in his cell. It was reproduced, eccentricities and all, and it began:
i, dreamP'T, i, was, in, HeaVen,
Among, The, AngeLS, FAir;
i'd, near seen, non, so HAndSome,
THAT TWine, in, golden, HAir;
I was hooked. First, the name “Rufus Buck” was awesome. Such a name would practically predestine one for outlawry. The idea of men so young embarking on such a mad scheme suggested both near-religious zeal, and childish naïveté--for me, an irresistible combination. That Buck fancied himself a poet was icing on the cake. In addition, Buck’s short life had crossed paths with grand historical figures, including the famous “Hanging Judge,” Isaac Parker, who had been the de facto ruler of Indian Territory for 20 years; notorious half-black, half-Cherokee outlaw Cherokee Bill; and the one-quarter Cherokee bandit Henry Starr, relative of the infamous outlaw Belle Starr.

The story seemed impossibly rich. It was the dawn of the 20th century. Elderly Judge Parker’s rein over Indian Territory was coming to an end, just as the Territory itself would soon be a memory. Research showed me that Indian Territory in 1895 was a shockingly multi-racial place. More whites than Indians occupied the Territory that many black freedmen also called home. The Buck gang’s first victim was a black lawman. Judge Parker’s principal marshal was a black man named Bass Reeves. The chief of the Creek Indian Territory was half white.

If there was a problem with this story, it’s that there was too much going on. I had famous historical figures, the end of an era for both Judge Parker and the Indians, and a burgeoning United States swallowing up Indian Territories, a tense melting pot with one group about to overwhelm all others. My question was how to portray this. How do you meld these multiple moving parts while entertaining the audience?

To get this right, I had to develop a personal sense of the time--not historical details, but an overriding sense of the zeitgeist that would inform everyone who swam within it. I researched Indian Territory history, black freedmen and their history with the Creek 
Indians, the politics of the Indian Territories with respect to the United States, Judge Parker’s career as the Territory’s overseer, and the outsized roles of Territorial outlaws.

Author Leonce Gaiter

Researching this book made me realize that I am a throwback. Much of today’s literary writing is inward and domestic. It explores principally inner lives and how the outside world intrudes upon them. I, however, am fascinated with the grandiose, with men and women whose ambitions threaten to outstrip those of the gods themselves, who seek to impose their inner lives on the world at large. My research allowed me to see Buck and Judge Parker as two such characters. Buck envisions heavenly guidance for his crimes, while Parker is convinced of his rightness with God until his encounter with a seminal text and the reality of Buck’s rampage put the match to all of his former assurances.

The multi-racial aspect of this story also drove me. Being a black man who has lived the vast majority of his life in overwhelmingly white surroundings has had a profound impact on me. That Buck and Cherokee Bill were half-black, reared by a black mother and grandmother, respectively, greatly influenced their depiction. Even within Creek society, Buck would have been an outsider. In addition, the Indian Territory of the time housed more whites than Indians, which would have multiplied the dissociating effect. Bill reacted to his state by dismissing unjust societal norms as shams and staking his claim as an outlaw; Rufus reacted to his by donning the mantel of a savior.

In this case, deep research fed my personal stake in the narrative as opposed to tempering it. I make no claim to accurately portraying Buck, or Cherokee Bill or Judge Parker. What I have done is examine them and their history and filtered both through my own sensibility. It had to be this way if the book was to read as compellingly as I wanted it to. I am not a historian. I am a novelist who is using history, and in the end, a novelist has no more guidance than his or her own background and sensibilities provide. For me, this book is as personal a statement as the average memoir, or any more academically birthed literary venture.

This piece has made me fear that writers are as much to blame for the decline in the popularity of literary fiction as anything. We have gone small, narrowing our worlds to tiny bubbles as opposed to exploding beyond our world’s confines--and taking our audiences with us. To suggest that works exploiting the touchstones of history or genre are inherently less literary is ignorance at its most base. To suggest that there is a limit to the “acceptable” literary themes, locales, or writing styles is likewise a pernicious ignorance.

I Dreamt I Was in Heaven is a personal novel that uses America’s iconic history as its canvas. My goal in writing it was to entertain an intelligent audience, explore a bit beyond this world’s confines, and with any luck, transport you with me in that adventure.

POSTED BY J. KINGSTON PIERCE