to bump off a couple—an old man and his blanket, meaning an
Indian woman. Spencer asked Hale whom he wanted dead. “Bill
Smith and his wife,” he said. Spencer told Hale that he might be
cold-blooded but he wouldn’t kill a woman for silver. As he put it,
“That’s not my style.” Hale said he hoped that Gregg, at least,
would go through with the plan. But Gregg agreed with Spencer.
White thought that Gregg was being “on the level” and that his
refusal to kill for hire showed him to be “an outlaw with some
honor.” But though Gregg’s testimony offered the clearest
indication yet that Hale had ordered the murders, it was of limited
legal value. After all, the statement was coming from a crook
seeking to shorten his sentence, and Spencer, the one person who
could corroborate Gregg’s testimony, had since been gunned down
by a posse of lawmen. (The Pawhuska Daily Capital had reported:
WITH $10,000 BONDS IN ONE HAND AND WINCHESTER CLUTCHED IN THE
OTHER, FAMOUS BANDIT DIES IN HIS BOOTS WHILE HILLS WHICH GAVE HIM
SHELTER IN LIFE ARE HIS SEPULCHER IN DEATH.)
During one of his interrogations, Gregg said that agents should
find Curley Johnson, an outlaw who ran with the stickup man
Blackie Thompson. “Johnson knows all about the Smith blow up
and will squeal if made to do so,” Gregg promised. But Johnson, it
turned out, was also rotting underground. Less than a year earlier,
he’d died suddenly—word was of poisoned alcohol.
White’s desperate search for a witness soon led him to Henry
Grammer, the rodeo star and gunslinging bootlegger who, every
year or so, seemed to draw down on another man because of a
dispute. (HENRY GRAMMER SHOOTS AGAIN, one headline put it.)
Though Grammer and Hale generally moved in different circles,
White established that they’d known each other for years, from
the time when Hale had first appeared in Osage territory, at the
turn of the century. In a rodeo contest in 1909, they’d competed
with the Osage Cowboys against the Cherokee Cowboys.