threat that if he and the family pressed the matter any further
they’d all end up like W. W. Vaughan. After that, the family
stopped digging. Martha said, “I remember talking to my oldest
uncle; my sister and I were visiting with him before he died. We
said, ‘Who did this to Grandpa Vaughan?’ He mentioned the
warning to the family and said not to go there. He was still
frightened.”
I asked if Rosa, or anyone else in the family, had ever
mentioned any potential suspects besides Hale.
No, Martha said. But there was a man who’d embezzled money
from Grandpa Vaughan’s estate after he died and whom Rosa then
sued in civil court. I asked what the man’s name was, and Martha
said, “Something Burt.”
“Yes, H. G. Burt,” Melville said. “He was president of a bank.”
I wrote down the name in my notebook, and when I looked up, I
could see the eagerness in their eyes. I suddenly feared that I’d
stirred false hope. “It’s been a long time,” I said. “But I’ll see what
I can find out.”
The southwest branch of the U.S. National Archives is in a
warehouse, in Fort Worth, Texas, that is bigger than most airport
hangars. Inside, stacked in fifteen-foot-high rows, in humidity-
controlled conditions, are more than a hundred thousand cubic
feet of records. They include transcripts from the U.S. District
Courts of Oklahoma (1907–1969), logs on the deadly Galveston
hurricane of 1900, materials on the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, documents on slavery and Reconstruction, and reports
from many of the Bureau of Indian Affairs field offices. The
archive reflects the human need to document every deed and
directive, to place a veil of administrative tidiness over the