The Gethering

During my younger years I was fortune to meet some of the old time law men from the late 1890’s. One of them happened to live not far up the way from me and was an acquaintance of my step-father. When I was a teenager I gut the grass in the old man’s yard and would rack the leaves from his trees in the winter time.
He dearly loved to talk for he had no kinfolks that I ever heard about and he told me a lot of stories of the old days in the Territory before Oklahoma became a state.
Talking with him is when I remember of hearing of the gathering of outlaws. It was after the lawmen started working together to stop crime for before if a bad man did not cause trouble in your town you did not bother with him. Even had the bad man was a down to earth outlaw.
The use of the telegraph was the start of the down fall of the robbers and outlaws wanted for killing and such things. The old man had been a posse man on several occasions and a deputy marshal on two other times.
The old man had been a law officer at Ada Oklahoma before he retired and moved south to Idabel, Oklahoma to live near his son. Several times he would comment on the two outlaws that lived down the street near where I lived at. He said at one time they had robbed banks and other people in the old days.
The Gathering novel is based on his tales and several that my father mentioned to me in later years.