Ambush at Dogwood Crossing on Rooster Creek

On July 22, 2011 my oldest son John took me out to visit the old Juzan family cemetery. I never dreamed that Alexander Juzan who has been buried there for 124 years would come alive in print, only to be gunned down in an article that is hopefully the final chapter of this book.

I took Virgie White out to the old cemetery many years ago and took several pictures for her as she viewed the old ornate tombstones. She had lived on an adjoining farm when she was just a child. Wilber Wiggs did a story for The Madill Record and used the pictures in the article.

On Nov. 16, 2005 my second cousin Glenn Dale McCuan posted a story on our family website. He related a story that had been told to him and his cousin Brenda Reese Jackson, by his father Dale McCuan, when he and Brenda were very small children. Dale showed them a scar on an old tree on the A.C. (Pud) Lindsay property, made by a bullet many years earlier. (Incidentally, the Lindsay property is where my family lived until 1942.)At the time Glenn posted the story, I failed to realize that Alex Juson was actually Alexander Juzan.

This can be accessed online at:

www.chickasawhistory.com/bussell.htm or by searching Chickasaw history.

The Juzan cemetery is east of Hwy 70- A where it terminates in the water of Lake Texoma and can be reached only by traveling across U.S. Government property managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Unauthorized crossing of government property in a vehicle is illegal. However, the cemetery location is on private property owned by Larry McGranahan. So I called Larry to get permission to visit the cemetery and he came by the next morning, bought me a cup of coffee and gave me several antique documents. One was the same story that Glenn had posted 6 years earlier, the murder trial of Steve Bussell held in Ft. Smith, Arkansas.

Larry gave John and I a signed, dated U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' document granting us permission to travel via truck across the Corps managed land to visit the cemetery site. For those who do not have access to the internet the story is as follows:

On April 10, 1887 Chickasaw policeman Jim Christian and Bud Luttrell were traveling by buggy North towards Tishomingo with a Chickasaw prisoner named William Hamilton.

James (Jim) Bounds and Chickasaw policeman David Hardwick were also part of the escort and were mounted on horses. This pair had stopped to talk to someone and was quite a way behind the buggy as it entered what is known as Dogwood Trail that led down to the most popular fishing hole on Rooster Creek. Both sides of the old wagon road were lined by the dogwoods that are always in full bloom at this time of year.

(These are the same dogwoods that are mentioned in the chapter titled "FOLIAGE". Virgie White had told me about the dogwoods and the gunfight, but as it turned out possibly 2 different conflicts had occurred here and the two somehow got intertwined down through the years. The account of the bank robbers may have gone with Virgie because she was the only one I ever heard mention it.)

When Bounds and Hardwick caught up with the buggy at Rooster Creek, Bud Luttrell was lying in the road and Jim Christian was in the buggy; both men were dead. The prisoner Hamilton was standing by the buggy proclaiming his innocence. He told the deputies that the shots had come from the creek bank. Several fishermen showed up at the scene and a boy told the lawmen that he had seen two men fleeing on horseback. The lawmen gave chase for about a mile and a half, but turned back when the fugitives entered a grove of woods.

(Present day geography would have the chase starting about 200 years west of the swimming beach, northwest across the abandoned golf course and up towards the Chickasaw Casino on Know Hill.) Two days later a posse caught up with the fugitives very near where the present Old Indian Trail intersects McDuffee Road. The ensuing gun battle left Alexander Juzan dead, but Bussell managed to escape. He was captured later by Deputy U.S. Marshall Charles Leflore.

Bussell was a Chickasaw, but murder victim Luttrell was a white man so the trail took place in Ft. Smith, Arkansas. Steve Bussell would stand before the notorious "Hanging Judge" Isaac Parker. He was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead on April 19, 1889. However, the sentence was appealed and reduced to life in prison. Sometime later, Harve McDuffee and Hick Ray, who were with Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders in the Spanish-America War, contacted their old commander and President Roosevelt issued a pardon for Bussell. He was reported to be back in Indian Territory by 1902, and settled in Woodville, marrying Hick Ray's sister Bettie. Hick Ray was Kay (McCuan) McCorstin and Freda (McCuan) Norris grandfather. Evidently Steve Bussell became a respectable citizen, and his daughter Lucy (Bussell) Taylor was a Sunday School teacher.

The following is recorded and accessible online: