Charles N. Stamper was a 23-year-old male deputy sheriff in Tulsa County, Oklahoma, living with his wife Emma and their three young children in the coal-mining village of Dawson, just north of Tulsa, when his life ended violently on October 9, 1910. The little settlement was a ranching and mining community on the Frisco rail line, a place where miners worked long days in the pits and gathered in rough wooden structures and canvas tents to drink, gamble, and scrape together a bit of leisure.
Stamper was rooted there: a young family man who walked a thin line between the lawless energy of a boomtown and his duty to keep order. After his death, he was laid to rest in Oaklawn Cemetery in Tulsa, his grave and name later preserved in law-enforcement memorials.
On the Sunday he died, a group of coal miners had gathered in a tent in Dawson for a dice game, an ordinary off-duty diversion that turned suddenly ugly. Voices were raised, tempers flared, and in the close quarters of the tent, the argument escalated into a gunfight. Some of the enraged miners drew their weapons and began firing at one another. The violence did not stay contained: shots rang out into the streets, and panicked citizens scrambled for cover as the chaos spilled from the gaming tent into the wider community. In the midst of this confusion, someone was sent running to summon Deputy Stamper from his home in Dawson, calling on the young lawman to step into the storm and restore calm.
Answering that summons, Stamper went toward the trouble, into a scene already thick with smoke, fear, and frayed nerves. Accounts agree that he arrived after the initial exchange of fire among the miners, at a moment when the town was on edge and the line between bystander, participant, and target had blurred. Somewhere in that confusion, as shots continued or resumed, a bullet struck the deputy. He was gravely wounded and rushed into Tulsa, where surgeons at Tulsa Hospital operated in an attempt to save him. Despite those efforts, the wounds were too severe: Stamper died later that same day from his injuries, his death officially recorded as a line-of-duty killing by gunfire.
In the aftermath, attention turned quickly to finding someone to blame for killing the deputy. Later historical writing describes how, when the dust settled, suspicion fixed on a Black man known locally as Frank Henson. He was arrested, charged with Stamper’s murder, and brought before the court in Tulsa County. A jury convicted him and the judge sentenced him to death by hanging, making his case one of the earliest and rarest county-run executions in Tulsa County history. Officials in the county, uncomfortable with carrying out an execution themselves, appealed in the hope that the sentence might be commuted, but the effort failed. Governor Lee Cruce, who was personally opposed to capital punishment and had intervened in other death cases, refused to step in this time. The machinery of the law continued to grind forward toward Henson’s execution.
On the morning of March 31, a gallows stood ready and a crowd of roughly five hundred people gathered before dawn to witness the hanging. Tulsa County Sheriff Bill McCullough, a former cowboy with a handlebar mustache, had overseen construction of the scaffold; when the appointed executioner failed to appear, it fell to McCullough himself to tie the noose, fit it around Henson’s neck, and pull the lever. Even years later, he would remember it as “about the worst job I ever had to do.” Before the trapdoor opened, Henson — who had been described throughout the proceedings under that name — spoke to the assembled witnesses. He insisted that the witnesses against him had lied and claimed that Stamper had fired the first shot without identifying himself as an officer. Then he revealed that “Frank Henson” was an alias, saying his true name was Amos Bell, and declared that nothing in his past under that name would justify what was about to happen to him. After a prayer and final words, the sheriff dropped the trap, and the man the courts had held responsible for Deputy Stamper’s death died on the rope.
The hanging did not end debate about whether justice had truly been done. Contemporary coverage noted that many people in and around Tulsa felt Henson’s sentence should have been commuted to life in prison, and questions lingered about the reliability of the testimony and the circumstances of the deputy’s death. Those doubts folded into a broader early- twentieth-century argument over capital punishment itself — an argument that touched the governor’s office, county officials, and ordinary citizens who had watched the spectacle of the gallows. Yet for the young family Stamper left behind — his widow Emma and their three children, only seven, three, and three months old — the legal wrangling and moral questions played out in the long shadow of personal loss. Over time, his name became part of the roll of fallen officers, remembered on law-enforcement memorials and gun-violence remembrances as a deputy who went out from his small mining village to answer a call for help and never came home.
