City Marshal Edward “Ed” Baum was a 38-year-old male serving as the chief law officer of the young town of Checotah, Oklahoma, when the trouble that had been simmering for years finally reached him on March 27, 1909. In the rolling country west of town, Muscogee traditionalists and their allies had gathered around the charismatic leader Chitto “Crazy Snake” Harjo, a man who resisted allotment and the dismantling of tribal sovereignty. Newspapers and later historians would remember the cl
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