It was July 3, 1903, when Deputy U.S. Marshal John B. Jones, a 50-year-old white male, stepped into an Independence Day celebration on the Osage Tribe Reservation in Oklahoma to confront a disturbance that had begun to overshadow the holiday mood. The problem centered on a drunk man who had taken up a position at the top of a darkened stairway, holding a rifle. As a federal officer, Jones moved toward him, not with gunfire but with words, trying to talk the man down from his precarious, volatile
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