THE WINDING STAIR MASSACRE

Hardback. It all began with the reported rape and murder of an Indian woman; but when the law men, Indian and white, arrive the trail leads them to three more murders and to one survivor, an 18yr old white girl named Jennie Thrasher. The time is 1890; the place the frontier city of Fort Smith where the famous 'Hanging Judge' Parker presided over the Federal Court and over the Indian Nations - the territory given to the Indian tribes who had been resettled in the West. The trouble was, the absence of effective law enforcement in the Indian Nations attracted the worst elements amongst Western outlaws. Into this harsh and violent world comes Eben Pay, a young lawyer who has been appointed to Parker's court to learn the realities of law enforcement. It is through Eben Pay's eyes that the reader sees what came to be known as the Winding Stair Massacre. A mere 4 days after he arrives in Fort Smith, Eben Pay is dragooned into a posse led by Marshall Oscar Schiller into the Winding Stair Mountains to investigate the murder report.......This story is not a historical chronicle of the Rufus Buck gang, all five of whom went to the gallows in Fort Smith, Arkansas on July 1, 1896, and with the exception of Judge Isaac C. Parker and George Maledon, all characters are fictitious. But the narrative does describe the kinds of crimes for which the Buck gang and others were tried in the Federal Court for the Western District of Arkansas in the last quarter of the 19th-century. The author dedicates the book to the good and decent people - red, white and black - of the Indian Nations, now eastern Oklahoma, who once suffered the ravages brought on by the complexities of national expansion. 277pp. 8vo. h/back. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. Vg+ in vg+ pcdw.