By Steve Bankhead
**Originally published in the March 17, 2004 Watsonville Register-Pajaronian**
Left to my own imagination, I'm apt to write on dull and trivial matters like politics. Fortunately, friends sometimes steer me towards finer themes. One such friend is Cherokee writer Michael Walkingstick, who often shares emailed thoughts from Oklahoma. He provided the cup for this column, into which I'll merely pour the words.
This is a tale of two people separated by decades and half a continent, but connected by unbreakable bonds. The first person is Ned Christie, a Cherokee born 1852 in Wauhila, Oklahoma.
Well over six feet tall and strongly built, Ned was a master gunsmith and marksman. He was also a tribal representative under Chief Dennis Bushyhead, and traveled to Tahlequah in 1887 to attend a council meeting. Meanwhile, U.S. Deputy Marshal Dan Maples was in the area searching for whiskey runner John Parris. When Maples was killed, Parris falsely accused Christie of the crime.
Christie was a thorn in the side of western expansion, strongly opposing both railroad entry into the Cherokee Nation and the Nation's dissolution into individual land allotments. Add the fact that Maples was a marshal under "Hanging Judge" Isaac Parker, and Christie saw little chance of proving his innocence.
Returning home, Christie's shooting skills defeated repeated posse assaults for five years, wounding many attackers while managing to avoid killing even one. In 1889, Ned's cabin was torched, forcing his family into the open. The posse captured Ned's wife, wounded his son, and blinded Ned's right eye with a face shot before he escaped.
Christie then built a double-walled stronghold called Ned's Fort Mountain, which withstood later attacks. But in 1892, a combination of cannon fire and dynamite ignited the fort, and Christie was shot before he could escape. The son of Marshal Maples was allowed to empty a pistol into Ned's prone body before it was strapped to a plank door and taken to Fort Smith for public display.
Though a witness to the Maples slaying provided testimony in 1922 clearing Christie of the crime, many reference books still refer to him as a notorious criminal and murderer. But to the Cherokees, he is regarded as a tribal patriot and martyr.
The second profile is of Florence Owens, a migrant mother who came to California in 1922, the same year Christie was exonerated. She settled first in Shafter, until her husband Cleo obtained sawmill work in Porterville and then Merced Falls.
Florence's fifth child Ruby was born a month before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The economic ripples eventually reached Merced Falls, and Cleo lost his sawmill job in 1931. The family moved to Oroville where Cleo found work picking peaches. He later developed a fever, and lack of money for medical care left Florence a widow expecting her sixth child.
She fiercely resisted suggestion from relatives to split the children among them, and kept her family intact as she followed the migrant farm worker route between Arvin and Redding. But a trip to Nipomo in 1936 ended bleakly when frost ruined the pea crop Florence and her folks had hoped to harvest.
As Florence and her children rested in the partial shelter of a tarp, an automobile approached. A nicely dressed woman came from the car with a camera and began taking pictures of the family group. The photographer was Dorothea Lange, and when her sixth and final photo ran in newspapers the following day, reaction was both swift and nationwide. A convoy of vehicles soon entered the Nipomo camp, bringing food, clothing and medical care.
Three years later, John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath" would maintain public conscience on the plight of Okie migrants, but the revolution of farm labor reforms was truly born in that wistful image of Florence and her children.
One link between these two stories is that Florence was of Cherokee ancestry. And from the web page of Roger Sprague, we also learn she was actually the granddaughter of Ned Christie. But from there, the stories diverge gloriously. Ned's stubborn resistance to adversity brought death and destruction, while Florence's resulted in human compassion and hope.
Today the Cherokee Nation is reestablished and growing, and migrant farm workers are provided assistance and protections unimagined by my own Okie ancestors. While pessimism is easy to acquire, stories like these provide uplifting evidence that human society is improving, and may yet achieve its nobler dreams.