The Adventures of Flossie Hitchcock and Sadie Burche Of the U. S. Marshals
Every so often a story makes its way back to us about two Lady Deputy U. S. Marshals doing field work in the Indian Territory. The story goes that S. M. “Sadie” Burche and Mamie Fossett left Guthrie and traveled hundreds of miles to the Sac and Fox lands to serve subpoenas for a murder trial. The story evokes a vision of two heavily armed women in cowboy hats, boots and trail worn dusters mounting their horses and riding down a dusty trail in search of their man. Now this is a good story, but it is just that, a story, it’s at that crossroads where myth and history intersect.
Susan M. Burche and Mary Francis “Mamie” Fossett both worked for the U. S. Marshals in Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory during the 1890’s, along with Florence “Flossie” Hitchcock and her sister Lottie.
Florence documented her life in a typewritten memoir. A copy of the thirty-eight page manuscript resides in the collection of the Oklahoma Territorial Museum. It is the story of a “Pioneer Woman,” who shouldered the responsibility of providing for her mother and two younger sisters in the wake of her father’s death, she was seventeen years old. The majority of the manuscript deals with her time as a U. S. Office Deputy Marshal Stenographer and clerk for the Deputy U. S. Attorney’s Office. This is a gold mine of information about Territorial Government, the Marshals service in Oklahoma Territory, and the workings of the U. S. Circuit Court, not to mention the life and job duties of an 1890’s working woman.
Florence spent the first fifteen years of her life in Poughkeepsie, New York before moving to Medicine Lodge, Kansas due to her father’s declining health, the air of the west was thought to be restorative. After two years in Medicine Lodge her father died and on his death bed he made Florence promise to care for the family.
“Like all others who go to the city to make their fortune, having no profession or ability, I found I would have to fit myself for business.”
Florence Hitchcock
In 1888, she enrolled in “Professor Zinn’s Business College,” and learned typing and shorthand. She returned to Medicine Lodge and began working for various lawyers in town. In 1890 at the request of a family friend and banker Joe McNeal and his family she moved to Guthrie to work in the McNeal’s bank. Soon after arriving in Guthrie, Florence met Susan M. Burche in Mrs. Hayworth’s millinery shop (woman’s hat store). The two would become roommates, co-workers, and later sisters-in-law.
Burche came to Guthrie from Washington D.C. and appears in the 1890 Territorial Census, enumerated in June of that year. She is also in Smiths First Directory of Oklahoma Territory, which gave the address of everyone in the territory as of August 1, 1890. Like everyone else in she was here in search of opportunity. All of the records we have found she is listed as a stenographer/typist. According to the Official Register of the United States (a list of all the employees of the federal government), her official title for the Marshals service was Office Deputy Stenographer, with a yearly salary of $900 ($23,000 in 2017). The 1900 census finds her back in Washington D. C., where she again worked for the Government as a stenographer/typist. She does not appear to have married or bore children.
Burche took a job with Hobart Johnstone Whitley, who built the first brick block in Guthrie. Whitley would be considered a Capitalist he invested his and various railroads money in property, built and operated banks and hotels, and built towns across the west. Hollywood California is one of the 500 or so towns and areas developed by Whitley.
Florence worked for the Territorial Governor George W. Steele until he resigned. The new Governor A. J. Steele did not want any girl clerks because he didn’t want to get up and go in the hall to swear. She was transferred to the office of William B. Grimes United States Marshal for Oklahoma Territory. In 1891, Grimes deputized Florence into the Marshals Service as Office Deputy Stenographer. We have her commission here at the Oklahoma Territorial Museum.
I think I’ve hammered the nail long enough that they did office work for the Marshals Service. One of the things people seem to misunderstand about the Territorial U. S. Marshal is that he was a political appointee not a professional lawman. That’s no to say that he couldn’t be one. The Marshal was a part of the federal bureaucracy running the territorial government; the Deputies were the ones chasing down the bad guys.
Florence tells the story about a present received from her “Brother Deputies.”
“My little pearl handled revolver was given to me by the deputies one Christmas while I was working in the U. S. Marshal’s office.It came in a box with a silver plate on the cover with my name engraved on it and underneath my name the words “From your Brother Deputies.” The box was velvet lined and there was a brush for cleaning the revolver and a couple dozen cartridges… I really was a Deputy and held a Commission the same as they did, though I never went outside of the office and served paper; but I did have to sometimes attend sessions of court in certain Districts to pay off Government witnesses and jurors and bailiffs.”
Florence Hitchcock
One of the districts she attended was in Cloud Chief, eighty-eight miles southwest of El Reno. Deputy Marshal Madsen was chasing Train Robbers, so Florence made the trip in his place, in a two seat surrey with Judge Buford, the court clerk Captain Hegler, the court stenographer Charlie Beacom and an unnamed lawyer. Their first stop would be a mission school sixty-five miles away. After fording the Canadian river at noon the party stopped for lunch. As they prepared their lunch a couple of hogs belonging to a “Sooner,” charged in after the food, the men chased them away. Near dark the group reached the mission school where they spent the evening and proceeded to Cloud Chief in the morning. Cloud Chief, according to Florence was the worst of all the desolate places on Earth. The one hotel they could stay in infested with bedbugs, the wind blew through the cracks in the walls, and red dust covered the food to the extent she soda crackers with sliced beef.
Before Florence married Susan’s brother Hewitt, they lived active lives and numerous adventures. On one occasion the ladies captured a prowler outside of their home, a thirty pound possum who had gotten fat eating chicken feed and stealing the cat’s food. It made the paper to the enjoyment of their friends and neighbors. Another time they floated the Cottonwood River, as it was known then, and ate “Nutmeg Melons,” they found dumped for hog food. A nutmeg melon is green fleshed cantaloupe.
She mentions only having “Shanks Horses” for transportation, her legs, so the two ladies bought bicycles. She tells the story of her, Susan, and Hewitt, riding to the Seay Mansion in Kingfisher for a party with the Governor and his family. Kingfisher is thirty miles from Guthrie, over wagon rutted roads and open prairie. Part way to Kingfisher a storm rolled in and they raced it to a sod house, hail caught them before they made it and knocked Florence from her bike. The found the family away and the house locked so they took shelter in a hay shed. After the storm passed they continued on through the mud, stopping every little bit to clean the “Gumbo” from the frames. When they arrived in Kingfisher the streets were deep in dust as the storm passed to the east adding another layer of grim to their already muddy selves.
In January of 1898, Susan Burche and Mamie Fossett did serve subpoenas in and around the towns of Perkins, Flynn (no longer in existence), Sac and Fox Agency, Stroud and Clifton (Meeker). According to the February 16, 1898 Daily Oklahoma State Capital, “…as far as having any such tastes of border ruffianism and bravado, ascribed to them, the assertion is utterly at variance with their character. They are delicate city breed girls…” Regardless, the story spread to newspapers around the country, made it into almanacs for the year of 1898, and The Stenographer. It even inspired a song by Freeman E. Miller “Song of the Bandit Chief.”
Something to be noted is that this is during the time of sensationalist “Yellow Journalism.” President McKinley appointed Canada H. Thompson as Marshal, after months of rejecting the candidates put forward by Territorial Governor C. M. Barnes, and Territorial Representative Dennis Flynn. Thompson named W. D. Fossett as Chief Deputy and on the same day deputized Fossett’s daughter Mamie as Office Deputy Stenographer. The uproar seems to have been stoked by the Guthrie Daily Leader a Democratic paper opposed to all things Republican.
These women lived heroic lives regardless of doing “Field Work,” as Deputy Marshals or not. They came west and settled in a new land, took jobs that supported themselves and their families, and lived what seem to be happy fulfilling lives with just enough adventure to have people remember them 120 years later.
