I saw True Grit, the old John Wayne movie, on TV last night. I saw that movie first in Los Angeles, when it first came out. I thought it to be the best John Wayne movie. Several years later, my friend Lonn Taylor, who works for The Library of Congress, told me the Rooster Cogburn character, John Wayne's character, is based on an Oklahoma Federal Marshal named Heck Thomas. Lonn also told me that Heck Thomas was the inspiration for Heck Ramsey, a Richard Boone television series in the '70s. Heck Thomas was my great-grandfather's first cousin.

I grew up knowing about Heck Thomas. My grandmother has a photo of him and his sons in her picture box. Several years ago she was staying at my house when I bought a copy of Glenn Shirley's book about Thomas. It is called Heck Thomas, Frontier Marshal. My grandmother read the book and said to me, "He wasn't anything but a killer." And so he was. I can't get an accurate count of his killings from the book, but I read somewhere he killed over twenty men. The twenty were, of course, on the other side of the law. Grandma said her father had about the same opinion of Thomas, that he was a killer.

Heck Thomas was born and raised in Georgia. As a very young man, he fought in the Civil War. Then he was an Atlanta city policeman. He came to Texas to work security for the railroad. He helped track down the train and bank robber, Sam Bass. He went to work in Oklahoma for Judge Isaac Parker, the famous hanging judge of Fort Smith, Arkansas. That court had jurisdiction over the Indian Territory and Thomas was a Deputy Marshal in the territory. He was known as one of the Three Guardsmen. The other two were Cris Madsen and Bill Tilgham. The three of them became the most effective and famous of the Territory marshals.

I often go to Oklahoma. My mother keeps telling me which towns my relatives live in, but I don't know those relatives. My mother doesn't know them, either, and my grandmother has lost track of them. So I never make any effort to locate them. But I was, a year ago, telling my friend David Hill about Oklahoma relatives. And we made a strange connection.

David is a Choctaw who lives near Sasakwa, Oklahoma. He was around near the beginning of the American Indian Movement. He went to Washington, D.C., with the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan that seized the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in the early '70s and was at the occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. That was in 1973 when the American Indian Movement made headlines for several weeks because of their seizure of the little town where the American army massacred Big Foot and his band of Sioux at the end of the Ghost Dance scare in 1890. I met David through the movement to free Leonard Peltier. Leonard is an Indian activist who has been in the federal prison system for sixteen years. He was convicted of the murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. I have been convinced for years that Leonard killed no one. Robert Redford made a documentary movie about the case. The movie, Incident at Oglala, presents convincing proof that Leonard is not guilty. At least three books have made the same point.

When I played the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1989, I met several people from Dallas who were heading a Leonard Peltier support group. Through them, I met David Hill. David came down to visit. We decided to write a long poem together about the beginnings of the American Indian Movement and David's part in it. David likes to talk a lot. So do I. We spent several days talking about that and everything else in sight. I told David about my Oklahoma relatives and he told me about his.

It turns out, David is kin to the famous Doolin family. The Doolins were from a non-Indian side of his family. The Doolins, along with the Daltons, did a good job of robbing banks, railroads and stores in Oklahoma. We talked about the Doolins and about my almost-relative, Black Jack Ketchum, who did some serious train-robbing, including one at Coleman Junction, and was hanged in Clayton, New Mexico.

Suddenly I began to realize what David was saying. Bill Doolin was his relative. I was pretty sure Heck Thomas killed Bill Doolin. I checked Shirley's book. Heck Thomas did indeed kill Bill Doolin. One of my relatives killed one of David's relatives in Oklahoma in 1896.

We talked about that and everything else in sight for the rest of the afternoon. Judy got home late and we told her what we'd discovered. David grinned and said, "Roxy and I just talk each other to death."