This article is quite a puzzle. While the newspapers, then and now, often got the facts wrong, usually there is some connection, however tenuous, between the story and real events. But what follows seems to me--let me know should you have other information--a complete invention.

For what it’s worth, [my comments are in brackets] the following appeared in the Davenport Weekly Leader, 11 January 1901, p. 6:

Generosity of Harvard

But Sam Sixkiller Loved Wild Life the Best

Washington, Jan.3.—A man who was killed in the Indian Territory a few days ago had a reputation far beyond its borders. [Supposedly, this is the son of the Sixkiller who was killed in downtown Muskogee—and not ambushed from a hazel thicket—in 1886. Sixkiller did have a son, Samiel Rufus, also spelled Samuel Rasmus, who was born in either 1878 or 1877 but (according the the Sixkiller genealogy posted at Ancestory.com) died in 1930. Whether he was a Harvard graduate or a law enforcement officer I have no idea.] This was Sam Sixkiller, a talented and well-educated Cherokee, who in early life was graduated from Harvard, the delight of Boston’s cultured because of his mental and physical qualities and a young man in whom Oliver Wendell Holmes took special interest. In later years he became the terror of outlaws and met death in riding the Territory of their operations. A college companion who accompanied Sixkiller to the Cherokee Nation reviewed the features of his eventual life. He said:

“After he had finished his education he went back to the Indian Territory. He had a lot of land—about 30,000 acres—but a man who had lived among cultured people all his life could not settle down to the monotonous life of a herdsman, with no society except for his own people, who had never been out of their own district.

“The United States Marshal’s place in the Indian country was one of great consequence and importance. He must be a man of iron nerve, a quick, deadly shot with the revolver or rifle, and besides all that be full of resource and expedient. In those days the “bad men” of the border took to “the nation.” There they were safe from State interference. Nobody but the United States Marshal could touch them. This important functionary had a deputy in each district of the Indian Nation, and there are six districts. This deputy was “the whole show,” to use an expression much in vogue down there. He drew from $75 to $100 per month and mileage. He had the authority to swear in any number of assistants required. About twenty years ago train robbing was extremely common and popular in that country.

Sam’s Father Was Assassinated

The father of this man, whose name was also Sam Sixkiller, was then a Deputy United States Marshal. He captured and had fourteen of the leading train robbers of that period hanged, for they were all guilty of murder. [This strikes me as highly unlikely.] One day somebody riddled him with two charges of buckshot from a hazel thicket as Sam, the elder, was quietly riding to his home, having summoned a lot of witnesses against some train robbers. Sam, the junior, was absent when his father was killed. [Snip long story of how Sam Jr. tracked down his father’s killers, blowing the head of one off “even with his ears.”]

Ran Down Counterfeiters

After this there were no more killings. The brief spread that Sam Sixkiller had either done it himself or had caused it to be done. He had done all the work alone.

Sam had been away a good deal that summer, the neighbors said. Finally his friends told him he had better leave for a while. Some of the men who were killed had sons, and they were talking ominously. So he left and went to Ft. Smith, where he was made the Chief Deputy Marshal for the Indian country.

Just about this time great quantities of counterfeit money were put all over the cattle country of the Indian Territory. The bills were twos, fives, and twenties. So good was the engraving that it was only when the bills were sent to Washington that the counterfeit was discovered. Sam Sixkiller was put on this work and in about a month he was able to locate the men who were passing it or selling it to the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks. He found that three men who called themselves Dalton were at the head of the gang. They had been known as train robbers before this, but the testimony was not strong enough to convict them. Two of them were arrested when they were not expecting it.

“They were carrying great quantities of this money on their persons buying cattle, mules, hogs, anything they could sell again with it. Sam Sixkiller was warned that he would be killed as his father before him had been. But it made no difference. He went on with his work and had finished it before assassinated."