Charles Arthur Floyd (1904-1934) was born in Georgia, but grew up in Oklahoma.  More exactly, he grew up in the Cookson Hills in the Cherokee Nation of southern Oklahoma.  Steep hills and valleys covered with oak, black walnut, and hickory.  People grew cotton in the bottom land, grazed cattle, and grew corn to feed to the hogs and to distill for private sale in Mason jars.  During the Twenties people started logging and sawing the lumber.  You go down out of the Hills and you come to little towns like Muskogee, Salisaw, and Talhlequah.  (The Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) were from Salisaw; and Merle Haggard is proud to be an “Okie from Muskogee.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iYY2FQHFwE )  You go east into Arkansas a bit and you come to Fort Smith, where Judge Isaac Parker had his court and George Maledon ran the “hanging machine.”[1]  (See: “True Grit” (1969, 2010).) 

Charlie Floyd left Oklahoma for the bright lights of Kansas City, Missouri, where he fell in with ill company.  He turned to armed robbery early and then stayed with it whenever he wasn’t in prison.  Given the nature of robbing banks and company payrolls, he became a traveling man.  In 1929-1932 he visited Missouri, Colorado, Ohio, and Oklahoma, generally to rob banks.  The police arrested him a number of times, but let him go when his false identity held up or he escaped when it didn’t.  He killed or had a hand in killing a number of policemen as well as two bootlegging brothers who had gotten on the wrong side of organized crime in Kansas City.[2]  Still, people generally didn’t disapprove of Charlie Floyd: whenever he robbed a bank he also burned all the mortgage records showing what local farmers owed the bank.   

Charlie’s luck turned against him when the FBI mis-identified him as one of the gunmen in a botched attempt to free bank-robber Frank Nash.  This “Kansas City Massacre” left four lawmen and Nash dead on 17 June 1933.  Floyd denied anything having to do with it, while never denying any of the other crimes attributed to him.  J. Edgar Hoover said different and sent the FBI after Floyd.  Floyd, and his fellow bank-robber Adam Richetti, hid out in Buffalo, New York over the winter of 1933-1934.[3]  Headed back to Oklahoma in October 1934, the two outlaws and their girlfriends wrecked their car on a foggy road in northeastern Ohio.  One thing led to another and both the police and a team of FBI men showed up.  Floyd died in the ensuing gun-fight.[4]  Floyd’s funeral in Salisaw, Oklahoma, drew a crowd of at least 20,000 people. 

In 1939, Woody Guthrie wrote the “Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd.”  It included the lines “As through this world you travel, you’ll meet some funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”   The song became a standard for country/folk/rock musicians, being recorded by Joan Baez (1962), The Byrds (1968), Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger (1981), and Bob Dylan (1988).  He appeared as a central or secondary figure in half a dozen movies.  Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana wrote a novel Pretty Boy Floyd (1994).  He was an affable young man with a gun, and a poor boy out against the Law and the Banks in hard times.  When people talk about Charlie Floyd, they’re talking about other things. 

[1] A twelve man gallows. 

[2] The newspapers gave him the knick-name “Pretty Boy,” but nobody called him that to his face. 

[3] Apparently making the reasonable assumption that a) no one would think that somebody would go to Buffalo, NY, in the winter willingly, and b) no one would look for a couple of Okies in Buffalo, NY, at any time of the year. 

[4] There has been some dispute just how he died.  At first, the FBI tried to claim that the local police weren’t even present and that Floyd had been brought down by the FBI alone.  Later, they had to admit that the local police had played a vital role.  Much later still (1979), one of the policemen claimed that the FBI had killed Floyd after he had been wounded, had surrendered, and had been disarmed.  The FBI denied that charge.  Who could believe that the FBI would murder someone?  (See: Ruby Ridge.)