Eli Hickman Bruner

Blacksmith, like his father. In June 1880 he was “E. G. Bruner,” 20, blacksmith, born Missouri, father born Indiana, mother born Kentucky, enumerated alongside his widowed sister Emma Clifford and her children at the silver camp of Gothic, Colorado; she had gone where her brother was. Older notes disagree on the page and line.

Later a Deputy U.S. Marshal for Judge Isaac Parker’s federal court at Fort Smith, riding in Indian Territory, and one of the deputies credited with leading the November 1892 posse that killed Ned Christie. His sworn account for an arrest two months earlier survives: on a warrant of 15 September 1892, “Deputy Marshal E. H. Bruner” arrested A. C. [or G.?] Wooten for larceny near Chelsea in the Indian Territory on the 17th and brought him, with a guard, 163 miles to Fort Smith, claiming $68.68 (record). A photograph of the Christie posse, its eight men numbered, has him as no. 8, standing at the right with a rifle (picture). A period newspaper calls him “the United States Marshal” and tells of “Bruner’s Graveyard,” a fenced grove south of Tahlequah said to hold 28 outlaws he killed; that is frontier-press legend, not verified.

Open questions

• The Gothic page and line number (pp. 247 or 248), from the image.
• His commission as a deputy marshal, and a record of his part in the Christie fight (the court’s papers at Fort Smith; the photograph’s own caption).
• The newspaper story of “Bruner’s Graveyard,” seen but not yet cited: a deputy who cleaned up Indian Territory and buried the outlaws he brought to justice in a graveyard of his own. To find again and add to the archive, with its paper and date.
• Where his portrait came from on FamilySearch.