McIntosh County Seat War

The war

When towns in the American West fought over which one would be the county seat, things usually stayed civil. Most of Oklahoma’s so-called county seat wars ended with just heated arguments and tight votes, no violence. But McIntosh County was a different story. The county was created in 1907, when Oklahoma became a state, and at the time it had 17,975 residents.

Before that, the land was part of the Creek Nation’s Eufaula District. On January 9, 1907, the territorial government in Guthrie sent a telegram to Checotah. The message said that a legislative committee had picked Checotah as the temporary county seat, with a future election to decide the permanent one. The news caught everyone off guard, and the town was thrilled.

Being the temporary seat gave them a big edge in the upcoming vote. People danced in the streets, church bells rang, and shopkeepers handed out cigars. The celebration didn’t last. A Eufaula attorney named William C. Liedtke, who was also a delegate to the constitutional convention, heard what happened.

On January 17, he gave a fiery speech to the general assembly arguing for Eufaula and called for a vote. The tally came back: Eufaula got forty-two votes, Checotah got forty-one. So despite the telegram and the party in Checotah, Eufaula became the new temporary county seat. A two-story building on the northeast corner of Main Street and Riley Avenue was rented for a courthouse, and the county records were moved there.

Checotah’s residents were understandably upset and protested, but they soon calmed down and turned their attention to the special election. The same went for people in Eufaula and in Stidham, a town about eight miles northwest of Eufaula. Over the next few months, boosters from all three towns campaigned hard for their own communities.

Aftermath

Joe Parmenter and Edward C. Julian were both taken into custody on murder charges, but neither was ever found guilty. Julian returned to his former position less than a year after the gunfight, while Parmenter was cleared by a jury in June 1909. Frank Jones headed back to his home in Checotah and eventually wrote a memoir titled The Experiences of a Deputy U.S. Marshal of the Indian Territory. That book covers many of his years as a lawman and his later adventures after retiring, yet it never once mentions the McIntosh County Seat War.

In July 1925, the old Eufaula courthouse was destroyed by fire and replaced with a single-story structure. The flames consumed many of the county records that the two opposing sides had been fighting over. The current McIntosh County Courthouse was completed two years later, in 1927. On April 14, 1988, the Eufaula Business District—which includes the Foley Building—was added to the National Register of Historic Places by the U.S. Department of the Interior.