Waitey McColl is a bright Native American young adult, who works as the night clerk of the historic Sequoyah House hotel, in the town of Seymour in eastern Oklahoma. Originally, this family hotel stood in the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory, in an especially lawless section known as the "Cherokee Badlands."
The action is compressed into a time frame of 36 hours in 1921. The champagne cork has popped on the Roaring Twenties in America. But the hilarity could have been a million miles away from Seymour; for it has been only 14 years since the state of Oklahoma was the wild and woolly Indian Territory of the United states. Miraculously, when the story begins, the Sequoyah House has never been held-up; and that's what Waitey's family like to celebrate, on New Year's Eve.
Late one night in March, the notorious Cherokee outlaw Henry Starr sneaks into the hotel lobby and introduces himself to Waitey as a cousin. After playing on Waitey's loyalty to his Indian heritage, he loses patience and coerces his intimidated cousin into giving his gang a room secretly, until dawn, when the outlaw promises they will be gone.
The next day, in a robbery based on an actual event, Henry Starr's gang robs a bank in Harrison, Ark. However, they botch the job and two persons are killed in the bank, and Henry Starr is wounded. There is a sidebar to this famous robbery. The robbers use an automobile and automatic weapon, for the first time in U.S. history.
The killers escape in a rambunctious shootout and road chase, in which their Stutz Bearcat easily outruns the Ford Model-T's of the posse. The gang goes on to outwit lawmen at two roadblocks and return to the hotel, forcing Waitey at gunpoint to allow them to hole up there, until things cool off. They become increasingly desperate, as the dragnet of lawmen tightens around them.
When the killers take the hotel hostage, endangering the lives of guests, Waitey's sweetheart, as well as his dear Aunt Hannah, the tension continues to build. In a climactic ending, Waitey becomes torn between his Cherokee loyalties and his admiration for J.C. Montague, a legendary sheriff who is as fast with a gun as most gunslingers. When the sheriff asks for Waitey's help, in capturing the gang, Waitey makes a decision that will change his life forever.
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The author, Howard Bryan Bonham, was born in Tulsa, Okla. He draws on his knowledge of Southwestern culture and history and close family ties to the Cherokee Badlands, as he relates Waitey McColl's coming-of-age story.
