Last Stand

Before a colonnaded white house on Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard last week collected gaping curiosity seekers and frightened neighbors. Outside, a posse headed by U. S. Marshal Robert P. Clark had waited ten days to take peaceful possession of the house in the name of the U. S. Government. Inside. Mrs. Anna Laura Lowe Barnett, onetime wife of "World's Richest Indian'' Jackson Barnett, sat waiting too. Marshal Clark said he would enter the house without violence. Mrs. Barnett said she would keep him out with knives & guns. And if they failed, threatened Mrs. Barnett, she had enough dynamite in the house to blow Wilshire Boulevard sky high.

The late Jackson Barnett was a simple-minded Creek who got 160 acres in Eastern Oklahoma from the Government in Benjamin Harrison's time and lived to see his land produce 12,000 bbls. of oil a day. So dim-witted that he used to parrot back "Hello. Jack" when he was addressed, Indian Barnett had a guardian to invest his $60,000 monthly income. He lived on $50 a month until Anna Laura Lowe, a white widow, entered his life, began fighting with the Government over his money.

Just before Jackson Barnett died in 1934, supposedly aged 92, the Government had their 13-year marriage annulled on the grounds that the old redskin had been "kidnapped by an adventuress." Marshal Clark, an old buffalo hunter and army man who prided himself on never having used violence in executing a court order, at first seemed stymied by Mrs. Barnett's tactics. But early one morning when his customary audience was home in bed, he and twelve deputies cautiously moved up on the house. Mrs. Barnett, in the back yard feeding her pet cockatoo, ran in, bolted the door.

When the invaders knocked their way in, they saw Mrs. Barnett at the top of the stairs, brandishing a hatchet. "Get out of here, you gangsters!" shrilled fat Mrs. Barnett. Seeing two women deputies, she screamed: "And keep your old fish hags out of here, too." Blinded by a whiff of tear gas. she hurled the hatchet downstairs before the deputies grabbed her. In the house Marshal Clark found Mrs. Maxine Sturgis, her daughter by her first husband, no dynamite but a large, menacing supply of jagged stones. Homeless Mrs. Barnett and daughter, still protesting, were bundled off to jail to face the charge of "suspicion" of resisting Federal officers.

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