The subject of this sketch was born in July 1856, the son of William Gordon, a half-breed Scotchman and Creek Indian. His parents dying while he was quite young, William was carried North during the war, and stayed at Osage, near the Sauk and Fox agency. At the conclusion of the war he went to school at Drury College, Springfield, Missouri, for two years. In 1879 he entered the mercantile house of his half brother, Sam Brown, at Wealaka, with whom he worked for three years. After this he took charge of his step-brother’s cattle at Red Fork for one year, and then moved back to the Sauk agency, where he clerked for J. B. Childs for five months, at the end of which time he entered the employment of H. C. Hall, at Red Fork. In 1883 he was elected to the House of Kings, and held the office one term. His people might have well re-elected him, or done a great deal worse, considering that, for a man so young and inexperienced, he took a leading part in killing a bill that was introduced by a man named Railey, of St. Louis, that provided for the fencing and inclosing of a tract twenty-five miles square. This measure passed the House of Warriors and was introduced to the Kings by a well-known citizen of Muskogee. Young Gordon thereupon rose to his feet and told the assembled body that the Creeks had no land to lease to the white men, and that the bill should be tabled at once. It was done, and Railey returned to the bosom of his family, a sadder yet a wiser man. Mr. Gordon has had some rough experience during his life. When the notorious Belle Starr and her gang attacked the store of Sam Brown, Gordon, while endeavoring to guard his stepbrother’s property, received a blow on the head from a breech-loader which almost stunned him. During the Esparhecher war he was clerking with two six-shooters in his belt, ready, as he says himself, to fight for old Esparhecher till the “crack of doom.” Mr. Gordon married Lucy Pagoquay, a Euchee girl, but they soon separated. By this marriage, however, he has one son, named Billy, aged six years. Mr. Gordon afterward married Eliza Chiso, but she died without issue, in twelve months after their marriage. William Gordon is lightly built and nearly six feet high. He is quick and impulsive, like all of his people, and courageous almost to a fault. In truth, it may be stated that he does not understand the definition of the word fear. He is well educated in the Indian languages, and speaks fluently the Creek, Sauk and Fox and Euchee languages, while his knowledge of the English tongue is very creditable to his scholastic opportunities.
