The deputy marshal in command, Charles F. Robinson, was an intelligent officer, who wisely decided not to launch a fruitless pursuit into the hills and thickets of the district. Robinson had brought along two doctors, Julian Fields and C.F. Pierce, who did what they could for those wounded in the courtroom shootout. Eleven men were beyond help.

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Zeke Proctor was long gone in any case. Escorted by a strong group of perhaps 50 heavily armed Keetoowahs, he was headed for the toughest and most inaccessible parts of the Cherokee lands. Digging out him and his escort would be bloody work, and probably fruitless, and Robinson decided he hadn’t lost anything out there in the backcountry. Judge Sixkiller had also departed for the tall timber, as had most of the jurors. Robinson rode back to Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital, where he lodged a formal demand for the delivery of Proctor and a long list of other Cherokees. Chief Downing naturally declined to honor the demand — even if he could have. Instead, he contacted the Cherokee delegation to Washington, D.C., asking that they lobby for the return of complete internal sovereignty to the Cherokee Nation.

In spite of Robinson’s intelligent decision not to pursue Zeke Proctor, it would take time for all the bad blood to die away. For a while afterward, great tension existed between the Cherokees and anybody who was or looked like a deputy marshal. One thing was clear: No marshal, no matter how efficient or courageous, was going to catch the elusive Proctor. He was something of a hero to most Cherokees, a symbol of tribal resistance to the increasing encroachment of white government from the East.

Inevitably, Zeke was indicted for murder in the death of Deputy Marshal Owens, charged with some 20 others, including the judge and jury. In the verbose, tedious legal language of the age, the indictment recited how Zeke, with ‘a certain pistol then and there loaded and charged with gunpowder and twenty leaden bullets…then and there feloniously and willfully and of his malice aforethought did shoot and discharge; and that…with the leaden bullets aforesaid out of the pistol aforesaid then and there by force of the gunpowder shot and sent forth as aforesaid Jacob Owens in and upon the left side of him….’ On and on went the indictment, which included allegations of aiding and abetting murder against a whole host of other Cherokees. Meanwhile, Cherokee leaders indicted White Sut Beck and several of his friends for the murder of Johnson Proctor.

The Cherokee delegation’s patient lobbying in Washington finally bore fruit, and President Ulysses S. Grant granted complete federal amnesty to Zeke Proctor and his Keetoowah supporters. The Proctor family said later that for years Zeke displayed on the wall of his house the document that granted him that amnesty. He is known, with some justification, as the only individual with whom the United States ever concluded a formal treaty.

The federal indictment was at last dismissed toward the end of 1873. Apparently Zeke and a small army of supporters rode into Fort Smith and were actually present when the U.S. attorney entered a nolle prosequi in the case. The indictment against White Sut Beck was also dismissed, and in February 1874, the Cherokee National Council passed a general amnesty. And so peace of a kind returned to Going Snake District — but there was no peace between Zeke Proctor and White Sut Beck. For many years each man watched his backtrail, kept his weapons close, wondered what lay hidden in the woods up ahead. Each man was carefully watched over by his kinfolk, and there was no real truce.

In later years, Zeke Proctor remained something of a Cherokee hero. Some Cherokees even believed that he had some sort of divine protection, and some thought that this aura would protect them also, if they stayed close to Zeke. Most probably, Proctor’s survival was actually due to his ceaseless vigilance, and maybe also to the fact, as rumor had it, that he habitually wore an iron cuirass underneath his coat.

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