Dow Brazil Killing

Both men carried badges. Ballew was a deputy under Sheriff Buck Garrett and had made his name in the oil field in its untamed days, while Braziel had served for years under the federal government, once as a deputy U.S. marshal and later with the internal revenue department. The Daily Ardmoreite called their feud old and widely discussed, and wrote that friends of both men were not surprised by the shooting. Six wounds were counted on Braziel's body. That November a jury acquitted Ballew after less than an hour.

What the plaque says

Near this spot on January 30, 1919 Deputy Sheriff Bud Ballew with the help of the Chief of Police Les Sigler shot and killed their rival US Marshall Dow Braziel in what was then the California Café

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Murray State Park — 8.8 mi
  Oklahoma's first and largest state park, built by New Deal crews on former Chickasaw Nation land south of Ardmore, with Tucker Tower, a governors' retreat never finished, on a point above the lake.
• Turner Falls Park — 18 mi
  Honey Creek dropping 77 feet over Arbuckle rock into a swimming hole off I-35, in a 1,500-acre city park named for the man who settled here with his Chickasaw wife.
• Chickasaw Cultural Center — 23 mi
  The Chickasaw Nation's 184-acre campus at Sulphur, opened in 2010, with an exhibit hall on the Nation's history, a recreated 1700s town with daily stomp dance, and a bridge into the national recreation area.
• Chickasaw National Recreation Area — 25 mi
  Springs the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations sold to the government in 1902 rather than lose them to developers, later Platt National Park, now the Travertine district's creeks, CCC stonework and bison pasture.

More markers nearby

• Edmund Pickens (Ok-chan-tubby) — 15 mi
• Love County Courthouse — 16 mi
• Civilian Conservation Corps and Platt National Park — 24 mi
• Sulphur — 25 mi