Belated thanks for this thread.

The singers who recorded this downstream from Woody Guthrie, such as Charlie Sawtelle, always seemed to me to stop the song before the lady's death. After 50 years i was finally curious enough to look it up, and it seems my dramatic instincts were correct -- her death is the point of the song, which, like Stewball / Skewball is a noble ballad in form.

I like what Guthrie did with it -- replacing the "Indians" with "rustlers" and leaving the lady alive -- but then, without her death, we miss the important information that she had become his wife.