This historical novel takes place in 1890 in the Choctaw Nation of Indian Territory and in Fort Smith, Arkansas, a town on the Arkansas/IT border. The Federal Court with jurisdiction over nontribal people in The Nations was located in Fort Smith and the Marshals Service worked from there.

When word of a murder in Indian Territory is received by the Marshal he assigns Deputy Oscar Schiller to investigate. Schiller is in Fort Smith and he and his posse, two Osage trackers, quickly prepare to board the night train to travel into the territory. A fourth person, Eben Pay, a naïve young lawyer from St. Louis temporarily assigned as an assistant to the prosecuting attorney, comes along as well. It was Pay's father, a judge in St. Louis, that thought Eben needed to experience law enforcement to understand all facets of law. When the four disembark from the train at Hatchet Hill IT, they are joined by the chief of the Choctaw police and some of his men. They take Oscar and his posse to the murder scene of Mrs. Eagle John, a Choctaw woman who was traveling in her wagon with a small black boy she was raising. She has been murdered and raped. The boy was able to escape and hide. This turns out to be only the beginning of Schiller's work. A man named Thrasher is found dead in his farmyard along with the two men that worked for him. When Schiller and the posse arrive, they bury the dead and begin to work on a puzzle Schiller would like not to have discovered. Mrs. Thrasher and their teenage daughter are missing.

Published in 1979, Winding Stair is well written with interesting and diverse characters indicative of the time and place.
Doug Jones was very knowledgeable about the history of Indian Territory, the Thrid Districct Federal Court in Fort Smith , and of the law of the time. ( )

This is set in a tighter historical frame than a lot of Westerns, and more fully explores the culture of the white man's west. A young lawyer gets a crash course in the peculiar misery that occurred in the present state of Oklahoma in the 1890's.
The self governing natives there were having a great deal of difficulty in dealing with relatively lawless refugees from the more tamed states. He joins an expedition to recover criminals that strayed into Arkansas, and this gives Jones a chance to play with the culture of the east, that of the West, and that of the Indians. It's an interesting read from that viewpoint. ( )