While working for John Tunstall as a ranch hand, he met Bill Bonney and several other men.

In 1880 at about age 27, Waite left the gang and returned to the Chickasaw Nation to build a more settled life.

His father was a farmer who also operated a trading store and stage stop southeast of Pauls Valley in the Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory.

His mother was mixed race (as was he and his siblings) and his maternal grandparents were Ela "Ellen" Teecha (Chickasaw) and the Rev.

They were pursued by Confederate soldiers as the conflict reached the Nation, and fled to the Sac and Fox reservation in Kansas, which supported the Union.

[2] Reportedly, Fred was sent to school first at the Illinois Industrial University, for education in European-American ways.

After his father's death, Waite returned to the Fort Arbuckle to manage the family store.

He wound up in Lincoln County, New Mexico, where he got a job as a ranch hand with John Chisum in 1877.

[1] They originally collected as a posse led by Dick Brewer to serve arrest warrants on Tunstall's killers.

Waite was allegedly behind a wall with the gang when they killed William J. Brady, sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico.

[4] Waite was said to have stayed with the Regulators long enough to become the subject of one county and two federal arrest warrants.