Hard Way Out of Hell

by Johnny D. Boggs

  Laughing, he shook my hand and reminded me that I had once made him leave behind $8,000 in Yankee greenbacks in Kansas. “As I recollect, you said something about not becoming a petty thief,” he reminded me.

  Little Archie Clement, Payne Jones, Dick Burns, Bud and Donny Pence, George and Oll Shepherd, Joab Perry. Ten of us in all, wearing gloves, mufflers, and Yankee greatcoats, for the day had turned bitterly cold, and snow flurries would begin to fall. At Blue Mills Ferry, we crossed the icy river, stopping at Captain B.S. Minter’s for food, hot coffee, the warmth of a fire, fine conversation, and two sacks of meal. On the outskirts of Liberty, we dumped the meal in a ditch, and I stuck the empty sacks inside my greatcoat. A few of our colleagues pasted fake mustaches and/or beards on their faces, but such frivolities I shunned. Then we split up—the boys coming to the square from different directions, and finding their positions at various locations, leaving Frank and me to ride in alone a few minutes later.

  On the southwestern corner of Liberty’s town square, a fine two-story building of red bricks housed the Clay County Savings Association. A week or two earlier, the bank’s owners had led a meeting of blackhearted Radical Republicans.

  Just around 2:00 p.m., Frank and I swung from our horses, wrapped the reins around a hitching rail, and walked inside the bank.

  It was February 13, 1866.

  The cashier’s name was Greenup Bird. He had been pointed out to Frank by his mother often. Bird’s son, William, glanced at us briefly when we walked inside before he went back to his scribbling. As a county clerk, the banker had helped settle the estate after Frank’s pa died of fever in California during the Gold Rush. The Birds, Frank assured me, wouldn’t know him from Adam’s house cat, and they sure did not know me.

  As we warmed ourselves by the stove, I pulled a crumpled ten-dollar note from the pocket of my trousers. My eyes locked on Frank’s. The next decision would change our lives, but Frank merely shifted the quid of tobacco he chewed to the other cheek. After that, he smiled. So did I, and, clearing my throat, I moved to the counter.

  “Mister”—I tried to smooth the bill on the cold countertop—“can you change this note for me?”

  “Certainly.” William Bird’s chair legs scraped against the floor. When he reached for the banknote, I stuck my .36 in his face.

  “Make one sound and I’ll shoot you down,” I said. “We want all the money you have, and you had better be damned quick about it.”

  The younger Bird blinked in utter confusion, whilst the old man rose and started to say something that he did not finish because Frank came through the opening and shoved a Remington into the banker’s gut.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Greenup Bird croaked after a second.

  We have been credited with robbing the first trains in America, but that is not the case. The Reno boys in Indiana beat us there. Yet, unless you count the affair at St. Albans in Vermont in 1864—and that was a Confederate raid, an act of war—we were making history that snowy afternoon. No one had ever dared rob a bank in broad daylight.

  “Damn you, be quick!” I spun William Bird around, pressed the Navy’s barrel against his spine, forcing him toward the vault, while Frank pushed the old man to the cash drawers.

  William Bird filled my cotton meal sack with gold and silver, while Greenup Bird dumped greenbacks, Union Military bonds, and three-year 7-30 notes into Frank’s sack. My sack, obviously, weighed more, but I was bigger than Frank James.

  “Stay here,” I told the now panting William Bird, and backed out of the vault. Frank, his sack also bulging, sent Mr. Bird toward the vault.

  “Where is the key to the vault?” I asked.

  The old man paled. “Merciful Jesus, please, do not lock us in there. We could asphyxiate.”

  “Or you could die with a bullet through one of your eyeballs,” Frank said, moving the barrel from the man’s blinking left eye to his right.

  The banker pointed feebly. “In … the … door.”

  I stepped aside, saying: “Don’t you know, sir, that all Birds should be caged.” Frank shoved him into the vault, and we closed the door. We did not, however, lock it. Cold-blooded murder was not our nature, though we would soon regret that bit of charity.

  Outside, I tied the heavy sack onto the horn, and as I swung into the saddle, the window in the bank jerked up, and Greenup Bird stuck his head out, screaming: “Saint Albans! Saint Albans! Thieves! They are stealing our money!”

  Panes above his head shattered as bullets rang out from the revolvers of our comrades.

  Liberty was crowded that afternoon, with court in session. Men tended to flock to courthouses more than they frequented an opera house for a good show. Horses’ hoofs pounded, and our boys shot and yelled: “Get off the streets or get killed!” “Stand back!” “Remember Osceola!”

  A boy on the corner, however, had taken up the cashier’s alarm, shouting: “Thieves! Thieves! Robbery! Murder!”

  Murder. The last word Jolly Wymore ever spoke. George Shepherd shot him down, and the boy, no older than nineteen, slumped onto the boardwalk. Later, George told us that his horse had reared, and he had missed his aim.

  Few of the townsfolk carried any weapons, or, if they did, none dared present one against ten rough men. I emptied one of my Colts, and, as my horse carried me away from the bank, I glanced at the boy George Shepherd had shot down. A few men had run over to him, but I could tell his soul had departed. I had seen enough death in the war.

  “Ride!” Frank shouted. “Ride!”

  We did. As hard as we could.

  Down Franklin Street, and east, as the flurries soon blew into a blizzard. The posse quickly lost us in the storm and turned back. After swimming across the Missouri near Sibley Crossing, we stopped at Mount Gilead Church. On our knees at the altar, we divided our spoils.

  “ ‘And they parted his raiment,’ ” Frank said with a sneer, “ ‘and cast lots.’ ”

  “Don’t be sacrilegious, Buck,” I told him. “Not here.”

  “Listen to the bishop,” Oll Shepherd said, and the boys laughed. Yet the laughter died as we emptied the two meal sacks and stared at our gain.

  More than $8,600 in greenbacks. Another $3,000 in the UM bonds, and perhaps $40,000 in the 7-30s. Farmer Bank notes totaling $300. More than $5,000 in other bonds. And that does not even include the gold and silver coins.

  We divided the loot, although I took most of the bonds. The boys figured that, considering my spying days for Shelby, I could cash those bonds without getting arrested. That agreement meant I would have to travel, but such was my nature. I went to Ohio, Louisiana, and Kentucky, with a simple defense that, if I ever got caught, I would just say that I was happy to cash bonds given to me by my friends, never thinking that I might be asked where my pals had gotten such bonds.

  We rode our separate ways, agreeing to meet up at a place we dubbed “the Rubicon” after our fortunes had been spent. That didn’t take long. Frank took to benders, getting roostered fairly often in Centerville or Kearney, and forcing his stern mother to bail him out of jail. Joab Perry was arrested for horse stealing in Independence, so the Shepherd and Pence brothers rode up to that fortress with a few other men and tried to get Perry freed. It didn’t happen, and their gunfire killed the marshal and wounded the lawman’s seven-year- old son.

  In October, John Jarrette, Frank, and I took Jesse along with us to Alexander and Mitchell Company in Lexington, Missouri. After the death of that boy, Jolly Wymore, in Liberty, Frank and I had agreed that ten trigger-happy men increased our risk and decreased our take. Fewer robbers, more money—and we wanted men we could trust, which ruled out Little Archie Clement and the others.

  After making a bloodless withdrawal of $2,000 and change, the four of us split our take with good old Dave Pool. Pool happened to be in town that afternoon, and joined the posse that took after us. Dave must have led those b
oys through every briar patch and bog along the Missouri River before they had enough and went back to soak their wounds and windpipes in the grog shops in town. Dave Pool and I had a big laugh over that when I paid him his share.

  But it wasn’t long before the law began to laugh. Joab Perry, of course, got sentenced to hard labor at the Walls. Little Archie Clement was gunned down on the streets of Lexington before Christmas. And after John Jarrette led some of the boys to the Hughes and Wasson Bank in Richmond, Missouri, things turned really sour. The town’s mayor was shot dead during the holdup. So were the jailer, and the jailer’s son.

  When Tom Little and Fred Meyers were arrested in Warrensburg, a mob took them to the livery and left them swinging. Andy McGuire danced from the end of a rope in that town a short while later. Felix Bradley was arrested in Richmond and lynched, even though Jarrette swore to me that Felix had been in jail during the bank robbery. Dick Burns was found with his brains bashed out a few miles south of Independence. Payne Jones met his maker the same night, but with a bullet in his back, not an axe buried in his skull. George Shepherd almost got himself arrested in Nashville, Tennessee, after trying to cash one of the bonds he had kept from Liberty.

  About the only ones who showed good sense were the Pence boys and John Jarrette. In fact, Bud and Donny Pence each married the daughter of a judge and found steady, honest work in Kentucky, but I guess it was my brother-in-law who topped even the Pence brothers. After that dreadful affair in Richmond, when bushwhackers, some of them innocent, started paying for the crimes of other Missourians, John took his wife and family—along with the money he had stolen—to Arizona Territory. Raising sheep, he became respectable, and forgot all about his Younger in-laws.

  * * * * *

  During new moons, between my bond-cashing excursions, I rode in the darkness to find Ma, or Jim, and leave them enough gold coin or blue notes to get them through the hard times.

  The money helped, because when I visited my family in Pleasant Hill for Christmas, Ma announced that she wanted to return to our farm around Greenwood, the one Jim had been working. Jim agreed that things had turned more peaceful in Jackson County—compared to the rest of western Missouri—and we hugged, prayed, sang, and ate. Still, I knew my family would need money soon.

  Almost two years had passed since we had pulled the bank robbery in Liberty—the Yankee bank had been forced to close its doors—when I met Frank and Jesse James at the Rubicon, a little bend of the Big Blue.

  Jesse gave me a grin. “Bud,” he said, “Missouri’s become a little hot for us old bushwhackers. So we’re thinking about making a trip to Kentucky. Want to come along?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  From Lexington, we boarded a side-wheeler and made our way along the Missouri to the Mississippi, and then up the Ohio.

  “I ain’t never been on a steamboat before,” Jesse said, his eyes bright. “This is gonna be fun.”

  “Might be more fun, Dingus,” I told him, “if you’d leave those pistols in our berth. Folks keep eyeing you with a great bit of suspicion.”

  He spit tobacco juice into the dark, churning waters of the river, and turned to me, each hand on the butt of his revolvers.

  “You telling me that you aren’t heeled?”

  “I have a Derringer in my pocket and a Manhattan in a shoulder holster … just to be safe.”

  “All right then.”

  The boy was too ignorant to know what I had just told him, so Frank explained it.

  “Folks can’t see Bishop Cole’s hardware, Dingus. Like they can’t see mine. Our business revolvers are in our grips.”

  Jesse shook his head. “These guns come off when I’m dead,” he said, and walked away, pushing his coattails back behind the holsters, to spite us, to show off, leaving me staring at his older brother.

  “ ‘I am his brother,’ ” Frank said, “ ‘and I love him well.’ ”

  Richard III, act 1, scene 4.

  “Remember what happens to Clarence,” I reminded my friend, and went to the next deck to find a friendly game of poker.

  Grinning, Frank followed me. “Like I said, this is his dance, his idea.”

  “I don’t remember voting him to the captaincy.”

  “Dingus has ambitions.”

  “So do I. Like staying alive.”

  “Sounds like a plum bank, Bud,” Frank said. “But you and I shall check it out before we commit.”

  * * * * *

  We arrived in Louisville. The next morning, after cashing one of my bonds from Liberty, we bought some fine thoroughbred horses and followed Jesse. After all, this was his idea, and he intrigued me when he said we were going to meet a couple of brothers I knew who had told him about the bank. I figured I’d soon meet up with the Pence boys.

  Instead, Oll and George Shepherd were waiting for us at the Marshall Hotel in Chaplin. George had moved there after the war, and Oll had come to visit from Jackson County, Missouri, after talking to Jesse.

  I pretended that seeing them made me happy, when, in fact, it soured my stomach. When George started talking about a bank down south, however, I became more and more interested.

  “Nimrod Long is just one of ’em bankers,” Oll whispered. “Got hisself a pard named George N. Norton.” He stressed the man’s name.

  I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “Am I supposed to know him?”

  “You might recollect his brother, Elijah,” George Shepherd said.

  Indeed, the name made me frown and drop the napkin. Judge Elijah Hise Norton, of Platte City, had served as a 4th District Congressman in the Missouri House of Representatives during the first few years of the late war. He opposed Secession, and did everything he could to keep the Yanks in office, and in the field of war.

  “It’s a Yankee bank,” Oll said, “filled with Yankee money.”

  * * * * *

  The Nimrod L. Long & Company did business in Russellville in a fine two-story brick building with big fancy windows on a pretty, treelined Main Street.

  I rode in alone, leaving the boys in a hollow on the outskirts of town. Dressed in duster and a fine frock coat of green, I climbed the steps and entered the bank, and produced one of those five-hundred-dollar 7-30 bonds to the cashier. With a sorry frown, he walked to the office and brought back Mr. Nimrod Long himself.

  I shook his flimsy hand. “Thomas Colburn, sir,” I said, “of Louisville.”

  “You desire to cash this, young man?” he asked, squinting through his spectacles.

  “On par,” I told him.

  “The note has matured,” he said. “A six-percent premium would be in order.”

  “But I’m not greedy, Mr. Nimrod, and desire to make it home to my ailing grandmother.”

  “I see.” Oh, Nimrod L. Long saw all right, saw right through me. “I am sorry, Mr. Colburn, but at this moment we lack the funds to cash your bond.”

  I didn’t like it, and over the next week we scouted some other banks in the area, but nothing appealed to Jesse or the Shepherds. Not that I blamed them. So Frank, Jesse, and I rode into Russellville, and ate dinner at a café across the street, while George and Oll stopped at the livery and dickered with the owner about a mule they had no intention of buying.

  We finished our dinner of ham and eggs, and I asked for more coffee.

  “If you don’t want to do this deal, Bud,” Jesse said, “Frank and me’ll do it ourselves.”

  Frank laughed and said: “ ‘Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper sprinkle cool patience.’ ”

  “I wish to hell you’d quit spouting your damned Macbeth, brother,” Jesse said.

  “ Hamlet,” Frank corrected him. “You’d do well to read the Bard, Dingus.”

  “I read only the Bible.”

  “And newspapers,” I reminded him.

  “Penny dreadfuls, too,” Frank chimed.

 
The waitress touched up my coffee, Frank’s, too, and walked away. But I slid the cup away, and rose from my chair.

  “Thought you was thirsty,” Jesse said.

  My thumb hooked at two men who had just walked into the café. Regular as a Tremont watch, the clerk and cashier had arrived to eat their dinner.

  I walked back up those steps to the bank with a blue note worth $100 that I had borrowed from Frank. I asked Mr. Nimrod to cash it, and, just as I expected, Mr. Nimrod rudely slid the note back to me. “That is counterfeit, sir. Good day.”

  Counterfeit? Why, Frank James had withdrawn that note from the Clay County Savings Association in February of 1866.

  “Is this good, sir?” I asked.

  Mr. Nimrod gasped when he saw the Navy .36 I had pressed against his nose. “Now, empty the damned vault.”

  When the doors opened, bringing Frank and Jesse inside, the fool banker turned and ran, which almost proved to be his undoing, because Jesse popped three shots at the running man, one round grazing Nimrod’s head, but fools get lucky, and Nimrod made it out, safe and sound.

  “Hurry,” I said, and we moved toward the vault that Nimrod, in his haste, had kindly left open.

  Outside, the Shepherd boys opened fire with Spencer repeaters.

  Glass shattered, bullets whined off metal and bricks, or thudded into wood. Women screamed, but Jesse, Frank, and I focused on filling our empty wheat sacks with money. With the cannonade continuing outside, we hurried to our task, then rushed through the front door, guns in one hand, sacks in the other.

  This might have been the strangest robbery we committed, for, as I mounted my bay, an old man rounded the corner and bumped into me, dropping two buckets of water he had been struggling with. The gelding wheeled, the man fell backward, and as I struggled to get my horse under control, I aimed the Navy at the old man.

  Blinking, he sat up, shook his head, and said: “Where is the fire, youngster?”

  “Mister,” I said, and popped a shot across the street, “we are having a fine serenade here, and I think it would be best for you to go back around the corner there. Or you might get shot.”