Hard Way Out of Hell

by Johnny D. Boggs

  By that time, I had fallen to my hands and knees, and I was groping blindly, desperately trying to find the door. At first, I tried to avoid the hot embers that were burning my palms and knees. But within seconds, I no longer cared and couldn’t really feel any pain. Reaching the exit, feeling the freshness of the bitterly cold air, I crawled through the doorway, leaned against the wall, and then reached back inside the door. It wasn’t long until a hand locked on my wrist. My fingers clinched the wool of a coat, and I pulled Terry Logan out.

  “Over there,” I said, coughing and watching a vicious prisoner, who had killed his own brother, scramble toward the foundry. I cared little for Terry Logan. Again I reached back into the smoke-filled building, feeling the heat of flames, until my hands locked on someone else.

  Erskine Green came out, coughing, spitting, trying not to breathe in the hot, scorching air.

  Jim came out, and I thanked God. Then another robber … Bob Younger. Then Ben Cayou, his clothes smoking from the intense heat.

  “Where’s Lempke?” I yelled above the roaring furnace that had been a cellblock.

  “I don’t … know.” Cayou’s eyes were filled with fright. He blinked, turned back, and started inside, but I grabbed his waistband and pulled him back into the yard, away from the inferno. “If Lempke’s not here by now,” I told the guard, “he’s dead.” We later learned I had been right. We all ran farther out into the yard as the roof caved in.

  Snow covered the yard, numbing my bare feet.

  All around us was bedlam. The city’s fire engine, hose cart, and hook-and-ladder had arrived, and firemen ran with axes and shovels. Jim worked alongside a city fireman, trying to connect a hose to a hydrant. But water came out only in a trickle, perhaps because of the cold, or because there was not enough pressure. “Dodd! Dodd!”

  I turned to find Warden Reed calling out, standing in his nightshirt and hood as the head guard, George Dodd, slipped on ice as he raced over to his boss.

  “You’ve got to get the women prisoners,” Reed ordered. “Put them in that room.” He pointed.

  “Warden,” I heard Dodd say, “we’ve got some of the worst men alive out here … and not all of them are shackled …”

  “I know that, Dodd.” Reed started toward a man in a helmet that I could only guess was the fire chief.

  Outside the burning cell house, Griggs was his normal self again. “Come on, boys.” Pointing at the walls, he laughed. “Try to escape, you damned fish!” That fire has lit up this yard like high noon. “We’ll cut you sons of bitches down real easy. Try it. Try it, damn you!”

  Ignoring Griggs, I went to George Dodd, who had stopped and was staring as though he was unable to make any decisions under the circumstances.

  “Can I be of service, Mr. Dodd?” I asked.

  He spun, hand darting for his holstered revolver, but then he stopped, stock-still. For some unknown reason, every bit of doubt disappeared from his face. Having spent seven years in Stillwater, I had become almost as trusted as Erskine Green. He drew the heavy Schofield .45 from his holster, tossed it up, caught it by the barrel, and handed it to me, butt forward.

  “Cole, will you …?” Then he noticed Bob and Jim standing beside me. “Will you and your brothers guard the women prisoners?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Dodd,” I assured him as I took the revolver, and led my brothers over to the storeroom where they had gathered the women.

  Somehow, Jim grabbed an axe handle off the fire engine, and Bob found some little pinch bar. The women prisoners had been housed in a storeroom. Six of them—two Negresses, a Celestial, and three white women—along with the prison’s matron, who looked as if she wished she were back in St. Peter. Bob had left his cell with a blanket, and, upon opening the storeroom door, he handed the blanket to the first shivering girl he saw, and advised her we were there to protect her and the others.

  There was nothing to keep us warm but the massive flames coming from the cell house. Yet we stood in front of that door. Erskine Green had found the other convicts of color, and he began leading them in spirituals. Before long, Jim tried to join them. His words still came out incoherent, but I smiled. My mouth moved along to the words, but I did not sing.

  Then L.M. Sage and J.B. Coney walked toward us.

  Coney’s face had been blackened by soot, and Sage wore no shirt despite the January freeze. Both men grinned.

  “Why don’t you boys take a walk,” Sage said, “whilst J.B. and me visit ’em women.”

  The Schofield came up, and I eared back that thumb-busting hammer.

  “I got a better idea,” I told the vile man. “Why don’t you and your pal sit on that box? Otherwise, I’ll give this Schofield to one of the ladies in that storeroom … and remember … three of them women are in here for murder. I bet any one of them would just love to blow your damned head off.”

  “That gun …” J.B. Coney grinned excitedly. “Boys, you can get us all out of here. Think about it. You can get us all out of this pigsty.”

  “Or,” I said, “I can blow your damned head off, too, and my aim’s probably a wee bit better than any one of those women in there.” I motioned the big .45’s barrel toward the pile of boxes. They sat down and behaved themselves until Cobb returned around sunrise and ordered Griggs and another guard to shackle the two fiends together. Slowly, George Cobb walked toward me, holding out his right hand.

  “I’ll take my revolver now, Cole,” Cobb said.

  “Shoot the damned bastard,” Coney said.

  The Schofield felt heavy in my hand as I lifted it. I grinned. “Want to see a bushwhacker’s border shift, George?”

  “Sure, Cole.”

  So I tossed the heavy .45 in the air, stuck my right hand inside my waistband to warm my fingers, caught the Schofield in my left hand, slipped my finger into the trigger guard, spun the pistol, till the butt was facing toward Cobb.

  With a dry laugh, he took the .45, holstered it, and walked away. Only he stopped a few feet away, his boots crunching in the snow, and faced me again.

  “Thanks, Cole,” he said. “Thanks to you and your brothers.”

  Not everyone, of course, thought to thank us.

  By midmorning, Griggs had found us and slapped manacles on our ankles, while we looked with a strange numbness at the blackened stone walls of the cell house. The fires had consumed other buildings, including our prison library. The state pen no longer could house the prisoners, or even the guards. And although the sun had broken free of the clouds, the cold remained. Erskine Green brought me socks and shoes, and I rubbed circulation back into my feet before slipping on the borrowed warmth.

  Warden Reed came by, shook my hand, and reached into his pocket, withdrawing a few sheets of telegraph paper. He held one out.

  “ ‘Keep close watch on the Youngers,’ ” he read.

  Dropping it, he read the next one: “ ‘Was fire plot to free Youngers?’ ” And a third: “ ‘Did Youngers escape?’ ”

  Those sheets of paper now wadded into balls, fell onto the snow, as Warden Reed walked across the icy grounds.

  The governor showed up a few hours later, while we walked around, shackled, in the snow to stay warm. Most of the prisoners crowded by the gate, but I figured soldiers and deputies and marshals and hayseeds stood beyond those walls.

  By nightfall, the prisoners of Stillwater were being carted off. Guards would lead them to county jails across the state: Winona, Hastings, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. The women were put up in Warden Reed’s house before they boarded the Winona train. But Jim, Bob, and I got special treatment.

  A judge named Butts and a gent named Abe Hall came to take us to the Washington County Courthouse.

  “Brothers,” I said with pure delight, “this is the best start to a new year that I’ve ever had.”

  I meant it, too. All my life I had longed to take a sleigh ride.


  Chapter Thirty-Two

  In 1885, the news arrived. Frank James was a free man. Jesse had been betrayed by a gang member, shot in the back of the head at his home—with his wife and two kids in a nearby room—by a gutless wonder named Robert Ford back in 1882. Mark my words, I cared little for Frank’s brother, but I despise the way he died. Murdered. A murder sanctioned by the cowardly governor of Missouri.

  After Jesse’s death in St. Joseph, Frank gave himself up. He spent a year or better in the Independence jail before a jury acquitted him of two murders and a train robbery in Winston after he and Jesse reformed the gang. A short while later, Frank was tried in Alabama for yet another crime, and, once again, a jury set him free. Finally, in 1885, he walked out of jail after the state’s prosecutors in Missouri dropped its last indictment against him.

  In 1886, Mr. Cobb and Mr. Cayou escorted me into Warden Reed’s office and left me there as the warden motioned to a fancy chair. I tried to settle into it, but could not find a comfortable spot so I fidgeted around like a boy forced to wear tie for Sunday school.

  “What’s the matter?” Warden Reed asked.

  I stopped squirming. “I don’t know, sir. Guess I’m not used to all these cushions.”

  He laughed, looked at the papers before him, and paused before he said: “You have been a first-class prisoner for several years now, Cole.” That I was, now wearing the nice gray suit and cap that befitted a convict of my status. “I see just two demerits against you.”

  “Yes, sir.” I grinned. “Some ladies were brought into the cellblock, sir, and I just lost my head. Like most of the other boys, I removed my hat and whistled and winked.”

  Reed pushed back, grinning like the proverbial cat’s run-in with a certain canary. “Were they pretty?”

  “They were women, sir, and not wearing stripes or checks.”

  Again he laughed, but the lightness faded from his face quickly as he slid a newspaper across the table. “You are prison librarian, Cole. Have you seen this?”

  It was the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the story of the day said William Marshall, formerly the governor of Minnesota, and others thought that Jim, Bob, and I should be paroled, if not outright pardoned. I stared at the headline and read the first few paragraphs of the story, before I leaned back into the cushy chair.

  For once, I could think of nothing to say.

  “Don’t hold out much hope, Cole,” Warden Reed said. “You have been here ten years, but many politicians and newspaper editors think you should rot behind these walls.”

  “Yes, sir.” Nobody in Northfield would favor turning us loose.

  “I don’t know if I think you should be paroled, either,” Reed said.

  “I understand, Warden.”

  “Yet, I do believe you and your brothers have been reformed.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He pointed to some envelopes and telegrams, glancing at a few without sharing their contents with me, until he found the letter he must have been looking for. He pulled a dainty piece of paper from the well-traveled brown envelope and slid it across the table.

  With trembling hands, I lifted the letter, fearing the worst—some Radical Republican saying they should hang me and my brothers, draw and quarter us, behead us, and weight our bodies with stones before sinking us to the bottom of the St. Croix River.

  Instead, my mouth fell open as I read.

  I have known the true character of Cole Younger for many years. At a critical time, while he wore the gray, he did brave and unselfish things for those who were dear to me, now dead and gone. I have learned from the lips of the just dead of the true nobility of his inward character.

  Sincerely,

  Mrs. Elizabeth Daniel

  Harrisonville, Missouri

  Sweet Lizzie Brown, the girl I had so long admired, still married to another man, yet still championing an old, worn-out warhorse like Thomas Coleman Younger. Tears rolled down my cheeks.

  “Cole,” Warden Reed said softly. “Don’t get your hopes up. Not in here. Not ever. Remember Erskine Green.”

  How could I forget Erskine Green? Less than a year earlier, in July of 1885, as I walked to my cell, I heard a loud commotion from the upper tiers. With Griggs walking alongside me, we stopped, turned, and looked up.

  “Green! Green! Don’t be a damned fool, boy!” Cobb screamed as I watched Erskine, looking so small from where I stood five floors below, shaking his head, waving a finger at the guard a few rods away.

  “No, sir. No, sir. No, sir.”

  “Boy!” Cobb shouted. “You’re a free man. Your sentence is over. You’re walking out of here … free.”

  “No, sir.” His voice cracked. “What the hell can I do out yonder?”

  And he jumped.

  I turned my head, but could not close my ears. The sound sent me to my knees, and I reached forward, gripped the bars of the nearby cell, and vomited.

  Griggs spit out his disgust, and ordered me: “Get a mop, Younger. And a paintbrush. You’ll be cleaning up the mess you just made … and the mess Green made, too.”

  * * * * *

  Others began working on our parole—from Missouri, from Washington City, even in Minnesota. Stephen B. Elkins, who had taught me at the Academy and whose life I had saved from Quantrill after the battle at Lone Jack, wrote on my behalf, and El kins was now a senator from West Virginia. W. C. Bronaugh, who had fought with us at Lone Jack, visited with me and began campaigning for our cause at every Board of Pardons meeting.

  As a first- class prisoner, I could write a letter— once a week—and I did so. Not so much for me, but for my brothers. I had meant what I told that judge ten years earlier in Faribault. If Bob and Jim could go free, gladly would I die in prison.

  But I was too late for Bob.

  By 1887, his hacking cough left flecks of blood on his handkerchief, and we knew what that meant. Ma had caught the lung disease, which had killed her. Bob’s consumption worsened in the rot and dampness of the new cell house, and he began to wither away. He had been sentenced to death.

  “Warden,” I told Reed in 1889, “if you can get Bob pardoned or paroled, so he can go home to die in Lee’s Summit, I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles that Jim and I will never write another letter, never ask for any leniency.”

  I don’t know if Reed tried or not, but too many people were still speaking out against us. Yet Reed did allow our sister Retta to come up to see us. That was no blessing. We sat around. We waited for Bob to die.

  Retta got to Stillwater on September 2, 1889. The deputy warden, a good man named Westby, allowed a photographer named Kuhn to come in with his big box of a camera and take some portraits of my brothers, Retta, and me. He even let us pose for some individual portraits. Best of all, he let us exchange our gray suits and caps that distinguished us as first-class prisoners for fine suits, ties, and fancy shirts for the photographs.

  Two weeks later, Bob couldn’t swallow, could hardly breathe, and his words came out in ragged breaths, staining his lips with blood.

  “Cole,” he managed to say, “lift me up so I can see the sky.”

  I did, holding him close, amazed at how light he felt in my arms, understanding then that the disease had worn him down to little more than skin and bones.

  We could hear mockingbirds begin to sing, sounding sweeter than a church choir.

  “Remember the birds back in Missouri, Cole?” Bob asked.

  “Maybe,” I answered. My mind was going kind of foggy by that time as I laid Bob’s head back down on the pillow.

  The deathwatch went on.

  “Don’t leave me here all shot,” he sang out in a surprisingly strong voice. “Don’t leave me, Cole.”

  Crying, I remembered those words from Northfield, after Bob’s horse had been shot dead, after a bullet had shattered his elbow. “I’m not leaving you, Bob,” I said, or
thought I said. Perhaps he could not understand me, choking on the words, the pain.

  “Cole …” I had to lean close to Bob’s lips just to hear him. “You ain’t Dick.” He coughed out a faint laugh. “You’re … better …”

  Four hours later, as Jim and I held Bob’s hands, and Retta, who had extended her stay, stroked his hair, a merciful God freed Bob Younger, not yet thirty-five years old, from the life sentence he had been given in Faribault roughly thirteen years earlier.

  I told the reporters for the Stillwater newspapers—the Gazette and the Democrat—that Bob Younger had never committed any crime until I lured him to Northfield. It wasn’t the truth, though maybe, grieved as I was at that moment, I believed it.

  The prison chaplain, a good man named Albert, preached the funeral, gave Bob the last rites. The prisoners had draped the chapel’s walls in black, and an undertaker had donated a fancy casket. Every prisoner, every guard came to Bob’s funeral.

  And Retta took him home.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  We thought—though I did not want to admit it—that Bob’s death would change the mood of Minnesotans. That sympathy would take over and we would be freed. Maybe the loss of our brother finally did it, but, sometimes, sympathy can be a long time coming.

  The year 1889 passed. So did another ten years and more.

  Christmas pageants. Plays. Lectures. Meetings with the Board of Pardons, at which, time after time, they demanded that Jim or I admit that Frank James killed Joseph Heywood inside that Northfield bank, which I never did. Visitors. I saw them all. Henry Wolfer became the new warden in the late spring of 1892. Jim took over my job at the library, and I went to work in the laundry until a new hospital was completed, where they put me to work there because they had heard what a fine nurse I had been down in the Sni-A-Bar when I rode with Quantrill.

  On July 10, 1901, I was bringing peaches to some sick prisoners in the hospital, laughing at the joke the doc had just told me. A young prisoner named Smith hurried up to me and told me I was wanted in the library. That’s where Jim worked, and I feared the worst, could even picture Jim lying on the floor, dead of an apoplexy. I handed the sack of peaches to the fresh fish and hurried across the yard, letting out a heavy sigh of relief when I saw Jim scratching his bald head.