The Adams Express faced not only changing corporate threats, but new criminal ones as well. From the days of Dinsmore’s youth, the express business had always been a target of burglars, sneak thieves, and confidence men. The Adams had suffered armed robberies before, including the Reno brothers’ raid on a train in Seymour, Indiana, in 1866, but they had been infrequent, nothing to prepare its president for the ex-Confederate bushwhackers who emptied the company’s safe at Gads Hill.
The railroad corporations did almost nothing to catch them. After the Iowa raid in 1873, the Rock Island had posted a reward, put rifle-carrying guards on its trains, and let it go at that. The Iron Mountain line did even less after Gads Hill. But Dinsmore was a hardheaded businessman. He would have seen that robbers had, in fact, cost the railroad companies almost nothing. The Rock Island had repaired its tracks and restored its derailed locomotive—one of 108 it operated in Iowa—the night of the robbery; it didn’t even mention the incident in its annual report. The Iron Mountain had suffered even less annoyance, certainly nothing to compare with the $156,700 it earned that month. The American Railroad Journal and other industry publications never even bothered to discuss the robberies. Nor did the U.S. Post Office make any effort to pursue the outlaws, despite the rifling of registered mail at Gads Hill (and press reports to the contrary). Dinsmore, however, saw clearly that the Missouri bandits did not rob railroads—they robbed express companies. If anyone was going to put up the money to catch them, it would have to be the Adams Express.6
Dinsmore took his problem to Allan Pinkerton, the bearded, squint-eyed, fifty-two-year-old Scotsman who was the founder and principal of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, a private company with its headquarters in Chicago and branch offices in New York and Philadelphia.7 The patriotic, fiercely abolitionist investigator had risen to fame during the Civil War, sheltering John Brown after his last raid on Missouri, providing security for Lincoln’s inaugural journey to Washington, and serving as personal intelligence chief for General George B. McClellan.8 Like Dinsmore, Pinkerton represented the growing nationalization of American commerce, as trade and industry broke out of local markets and made long-distance connections. Where money went, criminals followed, and traditional law enforcement was ill-equipped to capture outlaws who increasingly operated across county and state boundaries.
When Pinkerton made his start in crime fighting in the 1840s (breaking up a counterfeiting ring in Chicago), the detective was a new figure on the American scene. Old-fashioned town constables had emphasized crime prevention, but the detective promised retribution, by finding the thief and his plunder. Private agencies formed in St. Louis, Baltimore, and Philadelphia between 1846 and 1848. Boston formed a municipal force in 1846, but other major cities did not follow its example until 1857, when New York launched its own squad. Most of these detectives, however, were vulnerable to political control and suffered rampant corruption. (Some officers coordinated their activities with professional burglars, sharing either the loot or the reward.) And all were limited to their localities. Pinkerton’s was the first truly national agency, free from the political pressures or graft that influenced county sheriffs, urban detectives, and even U.S. marshals. His advertisements ran, “This agency does not operate for contingent rewards, is independent of Government or Municipal control, and prepared to do all legitimate detective business intrusted to it by Express, Railroad and Insurance Companies, Banks or individuals.”9
The Scotsman excelled at his work. From the founding of his agency in 1850 through the 1870s, he and his men engaged in an intricate game of domestic espionage and counterespionage with the professional thieves and burglars who stalked the major cities. He built up a “rogue’s gallery” of photographs of known pickpockets, confidence men, and safecrackers, and successfully infiltrated their organizations. He had even defeated the original train robbers, the Reno gang. He was, above all else, a man of determination. He had struggled back after a severe stroke in 1869, for example, returning to work within a year; he had survived the great Chicago fire, which destroyed his offices; and he had kept his business open through a drastic cash-flow crisis in 1872. The Missouri bandits could be no worse.10
Pinkerton made an art of reconnaissance and infiltration, and he put both tactics to work immediately after Dinsmore gave him the Gads Hill case.11 The posse that initially chased the bandits, he learned, had tracked them through Texas County toward western Missouri. In February he dispatched an agent who confirmed the report. He also discovered that the gang had dispersed. The Younger brothers had retreated to sparsely settled Monegaw Springs, St. Clair County, and the James boys had gone back to their mother’s farm, near Kearney.12 With the reconnaissance complete, it was time to infiltrate.
“I was in Europe at the time, but the case was in progress on my return,” William Pinkerton, the son of the agency’s founder, recalled seven years later. William worked as an informal second-in-command in the Chicago headquarters, and he swiftly caught up on the investigation. After the initial probe, “operatives were detailed to go into the respective vicinities to obtain evidence of the guilt or innocence of the parties charged with the robbery. Capt. Louis J. Lull and John Boyle were sent to St. Clair county, and J. W. Whicher was dispatched to Clay county.… The detectives were not expected to make arrests, their duty merely being to look over the ground and report what they could learn.”13
“The detective following the James boys was Joseph W. Whicher,” the New York World later reported. “He was a young man of twenty-six, stood almost six feet, had blue eyes and light hair, and a smooth, boyish face with but a shadow of a mustache.” Whicher had wandered far from his native Des Moines, Iowa, in search of adventure. He had spent his first adult years as a seaman in the Mediterranean, until a broken ankle drove him ashore in 1871. He then entered the Pinkerton ranks, earning a reputation for iron nerve and soft discretion.14
At the end of the first week of March 1874, Whicher stepped off the train in Kansas City. There, in that bustling town of stockyards, meatpacking plants, and crisscrossing railway tracks, he prepared for his new role, changing into the worn clothing of a farm laborer.15 On March 10, he arrived in Liberty. The town had changed since the days when its dirt streets were clogged with Oregon-bound migrants and slave-driven wagons piled with hemp and tobacco. It had a modern feel now, with telegraph wires and locomotive smoke filling the sky, and paved roads and neat stone sidewalks underfoot.16
Whicher went to the Arthur House hotel, where he registered as “J. W. Whicher, Mississippi.” As he set down the pen, he asked the clerk how he might find the sheriff. Confident, even eager, he walked the short distance to the courthouse, where he wandered into the office of the recorder of deeds, Sidney G. Sandusky.17 Again he asked for the sheriff. Sandusky returned a few moments later with a vigorous-looking man with one empty sleeve, whom he introduced as Sheriff George E. Patton.
Whicher identified himself as a Pinkerton agent and explained his mission. He opened a valise and produced a set of descriptions, which he read aloud for the sheriff. Did any of them match the James boys? he asked. Patton shook his head. They were imperfect as far as he could tell, Patton informed the detective, but he had not seen Frank since they served together on the Confederate side in the first year of the war, and he had not laid eyes on Jesse since he was outlawed in 1869.
Whicher pressed on, asking for—and receiving—precise directions to Zerelda Samuel’s farm. Was it a big operation? he asked. Did they often hire laborers? As he spoke, he extended his hands and examined them; they were too soft, he mused aloud, and might give him away. Patton said the farm was “of the first class and of good size,” but he warned the detective to keep clear of it at all costs—the James brothers would never be off their guard. Did that mean they were at home? persisted Whicher. Patton didn’t think so; usually one or two of the neighbors let him know when they spotted Frank or Jesse near their mother’s place. Whicher thanked Patton and mentioned that he might ask for assis
tance in the days to come. Then he left his valise in the recorder’s care and confidently walked out the door.18
His next stop was the Commercial Bank of Liberty, on the southwestern corner of the public square. There he met D. J. Adkins, president of the seven-year-old institution, and introduced himself as a Pinkerton agent.19 He planned to infiltrate the Samuel household by posing as a laborer, he explained, and had to deposit the fifty dollars he carried, since it was far more than a farmhand would normally carry. Adkins, like Sheriff Patton, was stunned by Whicher’s idiocy. He brought the young man into the back room of the bank, then went to get O. P. Moss, the former sheriff. Moss’s contempt for Whicher’s arrogance must have been profound. Having endured thirteen years of conflict with the county’s secessionist bushwhackers, Moss knew that time had only made the James brothers more dangerous. When Whicher protested that Patton had told him that Frank and Jesse were not home, Moss cut him off. It didn’t matter, he told him. “The old woman would kill you if the boys don’t.”20
Whicher thought he knew his business best. At 5:15 in the afternoon, he caught a slow-rolling freight train that clacked north out of Liberty, lumbering into Kearney shortly before dusk. He stopped at the telegraph office and sent a report to agency headquarters, then struck out on foot, covering the last couple of miles under the deepening shadows of twilight. Finally he reached that slouching white farmhouse that had been described to him, and knocked on the door.21
AT THREE O’CLOCK in the morning on the darkened banks of the Missouri River, the March air would have seized a man like an ice-water bath. J. W. Whicher, however, could do nothing to adjust his clothing—his hands were bound tightly, his ankles looped and tied together under the belly of the horse he rode. His three fellow riders, on the other hand, were warm enough; they had woolen scarves wrapped around their mouths and noses, and hats pulled down over their eyes.
The detective watched and listened as one of them bellowed for the ferryman. He was deputy sheriff Jim Baxter of Clay County, he shouted. They had captured a horse thief and needed to cross over to Jackson County to catch another.22 As the boat pilot dawdled, the spokesman ordered him to be “damned quick,”23 adding, “if he did not come out and row them across they would cut his damned boat loose.”24 The ferry master duly appeared and set about his work with perfect equanimity, as if he was roused every night by angry armed men.
As the boat glided across the night water, Whicher could say nothing. A gag kept him from telling the ferryman about what had happened in the hours since he had knocked on the Samuel farmhouse door. He could not say if he had been tackled, tortured, and interrogated, as William Pinkerton later claimed. He could not identify the third man who rode that night with the James brothers—perhaps it was Clell Miller, as Pinkerton thought, or Arthur McCoy or Jim Anderson, as John S. Thomason argued. Whether beaten into submission or simply iron-nerved, the detective remained calm and quiet when the boat slid ashore on the southern bank and his horse was led by the three gunmen onto Jackson County soil. Had they lied to him, promising to let him go, or did he know what to expect when, at a crossroads not far from the ferry, the first of three revolver blasts erupted in his ear?25
• • •
SOME TIME LATER, someone in the headquarters of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency noticed a small item in the Chicago Times, “telling of a mysterious murder that had occurred near Independence,” recalled William Pinkerton. As the headquarters staff pursued the story, they learned that the victim was indeed their man Whicher. Immediately Allan Pinkerton ordered agent L. E. Angell to the scene to find out what happened and bring the body home.26
Whicher was not the only detective in the field. Louis J. Lull, formerly a Chicago police captain, and John Boyle, a veteran of the St. Louis force, had been dispatched to St. Clair County to gather information about the Younger brothers. Lull took the alias W. J. Allen and Boyle that of J. W. Wright, pretending to be buyers for land. “Word was immediately sent to Capt. Lull to be on his guard” after Whicher’s death, William Pinkerton reported. But it was already too late.27
In midafternoon on March 17, 1874, Lull and Boyle guided their horses through the landscape near Monegaw Springs, St. Clair County—“a hilly, wooded, and sparsely settled country,” a reporter later remarked, “just such a locality that a band of outlaws would select for their rendezvous.”28 Beside them rode former deputy sheriff Edwin B. Daniels, who knew their true identities and had promised to help them. They briefly stopped at the farmhouse of Theodrick Snuffer to ask for directions, then cantered their horses away. By coincidence, two of Cole Younger’s brothers, Jim and John, happened to be seated at Snuffer’s dinner table at the time. The appearance of three heavily armed strangers in this remote part of the country immediately made them suspicious. “After eating their dinner,” Snuffer recalled a day or two later, “John Younger remarked to his brother James that they would follow those men and see who they were, stating at the same time that he supposed they were detectives.”29
As the detectives and Daniels rode slowly down the road through a sparse stand of trees, they heard galloping hoofbeats behind them. Turning in their saddles, they saw Jim and John Younger spurring their horses toward them at a rapid pace. The hard-edged John—who had earlier killed a deputy sheriff in Texas—leveled a double-barreled shotgun, cocked the hammers, and ordered the trio to halt.30 Boyle, who was a short distance ahead of his companions, immediately kicked his horse into a gallop. The Youngers fired, blasting Boyle’s hat off his head, but he rode off unharmed. The Youngers then instructed Lull and Daniels to unbuckle their pistol belts, which they did, letting their holstered revolvers fall to the ground.
John raised the twin muzzles of his shotgun as Jim dismounted and picked up their fallen revolvers. He examined the weapons admiringly. “Damned fine pistols,” he remarked. It only fed John’s suspicions. You’re detectives, he snapped; you were up at Monegaw Springs yesterday asking about us. “I am no detective,” Daniels replied, “I can show you who I am and where I belong.”
One of the brothers said that he recognized him, and addressed Lull. “What in the hell are you riding around here with all them pistols on for?”
“Good God!” Lull said. “Is not every man wearing them that is traveling, and have I not as much right to wear them as any one else?”
“Hold on, young man,” John replied sarcastically. “We don’t want any of that.” As he spoke, he leveled his shotgun.
Daniels began to speak to the Youngers, trying to save their lives, but all Lull could think about was the shotgun that John held. He will shoot no matter what I say, Lull thought. Reaching behind his back, he grasped his backup weapon, a small Smith & Wesson No. 2 pistol, and quietly cocked the hammer with his thumb. Then he snapped his arm out in front of him and fired at John Younger.
The bullet tore straight through Younger’s throat. In the split second before he died, he pulled the trigger of his shotgun, firing the remaining charge. The heavy load of buckshot shattered Lull’s right arm. Jim reacted a moment later, blasting a bullet into Lull’s side, then snapping off a shot at Daniels, hitting him in the throat. The multiple gunshots sent the detective’s horse careering away in a panicked gallop, until Lull struck a branch and fell to the ground.31
After killing Daniels, Jim cradled his fallen brother. “Can you see me?” he asked. John made no reply. Jim set him back down, went through his clothing for money and papers, and took his firearms. Then he called to G. W. McDonald, a black farm laborer who had watched the entire affair from a field nearby. Go tell “Snuffer’s folks,” he said, and tossed the farmhand a Remington revolver that had belonged to either Daniels or Lull.32
As Jim disappeared into the countryside, the bleeding, battered Lull staggered from the woods. McDonald went to his assistance and cared for him until he could be moved to the town of Roscoe. Despite his severe wounds, Lull gave a sworn account of the event for a coroner’s inquest shortly after the gunfight. Three days later, he
died.33
The murder of Whicher and the St. Clair County gun battle reverberated in the Pinkerton headquarters in the same way that news of a terrible Union defeat had during the Civil War. The agency was completely demoralized. “I have no soldiers but all officers in my regiment,” Allan Pinkerton complained, “all capital men to give orders, [but] few will go forward except somebody goes ahead.… Mr. Warner and William refuse to go with the men to Mo.,” he said, referring to the superintendent in the Chicago office and his own son, “both declared that they are not to be made a notch to be shot at.”
The unprecedented defeat left Pinkerton bitter. “I know that the James’ and the Youngers are desperate men, and that when we meet it must be the death of one or both of us,” he wrote to George H. Bangs, superintendent of the New York office, on April 17. “My blood was spilt, and they must repay. There is no use talking, they must die.”
Pinkerton had planned to launch a major operation to capture the bandits, but called it off when an agent telegraphed him that the James and Younger brothers had left Missouri. He instructed Bangs to tell both Dinsmore and John Hoey, the managing director of the Adams Express Company, that he would send them a full account of his plans. “If I am allowed by Mr. Dinsmore to hunt them up, then of course I will send my men forward,” he wrote. “But when the time comes when we find the men can be arrested, then recollect, I shall be with my own men in charge.” Bangs had warned against Pinkerton’s personal involvement, given his fragile physical condition, but he was undeterred. With even his son backing off, “I make no talk but simply say I am going myself,” he wrote, “and will carry my own musket.”34
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