Nine-year-old Dwight Lockerby was sitting uncomfortably at his desk in a warm classroom in the public school, also just two blocks away, when a classmate came into the room looking scared and upset. The boy had come from outdoors and had apparently seen something disturbing, but neither his teacher nor his classmates could get the boy to talk.
At about that same time, the teacher and the students began to hear the town’s bells. An elderly woman came in, rushed to the front of the classroom, and leaned close to the teacher’s ear. She sobbed as she whispered something, the students straining their hardest to hear her words.
Suddenly, the teacher cried, “My husband!” and fell back into her chair. Dwight’s teacher was twenty-five-year-old Nettie Bunker, the wife of the bank’s teller. Just a month earlier, the couple had celebrated their one-year anniversary.
This was too much for Dwight and his classmates, who rushed out of the school to see what was going on downtown. When Dwight got to Division Street, he found crowds of familiar people carrying all sorts of weapons—rifles, shotguns, revolvers, even knives. He squeezed through one of the bigger throngs to see what they were chattering about and abruptly came upon the dead body of a man lying in a pool of blood.
Stunned by the grisly sight, Dwight backed away, turned, and headed to the other side of the street. Just as he passed in front of the bank, he saw two men carrying out a stretcher with another dead body. Dwight ran straight home.
Nettie Bunker got a fellow teacher to watch the few students remaining in her classroom and set off to find her husband. She anxiously asked each person she encountered where Mr. Bunker might be. Some told her he was wounded, others said he’d been shot dead. She finally found a friend with a carriage who took her to the residence of Dr. Hyram Coon on Water Street, where her husband was being treated.
Charlie Pitts’s bullet had entered Bunker’s shoulder in nearly the same spot as the slug that killed Clell Miller, but luckily for Nettie and her husband, Pitts’s bullet had just missed the subclavian artery. Bunker would be stiff and sore for a time, but he would be fine.
Sarah Elizabeth “Lizzie” Heywood.
(Northfield Historical Society)
Not so fine was Lizzie Heywood. As the robbers cursed and bloodied her husband in the bank, she and another, younger woman sat in her home on West Third working on a new dress. The house had grown stuffy from the warm afternoon so they decided to take a break and step outside to get some fresh air. From across the street, they could hear a neighbor shouting to another about the bank having been raided and Mr. Heywood murdered. Lizzie sank to her knees and toppled over onto the grass lawn. It was some time before Lizzie’s friend and anxious neighbors were able to revive the distraught woman.
Joseph Heywood’s body was brought to his home a short time later, transported in a carriage, by President Strong of Carleton, who was cradling his dead friend. When Lizzie learned the full details of Heywood’s death, how he had repeatedly defied the robbers and saved the bank’s money, she reportedly said, “I would not have had him do otherwise.”
Lizzie Heywood was Joseph’s second wife. His first wife, Martha, had died a year after the birth of their little girl in 1871. Lizzie was Martha’s old schoolmate and good friend—Martha had named her child for Lizzie—and she was Martha’s choice to raise her daughter and be the next Mrs. Heywood.
“This ‘friend’ was made a widow . . . by an assassin’s bullet,” Adelbert Ames wrote to his wife after the raid. “The first wife now has her husband, and her friend, her child.”
The other victim of the raid, Nicolaus Gustavson, also appeared to cheat death much like Alonzo Bunker had. After a few minutes of lying motionless on the street, the Swede was able to stand up on his own power, seemingly more sober than before he took Cole’s bullet.
Gustavson was even able to run to the Cannon River and wash the ugly wound in his scalp. A friend took him to a doctor who treated the injury. Gustavson talked and seemed fine, but as his brain swelled from the trauma, his condition worsened. The next day, he could not rise from his bed, and the day after that he drifted into a coma. The Swede died on September 11.
On Division Street, the crowds of gawkers continued to grow throughout the afternoon.
“The two dead robbers were left lying in the street in pools of their own blood, to be looked at by the world,” reported Adelbert Ames. “Men, women and children had their fill. Country folks came in or were in town and sat in their wagons by the dead bodies and chatted for hours. . . . All the women and children in town nearby went to see them.”
A traveling salesman from Pittsburgh, who happened to be lodging at the Dampier House at the time of the raid, wrote that the corpses “presented a terrible look—a determined, savage, disappointed look was depicted upon their ghastly countenances. Certainly, thought I, looking upon their bloody bodies and awful faces, the way of the transgressor is hard.”
Alonzo Bunker, his wound cleaned and bandaged, carefully stepped into his doctor’s carriage to be driven home. But Bunker asked the doctor to take him home by way of Division Street so he could look at the dead gunmen.
“I witnessed women calmly surveying the carcasses of the robbers,” Bunker recalled, “expressing contempt rather than pity.”
Division Street had quickly come to resemble a carnival. And the dead robbers were not the only things to see. There were broken windows, glass shards on the sidewalks, and bullet scars in the bricks and masonry of several buildings—dramatic evidence of how intense the skirmish between the townspeople and the outlaws had been. The bullet holes in the wooden staircase on the Scriver Building were especially impressive. At least one pistol belonging to the robbers had been picked up off the ground after the gang retreated, a .45-caliber nickel-plated Single Action Army revolver with ivory grips.
Druggist George Bates retained a couple of mementos from his encounter with the robbers. One was a slight scratch on his cheek and the bridge of his nose he received from a glancing bullet fired by one of the bandits. There’s a good chance the wound was from flying glass, but he liked to say it was a bullet, which made for a more exciting tale. He said he found the bullet lodged at the back of a collar box in the clothing store where he’d been when he challenged the outlaws with his empty revolver.
The druggist told a reporter he would keep the bullet “as a souvenir of the hottest day Northfield ever saw.”
At 3:00 P.M., John T. Ames hovered over the telegraph operator at the depot, rapidly dictating the news of the raid. Neither he nor anyone else could have imagined such a calamity. One Northfield man, a good man, was dead, and Ames’s own wife had blundered upon the robbers as the bullets were flying.
But the worst came later, when a horrifying rumor reached Ames that the robbers were on their way to his home. He certainly couldn’t dismiss the idea of the bank robbers striking his residence as ludicrous, especially after what had just happened on Division Street. His daughters were home, unprotected. He decided he had to go to them.
Adelbert tried to reason with his brother and urged him not to leave. As one of Northfield’s most prominent citizens, the people looked to John T. for leadership, to organize a pursuit of the killers. Even if the robbers did go to his home, Adelbert said, they would not harm his daughters. But John T. couldn’t be stopped and headed off for his home, with Adelbert following. Fortunately, before the Ames brothers had gotten very far, they met up with a man who told them the robbers had ridden out of Northfield without stopping. Adelbert told his greatly relieved brother to get back to Division Street and he would go ahead to look in on the girls.
Some citizens had already begun to chase the robbers, but John T. realized it would take a much larger effort to apprehend the criminals. These bandits were ruthless, armed to the teeth, and willing to fight to the death. The small town of Northfield had done exceptionally well in defending itself and driving off the robbers, but now it sorely needed help.
Minnesota, like Missouri and most other states, ha
d no state police force. The larger municipalities, with their professional police departments, filled that role in certain situations. So John T. reached out to Minneapolis and St. Paul for help and sent a telegram to the chief of police of each city:
EIGHT ARMED MEN ATTACKED BANK AT 2 O’CLOCK. FIGHT ON STREET BETWEEN ROBBERS AND CITIZENS. CASHIER KILLED. TELLER WOUNDED. TWO ROBBERS KILLED. OTHERS WOUNDED. SEND US SOME MEN AND ARMS TO CHASE ROBBERS.
JOHN T. AMES
The telegraph operators in the Twin Cities transcribed the messages, becoming increasingly excited as they put each letter, each word, each sentence together. The Minneapolis chief of police quickly read his telegram and frantically went to find the mayor and located him around 3:40 P.M.
When the 4:00 P.M. train pulled out of Minneapolis, the chief of police rode in one of the cars, along with four of his men armed with lever-action rifles and three hundred rounds of ammunition. The St. Paul chief and several of his men also made the 4:00 P.M. train in their city, the two forces joining up at Mendota Junction, just south of the Twin Cities, for the remainder of the journey.
John T. Ames left the telegraph office to look for horses for the manhunters. The telegraph operator continued tapping out warnings to all of southern Minnesota with descriptions of the robbers.
At some point that afternoon, one of the First National Bank’s directors came to the telegraph office with an urgent message he needed sent to Philadelphia. The message was for George M. Phillips, the bank’s cashier, who had just begun his visit to the World’s Fair.
In eight words, the telegram informed Phillips of the tragedy in Northfield. The cashier would return immediately to Minnesota and to the desk he always occupied. But by the time Phillips arrived, the blood and brains of the man who had worked in his place had been cleaned away.
Many Northfield citizens, adults and children, had difficulty sleeping on the night of September 7. If any of them got up and looked out their windows, they would have seen the stars disappear as clouds began to roll in. Civil War veterans eerily recalled how heavy rains invariably followed catastrophic battles. Northfield’s fight never reached the level of a battle’s slaughter, but a big rainstorm was still coming.
FIVE
AND THEN THERE WERE SIX
Long experience in their mode of life has made them not only desperate men but detectives equal to the most noted, and to capture them is no easy matter.
—LIBERTY TRIBUNE
Six men on five horses headed straight for the Big Woods. All they’d gotten from the bank was $26.60 in coin and scrip. As the robbers cantered out of town, they ejected the spent shell casings from their revolvers’ cylinders and replaced them with fresh rounds. They also took stock of their wounds. All three Younger brothers had bloodstains on their clothes and saddles. Cole had the hole from Anselm Manning’s rifle bullet in his left hip, but the wound was not dangerous. Jim Younger had taken a ball somewhere to the shoulder, though it apparently punched through clean, and Bob’s elbow was busted. The brothers likely had other wounds as well, but Bob’s elbow would end up being the most troublesome. Frank’s right leg was bleeding where he’d been hit by a pistol ball or buckshot sometime after he exited the bank. Whether or not the people of Northfield nicked Jesse or Charlie Pitts, no one knows for sure. They may have escaped unscathed.
If the robbery had gone according to plan, the gang was going to cross the Cannon River on the iron bridge at Mill Square, pausing briefly at the depot to smash the telegraph equipment at the office there before riding west. But Manning and the other Northfield defenders had undone that plan. Now the robbers would have to cross the river at Dundas, a village of eight hundred people three miles to the south.
Riding five abreast, the gang was in no mood to share the road. Just outside of Northfield, they ran into an elderly farmer driving a wagon loaded down with vegetables. One of the outlaws pulled his revolver, aimed it at the farmer, and shouted, “Take the ditch, God damn you!” The frightened old man jerked on the reins of his big draft horses and forced them down the steep bank, wrecking the wagon and spilling his load all over the ground.
Reaching Dundas, the outlaws paused briefly at the bridge to wash their wounds in the Cannon’s cool waters. Someone fashioned a crude sling for Bob’s arm. Then they rode cautiously through the tiny business district, their eyes trained on every man in view, wondering if the town had been alerted to the robbery. It had not, but not for lack of trying. The Northfield telegraph operator had sent message after message to the little town, but its operator had been gone from the office for at least an hour. So the people of Dundas didn’t think anything more about the passersby than what an odd-looking bunch they were. The owner of the hardware store thought they were “a lot of drunken loafers.”
Some of the outlaws cursed at one another, sharply laying the blame for the disaster on what someone did or should have done. The hardware store owner, in a jocular mood, asked the boys if they were a cavalry regiment. A traveling salesman from St. Paul guessed that if Sitting Bull was after them, they would be riding a little faster. In a blur of movement, one of the robbers unholstered his pistol and pointed its big bore at the salesman, snarling, “Get in [the store], you son of a bitch.”
On the other side of Dundas, the gang encountered a man driving a wagon of hoop poles, which would be used to make the hoops that hold together wooden barrels and kegs. Bob Younger, in increasing pain, needed a mount, and one of the man’s horses looked like it might do. So the gang told the wagon driver an incredible tale: a band of ruffians had robbed the bank at Northfield and murdered the sheriff. They were hot on the trail of the bad men but would need to commandeer one of his horses. When the wagon driver made the mistake of arguing, one of the outlaws jerked out his revolver and cracked its butt on the man’s head, sending him tumbling into the ditch.
The outlaws were taking the better of the two horses, and they had begun to help Bob mount it when they spotted two horsemen coming up fast from behind. This could mean trouble, and sure enough the two men rapidly approaching were the first of the pursuers to set out on the trail of the bandits. They were well armed and riding the fastest horses in Northfield—the mounts of the fallen Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell.
One of the outlaws took several steps toward the oncoming riders, held up his hand, and yelled, “Halt!” Suddenly, the two citizens no longer seemed so hell-bent on catching up to the robbers; they immediately reined in their horses and sat there watching as the outlaws saddled up and galloped away. The two Northfield men wisely followed at a good distance, giving the posses time to catch up with them.
After riding no more than a half mile, the gang stopped once more to tend to Bob’s wound, which was bleeding so profusely that blood flowed down his forearm and dripped off his fingertips. They got a pail of water from a farmer and poured it over Bob’s arm. The farmer, who had followed the gang members out to the road, asked how Bob had been hurt. One of the outlaws explained that “they had got into a row with a blackleg at Northfield, who had shot him, and the blackleg [a card cheat or swindler] had been killed.”
The gang galloped west toward Millersburg, three abreast in two ranks. Bob rode in the middle of the first rank so his companions could lead his horse while keeping him propped up. But he desperately needed a saddle. After spotting a house in the distance, two of the boys turned off the rode and talked the farmer there into “loaning” them a saddle, this time claiming they were law officers chasing horse thieves. At approximately 4:30 P.M., the gang reached Millersburg, six miles from Dundas. The hotel owner there got a quick look at the men as they rode by and recognized some of them as his guests from the previous night. Millersburg, hardly more than a spot in the road, was off the route of the telegraph, so no one there could possibly know about the Northfield Raid. Even so, the robbers did not stop to get reacquainted.
But the Northfield telegraph operator had done his job well, and with each passing hour, dozens more men turned out to join the hunt for the
bandits. Shopkeepers, craftsmen, farmers, and day laborers dropped everything at the cry of the news and dug out their old muskets, pistols, and knives, loaded themselves into buggies and wagons or saddled their nags, and headed west to cut off the robbers’ retreat. Five such manhunters arrived at Shieldsville, deep in the Big Woods southwest of Millersburg, at approximately 6:00 P.M. They had come in a wagon direct from Faribault and, as it had been a long ride and the town appeared quiet, the manhunters decided a glass of beer would taste pretty good. They parked their wagon in front of Joseph Hagerty’s general store and saloon and went in, leaving their guns in the wagon—guns that they had neglected to load.
As the Faribault party sipped on their drafts, six men on horseback slowly rode into Shieldsville. Eyewitnesses said the riders looked tired, and one awful-looking man was covered with blood. These men, the James-Younger gang, could not help but notice the wagon with its shotguns and pistols sitting in plain view. One of the outlaws asked a bystander how long the wagon had been there, and the man replied that it had rolled into town only about five minutes earlier.
The riders pulled up to a water pump in front of Hagerty’s establishment and calmly watered their horses at the trough. A few of the outlaws dismounted. An old man came out of the saloon and asked the boys where they were going. Jesse James, who had not yet lost his sense of humor, pointed to Bob Younger and said they “were going to hang that damned cuss.”
Just then, one of the young manhunters appeared in the saloon’s doorway, shouted, “Those are the fellows,” and rushed toward the wagon to get his weapon. But he froze in his tracks when the robbers, in a blur of movement, cocked and aimed their revolvers at him. The rest of the Faribault party stumbled outside a second later, all wearing the same shocked look on their faces.
“Let’s break their guns,” said one of the outlaws.
“You won’t break my gun,” yelled one of the Faribault men, as he lunged forward. The robbers pointed their revolvers at him and told him to get back. “They are not loaded,” he pleaded as one of the outlaws made a move toward the guns. Plainly seeing what a bunch of bumpkins they were up against, the bandit turned away from the wagon and got back on his horse. They left the firearms alone.
Shot All to Hell Page 10