Based on descriptions he gathered from Northfield eyewitnesses, Detective Hazen said who he thought the robbers in the bank and the man who murdered Heywood were. But he got that wrong, too, although his reasoning was not completely unsound: “Jesse James is always ready for murder,” Hazen said, “and he is undoubtedly the one who fired the fatal shot at Heywood, the cashier.”
There would be plenty of mistakes and bad hunches to go around in the days and weeks to come—there always were when it came to the James-Younger gang. St. Louis chief of police James McDonough still had men pursuing the outlaws in Texas when news of the raid reached him. “I am of the opinion,” he wrote Missouri’s governor, Charles Hardin, on September 12, five days after the raid, “that it is quite a different gang who made the late assault on the bank at Northfield, Minn.”
Henry Wheeler could not stop thinking about the bodies. As a medical student, he knew firsthand the demand for good cadavers at his university’s medical school. Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell were not only outstanding physical specimens, but Wheeler felt a proprietary interest when it came to Miller. It would be a true waste if the bodies were to rot out in the cemetery when they could be put to good use elsewhere. Besides, these wicked men who had terrorized Northfield were thoroughly despised; no one visiting a Minnesota cemetery would miss them.
Wheeler and a classmate, Charles Dampier, approached Mayor Solomon Stewart and told him they would like to claim the outlaws’ bodies for the University of Michigan’s medical department at Ann Arbor. Stewart initially told the boys yes and good riddance. But once the mayor gave the matter more thought, he decided he did not have the right to give the bodies away, worthy cause or not. He met the boys again and gave them the bad news: the robbers would have to be interred in the cemetery. But, and he leaned in close and spoke in a whisper, the bodies would “not be covered with any more earth than was necessary.”
During the afternoon following the inquest, the outlaws were buried in unmarked graves in the paupers’ section of the Northfield Cemetery. Late that night, a wagon with four men and two large wooden barrels quietly rolled through the cemetery gate. A black man drove while Wheeler, Dampier, and another University of Michigan classmate, Clarence Persons, steadied the barrels. The wagon stopped next to the fresh-dug graves in the southwest corner of the cemetery, and by the light of a lantern, the medical students went to work with their shovels. They quickly struck the corpses, just as Mayor Stewart had promised. The bodies were stiff, and it was no easy task stuffing them in the barrels—especially the tall Chadwell. The popping of bones and joints mixed with the grunts of the young men.
Carrying its macabre cargo, the wagon next arrived at a discreet location where the barrels were filled with alcohol or brine and lids carefully sealed. On the outside of the containers, the word PAINT was written on each. The barrels were then driven to the depot and unloaded. In order not to excite suspicion, Clarence Persons arranged for the shipment of the “paint” to leave for Ann Arbor the next day.
On the afternoon of September 9, as the corpses sloshed in their barrels aboard a train bound for Michigan, the first engraving based on Sumner’s photograph of Miller appeared in the Saint Paul Dispatch. Soon after, Chadwell’s image would be selling newspapers, too. By any measure, the two Missouri bandits could not have come to a more ignominious end. Such was the fate of outlaws who got caught, and the men fleeing through the Big Woods knew this all too well.
SIX
THE GREAT MANHUNT
It seems hardly possible that they can escape, so swarmed with enemies are the woods.
—THE MINNEAPOLIS TRIBUNE
Twelve noon, Friday, September 8, 1876
Cannon River, thirty miles southwest of Northfield
George James cradled his single-shot shotgun and looked across the river to the east bank. A group of men he didn’t know had come to James’s house while he was away that morning and had asked his wife a lot of questions about the river, marshes, and area roads. He knew they had to be the robbers, so he grabbed his shotgun and went off to alert the authorities. Farmer James found several guards at one of the bridges over the river, but right around the time he got there, word came that some suspicious men claiming to be posse members had questioned a nearby road crew about the closest fords.
The commander of the small force at the bridge immediately sent James and two other men downstream along the west bank to block the lower ford while he and another man started for the upper ford. James and the two men had just reached the lower ford when he saw something move in the woods on the east bank, and then six men leading horses slowly emerged from the brush and started down the bank. Just as their leader and his horse entered the water, James raised his shotgun and yanked the trigger. The boom of the shotgun echoed down the river as bird shot peppered the brush around the leader.
The outlaw cussed and unholstered his revolver. “We must take to the woods,” he shouted to the men behind him.
James hurriedly reloaded his shotgun as the robbers scampered back into the forest. “Come on, boys, we have got them!” he yelled. But when he looked back, he saw that both of the men had dropped their weapons and run like hell at the sound of the gunshot. One of the men, a doctor, somehow lost his false teeth while he was getting away. The Saint Paul Dispatch even wrote that the doctor “lives to tell the tale how he escaped by the skin of his teeth.”
James could see how outnumbered he was and retreated as well. The outlaws, hidden just inside the trees, apparently heard the guards fleeing upstream. The bandits mounted up, wheeled their horses, and trotted out to the bank and splashed into the swollen river. They crossed to the west bank in silence and disappeared into the woods. The manhunters quickly regrouped, and while some attempted to trail the robbers from the ford, word was sent out to the posse leaders that the irregular containment line would need to be shifted west—and fast.
But the outlaws were entering a particularly wild section of the Big Woods, what one correspondent called the “bad country back of Elysian.” Roads were scarce—if what they were riding on could be called roads—and there were the marshes to cross, with their soft, muddy bottoms that sapped precious strength from the horses. Farmsteads were scattered, and quite a few people living there still did not know about the raid, which was helpful to the gang.
A half hour after crossing the river, the outlaw band, six men and five horses, reached the secluded farm of fifty-one-year-old Ludwig Rosnau, a native of Germany. Ludwig and his sixteen-year-old son, Wilhelm, saw four of the men at the barn and went up to see what they wanted. The strangers wore India rubber coats, which were unbuttoned, giving the farmer an easy view of their wide cartridge belts. One was a large man, as large as the boy had ever seen—Cole Younger. The “leader” was smaller, a “middle-sized man,” and he did all of the talking. This was Jesse James, whom the rest of the gang now followed as they desperately tried to elude the manhunters on their trail. There was no time for arguing over leadership if they were to escape from Minnesota.
Jesse told the Rosnaus that he was the sheriff of Rice County and he was on the trail of horse thieves. He asked the directions and distances to St. Peter, Le Sueur, German Lake, and other places. Jesse then wanted to know if there were any horses in the barn. Wilhelm, speaking for his father, answered yes. Waving a large document in the farmer’s face, Jesse said he needed two horses and a guide. The boy recognized the document as a map of Minnesota, but that didn’t matter because there was no way his father was letting anyone take a single horse. That is, until the “sheriff” and his “deputies” pulled their revolvers.
The outlaws helped themselves to two horses and saddles and made Wilhelm mount one while one of the robbers got up on the other. Jesse told Wilhelm to take them to the road that ran from Waterville to Cleveland. Farmer Rosnau wasn’t happy about this, but he wasn’t really worried because he still didn’t know about the raid. Wilhelm was a little frightened, but he was a good guide, leading the gang through the
woods and around a deep swamp. They traveled slowly because one of the horses had an ugly sore caused by a saddle cinch and could hardly walk. The outlaws talked low among themselves, and several times Wilhelm tried to talk with the men, but they did not answer, and finally Jesse told him not to talk so loud as he might alert the robbers.
At one point, they encountered another boy who knew Wilhelm. The group halted, and Wilhelm and the boy began speaking in German. Jesse did not like that one bit, and he told the boy to hush up. But the young man kept speaking to Wilhelm in German. Suddenly, Jesse cursed and ordered someone to knock down the kid. One of the outlaws pulled his revolver and raised the butt in the air to strike the boy, when the boy jumped back, crying, “Don’t! Don’t!” He also said his English was poor. Jesse then told the boy he’d better hightail it out of there, and if he turned around, he would be shot. The boy hightailed it.
The gang and Wilhelm reached the Cleveland road after about a mile and a half, where they halted to trade horses with the boy, giving him the lame animal. They told him to stay there for half an hour while they went into the woods and scouted for tracks. Wilhelm watched as the outlaws crossed a cornfield and got onto the road where it led into some trees. Suddenly, the outlaws put their horses into a gallop, the tramping of their hooves gradually growing fainter until all Wilhelm heard were the sounds of the forest. He stayed like he was told until another young man came up the road and asked if he’d heard about the Northfield robbery. Everything instantly came together in Wilhelm’s mind, and he started immediately for home.
That evening Wilhelm told a group of lawmen about his experiences with the robbers and that one man carried his arm in a sling and it looked like there was blood on the man’s sleeve. Wilhelm thought this man’s leg also might be hurt because he kept one foot out of the stirrup.
“They were mild-mannered men and behaved all right,” said Wilhelm, “except when they drew revolvers.”
The last time the gang was seen was on Friday just before dark. A posse spotted the men riding across a cornfield, heading for cover in some thick trees. The posse had been close enough to see the bloodstains on Bob Younger’s sling and also saw where blood had dripped down onto his leg. The men had gone by so quickly, like ghosts, that the possemen hadn’t even had time to raise their weapons.
At least five hundred men pounded the roads through the Big Woods on Saturday and Sunday. A special train ran the seventeen miles between Mankato and Janesville, patrolling the tracks and transporting men and supplies. Telegraph operators manned their stations around the clock, transmitting every scrap of news, every rumor, as well as a flood of dispatches coming from the Minneapolis and St. Paul newspaper correspondents who now rode with the manhunters.
But the robbers seemed to have vanished. This area was home to thousands of feral hogs that tore up the earth searching for grubs and roots—one man described it as “the hog pen of the state”—and this made following any trail tedious. And when fresh tracks were discovered, they turned out to be made by other posses. The rain, which only seemed to get heavier and colder, turned the roads into muck and soaked the possemen, causing some guards to abandon their posts.
Fear of the robbers rattled quite a few of the men and boys who made up the posses. “Many, of course, were there who started in the chase as they would go upon a chicken hunt,” commented one reporter, “made brave by the excitement of the moment, but worse than useless in case of actual service.” Some, he said, were “scared at the sight of a stump.” Of course, part of their fear was from them being poorly armed “with weapons little better than garden syringes”—or no arms at all.
The locals were also easily terrified and often mistook the manhunters for the bandits. Instead of waiting and asking questions, they simply ran for their lives, spreading false reports of robber sightings that only caused more confusion. Some others took advantage of having all these warm, hungry bodies and dramatically raised their prices on provisions and meals. The price gouging was so bad that a special shipment of bread, sausage, and cheese was delivered by rail to one group of manhunters.
But the biggest problems for the men from St. Paul, Minneapolis, and other parts of the state were a lack of familiarity with the area and a lack of coordination, which caused them to be as lost in the Big Woods as the outlaws. The best maps of the region were the county maps found in the large (14½×18 inches) Minnesota atlas published in Chicago by A. T. Andreas in 1874. A number of possemen actually toted along the unwieldy 394-page book. Others tore out the maps they needed and tried to piece together the different roads. Unfortunately, even these maps were not detailed enough and contained many errors.
The manhunters had plenty of leaders in their ranks, county sheriffs and prominent citizens, but they still didn’t have strict charge of their volunteers, frequently making suggestions on what needed to be done as opposed to issuing direct orders. And no one man oversaw the entire operation or had authority over all the various parties in the field. So a number of escape points were left unguarded because everyone assumed someone else was doing it. Probably the most inexcusable behavior came from the police departments of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The two cities were jealous and bitter rivals in everything: business, transportation, politics, sports, and more. And so, too, with the robber hunt.
Detective Mike Hoy led the Minneapolis squad. A native of King’s County, Ireland, the thirty-nine-year-old Hoy had fought with the Tenth Minnesota in the Civil War and had served as chief of police of St. Anthony, Minnesota, before it merged with Minneapolis. Hoy was a large and powerful man with a full beard and bushy eyebrows, and he could also be a bully with an evil temper. His counterpart with the St. Paul contingent, thirty-eight-year-old Detective John B. Bresette, had been with the police force since 1857, except for Civil War duty with the Eighth Minnesota. A native of New York, Bresette was also a good-size man with a florid complexion and a drooping mustache. He was said to be “known for his brusque, quick, off-hand way,” which was not necessarily a compliment.
Hoy and Bresette were alike enough to hate each other, and they bickered and quarreled like children, refusing to cooperate, each striving to secure any glory for themselves. “The defeat of the object sought to be obtained,” wrote one reporter, “is the inevitable result.”
On Sunday afternoon, convinced that the outlaws were being harbored by local criminal types, Detective Hoy led his party to the home of a man named Conway, who had a notorious reputation as the leader of a gang of horse thieves. According to the people at the house, Conway had not been seen for the last three weeks. Not only did Hoy not believe them, he was convinced they were hiding something.
Hoy singled out a young man named Dolan, a former inmate of Stillwater Penitentiary, and forced him to accompany his men to an island in nearby Lake Elysian. Dolan trembled as he watched Hoy uncoil a long rope and then step around behind him. The detective tied one end of the rope around Dolan’s neck and threw the other over the limb of a large oak. Hoy then asked Dolan if he had anything he wanted to tell him. When Dolan shook his head no, Hoy signaled his men to hang the poor man. The rope instantly snapped taut and Dolan’s feet left the ground, kicking and twisting.
After a few seconds of this torture, Hoy told his men to let Dolan down so he could interrogate the man again. Gasping for air, Dolan still refused to talk, and the torture was repeated. The “hanging bee” went on for some time until Hoy finally threw up his hands and released Dolan, flabbergasted that the ex-con refused to squeal. It never seemed to occur to Hoy that Dolan might have nothing to squeal about.
That same afternoon, as the fears grew that the outlaws had completely escaped, a rider galloped into Janesville, a thick lather dripping off his heaving horse. He pulled up at the railroad depot, jumped off his mount, and rushed inside to the telegraph office. He handed a message to the first man he saw, a reporter for the Saint Paul Dispatch. Three robbers had been driven out of the woods, the message said, and were fleeing toward Waterville. The rep
orter anxiously asked if there was any other information, and the man told him the outlaws had dashed across a bridge over the Cannon River yelling and firing their guns in the air. The guards dove for cover, but they described one of the horses as a buckskin, which matched one ridden by a robber in Northfield.
The reporter turned to the telegraph operator and dictated several messages to points all over southern Minnesota, including his newspaper in St. Paul. The correspondent for the Minneapolis Tribune took his turn with the wire next. “The announcement creates a sensation among the few men remaining in town,” he reported. “It settles the question that the robbers are still in the country, and we wait now breathlessly for news from the front. It looks as though the end would come today. Every one is excited. Every one talks rapidly and excitedly.”
These telegrams did raise excitement across the state and even more men volunteered for the robber hunt. A special train carrying more than one hundred men from Northfield, Winona, Rochester, Owatonna, and Medford soon steamed toward Janesville. Another train departed from St. Paul at 6:00 P.M., carrying Chief of Police James King, private detective Larry Hazen, and twenty armed men. Several hundred people gathered at the St. Paul depot to see the chief off.
The St. Paul train arrived in St. Peter, seventy-five miles down the track, at 9:15 P.M., and Chief King stepped off in a drizzling rain, anxious to get any updates. An official at the station handed the chief an urgent dispatch, and what he read disgusted him. The report of the robbers was false. Yes, some men had terrorized the bridge guards, but they were a bunch of drunken yahoos from Waseca having fun scaring the hell out of people and not the Missouri outlaws.
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