Shot All to Hell

by Mark Lee Gardner

  At that time, a small party from St. Paul was out hunting prairie chickens, and they saw the men fleeing across the prairie, followed by their pursuers, and quickly guessed that they had stumbled on the hunt for the Northfield bandits. The party consisted of Horace Thompson, president of the First National Bank of St. Paul, his son, four ladies, and two children. Thompson had rented two light spring wagons in Madelia, each pulled by a pair of fine horses. After Thompson’s party spotted the fugitives, they followed the hunt from the high ground on the south side of the river, stopping about five hundred yards short of the Anderson place.

  Mrs. Anderson ran toward the Thompsons, shrieking that the robbers were coming. Thompson tried to calm the woman, who said her husband was working a field about a mile away. Thompson instructed her to go to her husband and tell him what was happening. He then told his son to fetch the shotgun shells with the heavy goose loads. They quickly switched out their shotgun shells, stepped in front of their wagons, and began walking slowly toward the robbers, who were clearly coming in their direction. Horace Thompson recalled that he “never saw four more robust and powerful looking men.” The women of the party stood upon the wagon seats waving their scarves wildly, trying to attract the attention of the possemen.

  Cole and the others were surprised to see the Thompson party. Hell, they thought, everybody, even the ladies, was after them. But the desperate men recognized the two teams and buggies as a godsend—they must have them. However, as the outlaws closed the distance, it became evident that the Thompsons were moving toward them as well, with weapons at their shoulders. Both parties halted just out of pistol range. The forty-nine-year-old Thompson watched as the Youngers and Pitts huddled together in conversation.

  Believing that Thompson and his son might be armed with rifles, the outlaws turned to their left and stepped into some tall weeds. The fugitives crouched down and slowly followed a ravine back toward the riverbank. Thompson and his son advanced to the edge of a bluff, where they looked down and saw the robbers enter a copse of willows in an elbow of the river.

  Sheriff Glispin had been forced to ride east for a mile before finding a place to cross the river, but Thompson now saw the sheriff and several horsemen approaching at a gallop and waved them in. Within thirty minutes, more than forty men were on the scene. Guards were hurriedly placed all around the five-acre patch that contained the fugitives, with some men on the north side of the Watonwan to block the gang if they attempted to recross it. The Youngers and Pitts, hunkered in the thickets, could hear the excited shouts and whoops of the manhunters closing in, like the high-pitched howls of hounds nearing the end of the chase. The outlaws were simply too exhausted to run again.

  “Cole, we are entirely surrounded; there is no hope of escape,” Pitts said. “We had better surrender.”

  Cole looked at his old friend Pitts and called him by his real name: “Sam,” Cole said grimly, “if you want to go out and surrender, go on. This is where Cole Younger dies.”

  “All right, Captain,” Pitts said, “I can die just as game as you can. Let’s get it done.”

  To flush the fugitives, Sheriff Glispin turned to thirty-nine-year-old Captain William W. Murphy, who had arrived with several men from his farm four miles away. Murphy, a veteran of the Fourteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry, had been wounded three times in battle and had also spent time in a Confederate prison camp. His Civil War heroics were well known, and Murphy fully lived up to his reputation, immediately calling for volunteers to accompany him into the brush to root out the robbers.

  The outlaws froze in place as they listened to Captain Murphy’s call for men. They instantly looked at one another and then hurriedly pulled out all their revolvers, spinning the cylinders of each one to make sure every chamber contained a live round.

  Cole spoke in a whisper: “Make for the horses. Every man for himself. There is no use stopping to pick up a comrade here, for we can’t get him through the line. Just charge them and make it if we can.”

  Six men volunteered to join Captain Murphy, including Sheriff Glispin and Colonel Vought. Others were called to join the seven, but not a sound came from the remaining possemen, so Captain Murphy organized his brave handful in a skirmish line, each man five feet from the next. Do not shoot first, he instructed his men, as he intended to call out to the fugitives to surrender once he knew their location. But he told his men, if they did get into a shoot-out, they were to shoot low. The battle veteran had given this same advice countless times to the soldiers in his regiment, as it was well known that most soldiers in battle shot high, missing the enemy entirely.

  Captain Murphy now gave the command to march, and the line slowly advanced north through the brushy bottom toward the riverbank. All eyes focused on the ground in front of the skirmishers, the agonizing tension rising with each step, but this sweep failed to disclose the fugitives, so Murphy turned his skirmishers on a sharp left wheel, Sheriff Glispin anchoring the end of the line on the riverbank. Once the men came even with Glispin, they marched west, pushing through thick willows, about five feet high.

  Charlie Pitts, crouching in the willows with his comrades, spotted Sheriff Glispin coming toward him, and when the sheriff approached to about fifteen feet, Pitts jumped up and aimed his revolver at the sheriff. Glispin, who held a single-shot rifle at the ready, saw the huge outlaw rise from the willows and quickly drew a bead on him. Both men fired almost simultaneously. Pitts fell forward like a brick and rolled over upon his back, dead. Glispin, unharmed, dropped to one knee to reload as the Younger brothers stood up and furiously fired their pistols, flame and smoke belching from the barrels.

  The manhunters instantly returned fire on the outlaws, a spray of lead flying all through the brush. Across the river, several trigger-happy possemen blazed away into the willows, their bullets snipping twigs perilously close to Murphy’s men. Captain Murphy fired all six chambers of his revolver and yelled over to Glispin that he needed to reload. The sheriff yanked his own loaded pistol from its holster and tossed it to Murphy. The captain began to move even closer forward, but then he suddenly jumped back when one of the outlaws’ balls slammed into the right side of his stomach. He immediately reached down, expecting to feel blood soaking his clothing but instead felt his large briarwood pipe, now splintered, in his vest pocket. Later, when he pulled back his vest and shirt, all he could find was a slight bruise.

  The Youngers were getting the worst of it, taking hits from all directions. Jim winced in pain as a ball pierced his right thigh. Then his head snapped back as one of Colonel Vought’s bullets tore into the left side of his upper jaw and lodged in the roof of his mouth near the back of the throat. He fell to the ground unconscious, blood gushing from his face. Buckshot peppered Cole’s head and back, causing him to grunt and suck in air. Next a ball penetrated his head behind his right eye. He collapsed near his brother, bleeding from his nose and mouth. Bob took a bullet in the right lung but remained standing, an empty revolver in his left hand. His elbow injury rendered him helpless to reload his pistol.

  With the outlaws’ guns silent, Captain Murphy shouted for a cease-fire and demanded that the fugitives surrender.

  “Do not shoot any more,” Bob Younger answered, “as the boys are riddled.”

  “Throw up your hands,” ordered Sheriff Glispin.

  Bob held up his left hand.

  “Throw up the other!”

  Bob explained that his other arm was broken, and Glispin told him to move to Captain Murphy and turn over his weapon.

  As Bob stepped forward, he came onto higher ground and was suddenly visible to the possemen across the river. One fired at Younger, striking him under his arm and causing a flesh wound. Bob halted, angrily shouting, “Some damned son of a bitch shot me after I surrendered!”

  Murphy yelled again for all the men to cease fire.

  “Don’t shoot him or I’ll shoot you,” Sheriff Glispin added for good measure. Bob then advanced to Murphy and handed him his pistol.

  T
he other skirmishers converged on Murphy and Glispin, and all the men farther out began pouring into the willows to get a look at the defeated Northfield robbers. They heard the moans of Cole and Jim before they saw them on the ground. Jim sputtered and hacked, strangling on clots of his own blood. He pointed to his mouth as the possemen crowded around him.

  Thirty-three-year-old John M. Robb of Madelia kneeled down and ran his finger between Jim’s lips and cleared his mouth, causing the panic in Jim’s face to fade away. Robb then told Jim to get up.

  “They will shoot me,” Jim slurred.

  “No,” said Robb. “You have surrendered, and I will stand between you and harm.”

  Jim stood up, unbuckled his ammunition belt, and handed it and his loaded Smith & Wesson to Robb. He had tossed aside his other revolver after emptying it in the fight, although it was quickly recovered—the souvenir-seeking started almost immediately.

  Sheriff Glispin called for a wagon to transport his prisoners and Pitts’s corpse to Madelia. Cole, eight fresh wounds in his body (not counting those from Northfield), slowly stood, and, along with Jim and Bob, was marched out of the willows to a place where the wagon could pull up. Several men dragged Pitts’s body out of the brush by its feet. Colonel Vought walked up to Cole and instantly recognized him as the pleasant southern man who had lodged at his hotel under the name J. C. King.

  “He recognized me,” Vought remembered, “and held out his blood covered hand and shook my hand and called me landlord.”

  Captain Murphy could not help but feel compassion for the pathetic-looking fugitives, with their soiled and torn clothing, worn-out boots, and multiple bloody wounds. They were suffering incredible pain. After a moment of silence, Murphy spoke up: “Boys, this is horrible, but you see what lawlessness has brought to you.”

  There were those who felt no sympathy at all. Some, including several possemen who had remained silent when the call went out for volunteers to go in after the outlaws, clamored for killing the Youngers. With a disgusted look on his face, Sheriff Glispin put a quick stop to such talk.

  Oscar Sorbel, who had been relegated to holding some of the possemen’s horses during the capture, came up as the wagon arrived and helped load Pitts’s body. Once the Youngers were aboard, Bob asked if he could have a chew of tobacco. Several men said he did not deserve any. But Oscar found a man who was willing to give up a ten-cent plug, and he handed it to the outlaw. Bob broke off half with his teeth and began to return the other half to Oscar, but the young man told him to keep it.

  The wagon lumbered out of the Watonwan bottom and halted briefly on the bluff to the south. Glispin needed to rearrange his prisoners to make them more comfortable for the ride of several miles into town. Cole and Jim were in such bad shape, they looked like they might die before getting to Madelia.

  The Horace Thompson party came up as the possemen tended to the outlaws. The ladies could see that the Youngers desperately needed bandages, and they untied the colorful scarves from around their necks and handed them over to the prisoners. These scarves were the same ones they had frantically waved earlier to get the attention of the manhunters.

  At approximately 5:00 P.M., Sheriff Glispin’s posse with its grizzled trophies pulled up at the end of Madelia’s Main Street. A large crowd—made even bigger by a special train from Mankato—had arrived at the site of the cavalcade. Many stood in buggies and wagons to get a better view. As the prisoners’ wagon passed down the street, huzzahs went up as each throng got its first good look at the outlaw brothers.

  Despite their exhaustion and aching injuries, the Youngers suddenly became alert, marveling at the crowd and reveling in the attention. Jim, blood dripping from his face in “clotted masses,” waved his hat back and forth and even managed to let out a cheer or two. Cole, his right eye now swollen shut, waved his hand and took a gentlemanly bow.

  Twenty-three-year-old Luther Pomeroy never forgot the sight. Cole “may have been an outlaw,” he said years later, “but many of us that day admired his nerve, for he was a man who could take it on the chin and still smile.”

  The prisoners were delivered to the Flanders House and placed in rooms on the second floor, Cole and Jim sharing one with a single bed, while Bob was in another room about ten yards away. They were given clean clothes and told to take off their tattered and dirty garments. The town’s doctors immediately set to work patching up the outlaws the best they could. Cole told the physicians his swollen and bruised feet hurt more than all his wounds. When his boots and makeshift socks were removed, his toenails came off with them.

  Cole’s and Jim’s injuries appeared to be fatal. The doctors worried that the ball behind Cole’s eye would cause inflammation of the brain, and it could not be removed safely. The doctors stepped away from the bed and discussed this wound and others, speaking in whispers so as not to upset their patients.

  “Speak up, Doctor,” Cole said. “You needn’t mind me. It makes no difference to me. If I die within five minutes, it will be all right.”

  Jim’s ghastly mouth wound presented the greatest challenge. The bullet had shattered his upper jaw so a large piece of the bone needed to come out. The doctors gave Jim morphine to reduce his suffering; afterward they performed the delicate surgery while Cole, lying at his brother’s side, watched. When one of the doctors finally succeeded in cutting all the surrounding tissue and removed the section of bone, four teeth were still attached. But try as they might, the doctors could not find the bullet lodged behind the muscles near his throat.

  Crowds remained around the Flanders House until late that evening, and a steady stream of men, women, and children were allowed to march up the stairs and peek into the rooms of the prisoners. Still, the guards forbade anyone but reporters from speaking to them. At one point, a man in the crowd shouted excitedly to “hang the skunks,” offering to “knock their skulls in with the butt end of his rifle.”

  Sheriff Glispin immediately stepped before the throng and announced that he would shoot down the first man who attempted to touch the robbers. A lynching was actually the boys’ greatest fear. They were almost sure they would be lynched the moment they were captured.

  “I don’t want any man to risk his life for us,” Cole said to the sheriff, “but if they do come for us, give us our pistols so we can make a fight for it.”

  “If they do come, and I weaken,” Glispin replied, “you can have your pistols.”

  The next morning’s train brought more hordes anxious to view the outlaws. They were joined by an enterprising Mankato photographer named Elias F. Everitt, who had gotten permission to capture the outlaws’ images on his glass plates. A chair was placed on the porch of the Flanders, and each brother was brought down, one at a time, for his “sitting.” The whole affair made a fascinating show for the crowd on the street. After Everitt had exposed plates for all three robbers, one of the guards plopped down in the empty chair. The guard, a rough-looking character with only one hand, wore a dirty shirt stained on the front with tobacco juice. As he settled into his seat, a young woman standing on her toes in the back of a farm wagon exclaimed, “Look, look, there is the worst looking one of them all.”

  Cole Younger, age thirty-two, Madelia, September 22, 1876.

  (Robert G. McCubbin Collection)

  Jim Younger, age twenty-eight, Madelia, September 22, 1876.

  (Northfield Historical Society)

  Bob Younger, age twenty-two, Madelia, September 22, 1876.

  (Northfield Historical Society)

  Charlie Pitts in death, September 22, 1876.

  (Robert G. McCubbin Collection)

  Before leaving the Flanders House, Everitt made two more exposures. One was of Oscar Sorbel, the young Paul Revere of the Watonwan. Then the photographer lined up all seven manhunters who had bravely gone into the willows after the gang. These men would forever after be known as the Madelia Seven.

  It was warm that morning, and Everitt had taken off his coat and draped it over a nearby clothesline that a
lso held the tattered garments of the robbers. When he went to retrieve his coat, he discovered that the buttons were missing. The souvenir hunters had cut them off, just as they had all the buttons on the robbers’ clothes.

  Everitt also photographed Charlie Pitts, whose body had been lain out on ice in Madelia’s tiny jail. But Charlie apparently did not keep well because his nose and mouth had become terribly swollen. The Saint Peter Tribune complained later that Everitt’s photograph of the stiff corpse, a bullet hole plainly visible in the center of the chest, looked nothing like the outlaw who had visited St. Peter before the Northfield Raid: “[T]he man himself was a fine, genteel-looking person, instead of the gross, brutal rough indicated by the photograph.”

  The crowd was standing room only in the Flanders House as hundreds of people—eight at a time—filed past the robbers. Bob, his ruggedly handsome face without the slightest scratch, received several bouquets of flowers from admiring ladies. For most of the day, though, the scene was one big crying jag.

  “The women were melted to sobs and strong men gave way to sympathetic tears,” reported the Saint Paul Dispatch. “Prayers, ardent and fervent, were uttered, and the two brothers [Cole and Jim] clasped each other’s hands and gave way to apparent grief, their features quivering in every muscle, and the scalding tears rolling down their cheeks. Many believe in their contrition. Both brothers speak in feeling tones of their dead mother and living sister, and this touches the women wonderfully.”

  The Madelia Seven. From left to right: Sheriff James Glispin, Captain William W. Murphy, G. A. Bradford, B. M. Rice, Colonel Thomas L. Vought, C. A. Pomeroy, and S. J. Severson.

  (Northfield Historical Society)

  One sobbing woman stepped into Bob’s room and asked the outlaw if he knew her.