Shot All to Hell

by Mark Lee Gardner

  “No, madam, I have not that pleasure,” he said.

  “Don’t you know me?” she asked again.

  “Indeed, I cannot recollect you, madam,” Bob answered.

  “Don’t you remember the woman who gave you bread and butter?”

  “Oh, yes, certainly, and most thankful were we for it.”

  “Oh forgive me, sir,” she blurted out, “indeed, I did not intend to do it.”

  “I have nothing to forgive,” Bob gently assured her. “You were very kind to us, and we shall not forget it.”

  “But forgive me, sir,” she pleaded, “I did not mean to betray you.”

  “Why, really, madam, we never supposed you did. We do not blame you at all. We are only very grateful for what you did for us.”

  “But, sir, it was because you were at our house you were caught; but it was not my fault, indeed it was not.”

  Finally, to pacify the distraught woman, Bob forgave her, and she immediately brightened. Drying her tears, she said good-bye and left the room. But as soon as she stepped out of hearing, Bob turned to a reporter and asked the woman’s name.

  “Mrs. Sorbel,” the reporter answered, “the mother of the lad who informed the people of your whereabouts.”

  “I shall never forget that name,” Bob said.

  A flood of telegrams came over the wires with reports of the capture and descriptions of the robbers. One telegram received by the Saint Paul Dispatch read:

  ST. PETER, MINN., SEPT. 22.—WE HAVE SURRENDERED. MIKE HOY CAN NOW COME ON WITH SAFETY.

  COLE YOUNGER

  Written by some wag, the “Cole Younger” telegram subsequently appeared in newspapers across the state.

  Several newspaper correspondents kept the outlaws occupied during their confinement at the Flanders. The boys admitted that they were the Younger brothers, but they refused to identify those killed or the two who broke the line at Lake Crystal. They made it a point, they said, not to speak of each other’s affairs, only their own. Still, that did not stop others from trying to coax the Youngers into admitting that the two who had escaped—nearly everyone now believed they were Frank and Jesse—were the notorious James brothers. A correspondent for the Saint Paul Dispatch told Cole and Jim of a recent report (which would prove to be false) that the two had been captured and that one was dead and the other dying. The journalist referred to the captured bandits as the James brothers, even though this identification had not been part of the report.

  This got the outlaws’ attention, and they appeared to be genuinely distressed. Cole asked which one was dead, the smaller or the larger of the two. “Mind,” Cole quickly added, “I don’t say they are the James brothers.”

  But, the journalist insisted, the two men confessed that they were the James brothers.

  “Did they say anything of us?” Cole asked.

  “No.”

  “Good boys to the last,” Cole said with a smile.

  The other burning questions were who had killed cashier Heywood and why. Bob Younger admitted to the Minneapolis Tribune reporter that he was one of the three robbers who had gone into the bank, but he refused to say who committed the murder.

  “[I]t was a bad piece of business and very foolish,” he said. “It was not our intention to kill him; we have not wanted to kill anyone. It, of course, would do no good to kill the cashier, because then we couldn’t get into the vault anyway. Of course, I cannot say what the motives of the man were when he shot, but I suppose he thought the cashier was reaching down under his desk for his revolver.”

  The correspondent replied: “Heywood was a brave fellow—do you not think so?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Bob answered. “I think it was more fear than bravery.”

  While the Youngers sparred with reporters, Sheriff Glispin sparred with pushy state officials. The Minnesota governor was in Philadelphia attending the Centennial Exposition when he heard the news of the capture. He immediately telegraphed his secretary in St. Paul to have the Youngers and the body of Pitts transported to the capital.

  Glispin initially agreed but then changed his mind after consulting with several Madelia citizens. It seemed to them that the Twin Cities were trying to steal the show, when the prisoners properly should go to Rice County, where there were warrants for their arrest, and where they would eventually be tried.

  Sheriff Ara Barton of Rice County, along with a posse of twelve men, set out for Madelia on Friday, September 22. Changing trains in Mankato, Barton met a delegation from the governor on its way to Madelia for the same purpose. The two parties began a heated conversation, with Barton finally declaring that the Youngers were his prisoners, and he would be taking them to Faribault, the Rice County seat, by the most direct route. As a consolation of sorts, he agreed that the governor could have Pitts’s body. The governor’s delegation had no choice but to go along with Barton’s decision. The prisoners were legally his.

  Sheriff Barton and his deputies arrived at the Flanders House late that evening. Shortly after 6:00 A.M. the next morning, the Youngers were loaded in a wagon and driven to the Madelia depot. A mattress had been placed in the train’s smoking car for Cole and Jim. The two were rapidly improving, but their doctors were still concerned about their condition, particularly the wound behind Cole’s eye. Bob rode in a seat behind his brothers. Sheriff Glispin and the other members of the Madelia Seven, along with two doctors, accompanied Barton and his men.

  It was not yet 7:00 A.M. when the train pulled into Mankato, where the sheriff’s party were going to transfer the prisoners to the Winona & St. Peter line a few blocks away. Huge crowds had already gathered at both depots. The Mankato mayor had made arrangements to put the outlaws on display in the railroad agent’s office, which had a large window that fronted the station platform. Approximately a thousand people filed past the open window as the brothers ate their breakfast. When it was time to go to the Winona depot, throngs surrounded the wagon with the prisoners and ran after it.

  “A few foolish men and women shook hands with them and begged tokens of remembrances,” reported the Mankato Union.

  The outlaws found similar receptions at each stop as their train chugged eastward, the curious plastering their faces against the windows of the cars, some of the bolder ones even attempting to get inside. Bob “sat complaisantly twirling his moustache during most of the stops at the stations and chatted affably with the officers and others who occupied seats adjacent,” observed a Minneapolis Tribune reporter. Cole passed the time reading a detailed account of the capture in a copy of the Mankato Review.

  The last transfer occurred at Owatonna, where the officers forced the crowd back with shouts and orders, quickly ushering their prisoners into the caboose of a freight train that pulled out immediately for Faribault, sixteen miles north.

  The use of a freight train for the final leg of the journey had been intentional, Sheriff Barton correctly predicting that Faribault’s citizens would be expecting the robbers on a passenger train. But although there were relatively few people at the depot when the prisoners were led from the caboose, word of their arrival raced through the town’s streets like a raging flood, and the sheriff hardly had the Youngers in the open wagon before the excited crowds began to form. By the time he had his prisoners locked up in their cells, most of downtown Faribault seemed to be heading up to the jail. But Barton wouldn’t allow anyone to see the prisoners until the afternoon, by which time the doctors had removed several bullets from the men and again dressed their wounds.

  The number of visitors was respectable, yet it hardly prepared the sheriff and his officers for the next day’s circus, when nearly four thousand people passed through the jail to see the Younger brothers.

  When the news of the capture of the Youngers reached St. Louis, Chief of Police James McDonough suddenly changed his mind about the identities of the Minnesota raiders. “I am now convinced that the ‘old mob’ were at Northfield, Minn.,” he wrote Missouri governor Charles Hardin on September 2
2. He assured the governor that should “any of the uncaptured ones find their way into Jackson or Clay Counties, I will be prepared to receive them.”

  In the meantime, McDonough would leave that night for St. Paul with one of his men, Russell Palmer, “who can fully identify all the captured robbers, dead or alive” (Palmer, thirty-six years old, had lived for a short time with the Youngers’ uncle). McDonough had already wired St. Paul’s chief not to bury any dead outlaws until he had a chance to view their bodies.

  McDonough and Officer Palmer, along with Calvin B. Hunn, superintendent of the United States Express Company, reached St. Paul Sunday morning, September 24. Along with St. Paul chief of police James King, they went directly to the capitol to examine Pitts’s corpse, where they found the state’s surgeon general in the process of embalming the decomposing outlaw. McDonough immediately confirmed the identification of the dead man as Charlie Pitts, real name Wells, based on a photograph he brought and Hobbs Kerry’s detailed description. Every physical detail Kerry provided the chief matched up, McDonough explained, even down to the black hair on the back of Pitts’s hands. McDonough’s party also carefully examined the Ira Sumner photographs of the two bandits killed in Northfield and agreed they were Miller and Chadwell, the names provided by the Kansas City chief of police.

  Making quick work of their visit to the capital, the next order of business was to see the prisoners in Faribault. At 1:30 P.M., they boarded a special train consisting of an engine and “an elegant passenger coach.” Several local dignitaries, state officials, and journalists traveled with the St. Louis party, including St. Paul’s mayor, chief of police, the governor’s secretary, and John T. Ames of Northfield. At Mendota Junction, six miles down the line, the train took on two cars containing a large party of Minneapolis dignitaries: the city’s mayor and chief of police, as well as a large number of women. More than seventy people stepped off the special train in Faribault at about 4:00 P.M.

  The St. Louis officers found Cole reclining on a couch outside the cells reading a newspaper, a cigar stuck in his mouth. A boy fanned the outlaw to keep him cool.

  “Hello, Cole,” Officer Palmer greeted the bandit, “how are you?”

  Palmer sat down on the couch next to the outlaw, and the two talked a long time, Cole giving Palmer verbal messages for his friends in Missouri. The St. Louis policeman also recognized Bob, who matched the descriptions assembled by Chief McDonough. But McDonough and Palmer were not at all sure about Jim.

  According to McDonough’s information, Jim Younger had never fully recovered from a wound in the thigh he supposedly received in the Roscoe gun battle with the Pinkerton men. McDonough had Jim stripped, and after failing to find a wound or scar in the outlaw’s thigh, he told Sheriff Barton that the prisoner could not be Jim Younger. Jim did not have the stamina to journey to Minnesota, he declared. No, this man was a Texas desperado named Calvin “Cal” Carter, formerly of Missouri.

  McDonough’s investigation had convinced him that Cal Carter was “the eighth man of the gang,” having filled the place of Kerry. Strangely enough, Officer Palmer, who claimed to be well acquainted with Carter from his time in Jackson County, insisted that Jim was none other than the Texas outlaw. Palmer had never met Jim Younger, only the brothers Bob and Cole.

  Sheriff Barton later told Cole about the identification of Jim as Carter, causing Cole to nearly swallow his cigar.

  “He’s a Younger, and our brother as we have told you,” Cole said, somewhat indignant. “If you want to test it, bet them $1,000 that he is our brother, and we will back you and prove it if we have to bring his mother!”

  A Saint Paul Dispatch reporter summed up the confusion best, writing that McDonough’s doubt “seems to arise from the fact that the presence of Jim Younger in Minnesota is not consistent with the detectives’ theory of his movements, but then, according to the same theory, none of the Younger-James gang of desperadoes could have had a hand in the Northfield tragedy.”

  That evening, as the special train rolled north from Faribault on its return journey, the passengers took a vote on what should become of the Youngers. Seventy-one votes were for hanging the boys. Six voted not to hang them, and three were undecided. All the ladies were in favor of hanging, with one young woman adding the following qualification to her vote: “Hang all except Bob.”

  EIGHT

  THE PURSUIT OF THE JAMES BOYS

  The detectives . . . think the capture of the James boys only a matter of time. Parties have been sent out from St. Louis and other points, but Cole knowingly remarked that they are where they won’t get them now.

  —THE MINNEAPOLIS TRIBUNE, SEPTEMBER 25, 1876

  Over the past two weeks, there had been so many false reports about the outlaws that the first telegrams with the news that four of the Northfield robbers had been surrounded near Madelia were received with biting cynicism. By nightfall of the twenty-first, it was confirmed that three robbers had been captured and one killed, creating a great euphoria across the state. But nothing compared to the jubilation in Northfield.

  “The people were wild,” Carleton student Thomas Hughes wrote to his parents and siblings. “Last evening was like a regular Fourth of July night. A huge bonfire was made in the square in the middle of town. Cannon, torpedoes, firecrackers, and guns were fired ’till near midnight. The band was also out.”

  Adelbert Ames saw the great bonfire and flash of guns that night, too, writing his wife that “Everybody talks and laughs with everybody else, and all is happiness.”

  But even in that happiness, talk turned to the James brothers, the last of the robbers still on the run. People hoped there would soon be news that these two evildoers had been overtaken or shot dead in the Dakotas or Iowa. With six of the eight gang members now dead or jailed, the citizens of Northfield had to believe the chances of this happening were good.

  They did not know brothers Jesse and Frank James.

  Three and a half hours after stealing Elder Rockwood’s fine iron-gray mares on the early morning of September 15, the James brothers appeared at a farm about two miles northwest of Madelia. The outlaws dismounted and asked the woman of the house for something to eat. She told them breakfast was not ready but soon would be. The brothers said they did not want breakfast but would appreciate a loaf of bread. She encouraged the pair to wait, but when they declined, she gave them the bread, and they paid her ten cents.

  Jesse was bareheaded, having accidentally lost his hat when he and Frank were shot at by the Lake Crystal guard. He asked the woman if there might be an old hat about the place, explaining that he had lost his. There was no old hat, she replied, but they had just bought a new one for their boy. Jesse talked her into selling the boy’s hat for $1.50.

  The brothers also purchased two cloth sacks that they filled with straw or hay and tied to their horses’ backs—the brothers had been riding the mares bareback. When one of the outlaws pulled out a large roll of bills to pay the woman’s husband for the sacks, the farmer’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. The roll was “as large as his arm,” and the farmer saw lots of fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills as the outlaw flipped through it.

  Before leaving, Frank dressed the wound in his right leg. The farmer studied Frank curiously as he did this, noting that the wound looked like an old sore. When the outlaws were ready to leave, the farmer helped both men into the saddle. They appeared to be “badly used up,” he would later tell the authorities.

  Jesse and Frank rode the grays hard all day, covering a good forty miles (and showing just how much Bob Younger had been slowing them down). At sundown, they pulled up to the home of a German farmer five miles south of the town of Lamberton. The farmer gave the boys a puzzled look. Their makeshift saddles were one thing, but their horses were larger than ones used for riding and were obviously a team intended for pulling. The brothers said they had had an accident with their wagon, forcing them to abandon it, and the man appeared satisfied.

  They asked the farmer if they c
ould stay there for the night, and he immediately told them to get down off their horses and come in. He noticed that both Frank and Jesse were extremely stiff and favored their right legs. They continued to lie to their host, telling him their injuries had been a result of the wagon mishap. But the German’s later statement that both men had wounds in the right leg was the first evidence that the Lake Crystal guard’s snap shot had struck at least one of them, that outlaw being Jesse.

  The German dressed Frank’s wound, but Jesse didn’t show his injury. The German thought it was strange that both men slept in their clothes, but the outlaws were not about to let him see the impressive arsenal beneath their rubber coats. At about 7:00 A.M. the next day, they thanked the German and told him they were going to head into Lamberton. He watched as they rode away, but after riding north for a quarter mile, the brothers suddenly turned at the corner of a cornfield, dug their spurs into the sides of the grays, and galloped south across the prairie.

  As the authorities began to hear about these encounters and other sightings, the posses raced to get ahead of the fugitives so they could intersect their route. The brothers were most likely fleeing southwest, but the chances of blocking their retreat, with so much territory to cover and the pair moving so rapidly, were slim. On the same night that the brothers lodged with the German farmer, Mike Hoy’s squad had been camped just eight miles to the south. It might as well have been a hundred.

  About noon on Saturday, September 16, Sheriff William H. Dill of Winona County, Detective Bresette, and more than twenty men guarded three likely routes south of Lake Shetek, in the direct path of the outlaws. There was no sign of the brothers until dark, when two of Dill’s scouts came galloping up and said two men on the gray mares had visited a house on the Des Moines River not five miles away at 2:00 P.M. The outlaws told the woman at the house they were after horse thieves and she gave them her bread, milk, and meat—which they devoured while sitting astride their steeds and then rode to the southwest.