Shot All to Hell

by Mark Lee Gardner

  “I do.”

  “That is Mann’s house.”

  Jesse was lying, of course. It was not Rudolph Mann’s house. The brothers had only wanted to get the doctor far enough away from Sioux City that he wouldn’t be able to spread the alarm before morning.

  Jesse took Mosher by the shoulders and walked him a few feet forward, guiding him. “Go for that light,” he said. “Don’t you look around or turn to the right hand or the left. Run!”

  Mosher now remembered the fear he’d had when he first met up with the outlaws. He was convinced that these murderers intended to shoot him in the back. He ran like hell into the darkness—or tried to; Frank’s pants were a good six inches too long. After going some distance, Mosher stumbled into a big slough more than four hundred yards wide with water up to his waist, but he did not stop. When he reached the house, he nearly collapsed from exhaustion. The owner, a German, listened to the doctor’s incredible tale and gave him a place to stay the night.

  Mosher started for Sioux City the next morning, the twenty-first, arriving about noon. Frank’s bloody pants with the bullet hole were enough evidence to convince the authorities that Mosher had really encountered the Northfield robbers. The doctor would later state that Jesse, too, had a wound, just above the heel. Mosher stayed in town only long enough to report his experience with the robbers and get more medicines from his office (the Jameses had taken his medicine case). He then rented a team and buggy from the same livery stable and left again to care for Phoebe Mann.

  After hearing Mosher’s tale, Woodbury County’s sheriff, John M. McDonald, suspected the fugitives would continue to move in a southeasterly direction, possibly to Denison, on the Chicago & North Western Railroad. Warnings flashed ahead over the telegraph, and descriptions of the outlaws were given to railroad conductors in case the outlaws slipped on board a train.

  But several exciting reports that came in over the next couple of days placed the robbers all over the map. One had them on the bluffs of Broken Kettle Creek, north of Sioux City. Another claimed the fugitives hired a farmer northwest of Le Mars to take them in his buggy several miles south, telling him they were after the “damned robbers.” The farmer and his buggy had not been seen since.

  Later reports confirmed Sheriff McDonald’s suspicions. A posse “armed to the teeth” under Plymouth County sheriff James Hopkins took up the bandits’ trail at the point they parted with Dr. Mosher. This posse traced the brothers to the Little Sioux River, which the outlaws swam with their horses, and then southeast to the Maple River near Ida Grove. The Jameses were on no particular road, often cutting across country. Several farmers spotted them, riding by at a gallop. When the outlaws did stop for food and water, they told the curious they were after horse thieves.

  Near Ida Grove, Jesse and Frank stopped for a few minutes to talk to a little girl out in the road. They asked her what she was eating, and she told them a raw potato. This made the brothers laugh. They joked with the girl for a bit, politely declined her offer of some of the raw potato, and, spurring their horses, dashed away. When last seen, Jesse and Frank appeared to be riding for the North Raccoon River, below Sac City.

  Sheriff Hopkins’s posse and another formed later at Correctionville on the Little Sioux, the last two posses on the outlaws’ trail, abandoned the pursuit on the night of September 23. As with previous posses, they had not been able to match the brothers’ speed and near superhuman stamina. “The robbers had two days’ the start of the sheriff’s party, as well as our own, and were making good time,” wrote one posse member, “and we concluded to let someone else head them off.”

  But with no more sightings of the outlaws, there was little interest in manhunting. “It is a pity that more efforts have not been set forth to capture these two villains,” lamented an Iowa newspaper. Aside from the two posses that had recently given up, “nothing has been done in this state.” And nothing else would be done. Jesse and Frank James had simply disappeared, as they always did.

  Chief McDonough hoped and prayed Jesse and Frank would make it home to Missouri so he would have a chance to capture them. He told Governor Hardin he had posted Sergeant Morgan Boland and a squad of officers in the northwest part of the state, “guarding their crossings, and haunts.” But Boland’s squad consisted of only a handful of men; Jesse and Frank would be able to gallop around them all day, and they would never know it. And the detectives who staked out hot spots like Kearney, Missouri, were embarrassingly easy to pick out, especially by Mrs. Zerelda Samuel. She found that the detectives invariably passed themselves off as either itinerant sewing machine salesmen or lightning rod salesmen. Not long after the Northfield Raid, she called the bluff of the lightning rod men, by telling them she would pay them well to come out to the farm and put up three rods. But the men never showed.

  “I was sorry they did not come,” she said later. “Lightning would never have troubled them again.”

  On the other hand, McDonough did have trusted informants in Clay and Jackson Counties who were looking out for the brothers to return. Once McDonough heard from even just one of these spies, he would order his men to swoop in. They would nab the surprised outlaws, just like Hobbs Kerry.

  “I feel assured of their capture, should they make for the state,” he wrote confidently to the governor. It would be his greatest achievement as a law officer, bringing him lasting fame as the man who brought down the infamous James brothers.

  During the first week of October, McDonough got the news he had been waiting for: the James boys were hiding out at two rural homes in Jackson County. Chief McDonough immediately sent thirty-four-year-old Boland, Officer Russell Palmer, and two other policemen to work the case. Two of the officers hired out as woodcutters at Independence, although one man spent most of his time on the town square and at the local livery, listening to the gossip and watching.

  Very soon, Boland told the chief the report was true. A man matching the description of Frank James was then staying with Dr. William Noland, who lived about five miles south of Independence. More important, the man had an ugly gunshot wound above his right knee. The wounded man had arrived secretly at the Noland residence by a roundabout and tedious route. The man seemed to move from place to place, sometimes accompanied by another suspicious man. The wounded man had to be Frank.

  Boland had learned that armed men guarded the house at night, and, during the day, men watched the road leading to the residence for two miles in each direction. Boland also believed that Jesse was hiding at Dick Talley’s home, about a half mile from the doctor’s. Boland asked for more men, well armed, to help capture the fugitives, and Chief McDonough happily sent four additional officers to Jackson County on October 12.

  Boland, apparently not a superstitious man, planned his raid for the next day, Friday, October 13. He got additional information about the layout of the Noland place the night before by sending an officer, pretending to be a retired Black Hills miner, to the doctor’s door. The officer asked if he could sleep in Noland’s barn, but the doctor refused, telling him he was welcome in the house. Late that evening, the “miner” slipped away and told Boland what he had gathered. And the most important information was that Frank James was there.

  On the afternoon of the thirteenth, Boland and his seven officers silently moved in on the Noland house, coming from the brush so as not to be seen from the roads. At 4:00 P.M., they burst through the front door, guns drawn and cocked. The doctor was away at the time, but the women were home, and they shrieked and cowered as the armed intruders raced from room to room. The officers quickly located their quarry, resting on an elbow on a bed in a corner, his right leg bandaged.

  “Hello, Frank,” said one of the officers, pointing his revolver at the man’s chest.

  “My name is not Frank,” the wounded man replied in a shocked voice.

  The officers were not fooled by this. Any time they made an arrest, the criminal protested that the wrong man was being taken. No, they told him, you are Frank Jame
s, and they ordered him to get out of bed. The man said he could not walk, but the officers forced him to stand up.

  “Damn you,” one of them snarled, “if you could travel here from Minnesota, you can walk across this room.”

  The man took a step and collapsed in pain. The officers, cursing, placed him back on his bed and picked up the mattress, using it for a litter.

  Polly Noland, the doctor’s wife, slowly recovering from her fright, begged Sergeant Boland to let the man be. He was not Frank James, she insisted, but John Goodin, a cattle trader from Louisiana. Boland asked about the bullet wound in the right leg, above the knee. That was an unfortunate accident, she explained. Mr. Goodin shot himself while squirrel hunting, and he had come to Jackson County a few weeks ago for medical treatment. Doctor Noland’s son, Columbus, told Boland the same story.

  The Nolands seemed sincere, but Boland knew that most of the Jameses’ sympathizers—and there were plenty in that part of the state—would lie to protect the outlaws. He directed his officers to take the prisoner to the waiting train and also to detain Columbus Noland. He did not want the doctor’s son to send out an alarm before his officers had a chance to visit the Talley place and bag Jesse. But they made a thorough search of the Talley residence and did not find Frank’s brother.

  Boland’s squad moved next to the home of the widow of former bushwhacker Bill Pettis, and they didn’t find Jesse there, either. And Frank James was not talking.

  With one very important prisoner, then, Boland and his officers boarded their train. But Boland wasn’t taking Frank James to the jail in Kansas City, just a few miles away. No, this was entirely a St. Louis operation, and their prize would be going to Chief McDonough.

  The train arrived in St. Louis at 7:00 P.M. on October 14. There was no crowd waiting at the station to see the famous prisoner; the arrest had been kept quiet. The officers carried the stretcher with the prisoner three blocks to the Four Courts Building and Chief McDonough’s private office on the second floor. McDonough interrogated Frank, who again strongly denied being one of the James boys or having any knowledge of the Northfield Raid. Next a tape measure was used to measure the prisoner’s height. At five feet, seven and a half inches, the man was not nearly as tall as Frank James. He also had a jet-black beard and black hair, whereas Frank was known to have light hair and short, sandy whiskers.

  These discrepancies should have worried McDonough, but the self-important chief simply refused to believe that this mysterious man with a gunshot wound in the exact same place as Frank’s was purely a coincidence. Still, the evidence began to mount that it was. Dr. Noland signed an affidavit stating that his patient was John N. Goodin, and that he had been recuperating at his home on the day of the Northfield Raid. Several others claimed they knew the James brothers, but when they visited the jail, they failed to recognize the prisoner. And Red Wing, Minnesota’s mayor, then visiting St. Louis, proclaimed that McDonough’s man was not one of the four Northfield robbers who had bought horses in his town.

  Frank James’s mother—admittedly, not the most trustworthy source—also cast doubt on the identification. When asked by a Kansas City Times reporter if the prisoner was her son, she replied, “Do you think I would be here, laughing and talking with you, if my boy was in jail?” The reporter continued to prod, and Zerelda finally commented, “All I have to say is this, when either Frank or Jesse is caught, it will not be here.”

  As the likelihood that Frank James sat in a St. Louis cell began to diminish, McDonough continued to believe the wounded man was one of the Northfield robbers. By now, McDonough knew he had been mistaken in proclaiming Jim Younger to be Cal Carter, but the chief remained convinced that Carter had gone to Minnesota with the gang. His prisoner had two letters postmarked Henrietta, Texas, the supposed home of Cal Carter, and an old photograph of Carter received from Jackson County bore a remarkable resemblance to the prisoner.

  “This is the man who escaped from Minnesota with Jesse James after the Northfield affair, and I know it,” the chief said emphatically to a Globe-Democrat reporter. “And whether his name is Carter or Goodin, I don’t care, so long as I am able to prove his connection with the robbery. In that will be glory enough.”

  But by the afternoon of October 18, it was clear that McDonough had apprehended neither Frank James nor Cal Carter. A council of three respected physicians visited the prisoner that day to give an opinion about the leg wound and how old it was. One of the doctors, J. C. Nidelet, sat on the board of police commissioners. After carefully examining the wound, the physicians unanimously declared it several months old “at least.” This verdict, combined with pressure from prominent St. Louisan Colonel Celsus Price, who remembered Goodin as a member of his father’s bodyguard during the war, caused McDonough to capitulate. John N. Goodin was free.

  “I now think that an innocent man has been captured,” a glory-deprived McDonough admitted to Governor Hardin in a letter of October 19. But the chief defended his actions and those of his men, blaming the fiasco on “one of the most remarkable coincidences on record.” And he was dismissive of his critics, writing the governor that “a few of our citizens here, of the old Confederate element, seem to differ with me, and are disposed to characterize the affair as an outrage, &c. &c.”

  That McDonough’s Jackson County raid amounted to nothing short of kidnapping never seemed to enter the chief’s mind. It did John Goodin’s, though, who promptly sued McDonough for $20,000 in damages.

  Sheltered by friends in Missouri, Jesse and Frank James licked their wounds. The route of the final leg of their journey may never be known. An Independence man, one “quite intimate with the James family,” informed a Kansas City Times reporter that the brothers had arrived in Jackson County direct from Lamar, 120 miles south in Barton County, about October 5.

  After escaping Minnesota, he told the reporter, the boys had passed through eastern Dakota Territory, Nebraska, and Kansas and into Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) and then turned northeast, crossing into southwest Missouri. Such a route made for an incredibly long, although not impossible, ride for the wounded men, but it had the advantage of having Jesse and Frank arrive at their home base from the south, when they were expected from the north.

  Later, gang members Bob and Charley Ford, interviewed after Jesse’s death, said the outlaws had made their way through Dakota Territory and Nebraska to Missouri. Another former gang member, Dick Liddil, told of how the James boys got a two-horse wagon, either through purchase or theft, and with the “wounded one” (presumably Frank) in the back, traveled through Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas before reaching their destination.

  Plenty of wild tales eventually surfaced, too. A Sioux City newspaper editor claimed years later that he helped the James brothers escape the Iowa posses in his buggy, transporting them to the banks of the Missouri River at Little Sioux, where the James boys jumped on a skiff and floated to St. Joseph. The editor had gone to such intrepid lengths, he said, all in exchange for what amounted to an exclusive interview with the James boys. He claimed to have obtained their plan for the raid, the details of their flight from Minnesota, and “the biographies of all their associates who had participated in” the raid. Not surprisingly, the editor never seems to have published his “scoop.”

  Another story came from a man who, although only five at the time of the raid, believed the James brothers had passed very close to his family’s farm near Lancaster, Wisconsin, during their escape. He said his father and a companion had actually seen the two outlaws on the side of the road. One sat on a log while the other applied a bandage to the man’s leg.

  “There has never been any doubt in my mind, or of any other person’s in the neighborhood, that these were the James brothers,” he wrote.

  Perhaps the most fanciful tale came from old Jim Cummins, a former pal of Jesse and Frank. In a 1916 interview, Cummins said he was writing a book that would tell the truth about the James gang. “The truth has never been told,” he said. �
��I am going to tell it and tell it all.” According to Cummins, the brothers made it back to Missouri by “a roundabout way that took them out in Arizona and New Mexico. They nearly starved and ate raw rabbit and roots.”

  But like most everybody else, Cummins didn’t really know the truth.

  Once they reached Missouri, one of Jesse and Frank’s first stops was the family farm near Kearney. This seems unbelievably reckless, but the brothers visited their mother from time to time throughout their outlaw career, a testament to their daring and, more significantly, the debilitating fear the boys struck in many of their fellow Clay Countians.

  Jesse seems to have spent most of his time recuperating at the home of the venerable General Jo Shelby near Aullville in Lafayette County. Shelby, then an even greater hero for unreconstructed Southerners than Jesse (rather than surrender at the end of the war, Shelby had led the tattered remnants of his army across the Rio Grande to Mexico), had long been friends with the James boys. The general loved to tell the story of how the brothers, part of a guerrilla unit under his command, had once saved him from certain capture.

  “I do not feel it incumbent on me to betray a set or class of men who offered to sacrifice their lives in defense of mine,” Shelby once explained to a reporter. Shelby also credited Jesse with single-handedly backing down a mob bent on killing the general’s teenage black servant in November 1872.

  As the brothers recovered, Jesse remained strangely silent. There were no letters from the outlaw denying that he and Frank had participated in the raid, no naming of alibis from the best citizens of western Missouri, no offer to come in if guaranteed a fair trial. The brothers had had the wind knocked out of them, and in addition to lying low, there was much to ponder. Meanwhile, their law-abiding enemies celebrated the end of the infamous James-Younger band.

  “The breaking up of this powerful and dangerous gang of outlaws is the most important event which has happened in the criminal history of the country,” proclaimed the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.