Shot All to Hell

by Mark Lee Gardner

  After Crittenden made his response public, a reporter visited the Independence jail and asked Frank for his thoughts. “I am not at all afraid to return to Minnesota,” Frank calmly replied, “if they will only give me a fair show and an honest trial. I was never in Minnesota in my life, and it is all nonsense about trying to connect me with the Northfield robbery.”

  That was essentially Frank’s answer to every crime charged against him, and prosecutors had an exceedingly difficult time proving otherwise. With the passage of time, some witnesses had died. Others did not have the clearest memories or could not actually identify Frank. And some, such as former gang member Dick Liddil, were not good witnesses because they lacked integrity. Sympathy for Frank played a role as well—as did a politically connected defense team. Trials at Gallatin, Missouri (for the murder of the passenger during the Winston robbery), and Huntsville, Alabama (for the Muscle Shoals robbery, of which Frank truly was innocent), ended in acquittals. By March 1885, all other cases, including an indictment for the Rocky Cut robbery, had been dismissed.

  Frank James in 1883.

  (Collection of the author)

  But Frank still fretted about Minnesota. John Newman Edwards knew this, and on March 18, 1885, excitedly wrote his friend with good news. Edwards had just left the office of Missouri’s new governor, John Sappington Marmaduke, a former Confederate major general and one of the state’s war heroes:

  Now Frank, I think you have perfect confidence in my judgment and my knowledge of men, and I here say to you under no circumstances in life will Gov. Marmaduke ever surrender you to the Minnesota authorities, even should they demand you, which I am equally well satisfied, will never be done. . . . You are as absolutely safe as if you were the Governor himself. Never mind what any alarmists or busy bodies say to you, trust me. I tell you that you are a free man, and can never be touched while Marmaduke is Governor.

  Frank James, after one of the most sensational and long-lived careers in American outlawry, had pulled off his greatest escape—this time from justice.

  EPILOGUE

  Be true to your friends, if the heavens fall.

  —COLE YOUNGER

  In 1897, Stillwater warden Henry Wolfer asked Cole Younger to write down his version of what happened during the Northfield Raid. The newly created pardon board would be considering Cole and Jim’s application for a pardon, and Wolfer believed a public statement in Cole’s own words, especially one that included any extenuating circumstances, would help their cause. Eight years earlier, Bob Younger had died of tuberculosis at Stillwater, and even after doctors declared that Bob had only weeks to live, the governor refused to issue a pardon. Cole and Jim could use all the help they could get.

  The Younger brothers, Bob, Jim, and Cole, with their sister, Henrietta, photographed in Stillwater Penitentiary shortly before Bob’s death in 1889.

  (Library of Congress)

  In the twenty years since the Northfield Raid, Cole had had a lot of time to craft a version of the debacle that made the Youngers look as good as possible. In his account for Warden Wolfer, he admitted that while the gang had considered other banks besides Northfield’s, they felt those banks “had enough to do to care for the farmers who had already suffered too much from grasshoppers to be troubled by us.” The gang chose the Northfield bank, he wrote, because they understood it held $75,000 belonging to Adelbert Ames and his father-in-law, General Benjamin Butler. Cole hoped that by presenting these two former Union generals, both Radical Republicans, as their only intended victims, he could paint the raid as Southerners still fighting the war. Although only partially true, it is an interpretation that persists to this day.

  Cole wrote that the gang had agreed they would not shoot to kill and would only frighten people off the street. But “all of the trouble” came about because of a quart of whiskey. According to Cole, the three inside men drank most of the quart and were dead drunk by the time of the robbery.

  “Had it not been for the whiskey,” Cole asserted, “there would not, in all probability, have been a man killed, and I can truthfully say had I known they had whiskey, I never would have gone into town.”

  Blaming the Northfield disaster on liquor was clever. It suggested that the gang’s defeat was more their own making, as opposed to the stubborn resistance put up by Northfield’s citizens. But none of the gang was truly drunk. Some of the outlaws did visit the saloons prior to the robbery, and Frank Wilcox recalled smelling liquor on Bob Younger’s breath, but no eyewitness accounts, including those of Wilcox and Bunker, describe any of the robbers as acting drunk.

  Cole also explained the Heywood murder, writing that the last of the robbers to leave the bank told him he saw Heywood jump up and run for his desk. The robber thought Heywood was going for a pistol and ordered him to stop and sit down. When Heywood failed to stop, the robber shot him. And Cole denied being near that part of Division Street where Gustavson was shot. He believed one of the townspeople shooting at the gang had fired the bullet that hit the Swede.

  “I know that neither Jim nor myself fired a shot in that part of the city,” he insisted.

  These last statements are mostly fiction as well. Though it is possible that Frank James told Cole he believed Heywood was going for a pistol, Wilcox’s testimony makes no mention of Heywood’s killer shouting at the acting cashier to stop. On the contrary, Wilcox makes it vividly clear that the shooting was nothing less than cold-blooded murder. And despite Cole’s repeated denials that he shot at Gustavson, eyewitnesses identified him as the Swede’s killer.

  The pardon board received an impressive stack of letters and petitions in support of clemency. As was to be expected, many came from Missouri, including a petition signed by members of the state’s General Assembly.

  “To a certain extent,” the petition read, the Youngers were “the last victims of the Civil War, having been so unfortunate as to live upon the border at a time when bad blood was hottest and evil passions most fully aroused.” Former governor Crittenden also urged a pardon “on the grounds that they have paid a severe penalty; that they have been exemplary prisoners for twenty years; that they are now old and broken down; the law has been vindicated. . . . ”

  A surprising number of Minnesotans supported the pardons as well; among the petitions submitted favoring clemency was one signed by eighty-six citizens of Madelia, including three surviving members of the Madelia Seven. Another active supporter was one Horace Greeley Perry, the girl Cole had taken on horseback rides in St. Peter, before the raid. Now grown up, the attractive, twenty-eight-year-old Miss Perry served as the St. Peter Journal’s editor. She visited the Younger brothers monthly.

  But there were plenty of Minnesotans, especially in Northfield, who opposed the pardons. The townspeople were incredulous over Cole’s published account of the raid, and not only did they forward their own petition, but the town sent a delegation to the pardon hearing in St. Paul to demand that the board keep the brothers in prison—for life.

  The board listened to testimony on the Youngers’ application on Monday and Tuesday, July 12 and 13, and of all those who spoke either for or against clemency, Mayor A. D. Keyes of Faribault made the most penetrating comments:

  These men come here and ask for a pardon on the ground that they have reformed in mind and morals as well as in heart, and they are prepared to become good citizens, if they are released. We claim that it is not too much to ask that they shall remain where they are until they disclose the name of the man who killed Heywood. It is not an element of good citizenship to conceal a murderer. Good faith on their part demands that they disclose the name of the man who killed Cashier Heywood, that that man may be brought back to Minnesota and punished. If the murderer was Frank James, as we are led to believe, then he has never suffered anything for his crime. He has never even been imprisoned, and it is no more than right that he should suffer the penalty in some measure at least. If the Youngers are now the good citizens they claim to be, they would go on the stand, and,
by telling the truth, would assist the authorities of this State in bringing the Northfield murderer to justice.

  The board refused to pardon the Youngers. But the brothers did not have much longer to wait. In 1901, the Minnesota legislature passed a bill permitting the parole of life prisoners after serving thirty-five years, minus a deduction for good behavior, which made for a minimum requirement of twenty-four years and seven months. The bill was clearly aimed at the release of the Youngers, who had already served nearly twenty-five years at Stillwater and, as inmates, had not a single mark against them.

  Following the legislature’s lead, then, the pardon board approved the Youngers’ parole on July 10, and in a display of just how much the world had changed since that fateful September day in 1876, the brothers received the news by telephone. There were conditions, however. The Youngers could not leave Minnesota, nor could they exhibit themselves in “any dime museum, circus, theater, opera-house, or any other place of public amusement or assembly where a charge is made for admission.”

  Cole Younger on parole in Minnesota, 1902.

  (Library of Congress)

  Not surprisingly, there were few opportunities for former bank and train robbers who had spent a quarter of a century behind bars. Their first jobs were peddling tombstones for a St. Paul granite company. Jim left that position after two months and became a clerk in a St. Paul grocery’s cigar department, changing jobs again a short time later for work in a Minneapolis cigar store. In April 1902, he surprised Minnesota’s governor with a letter asking if there would be any objection to him marrying. He was in love with a St. Paul socialite and newspaperwoman named Alix J. Muller, twenty-seven years his junior. Miss Muller had met Jim on a research visit to Stillwater, and she had subsequently worked hard for the Youngers’ release.

  But according to the attorney general, Jim was still a ward of the state. Only with a full pardon could he legally marry. The pardon board dashed that hope the following July, reasoning that the brothers had not spent enough time on parole.

  Becoming increasingly despondent and unstable, Jim quit his cigar store job in the fall of 1902. “I’ve been down the line and all I can get out of it is what I’m worth as a freak advertisement for some firm or other that believes people will be glad to stare at a reputed murderer and cutthroat,” he bitterly complained to an acquaintance.

  On the morning of October 18, Jim reached a depressing low from which he could not return. He took a .38-caliber pocket revolver, put it to his head, and pulled the trigger. He left a rambling suicide note folded in an envelope, on the outside of which he had written, “All Relations just stay away from me. No Crocodile tears wanted. Reporters Be my friend. Burn me up. Jim Younger.” His words “burn me up” referred to Jim’s desire to be cremated, a wish that was not honored.

  Brother Cole, sick in bed when he received the news of Jim’s death, anxiously asked if his brother had left any letters. What Cole really wanted to know was whether or not Jim had named Heywood’s killer? He did not.

  By taking his own life, Jim gave Cole the pardon they had both longed for. On February 4, 1903, less than four months after Jim’s death, the state pardon board released Cole from parole, with the condition that he never return to Minnesota and that he uphold the previous obligation to never exhibit himself “as an actor or participant” at any place that charged an admission.

  Ten days later, at approximately 3:00 P.M., Cole crossed the Missouri state line on a train bound for Kansas City. The fifty-nine-year-old outlaw sat up in his seat, his eyes glowing as he gazed out the window.

  “If I could only give a hearty Confederate yell,” he exclaimed.

  The Northfield Raid had cost the Minnesota treasury $7,000 ($3,000 for reimbursement of “extraordinary expenses” for the manhunt and $4,000 in reward money. In today’s dollars, it roughly equals $155,000). The distribution of the reward monies, delayed by lawsuits among the fifty-plus claimants, did not come until January 1878. Of the First National Bank’s $2,000 for the four captured robbers ($500 apiece), the claimants received equal shares of $45 to $48. The State’s $4,000 bounty was apportioned by a district court judge based on the merits of each posse member’s contribution to the capture. Thus, each of the Madelia Seven received $240. The judge allotted Oscar Sorbel $56.25.

  Minnesota’s governor Pillsbury wanted to send young Sorbel to the University of Minnesota, all expenses paid, “as the State’s acknowledgement of his valuable services.” But either nothing ever came of the governor’s idea or Sorbel did not want to go. He took up a homestead in Dakota Territory in 1883 and never said much about his role as Minnesota’s “Paul Revere” or of his past in general. He did become well known, though, as the best horse doctor around Webster, South Dakota, albeit “a rather rough old codger” in his later years. He died in Webster on July 11, 1930, at the age of seventy-one.

  In February 1877, the Minnesota House passed a bill to appropriate money to Anselm Manning and Henry Wheeler “for shooting and killing Bill Chadwell and Clell Miller.” But there were apparently second thoughts about the bill, and instead, the Minnesota legislature passed a joint resolution giving special thanks—but no money—to nine heroes of Northfield, including Manning and Wheeler, for their “gallant conduct” in resisting the Northfield robbers.

  There were no reward monies or thanks for Detectives Hoy and Bresette, or St. Louis chief of police James McDonough. The goats of the manhunt, they returned to their jobs, never to achieve the national stage again, always jealous that the glory for the one great capture had gone to a bunch of amateurs from Madelia. Bresette retired a senior captain of the St. Paul police force in 1890 and immediately took a job as a detective with the Northern Pacific Railroad. On a spring afternoon in 1892, he collapsed while walking up Minneapolis’s Hennepin Avenue, probably from a stroke. He was dead at the age of fifty-four.

  Detective Mike Hoy never changed, remaining his belligerent, abrasive self and doing things only his way. In 1887, the politically connected Hoy was appointed to Minneapolis’s board of police commissioners, and President Grover Cleveland made him a deputy U.S. marshal. But at the same time, he faced accusations of fixing boxing matches and misusing city travel funds. When a newspaper reporter got the upper hand in a game of pool, Hoy, in a fit of rage, drew his revolver on the terrified young man. He somehow outlived his St. Paul nemesis by three years, dying of a tumor at the age of fifty-eight.

  By June 1881, James McDonough had overstayed his welcome. The St. Louis board of police commissioners asked McDonough to resign so that they could appoint “a younger and more active man for Chief of Police,” but his forced removal was really about squabbles and infighting in the police department and among the commissioners. He started the St. Louis Detective Agency after resigning and then gave that up two years later to raise hogs and cattle on a ranch near Caldwell, Kansas. He died in St. Louis in 1892, four days after Bresette, aged seventy-six.

  The First National Bank gave Joseph Lee Heywood’s widow $5,000 outright, and the Heywood Fund presented her with $6,301.03. The fund gave another $6,301.03 to the First National Bank’s president in trust for Lizzie May Heywood, the only child of the slain bank employee. The bank’s president also became Lizzie’s legal guardian. Lizzie left Northfield with her mother only a few months after the raid, but she returned as a young lady to attend and graduate from Carleton College with a degree in music. After marrying in 1897, she settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she taught piano. Lizzie May died in 1947.

  Adelbert Ames, who fretted over the monies the raid had cost the bank, later battled with his brother, John T., and father, Jesse Ames, over money troubles with their Northfield mill. Lawsuits, involving tens of thousands of dollars, flew back and forth between the partners for years. One suit in 1888 claimed that Adelbert never gave John T. his share of the proceeds from Northfield flour sales in the East. General Ben Butler, who also had a financial stake in the mill, served as Adelbert’s defense attorney, which made for an interes
ting family rift.

  When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, Ames rejoined the army, serving in the Santiago Campaign as a brigadier general of volunteers. He died a very wealthy man in 1933 at the age of ninety-seven, the oldest West Point graduate and the last surviving full-rank Civil War general.

  In 1890, the Rice County prosecuting attorney presented the Minnesota Historical Society with a fine linen duster and a two-bushel wheat sack that had been left behind in the Northfield bank as the robbers fled. Former St. Paul police chief James King also presented the society that year with a pistol supposedly taken from the body of Clell Miller. The raid relic that received the most attention was the section of bone from Jim Younger’s upper jaw, complete with teeth, that had been removed by the Madelia doctors. But the society’s staff grew weary of the macabre artifact; accession records show that it was “discarded” in 1919, along with the wheat sack.

  Exactly what became of the bones of Charlie Pitts, Clell Miller, and Bill Chadwell remains something of a mystery, or at least a convoluted tale. In December 1878, a family near St. Paul’s Como Lake made a gruesome discovery when they pried open a wooden box sticking out of the ice and found a human skeleton. The bones of the feet were small, like a woman’s, and a hole from a large bullet was clearly visible in the upper part of the hipbone. The county coroner carefully transported the remains to the morgue, where it was determined that they belonged to a man, and he had obviously met a violent end.

  In the midst of the coroner’s murder investigation, Dr. John H. Murphy arrived at the morgue to claim the skeleton. Murphy was the surgeon general who embalmed Charlie Pitts. He informed the coroner that after he and his students had dissected the outlaw, he had instructed one of his students to sink the remains in the lake so that the tissue would decompose, after which the skeleton could be easily cleaned and reassembled for display. Case closed.