We were prepared to wait as long as they would, but they were not of the waiting kind. At least some of them were not, and soon we heard the captain, who, we afterward learned, was W. W. Murphy, calling for volunteers to go in with him and rout us out. Six stepped to the front, Sheriff Glispin, Col. T. L. Vought, B. M. Rice, G. A. Bradford, C. A. Pomeroy, and S. J. Severson.
Forming in line four paces apart, he ordered them to advance rapidly and concentrate the fire of the whole line the instant the robbers were discovered.
Meanwhile we were planning, too.
“Pitts,” I said, “if you want to go out and surrender, go on.”
“I’ll not go,” he replied, game to the last. “I can die as well as you can.”
“Make for the horses,” I said. “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.”
I got up as the signal for the charge and we fired one volley.
I tried to get my man, and started through, but the next I knew I was lying on the ground, bleeding from my nose and mouth, and Bob was standing up, shouting:
“Coward!”
One of the fellows in the outer line, not brave enough himself to join the volunteers who had come in to beat us out, was not disposed to believe in the surrender, and had his gun levelled on Bob in spite of the handkerchief which was waving as a flag of truce.
Sheriff Glispin, of Watonwan county, who was taking Bob’s pistol from him, was also shouting to the fellow:
“Don’t shoot him or I’ll shoot you.”
All of us but Bob had gone down at the first fire. Pitts, shot through the heart, lay dead. Jim, including the wound in the shoulder he received at Northfield, had been shot five times, the most serious being the shot which shattered his upper jaw and lay imbedded beneath the brain, and a shot that buried itself underneath his spine, and which gave him trouble to the day of his death. Including those received in and on the way from Northfield I had eleven wounds.
A bullet had pierced Bob’s right lung, but he was the only one left on his feet. His right arm useless, and his pistol empty, he had no choice.
“I surrender,” he had shouted. “They’re all down but me. Come on. I’ll not shoot.”
And Sheriff Glispin’s order not to shoot was the beginning of the protectorate that Minnesota people established over us.
We were taken into Madelia that day and our wounds dressed, and I greeted my old landlord, Col. Vought, who had been one of the seven to go in to get us. We were taken to his hotel and a guard posted.
Then came the talk of mob vengeance we had heard so often in Missouri. It was said a mob would be out that night to lynch us. Sheriff Glispin swore we would never be mobbed as long as we were his prisoners.
“I don’t want any man to risk his life for us,” I said to him, “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,” he said, “you can have your pistols.”
But the only mob that came was the mob of sightseers, reporters, and detectives.
* * *
Saturday we were taken to Faribault, the county seat of Rice County, in which Northfield is, and here there was more talk of lynching, but Sheriff Ara Barton was not of that kind either, and we were guarded by militia until the excitement had subsided. A Faribault policeman, who thought the militia guard was a bluff, bet five dollars he could go right up to the jail without being interfered with. He did not halt when challenged, and was fired upon and killed, the coroner’s jury acquitting the militiaman who shot him. Some people blamed us for his death, too.
Chief of Detectives McDonough, of St. Louis, whom I had passed a few months before in the union depot at St. Louis, was among our visitors at Faribault.
Another was Detective Bligh, of Louisville, who believed then, and probably did ever afterward, that I had been in the Huntington, West Virginia, robbery, and tried to pump me about it.
Four indictments were found against us. One charged us with being accessory to the murder of Cashier Heywood, another with assaulting Bunker with intent to do great bodily harm, and the third with robbing the First National bank of Northfield. The fourth charged me as principal and my brothers as accessories with the murder of Gustavson.
Two witnesses had testified before the grand jury identifying me as the man who fired the shot that hit him, although I know I did not, because I fired no shot in that part of town.
Although not one of us had fired the shot that killed either Heywood or Gustavson, our attorneys, Thomas Rutledge of Madelia and Bachelder and Buckham of Faribault, asked, when we were arraigned, Nov. 9, that we be given two days in which to plead.
They advised us that as accessories were equally guilty with the principals, under the law, and as by pleading guilty we could escape capital punishment, we should plead guilty. There was little doubt, under the circumstances, of our conviction, and under the law as it stood then, an accused murderer who pleaded guilty was not subject to the death penalty. The state was new, and the law had been made to offer an inducement to murderers not to put the county to the expense of a trial.
The excitement that followed our sentence to state prison, which was popularly called “cheating the gallows,” resulted in the change of the law in that respect.
The following Saturday we pleaded guilty, and Judge Lord sentenced us to imprisonment for the remainder of our lives in the state prison at Stillwater, and a few days later we were taken there by Sheriff Barton.
With Bob it was a life sentence, for he died there of consumption Sept. 16, 1889. He was never strong physically after the shot pierced his lung in the last fight near Madelia.
* * *
When the iron doors shut behind us at the Stillwater prison I submitted to the prison discipline with the same unquestioning obedience that I had exacted during my military service, and Jim and Bob, I think, did the same.
For ten years and a half after our arrival, Warden Reed remained. The first three years there was a popular idea that such desperate men as the Youngers would not stay long behind prison walls, and that especial watchfulness must be exercised in our case. Accordingly the three of us were put at work making buckets and tubs, with Ben Cayou over us as a special guard, when in our dreams we had been traveling to South America on Ben Butler’s money.
Then we were put in the thresher factory. I made the sieves, while Jim sewed the belts, and Bob made the straw-carriers and elevators.
The latter part of the Reed regime I was in the storeroom.
Jan. 25, 1884, when we had been in the prison something over seven years, the main prison building was destroyed by fire at night. George P. Dodd, who was then connected with the prison, while his wife was matron, and who still lives in Buffalo, Minn., said of our behavior that night:
“I was obliged to take the female convicts from their cells and place them in a small room that could not be locked. The Youngers were passing and Cole asked if they could be of any service. I said: ‘Yes, Cole. Will you three boys take care of Mrs. Dodd and the women?’ Cole answered: ‘Yes, we will, and if you ever had any confidence in us place it in us now.’ I told him I had the utmost confidence and I slipped a pistol to Cole as I had two. Jim, I think, had an ax handle and Bob a little pinch bar. The boys stood before the door of the little room for hours and even took the blankets they had brought with them from their cells and gave them to the women to try and keep them comfortable as it was very cold. When I could take charge of the women and the boys were relieved, Cole returned my revolver.”
Next morning Warden Reed was flooded with telegrams and newspaper sensations: “Keep close watch of the Youngers;” “Did the Youngers escape?” “Plot to free the Youngers,” and that sort of thing.
The warden came to his chief deputy, Abe Hall, and suggested that we be put in irons, not that he had any fear on our account, but for the effect on the public.
“I’ll not put irons on ‘em,” replied Hall.
And that day Hall and Judge Butts took us in a sleigh down town to the county jail where we remained three or four weeks. That was the only time we were outside the prison enclosure from 1876 till 1901.
* * *
In spite of the popular indignation our crime had justly caused, from the day the iron gates closed behind us in 1876, there were always friends who hoped and planned for our ultimate release. Some of these were misguided, and did us more harm than good.
Among these were two former guerrillas, who committed small crimes that they might be sent to prison and there plot with us for our escape. One of them was only sent to the county jail, and the other served a year in Stillwater prison without ever seeing us.
Well meaning, too, but unfortunate, was the declaration of Missouri friends in Minnesota that they could raise $100,000 to get us out of Stillwater.
But as the years went by, the popular feeling against us not only subsided, but our absolute submission to the minutest details of prison discipline won for us the consideration, I might even say the high esteem of the prison officials who came in contact with us, and as the Northfield tragedy became more and more remote, those who favored our pardon became more numerous, and yearly numbered in their ranks more and more of the influential people of the state, who believed that our crime had been avenged, and that Jim and I, the only survivors of the tragedy, would be worthy citizens if restored to freedom.
My Missouri friends are surprised to find that I prize friendships in Minnesota, a state where I found so much trouble, but in spite of Northfield, and all its tragic memories, I have in Minnesota some of the best friends a man ever had on earth.
Every governor of Minnesota from as early as 1889 down to 1899 was petitioned for our pardon, but not one of them was satisfied of the advisability of a full pardon, and the parole system provided by the enlightened humanitarianism of the state for other convicts did not apply to lifers.
Under this system a convict whose prison record is good may be paroled on his good behavior after serving half of the term for which he was sentenced.
The reiterated requests for our pardon, coming from men the governors had confidence in, urging them to a pardon they were reluctant to grant, led to a feeling, which found expression finally in official circles, that the responsibility of the pardoning power should be divided by the creation of a board of pardons as existed in some other states.
It was at first proposed that the board should consist of the governor, attorney general and the warden of the prison, but before the bill passed, Senator Allen J. Greer secured the substitution for the chief justice for the warden, boasting, when the amendment was made:
“That ties the Youngers up for as long as Chief Justice Start lives.”
A unanimous vote of the board was required to grant a pardon, and as Chief Justice Start had lived in the vicinity of Northfield at the time of the raid in 1876, many people believed that he would never consent to our pardon.
In the legislature of 1889, our friends endeavored to have the parole system extended to life prisoners, and secured the introduction in the legislature of a bill to provide that life prisoners might be paroled when they had served such a period as would have entitled them to their release had they been sentenced to imprisonment for 35 years. As the good time allowances on a 35-year sentence would cut it to between 23 and 24 years, we could have been paroled in a few months had this bill passed.
Although there was one other inmate of the prison who might have come under its provisions, it was generally known as the “Youngers’ parole bill” and the feeling against it was largely identified with the feeling against us. I am told, however, since my release, that it would have passed at that session had it not been for the cry of “money” that was used. There never was a dollar used in Minnesota to secure our pardon, and before our release we had some of the best men and women in the state working in our behalf, without money and without price. But this outcry defeated the bill of 1899.
Still it did not discourage our friends on the outside.
At the next session of the legislature, 1901, there was finally passed the bill which permitted our conditional parole, the pardon board not being ready to grant us our full freedom. This bill provided for the parole of any life convict who had been confined for twenty years, on the unanimous consent of the board of pardons.
The board of prison managers promptly granted the parole.
And July 14, 1901, Jim and I went out into the world for the first time in within a few months of twenty-five years.
Rip Van Winkle himself was not so long away. St. Paul and Minneapolis which, when we were there in 1876, had less than seventy-five thousand people all told, had grown to cities within whose limits were over three hundred fifty thousand. A dozen railroads ended in one or the other of these centers of business that we had known as little better than frontier towns.
Outlaws and Peace Officers Page 33