by Jon E. Lewis
Younger’s taste of bank robbery at Liberty was obviously to his liking, for over the next few years he gradually introduced his three brothers, John, James and Robert (“Bob”), into the outlaw fraternity.
After Liberty, the Clements gang robbed a bank at nearby Lexington, but had to settle for $2,000 because the vault could not be opened. The gang’s next ventures were disastrous. Clements himself was shot in an ambuscade on a follow-up visit to Lexington, a job at Savannah brought no booty, and a hold-up at Richmond turned into a bloodbath in which three citizens were killed. Enraged townsfolk then lynched several actual or alleged members of the gang. A fifth raid, on Independence in northwest Missouri, by contrast, was a notable success.
Although Jesse James helped plan the gang’s hold-up of the Norton-Long bank in the quiet town of Russelville, Kentucky, on 20 March 1868, he was not among the seven who showed up. The raid turned into a minor gun battle when Cole Younger, after trying to cash a counterfeit note, put a gun to the head of the bank’s elderly president, Nimrod Young. The old man made a run for the door and reached the street, a bullet creasing his scalp as he did so. The robbers departed the bank with $14,000 but had to fight their way out through aroused and armed citizens. One of the gang, “Big George” Shepherd, shouted to a bystander, “You needn’t be particular about seeing my face so well you’d remember it again.”
This bravado resulted in Shepherd receiving a three-year term in penitentiary, when the Russelville bank hired a private detective from Louisville, D. G. Bligh, who traced Shepherd back to his Missouri home.
On 7 December 1869, the James brothers raided the Davies County Bank at Gallatin, Missouri. This was the first robbery in which they were positively identified. When the local press branded them outlaws, a still free Jesse James wrote to the Kansas City Times complaining that not only was he guiltless in the Gallatin affair, but since the war he had “lived as a peaceable citizen, and obeyed the laws of the United States to the best of my knowledge.” The editor was Southern in sympathy, and regularly proclaimed that the James boys were innocent Confederate war veterans unfairly persecuted by (Yankee) authorities.
After Gallatin, the James brothers, in close cooperation with the Youngers (“the James–Younger gang”), undertook bank jobs from Alabama to Iowa. They also extended their operations to include hold-ups of stores, stagecoaches and trains. Although train robbery had been pioneered in America – and possibly the world – by the Reno brothers, when they flagged down and boarded a train in Indiana in 1866, the James–Younger gang made it their speciality. Their attack on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad train at Adair, Iowa, was typical. In preference to holding up the train, they posed as passengers and at a chosen point in the journey, whipped out guns and “busted” the train from within. The driver was shot, and the legitimate passengers so cowed that they dared not resist. On this occasion, the gang got a moderate haul of $3,000 in cash, plus such valuables as they found on the passengers.
If the James–Younger gang were ruthless, they were also impudent and audacious, daring in a manner which caught public imagination. The examples were legion. After robbing the bank at Corydon, Iowa, the gang rode up to the local church, where a political meeting was in progress. Jesse interrupted proceedings, to announce: “We’ve just been down to the bank and taken every dollar in the till.” Then he and his confederates, raised their hats, let out a yell, and galloped away. He once gave a dollar to the driver of a train he had robbed so that the driver could drink to James’s health. On another occasion, in 1872, the Jameses visited the Kansas State Fair and left with the contents of the box office. Around the same time, they dropped by to see a journalist whose sympathetic accounts of their activities had delighted them. The James boys gratefully presented him with a gold watch. Somewhat startled, he refused, thinking it might be stolen. “Heck no,” said a wounded Jesse James. “This ’un we bought with our own money.”
The year 1874 was the peak of activity for the James–Younger gang, their crimes over the 12 months comprising: three robberies of stagecoaches; two train robberies; a raid on the bank at Corinth, Mississippi; hold-up of a store at Bentonville, Arkansas; and the robbery of two omnibuses at Lexington, Missouri. In a somewhat novel turn, they also robbed a steamboat at Point Jefferson, Louisiana.
Such a catalogue of efficient crime had its price for the gang, as well as those robbed. Early in March 1874 John Younger was killed by Pinkerton detectives hired by the banks and railway companies to track the gang down. (A Pinkerton and a deputy sheriff died in the same gunfight.) Ten months later, on 5 January 1875, a Pinkerton undercover agent spotted the James brothers at the Clay County house of their mother, Zerelda Samuel, she having married Dr Reuben Samuel after the death of the boys’ father in 1850. The agent, Jack Ladd, managed to get a message out, and by night-time the house was surrounded by a posse of Pinkerton men. They tossed into the house a metal object, which they later claimed was a flare to let them see their target. The James family always insisted that it was a grenade.
The device exploded, blowing Zerelda Samuel’s arm off. Her nine-year-old son by her second marriage, Archie Samuel, was killed by a fragment of metal casing.
The tragedy only increased public sympathy for the James–Younger gang, whose popularity was already considerable in areas which had sided with the South and which viewed railroads and banks as oppressive monopolies. So great was public anger that the state legislature came very close to voting an amnesty for the entire James–Younger gang.
Jesse James himself, in fact, was fast turning into an American Robin Hood; as the “Ballad of Jesse James” would later have it:
Jesse James was a lad who killed many a man
He robbed the Glendale train.
He took from the rich and he gave to the poor,
He’d a hand and a heart and a brain.
Typical of the stories to circulate about Jesse James was the one in which he helped a poor widow whose mortgage was about to be foreclosed. James lent her the money to pay the banker – and then robbed the banker as he rode away, so taking his money back. In truth, the recorded noble generosity of Jesse James, American Robin Hood, amounts to the dollar given the robbed train driver and a share in a gold watch given to an admiring pressman.
A Career Ends, a Legend Begins
Despite the public backlash caused by their attack on the James house, the Pinkertons embarked on a campaign of overt harassment against the gang in their heartland of Clay County. This availed the detectives little, but it did indirectly lead to the downfall of the James–Younger robber band. With Missouri uncomfortably full of Pinkertons and lawmen wanting the generous bounty on the gang – $5,000 for any known member, $15,000 for Frank James and $25,000 for Jesse James – the outlaws decided to venture further afield. The place they chose was Northfield, Minnesota, on 7 September 1876.
Northfield was a death trap. Eight of the gang rode in, wearing linen duster coats to hide their weapons. While the rest kept guard, Jesse James, Bob Younger and another gang member, Samuel Wells (“Charlie Pitts”), rushed into the First National Bank and delivered the standard order: “Throw up your hands!” However, a teller, Joseph L. Heywood, ignored the injunction and tried to slam the door on Pitts as he entered the vault. James then demanded that Heywood unlock the safe. When Heywood told him that it had a time lock and could not be opened, Pitts pistol-whipped the teller and slashed him across the throat. Meanwhile another teller, A. E. Bunker, had got to the back door of the bank unobserved and broke into the street. Spotting him, Pitts put a bullet through his shoulder, but the teller managed to scramble to safety. The three bandits then tried to rejoin their cohorts outside. As they left the bank, one of them turned and shot the unconscious Heywood dead.
Outside, Cole Younger, hearing a shot from inside the bank (Pitts’s attempt to shoot the teller Bunker), had panicked and shot an innocent bystander. Within seconds angry townspeople had grabbed guns and opened fire on the outlaws. Clell Mille
r was peppered in the face with buckshot, then shot off his horse by a medical student with a carbine crouched at a second-floor window. Another of the gang’s riders, William Stiles, was also killed. For 20 furious minutes, the gang had to fight their way out of town, with Frank James, Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger all sustaining wounds. When Bob Younger’s horse was felled, Cole picked him up under fire and, with the rest of the gang, managed to gallop through the last ring of the townspeople’s fire.
There was to be no rest. A posse of Minnesota farmers was soon pressing the shattered band. Jesse James urged Cole Younger to abandon the badly wounded Bob Younger because he was slowing the escape. When Cole refused, he and Jesse James argued violently and the James brothers abandoned the Youngers. Jesse and Frank eluded capture and made it back to Missouri.
They were the only ones who did. The three Youngers, together with Pitts, skirmished several times with the manhunters before being cornered in a thicket at Hanska Slough. A wild gunbattle ensued in which a posse member claimed the life of Charlie Pitts. In the end only Bob Younger could stand. He struggled to his feet, held up his hands and shouted out: “The boys are all shot to pieces. For God’s sake don’t kill me!”
Another shot rang out, nicking Bob Younger’s cheek, but then the firing stopped and the posse took the Youngers prisoner. They were, indeed, “shot to pieces”. Bob Younger’s elbow was shattered and he was holed in the chest; Jim had five wounds, including a bullet which had smashed his jaw and lodged just below his brain; Cole Younger had 11 wounds. Despite these, he managed to make a bow to lady bystanders when he was hauled into the Madelia jailhouse.
At their trial, the Youngers pleaded guilty to robbery and murder and were sentenced to life imprisonment in the Minnesota State Penitentiary.
For three years after Northfield, the James brothers and their wives lived quietly under assumed names in Texas, Tennessee (where Jesse James’s two children were born) and Kansas City. But in 1879, the James gang went back into business, collecting $6,000 from the Chicago & Alton Railroad train at Glendale Station, Missouri. Two years later, the James gang murdered two men in the course of a train hold-up at Winston, Missouri. These were two deaths too many, and Governor Thomas T. Crittenden easily persuaded the railroads to underwrite a reward of $10,000 for Jesse and Frank James.
The reward proved too great a temptation for two members of the James gang, brothers Bob and Charlie Ford. “I saw the Governor [Crittenden],” recalled Charlie later, “and he said $10,000 had been offered for Jesse’s death. I went right back and told Bob and he said if I was willing to go, all right.”
In the morning of Monday 3 April 1882, the Ford brothers rode up to the white timber house on the hill in St Joseph, Missouri, where Jesse James was living under the assumed name of J. D. Howard. Shortly after eight o’clock, Bob Ford fired his famous shot, killing Jesse James as he stood on a chair to straighten a picture on the wall. According to what Bob Ford (“the dirty little coward who shot Mr Howard”) told Crittenden, the bullet hit James just behind the ear and he “fell like a log, dead.”
Jesse James’s career as a robber outlaw was over. But the legend was only beginning. “GOOD BYE, JESSE!” heralded the front page of the Kansas City Daily Journal The St Joseph Gazette cried “JESSE BY JEHOVAH”. The killing even made the front of the New York newspapers.
Six months later Frank James, who had tired of the outlaw life, surrendered to Crittenden in person. He was tried on several charges, but public sympathy – and fear – was such that the law could not get a conviction. Frank James went free, to spend his days firing starting pistols at country fairs, charging visitors 50 cents to visit the “Home of the James” and to dabble in showbusiness, notably the running of a Wild West show. In this enterprise he was joined by Cole Younger, who had been granted a pardon for his crimes. Fittingly, perhaps, this was due to the unceasing work of Warren C. Bronnaugh – the Union officer whose life Cole Younger had saved during the Civil War. Also pardoned, for good measure, was Jim Younger, Bob Younger having died in prison of tuberculosis in 1889.
Cole, in addition to working with Frank James in showbusiness, took a job as a salesman of tombstones. Jim Younger committed suicide not long after his release, but Cole Younger lived until 1916, a year longer than his old cohort, Frank James.
Violence Begets Violence
But the story of the James–Younger gang does not end with their deaths. As Paul Wellman has pointed out in A Dynasty of Western Outlaws, the James–Younger gang founded an outlaw dynasty, one perpetuated “by a long and crooked train of unbroken personal connections, and a continuing criminal heritage and tradition handed down from generation to generation.” The James–Younger tradition of armed gang robbery was carried on by Belle Starr – Cole Younger’s common-law wife – in the 1880s, and then by the Dalton brothers in the 1890s. The Daltons were kindred of the Youngers. After an elder brother Frank was killed while serving as a peace officer in Indian Territory, Grattan, Robert and Emmett Dalton also became lawmen. But blood or boredom got the better of them and they turned to horse-stealing. Then they graduated to train robbery. And then, possibly hoping to outshine the James–Younger gang, the Daltons decided to rob two banks in their home town of Coffeyville, Kansas – simultaneously.
Wearing false whiskers, Grat, Bob and Emmett, plus two henchmen, Bill Powers and Dick Broadwell, rode into Coffeyville on the morning of 5 October 1892. Unbeknown to the gang, the street between the banks was under repair, so they were forced to leave their horses a block away. The tragi-comedy continued with Grat Dalton, Broadwell and Powers being recognized (despite the fake facial hair) by a local man, who ran into the plaza shouting “The Daltons! The Daltons!” When the gang emerged from the two banks, they did so into a blast of gunfire. After the smoke cleared, it was found that four citizens had died – as had all the gang except Emmett, who was taken prisoner. On the following day, a local paper reported drily: “One of our banking institutions was visited yesterday by the firm of Dalton Brothers for the purpose of closing large accounts. When the transaction was completed they had been paid in full with interest compounded.”
Emmett Dalton was sentenced to a life term in the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing, and served 15 years before being pardoned. On release, Emmett headed for Hollywood and made several pictures which, he declared, gave a realistic portrayal of the West. They numbered a 1912 feature entitled The Last Stand of the Dalton Boys.
One of the Dalton gang was lucky, or wise, enough to miss the Coffeyville disaster. This was Bill Doolin, whose horse allegedly pulled up lame on the approach to Coffeyville, thus enabling him to escape the outraged bullets of the citizens. After the débâcle, Doolin (born in 1858) organized his own gang in Oklahoma Territory, thus carrying on the James–Younger–Starr–Dalton tradition of spectacular gunfight-bracketed robberies. A jovial, former Arkansas farmhand who married a Methodist preacher’s daughter, Doolin led his “Oklahombres” on four years of armed raids, which were successful enough to persuade the railways and banks to underwrite a reward of $5,000 for his capture “dead or alive”. (The wanted poster described Doolin as a “NOTORIOUS ROBBER OF TRAINS AND BANKS, about 6 foot 2 inches tall, It brown hair, dangerous, always heavily armed.”) Occasionally, Doolin was accompanied on his forays by Bill Dalton, who had aided but not ridden with his luckless brothers.
Among those chasing Doolin were the celebrated Oklahoma lawmen Bill Tilghman, Heck Thomas and Chris Madsen. On an icy, windy day in January 1895 Tilghman accidentally wandered into the gang’s hideout, a ranch on the Cimarron River. As Tilghman warmed himself by the fire, he heard a faint rustle behind the curtains and saw the tips of several Winchesters pointing out. Tilghman made his excuses to the rancher and left. One of Doolin’s gang, George “Red Buck” Weightman, started after him declaring that he was going to kill that “damn lousy marshal”.
The fabled version of this incident has Doolin telling Red Buck: “Bill Tilghman is too good a man to shoot in the back.” A more
probable explanation, as suggested by Oklahoma Territory Marshal E. D. Nix in his memoir Oklahombres, is that Buck was told that if he shot Tilghman a hundred men would be upon them by morning.
Whatever the truth, this brush with Tilghman was the beginning of the end for the Doolin gang. They would not be so lucky in their other meetings with Oklahoma lawmen in the remainder of 1895. Little Bill Raidler survived a gunfight with Bill Tilghman, only to be sentenced to the Ohio Penitentiary for ten years (where Raidler became a friend of fellow inmate, author O. Henry). Bill Dalton and Red Weightman both died resisting arrest. In December 1895 “Old Bill” Tilghman finally caught up with Doolin himself, arresting him in a bathhouse in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where Doolin was receiving treatment for his rheumatism. Taken to Guthrie, Oklahoma, Doolin stepped off the train to a hero’s welcome from a crowd of five thousand which had gathered to see him.
Doolin pleaded not guilty and was held over for trial at the Guthrie federal jail. He escaped in July 1896, freeing 37 others as he did so. Within a month, however, Doolin was cornered by a posse at a farmhouse near Lawson. This time he resisted arrest, and was killed by a blast from the shotgun of Heck Thomas. The “King of the Oklahoma Outlaws” fell near a wagon on which he had packed the possessions of his wife and baby son. Almost certainly, Doolin had been intending to leave the territory and quit outlawry.
Thus passed into history one of the last great Western outlaws. But not yet the dynasty of which he came. Little Dick West, a surviving member of the Doolin gang, would join Al Jennings for his 109 days in 1896 as an Oklahoma road agent. Al Jennings and his brother Frank – both attorneys – were unlikely and inept bandits, and their record in crime consisted of two abandoned attempts to hold up trains and one actual hold-up in which the five-strong gang got 60 dollars apiece. Four of the gang, including Al and Frank Jennings, were arrested single-handedly by deputy marshal Bud Ledbetter. Little Dick West had already quit the comedic Jennings gang. He would be shot down in the winter of 1897 in a gunfight with Bill Tilghman in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma.