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  DEDICATION

  To Duane and Joan Olson

  Northfield, Minnesota

  EPIGRAPH

  A man who is a damned enough fool to refuse to open a safe or a vault when he is covered with a pistol ought to die.

  —JESSE JAMES

  These men are bad citizens, but they are bad because they live out of their time.

  —JOHN NEWMAN EDWARDS

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  ONE Rocky Cut

  TWO Band of Brothers

  THREE Tigers on the Loose

  FOUR The Hottest Day Northfield Ever Saw

  FIVE And Then There Were Six

  SIX The Great Manhunt

  SEVEN Last Stand on the Watonwan

  EIGHT The Pursuit of the James Boys

  NINE One Last Escape

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  One: Rocky Cut

  Two: Band of Brothers

  Three: Tigers on the Loose

  Four: The Hottest Day Northfield Ever Saw

  Five: And Then There Were Six

  Six: The Great Manhunt

  Seven: Last Stand on the Watonwan

  Eight: The Pursuit of the James Boys

  Nine: One Last Escape

  Epilogue

  Resources

  Archival Material

  Private Collections

  Thesis and Dissertations

  Published Material

  Newspapers

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Mark Lee Gardner

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Nerves hard as blackjack oak, the ability to ride like blazes, and the latest six-gun all played a role in the James and Younger boys’ special brand of mayhem. Equally important to their astounding success was the art of the lie. They excelled at deception—they had to.

  During the Civil War, as Missouri bushwhackers, they often wore bluecoat jackets to deceive Union troops and Northern sympathizers. Later, as outlaws, they took on aliases and were able to stop trains or empty bank vaults while moving about freely in public, telling people they were livestock dealers, businessmen, or land speculators. On those occasions when they were accused of brazen robbery, they would write letters to the press denying their involvement and offering up alibis to show they had been far, far away from the scene of the crime. Powerful friends lied for them—and so did their kin.

  This tendency to deception creates an incredible challenge for the historian in telling the story of the Northfield Raid. The words of the three Younger brothers, from the first interviews given following their bloody capture to Cole Younger’s deathbed narration related in 1916, are a minefield of lies and half truths. The outlaws’ calculated statements were designed not only to protect themselves but to protect their brothers-in-arms, Jesse and Frank James, who famously got away. The Youngers steadfastly refused, at least under oath, to say the James boys were ever part of the fiasco. And thirty-nine years later, Frank James went to his grave still claiming he had never set foot in Minnesota.

  Fortunately, there are a number of eyewitness accounts from the men who defeated the James-Younger gang in 1876, including the surviving bank employees, the deadeye Northfield citizens, and the several posses that pursued the bandits. But these eyewitnesses don’t always agree, as is common after any event marked by excitement, great confusion, and tragedy. Some participants told and retold their stories over a span of years; others did not share their stories until decades later. Newspaper reports are another significant source of information about the raid and the manhunt, but in their craze to publish any piece of news about the robbers, these papers often ran items that were nothing more than rumors and speculation.

  Still, my efforts to uncover the true story of the raid and its aftermath have led to new discoveries—and new answers to old questions—that are published here for the first time. The following narrative is the most accurate account of the nineteenth century’s most famous robbery and manhunt. All dialogue within quotes comes directly from primary sources and has not been made up or altered.

  My personal pursuit of the James-Younger gang naturally led me to the reading rooms of aged archives and libraries, to which I made multiple visits. But I spent just as much time out in the open, following the winding blacktops of Missouri and Minnesota. Along with thousands of others, I witnessed the smoke-filled reenactments of the Northfield bank robbery and the capture of the Younger brothers. I sought out fellow historians, writers, curators, James-Younger gang buffs, and reenactors. I retraced the escape route the robbers took out of Northfield. I visited the rural home of Jesse and Frank near Kearney, Missouri; the modest house where Jesse was killed by the coward Robert Ford in St. Joseph; and the graves of Cole, Bob, and Jim Younger in Lee’s Summit.

  Some of these historic places were like old friends because I grew up in the heart of Missouri’s Jesse James country. Like most boys my age, I was fascinated by Jesse and pretended to rob banks and trains during school recess, all the while doing my very best imitation of the notorious outlaw. I taped wanted posters on my bedroom wall in the small town of Breckenridge. In more ways than one, this book has truly been a journey home for me.

  Jesse, Frank, Cole, Bob, Jim, Clell, Charlie, Bill—eight men at the top of their game. No gang of criminals was more feared, more wanted, more hated, and more celebrated. They were the quintessential horseback outlaws. Before September 7, 1876, the James-Younger gang had never been challenged, denied, or defeated. On that fateful day, the people of Northfield had little idea who these well-mounted strangers were.

  And that is just the way the gang wanted it.

  ONE

  ROCKY CUT

  They were no common thieves or vulgar robbers, but had an ambition to make themselves famous, in, as they termed it, “a fair, square and honorable” way of doing such things.

  —KANSAS CITY WEEKLY JOURNAL OF COMMERCE

  Friday, July 7, 1876

  Two months to the day before the Northfield Raid

  Henry Lewis Chouteau, the bridge watchman for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, sat smoking on a bench outside the pump house on the bank of the Lamine River. It was approximately 9:00 P.M., and express train number four was about an hour down the tracks to the west. When its puffing locomotive, baggage car, express-baggage car, three coaches, and two sleepers approached the bridge, a loud whistle would blow. The express-baggage car held two locked safes, which were the property of the Adams Express Company and the United States Express Company. Those safes had enough hard cash inside to operate a small bank.

  Chouteau was waiting there by himself. The closest town, Otterville, was a good mile away. And it was hot. At that time of evening, in the middle of a typical Missouri summer, the river bottom’s sticky stillness made a man’s sweat come easily. Suddenly, Chouteau tensed and gazed at something moving across the bridge. Four men were walking along the tracks toward him. Chouteau, a forty-six-year-old native of Switzerland, had been on the job only two weeks, and though he might not have been surprised to see a fisherman near the bridge, these four men were suspicious. The moon was bright that night, and as the strangers got closer, he could see that they were well dressed, their pants tucked into heavy, high-topped boots. He could hear the clinking sounds their spurs made as they walked. Three of the men sat down next to him without saying a word. The fourth, a tall man, stood out in front.

  “What are you doing here?” the man said.

  “I am here watching the bridge,” Chouteau answered.

  Then the man asked Chouteau ho
w he halted the train if there was danger. Chouteau thought this was puzzling but explained that he would stand on the tracks with his red-glass lantern. If all was safe with the bridge, he used his white lantern.

  The tall man turned to one of his companions on the bench. “What time is it?”

  That man reached into his trousers and pulled out a pocket watch. He tilted the watch’s face into the moonlight. “Ten minutes after nine.”

  “It is about time,” the tall man said.

  Another man on the bench stood up and asked Chouteau where he could get a drink of water. Chouteau told him there was a good, clear spring nearby, and he got up and walked with the stranger to where they could see it. Then Chouteau went to get a drinking cup from the pump house. He didn’t see the man’s three companions but still he stepped inside the small building, where the three men jumped him, grabbed his arms, and pointed a shiny, nickel-plated revolver at his chest. Chouteau stared at the pistol, trembling and speechless. He watched as the three strangers pulled masks from their pockets and put them on their faces.

  “Old man, come along with us,” one of the men ordered. “We have work for you to do.”

  Chouteau pleaded with the men that the Missouri Pacific would fire him if he left his post. “They laughed at me,” he later recalled, “and said the company would not mind that, as I had to go.”

  The men told Chouteau to hammer a large nail into the west side of the bridge and hang the lit white lantern there. The lantern would be clearly visible to train number four and the engineer would proceed across the bridge at normal speed. The men then walked Chouteau to the pump house to get the red lantern, after which they blindfolded him. With one of them holding on to each side of Chouteau, they crossed the bridge and followed the rails east for three-quarters of a mile. Along the way, Chouteau could hear them whispering to more men who had joined them. They eventually stopped where the rails entered a long, deep cut through the side of a limestone bluff and told Chouteau to sit down off to the side of the tracks.

  “You ain’t going to hurt me?” asked Chouteau.

  “What do we want to hurt you for?” a man said. “We want that money. That is all we care for.”

  One of the bandits began digging a hole between the wooden ties of the railroad bed so that a post could be sunk there in the ground, but it was exhausting, time-consuming work. The robbers decided it would be easier to block the tracks with some railroad ties they discovered stacked nearby.

  Chouteau, still guarded by two men, heard the robbers’ groans as they lifted and piled the ties on the rails. “The mosquitoes were thick there,” he remembered, “and every time I would brush them from my face with my hand, [the robbers] would put their hands on me and say, ‘Hands off your face.’”

  Once they finished, the robbers grilled Chouteau about those on the train: the express men, conductors, and engineer. They particularly wondered if any of those men carried firearms. Chouteau had no way of knowing that and told them so.

  Rocky Cut, as that remote place was known, was on one end of a long, broad curve in the Missouri Pacific line, which meant the robbers would hear the train before they saw it. A few minutes after 10:00 P.M., right on schedule, they heard the clear blast of the locomotive’s steam whistle from across the river bottom.

  Someone lit the watchman’s red lantern, handed it to him, and then led him to the middle of the tracks, some twenty feet behind the stack of ties. Finally, in the distance, they saw the beam from the locomotive’s oil lamp as it threw a traveling glow upon the leaves of the nearby cottonwoods and sycamores and the brush and vines growing near the rail bed. The robbers sharply ordered Chouteau to flag the train, and he passionately swung his lantern in big arcs from side to side.

  The moonlight was bright enough that the train’s engineer had trouble making out the red light, but the minute he recognized the warning signal ahead, he immediately grabbed the air brake lever and reversed his engine. There was a piercing squeal of metal on metal while the engineer did his best to halt the train. But the distance was too short. Chouteau, still blindfolded, prayed like never before as the locomotive’s cowcatcher hit the stacked ties and slid up on top of them before finally coming to a stop.

  That’s when the robbers fired off their pistols and started letting out triumphant whoops from both sides of the train. Some of these desperadoes had stationed themselves on the bluff overlooking the cut, and they were carefully watching to make a move. The locomotive’s own weight caused it to ease backward and down again upon the rails, a burst of steam hissing from the engine as if it were angry at how rudely it was being treated. An emotionally spent Chouteau was led away from the tracks and warned to stay put.

  Two robbers clambered up into the locomotive’s cab and pointed their revolvers at the engineer and fireman. “Better keep quiet, you know,” they said. At the back of the train, the other men threw ties and anything else handy on the rails to stop the engineer from trying to back away.

  At the sound of the first gunshots, John B. Bushnell, the twenty-seven-year-old express messenger, who had the key to one of the safes, headed to the rear of the train. As Bushnell rushed down the aisle, a passenger asked him what was the matter. Without stopping, a visibly distressed Bushnell blurted out, “The train is being robbed, that’s what’s the matter!”

  Bushnell’s words electrified the passengers, who frantically began looking for places to hide their valuables. Gold watches, breastpins, and greenbacks were shoved down boot tops and socks. Diamond rings were slid under the carpet. Some found hiding places in the cars’ dirty coal bins. One traveler climbed up and pushed his wallet through the ventilator in the ceiling so it rested on the roof of the car. All the while, the gunshots and yelling continued outside, causing more than a few terrified passengers to drop down and curl up beneath their seats.

  When a woman began to cry, one man exclaimed, for the entire car to hear, “Madam, I’ll protect you at the risk of my life.” This led another to say, “Why, then, don’t you go and fight those fellows in the front?” No one said another word.

  The Reverend Jonathan S. Holmes of Bedford, New York, began to sing the hymn “I’m Going Home (to Die No More).” Someone stopped him from singing and told him he should forget the camp meeting and find a way to hide his money. But the minister went back and finished his song in a quavering voice. Then he stood up and testified to his fellow passengers. He said that “if he was doomed to be murdered, he wanted his remains forwarded to his family . . . and to write them that he had died true to his faith and in the hope of glorious resurrection.”

  Bushnell made his way to the rear sleeper, where he saw a brakeman and quickly pressed the key into his hand, telling the man to hide it in his shoe, which the brakeman did. Bushnell then moved back to the nearest coach and took a seat, hopeful that he would be mistaken for a passenger.

  The baggage master, twenty-one-year-old Pete Conklin, was alone in the express car. The front and rear doors of the car were closed and locked, but the sliding side doors were open to let in air during the summer heat. As soon as the train came to a stop, three of the robbers climbed up on their companions’ shoulders and came through the side of the car. They immediately spotted the safes—and Conklin—and pointed their revolvers at him and demanded the keys. When Conklin said he did not have the keys, they began roughly feeling over his body, cursing the whole time. The men’s faces were covered with bandannas up above their noses, but he could not miss the fierce, blue eyes of the man who was the leader. His eyes seemed to blink more than normal. This man shoved his six-shooter into Conklin’s rib cage and demanded that he tell them who had the keys.

  “I suppose the messenger has ’em,” Conklin said.

  “Where’s the express messenger, then?”

  “He’s back in the train somewhere.”

  “Come with me and find him.”

  With Conklin leading the way, the outlaw chief and one confederate headed to the rear of the train. As they worked t
heir way through the cars, some of the passengers sat up and were completely still and looking straight ahead, scared they might be shot if they made even a slight move.

  It did not take long for Conklin to find Bushnell.

  “You’re the man I want,” said the leader. “Come forward now and unlock that safe without any nonsense.”

  Bushnell said he didn’t have a key to the safe.

  “You want to find it damned quick,” the leader said, raising the barrel of his pistol up to Bushnell’s face, “or I will kill you.”

  Bushnell didn’t need any more convincing. He led the robbers into the sleeper car and straight to the brakeman.

  “Give us the keys, my Christian friend, and be damned quick about it,” said the outlaw. With that the brakeman took off his shoe and handed over the key.

  The robbers now started back for the express car with Bushnell and Conklin. In the smoking car, a lanky man from Indiana was having a hard time squeezing his entire body beneath his seat, and one of his boots was sticking out in the aisle. The robber leader tripped over the boot and, after catching his balance, turned and looked down at the man.

  “Oh, Mister,” screamed the Hoosier, “please don’t shoot me! I didn’t mean to trip you up, Mister! I swear I didn’t! I wouldn’t a did it for anything! I beg ten thousand pardons, Mister!”

  The outlaw laughed and walked on.

  After the men had all passed through the coaches, the passengers started chattering excitedly back and forth. Someone said the robbers had to be the James boys. But they were even more worried about a freight train expected to come through very soon that could ram the rear of this train. A crash would send jagged wooden splinters, glass, and bone-crunching steel through the air, not to mention the danger of fire and scalding steam from a ruptured locomotive boiler. What the passengers did not know was that the robbers had already sent a man down the track with a lantern to stop the freighter.

  To intimidate the passengers and keep them from fighting back, the robbers kept up their firing and yelling outside. Anyone brave enough to poke a head out a window or door was greeted with a pointed gun and “Pull in your head you son of a bitch!” or “Go back you son of a bitch!”