Shot All to Hell Read online

  The passengers and crew did as they were told—except for one. Louis Bales, a twenty-two-year-old black newsboy from St. Louis, carried a pocket-size, small-caliber pistol that could perhaps hurt someone, if that someone happened to be standing directly in front of the gun’s muzzle when it went off. Bales and another gentleman were out on the platform of one of the coaches when Bales spotted a man on the bluff. He pointed his little weapon at the bandit and squeezed the trigger. The pistol made a pop like a cap gun.

  Several of the robbers started laughing. “Hear that little son of a bitch bark!” one of them roared. A return shot that struck between Bales and the passenger sent the two scurrying for the safety of the car’s interior. Bales “was game,” recalled Pete Conklin years later, but he “probably had more courage than discretion.”

  The engineer and fireman were now waiting in the express car. As soon as the robbers entered with Conklin and Bushnell, they put a gun to the latter’s head and ordered him to open the safe. Bushnell slid the key into the United States Express Company safe and pulled open the heavy door. The robbers began to fill a long wheat sack with the safe’s contents, all except the waybills. But one of the outlaws seemed disappointed.

  “Where are the remittances from the Kansas City, Sedalia and Atchison railroad?” he asked Bushnell.

  The messenger did not know, but he said they might be on the earlier train. That was true, and although this was an extremely good haul for the outlaws, the previous train was carrying about four times the funds as this one.

  After cleaning out the first safe, the robbers ordered Bushnell to open the Adams Express Company safe, but Bushnell nervously told them it was a “through safe,” and there was no key on board that would open it. The robbers let loose with a long string of profanity and threats and insisted on trying several keys in the lock, their frustration mounting as none of them worked. Bushnell explained that the through safe had been sealed and loaded in Sedalia, fifteen miles back, and the key was left there. A second key was waiting in St. Louis, 170 miles down the tracks to the east. To Bushnell’s great relief, the robbers finally accepted his story, but there was no way in hell they were leaving without the safe’s contents. One of the robbers went to the engine tender and came back with a coal pick. First he slammed the pick’s pointed end against the safe’s hinges, several times, but nothing happened. Then he furiously swung the pick against the door. Nothing.

  Another outlaw, this one a brawny fellow with a “fist like a ham,” stepped forward and took the pick. Everyone gave the man plenty of room as he reared back and delivered a mighty blow against one of the safe’s panels, which had only a single thickness of iron. After a dozen or so such swings, he was able to bust a small hole in the safe, but when he forced his large hand through the ragged opening, a good bit of his skin was taken off, and he couldn’t pull out any of the safe’s contents. He screamed out in pain as he withdrew his hand, cursing the safe as he did so. The leader could only laugh.

  “Let me get at it,” he said. “I wear a number seven glove, and both my hands will go where one of your mauleys won’t.”

  He reached in nearly to his shoulder and grabbed hold of a big leather pouch, but it was too large to get through the hole, so he took a knife and slit open the pouch and brought out the money, a fistful at a time. He dropped it into the wheat sack, which was getting bigger and bigger.

  The outlaws scavenged about the car for more booty, breaking into the newsboy’s chest, which was loaded with candies, apples, even homemade pies and cakes. The robbers gorged themselves as if they were a bunch of unsupervised seven-year-olds. The big outlaw who had conquered the safe acted like he was in a pie-eating contest, taking giant bites and “smearing his face till he looked ridiculous.” The men also broke open the car’s letter box and carelessly scattered the letters and documents all over the floor but found nothing of value.

  The robber who was leading the shouts about blowing the heads off nosy and uncooperative passengers suddenly became hoarse and thirsty. He asked the other outlaws in the express car if there was any water. Conklin pointed to the water bucket and its drinking cup, but the leader, who had thought nothing of eating the goodies in the locked newsboy’s chest, was suspicious of the open pail and asked if anyone had put anything in the water. Conklin said no, but the outlaw demanded that someone had to sample it before his men did.

  “Here, you son of a bitch,” he said to Conklin, “take a drink out of that. I don’t propose to run any chances in any of this water business.”

  Conklin gladly swallowed two big gulps because his mouth had gone bone-dry almost an hour before when the first revolvers had been pointed at his face. When Conklin seemed okay, the robbers took turns dipping the cup in the bucket and finally sent a full cup out to the man outside who had requested it in the first place. He drank it quickly, water dripping from the corners of his mouth and down his neck, and then flung the cup into the bushes.

  Next the leader insisted that Conklin unlock the other baggage car that had been added in Sedalia, but a quick look inside confirmed there was nothing worth bothering with. The leader then asked a curious question. He wanted to know if there were any detectives on board. He was not asking out of caution or concern; it was too late for that. The crew was aware of no detectives. The leader’s deep blue eyes became even more intense and cold-blooded. That’s a good thing, he told them, because if there had been any detectives on the train, he would have made “the train men point them out, and it would be goodbye for the detectives.”

  One of the men said he wanted a nice pocket watch and suggested holding up the passengers in the coaches and sleepers. The outlaw chief harshly vetoed the idea. “We’ve been an hour here already,” he said, “and can’t waste any more time, as trains are coming up. Must get away.” He then turned to the conductor and said, “Now Cap, you can take your damned old machine and go ahead.”

  The outlaw told Conklin it would be wise to gather some men and remove the ties from the tracks so the next train would not be derailed. Then, with a “Goodbye, boys,” the robbers jumped to the ground at the side of the car. They mounted their horses, and as they disappeared down the tracks, one of them fired a parting shot in the air, and Conklin heard the leader shout back, “Tell Allan Pinkerton and all his detectives to look for us in hell!”

  The engineer and fireman hurried to their locomotive. Conklin wasted no time getting some others to help him roll the ties off the tracks. With all the noise and commotion now passed, Conklin and the others could plainly hear the jubilant robbers laughing and talking as they rode over a hill a half mile away.

  The engineer engaged the locomotive’s throttle, and with a slight jolt from the engine, they began pulling ahead, the passengers and crew looking out the windows and seeing, to their immense joy, the train was moving. Those passengers still hiding crawled back into their seats and put money and valuables back where they belonged. There was a sense of excitement, relief, and stunned disbelief. Many thanked God they had not been shot or otherwise harmed. And they all had a story they would tell and retell for the rest of their lives.

  The robbery had taken approximately one hour and ten minutes. It would be another half an hour, though, before anyone else knew what had happened at Rocky Cut. When number four pulled into the station at Tipton, the conductor leaped off the train and headed straight for the telegraph office. First to be alerted was Missouri Pacific headquarters in St. Louis, and from there messages and orders burned up the lines for the next several hours. By 4:00 A.M., the first posse was in the woods, searching for the bandits.

  The holdup was sensational copy for Missouri’s newspapers as well as many others across the nation. The Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce said the robbery equaled “in all respects, and exceeding in many, any other one on record.” The Weekly Sedalia Times called it “audacious,” “astonishing,” and “the very supremacy of daring.” Incredibly, some Missouri papers wrote glowingly about the robbers, who had managed
“a dangerous task without shedding blood.” The perpetrators were “cool and courageous,” “bold banditti,” and, in what must have struck the express companies as especially outrageous: “dashing knights of the road.” The Boonville Daily Advertiser even seemed to downplay the seriousness of the crime: “No one was hurt, and no one loses anything save the express company.”

  The robbers’ take was estimated at $17,000, although some of that amount was made up of drafts and other paper useless to the bandits. But the express companies still lost big, in the neighborhood of $10,000 in cash. The two express companies and the Missouri Pacific offered $700 for the arrest and conviction of each outlaw. Governor Charles Hardin posted a reward of $300 each. A thousand dollars a man was a healthy incentive for the posses, but no one could say for sure exactly how many were involved in the robbery and, most important, exactly who they were.

  Estimates on the size of the gang ranged from twelve to twenty. With all the shooting and yelling around the train, many of the passengers thought they had been attacked by an entire army. And the robbers had done a good job of concealing their faces and making sure not to call each other by name. Still, the James and Younger boys were immediately suspected, particularly because of the bandit chief’s remarks about killing detectives, especially his singling out of Allan Pinkerton.

  Pinkerton was no longer pursuing the gang, but the Jameses and the Youngers still had plenty of reasons to despise Pinkerton and his famed Chicago detective agency. A year and a half earlier, at about half past midnight on January 26, 1875, approximately eight heavily armed Pinkerton men crept up to the rural home of Jesse and Frank’s mother, Zerelda Samuel. Jesse had been born and raised in this house, situated three miles from Kearney, Missouri, and he and Frank were known to visit the old homeplace on a regular basis.

  Pinkerton had been planning this raid for months, and after he received word from a local informant that the James boys had returned, he wired his men the go-ahead. The plan was to burn the boys out. To accomplish that, they brought an evil-looking metal sphere, seven and a half inches in diameter, filled with a highly flammable liquid that, once lit, was designed both to illuminate and start a deadly conflagration.

  As silently as possible, some of the Pinkertons set a fire outside of the kitchen while others lit the fuse or wick on the metal ball. Busting in one of the windows, they tossed the sphere inside. The racket and bright light quickly raised the Samuels and their black servants. Dr. Reuben Samuel, the James boys’ stepfather, raced outside and easily extinguished the flames on the house’s clapboard siding. Returning to the kitchen, he used a shovel to maneuver the heavy ball into the fireplace. Other than its fierce, licking flames, the ball did not seem dangerous. They could not know, nor could the Pinkertons, that something was not right with the device. It suddenly exploded like a grenade, sending jagged pieces of shrapnel across the kitchen. One piece ripped through Zerelda’s right arm, just above the wrist. Another lodged in the stomach of eight-year-old Archie Samuel, the James boys’ half brother, who died two hours later. Zerelda’s arm had to be amputated below the elbow.

  Waiting in the darkness and the cold, the Pinkertons were stunned to discover that Frank and Jesse were not in the house as reported—they would learn later that they had missed the notorious pair by one day. Worse, though, the raiders saw and heard the horrible explosion followed by the shrieks of terror. The detectives fled, firing a few shots from their pistols to discourage anyone from following. At a rendezvous point on the Hannibal & St. Joseph tracks, a little more than two miles away, they boarded a special train that whisked them back to Chicago, empty-handed and humiliated. The news of their disastrous raid outraged Missourians; a Clay County grand jury indicted Allan Pinkerton, among others, for the murder of little Archie.

  The Youngers had also lost family to the Pinkertons. It happened deep in the Missouri Ozarks, near the village of Roscoe, on March 17, 1874. On Chalk Level Road, a crooked path barely wide enough for two men to ride abreast, Jim and John Younger confronted three well-armed men whom they believed to be detectives. Their suspicions were right because two of the men were Pinkertons, and the other was a local guide. One of the detectives spurred his horse and raced away when the Youngers first ordered them to stop, but the brothers detained the other Pinkerton and his guide.

  But as the Youngers attempted to disarm the men, a vicious gun battle broke out, flame and smoke belching from an assortment of weapons at point-blank range. John received a fatal wound to the neck, but the brothers shot the guide dead and inflicted a mortal wound upon the detective. A black man who witnessed the melee from across a fence watched Jim calmly bend over his brother’s body and search his clothing, retrieving John’s money, pocket watch, and his four revolvers. Jim threw one of the pistols over the fence to the man, saying, “See that John has a decent burial.” He then mounted his horse and galloped down the road and out of sight. Jim and his brothers Cole and Bob would like nothing better than to reap deadly revenge for John’s death.

  The Rocky Cut robbery also seemed like the work of the James-Younger gang because of its fearless efficiency. “The scoundrels laughed and joked as coolly as though they had been at a picnic,” reported one newspaper. These bandits were clearly the best, and the James-Younger gang was the best at robbing banks and trains in 1876. The gang was also the best at not getting caught, but the local posses—no less than three were in the field right after Rocky Cut—were bragging that the bandits would be captured within twenty-four hours. “The whole country is aroused,” wrote the captain of the manhunt, “and it looks as though it would be impossible for them to escape.”

  The first arrest actually came just forty-eight hours after the holdup, and it caused a lot of excitement. The man arrested, Edmund Graves, had arrived in the Otterville area from Texas a week before the robbery, and he had been living in a house that was situated just three hundred yards from Rocky Cut. Locals described Graves’s conduct since the robbery as “very suspicious,” so a deputy sheriff took an agitated Graves to Sedalia for questioning. Standing in front of Missouri’s adjutant general, Graves explained that he was a native of the area but had been working as a stockman in Texas for the last five years. He said he had nothing to do with the holdup, nor did he know anyone who had been involved. The house he had been staying in belonged to his mother. It soon became obvious that Graves was telling the truth, and he was released later that same day.

  “I want you to state to the public,” Graves said rather testily to a newspaperman, “that there are lots of men in Texas who do not rob railroad trains, and pass for honest men.”

  There were more false arrests and bumbling missteps by the posses in the weeks to come—and one inexcusable tragedy. At about 2:00 A.M. on July 25, a special train pulled out of Sedalia carrying a posse of eight well-armed men and their horses. They were responding to an urgent dispatch that one of the Rocky Cut bandits, a young man named Samuel McKeehan, was believed to be at an isolated farmhouse near La Monte, Missouri. The train stopped at La Monte, twelve miles west of Sedalia, and the posse unloaded its horses, procured a guide, and mounted up for the ride of approximately five miles to the home of Albert Harris.

  McKeehan was part owner of the farm where Harris, his wife, Margaret, and their six children lived. Just before daybreak, the posse quietly surrounded the Harris cabin. Deputy Sheriff Steve Homans and posse member Emmett Harris walked up to the front of the house and knocked on the door. A sleepy and confused Albert Harris called out to see who it was. Homans identified himself and demanded that Albert open up; they needed to talk.

  A rustling came from inside the house as Albert and his wife got out of bed, and soon the front and back doors, separated only by a short hallway, were unbolted and opened. Margaret Harris was blocking the front doorway, facing posseman Harris and the deputy sheriff. Standing next to her, Albert peered around the door.

  “Madam, you need not be at all alarmed,” spoke up posseman Harris. “We do not come here to
hurt you or your family in the slightest manner. We came after Sam McKeehan, to take him to Sedalia. Is he here?”

  “No, he is not here,” Margaret answered. “He was here last Saturday night. He was here trying to sell my husband a piece of land.”

  “Ain’t this man in your house now?”

  “No, he is not.”

  Posseman Harris continued to assure the woman that no harm would come to her when he was suddenly cut off by a blinding flash and a deafening blast from the back door. Margaret stiffened. “I am shot. I am a dead woman,” she gasped. She fell limp, her head rapping loudly against the floor’s hardwood planks, her body penetrated by six heavy buckshot. Posseman Harris was on his knees, wood splinters from the surprise shotgun blast having struck his face, stunning him.

  An unknown man burst from the house and “ran like a deer” for a nearby cornfield. Two of the posse got off shots before the man disappeared down the crop rows. Posseman Harris struggled to his feet and rushed around to the back of the house, toward the sound of the gunshots. Still dazed, he tripped and fell, his gun going off as he slammed into the ground, but causing no injury.

  A doctor who had spent the night at the Harris home to tend a sick child rushed to Margaret’s side as her distraught family and the posse members gathered. She was dead in five minutes. The gunshot that killed the thirty-six-year-old woman came from a double-barreled shotgun of one of the posse, a railroad employee, who had been guarding the back door. He claimed his gun went off accidentally.

  No one ever found out who fled the Harris home, but that didn’t matter much because the tip implicating Sam McKeehan, like so many others about the outlaws, was false. McKeehan’s reputation was less than stellar, but he’d had nothing to do with Rocky Cut. Now, six children were without their mother, and the real robbers were long gone.