The Mammoth Book of the West (34 page)

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.

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.

A more serious perpetrator of the James–Younger bandit tradition was Belle Starr’s nephew, Henry Starr (“The Bearcat”), who gained his schooling in guns in the Starr family’s feud with neighbouring Cherokee clan, the Wests. According to Evett Nix, who knew him, Henry Starr was a “man of magnetic personality”. He was also an inveterate criminal, serving his first jail term for the murder of deputy Floyd Wilson. After disarming fellow inmate Cherokee Bill, however, Starr was released. He stuck up banks in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Colorado, punctuating these with terms in prison. On 27 March 1915, he rode with his gang into the small town of Stroud and, like the Daltons before him, attempted to rob two banks on the same visit. He was wounded making his getaway and arrested. Released from prison a year later, he was killed by a shotgun blast in the face, courtesy of cashier William J. Myers, while trying to hold up the People’s National Bank at Harrison, Arkansas.

When Starr began bank robbing he did so on a horse; for his last hold-up he went by car. Thus in Henry Starr was personalized the link between nineteenth-century brigandry and “1920s Mid-West gangsterism.” Among his associates was Al Spencer, whose own lieutenant was Frank “Jelly” Nash. In 1933 Nash was captured by the FBI and accidentally killed during an ensuing attempt to free him by the pomaded gangster Charles Arthur (“Pretty Boy”) Floyd at Kansas City railroad station. Only with the extermination of the Mid-West Dillinger-type gangs by the FBI in the 1930s did the outlaw dynasty founded by the James–Younger gang finally die.

The frontier lawman spent as much time sitting in his office chair as he did in the saddle leading posses. Peacekeeping in the West was a job of many paper chores and administrative duties. There were records to be kept, court notices to be posted, reports to be written, wanted notices to be read, written and filed. When the lawman left his office, there were dogs to be shot (for a fee), fines to be collected, streets to be repaired, and stray steers to be moved.

Pay was low, although supplementary fees for duties performed could be high. Even in sparsely populated Cochise County, Arizona, Sheriff John Behan garnered an estimated $40,000 a year undertaking such common lawkeeping tasks as serving summonses, attending court, and advertising property for sale. But if the job of lawman was mundane, it also carried the sudden, chill risk of danger. Many towns had an ordinance against the carrying of firearms within town limits. Along with arrest of fugitives, enforcement of the firearms ordinance probably constituted the most dangerous part of a sheriff’s job. Many Westerners regarded the taking of their “shooting
irons” as an infringement on their manhood and their rights as freeborn Americans. Marshal Joe Carson lost his life in just this way in January 1880, trying to disarm the Henry gang in the Close and Patterson Saloon in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Accompanying Carson was his deputy Dave Mather, who avenged his boss by killing one gang member and wounding another.

If disarming frontiersmen was dangerous in Las Vegas, it was doubly so in a Kansas cowtown, where Texas cowboys whooping it up were drunk and unpredictable, as well as proud, and not inclined to take orders from Northern peace officers. A famous such incident involved Dodge City marshal Edward J. Masterson, older brother of the more famous Bat Masterson. At 10 p.m. on the evening of 9 April 1878 Ed Masterson and his deputy, Nat Haywood, quietly disarmed drunken cowboy Jack Wagner at the Lady Gay Saloon. Masterson gave the pistol to Wagner’s trail boss, A. M. Walker. As Masterson and Haywood went outside, Walker returned the pistol to Wagner and both dashed outside after the lawmen. Masterson began grappling with Wagner for the gun, and when Haywood stepped forward to help, Walker prevented him doing so at gunpoint. Suddenly, Wagner’s gun went off, the bullet entering Masterson’s stomach. Mortally wounded and his clothes on fire from the gun flash, Masterson managed to shoot Wagner in the bowels and Walker in the arm and lungs. Wagner died the next day. Walker, however, eventually recovered.

Ed Masterson was a genuinely popular lawman, and something of a standard above previous policemen in the city, two of whom – William “Buffalo Bill” Brooks and Jack Allen – had backed down in fights. “A PUBLIC CALAMITY” said the Ford County
Globe
of Masterson’s death, eulogizing: “Everyone in the city knew Ed Masterson and liked him. They liked him as a boy, they
liked him as a man, and they liked him as their marshal. The marshal died nobly in the discharge of duty; we shed a tear upon his grave . . .”