CHAPTER 1MAYHEM IN MINNESOTA
As daring as the raid on Coffeyville in 1892 was, there was a precedent involving men who were kin to the Dalton boys. It had taken place sixteen years earlier, far from Kansas.
Jesse and Frank James were the most well-known members of the James-Younger Gang who flourished after the Civil War, but the bandits were as much led by Cole Younger as the James brothers. At various times, the gang included Cole’s brothers Jim, Bob, and John as well as their brother-in-law John Jarrett. There were also Clell Miller, Arthur McCoy, another set of brothers, George and Oliver Shepherd, and yet another one, William and Tom McDaniel, along with Charlie Pitt and Bill Chadwell. Most hailed from Missouri.
This roundup of roughnecks had begun as a group of Confederate bushwhackers who had participated in the bitter partisan fighting in Missouri during the war. Afterward, the men continued to plunder and murder, though the motive shifted to personal profit rather than for the fight for Southern independence. But the loose association of outlaws did not truly become the James-Younger Gang until 1868 at the earliest, when the authorities first named Cole Younger, Jarrett, McCoy, and the Shepherd brothers as suspects in the robbery of the Nimrod Long Bank in Russellville, Kentucky.
After that, they were off to the races. For the next eight years, the James-Younger Gang was among the most feared, most publicized, and most wanted company of criminals on the American frontier. Though their crimes were reckless and brutal, many members of the gang were afforded a romantic aura in the public eye that earned them significant popular support and sympathy. And they got around—the gang was suspected of having robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains in Kentucky, Tennessee, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and West Virginia as well as Missouri.
Who were they and why did they seem to relish a violent life of crime? Some of them did not start out poor. The Younger brothers grew up as the sons of a prosperous slave-owner father in Jackson County, Missouri. Thomas Coleman (the one known as Cole), James Hardin, John Harrison, and Robert Ewing were four of the fourteen children of Henry and Bursheba Younger. Henry was from Kentucky and had met his wife in Kansas City. In Jackson County, he became successful as a land speculator and businessman as well as a farmer. He could afford to have his children educated, especially his sons.
But Missouri was not to have a peaceful future for many years. Its turmoil began with the border war with Kansas. Many residents and lawmakers in the latter wanted it to enter the U.S. as a state free of slavery, while many families in Missouri were slave owners and wanted the same for their western neighbor. Though Henry Younger owned a couple of slaves, he supported the free-state movement in Kansas. This position, however, was no protection against Kansas Jayhawkers who crossed the border to attack Missouri farms.
The irony, then, was that as the pro-Union Henry’s livestock was being stolen and property damaged, his sons were becoming Southern sympathizers. Finally, Cole set off to join the guerillas led by William Quantrill. This could have resulted in being only a temporary allegiance, especially once Cole saw the consequences of Quantrill’s depravity, but in July 1862, his brother Henry was killed by Union militiamen. After that, there was no turning back.
After a year of hard riding with the Confederate bushwhackers, Cole was a willing participant in the August 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kansas. The town was ransacked and left in flames and some two hundred men and boys were gunned down or burned to death. The following year, James Younger replaced his brother in Quantrill’s band so that Cole could join the Confederate army. As a captain, he led troops in campaigns in Louisiana and then as far west as California. He was there when the war ended and had to make his way back to Missouri.*
Alexander Franklin James, known to all as Frank, and his younger brother Jesse were not related to the Youngers but grew up in the same “Little Dixie” area of western Missouri. Their mother, Zerelda, was an outspoken supporter of Southern independence.† Frank and later Jesse, at age sixteen in 1864, joined up with Quantrill’s raiders. Both also rode with the spin-off guerilla leaders Archie Clement and “Bloody Bill” Anderson. After these freewheeling and morally compromised days as bushwhackers, it is highly unlikely the James boys would have found work other than as outlaws.
In the final days of the Civil War, Frank surrendered to Union troops in Kentucky. Jesse was in the process of doing the same in Missouri when he was shot through the lung. In an unforeseen twist, this led to romance because Jesse was nursed back to health by a cousin also named Zerelda and the two married. Domestic bliss did not tame Jesse: He and Frank soon needed another gang to ride with, and the Younger brothers provided that.
Cole and James Younger had returned to a family farm in ruins and no trace of their former prosperity despite the efforts of their brothers John and Bob and their mother and sisters. This loss coupled with the anger toward Reconstruction with its ongoing presence of Yankee troops persuaded the Younger boys to pursue a different line of work. They joined the ranks of Confederate soldiers turned outlaws. In the case of the Youngers, they were especially good at it, even more so after they teamed up with the James boys.
Particularly in Missouri, banks had become the symbols of subjugation and financial ruin, so these institutions became the targets of the outlaws’ wrath. The first robbery by the James-Younger Gang was of the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty. Their new career had an auspicious beginning, as the thieves rode off with over $60,000, which was a very handsome haul in February 1866.*
No surprise, then, that the emboldened gang wanted to keep at it. During the next decade, with a changing cast of characters, some of whom were also former bushwhackers, the James-Younger Gang terrorized businesses and law-abiding citizens, and it frustrated lawmen throughout the South and Midwest. Best estimates are that the robbers raided a dozen banks, seven trains, and four stagecoaches. Fear and frustration were not the only result—at least eleven men were killed, beginning with a bystander, George Wymore, in Liberty.
An especially tragic event during this reign of terror occurred in January 1871. Two lawmen tried to arrest John Younger in Dallas County, Texas, and he killed them both. Another highlight, or lowlight, came five months later when the gang robbed a bank in Corydon, Iowa. One consequence was the bank contacted the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago, the first involvement of the famous company in the pursuit of the James-Younger Gang.
Allan Pinkerton dispatched his son Robert, who joined a county sheriff in tracking several gang members to a farm in Civil Bend, Missouri. A short gunfight ended indecisively as the bandits escaped. Displaying journalism ambitions, soon afterward, Jesse wrote a letter to The Kansas City Star claiming Republicans were persecuting him for his Confederate loyalties by accusing him and Frank of carrying out the robberies. “But I don’t care what the degraded Radical party thinks about me,” he wrote. “I would just as soon they would think I was a robber as not.”
What would have been a major confrontation in the history of the American West was narrowly avoided on September 23, 1872, when Jesse James and Cole and John Younger robbed a ticket booth of the Kansas City Industrial Exposition, amid thousands of people. They took some nine hundred dollars and accidentally shot a little girl in the ensuing struggle with the ticket-seller. In attendance and arriving on the scene just as the trio hurried off was Wild Bill Hickok, who often lived in Kansas City when he was not out on the trail.
Instead of a gunfight, a significant outcome of the robbery was that the editor of The Star, John Newman Edwards, wrote what became a famous editorial titled “The Chivalry of Crime.” It said about the gang, “They rob the rich and give to the poor”—giving the unreformed bushwhackers a Robin Hood sheen.
The cast of Younger brothers was reduced in March 1874. On the eleventh, a Pinkerton agent, Joseph Whicher, was found shot to death alongside a rural road in Jackson County, where the brothers grew up. Two other agents, John Boyle and Louis Lull, accompanied by Deputy Sheriff Edwin Daniels, posed as cattle buyers to try to track the Youngers down. On the seventeenth, the trio was stopped and attacked by John and Jim Younger on a rural stretch of road. Daniels was killed instantly, Lull and John Younger wounded each other, and Boyle and Jim Younger escaped. John Younger died soon after the shoot-out, but Lull lived long enough to testify before a coroner’s inquest before succumbing to his wounds.
More attempts to capture the gang were unsuccessful. Finally, on the night of January 25, 1875, Pinkerton agents surrounded the James farm in Kearney, Missouri. Frank and Jesse had been there earlier but had left. The Pinkertons threw an iron incendiary device into the house, which exploded when it rolled into a blazing fireplace. It was after this vindictive attack that injured Zerelda and killed her son Archie that Allan Pinkerton abandoned the chase for the James-Younger Gang.
The final act of the James-Younger Gang—one directly connected to what would happen in Coffeyville—took place in Minnesota on September 7, 1876. The gang set out to rob the First National Bank of Northfield.
Why would Jesse, Frank, Cole, and the rest travel so far away from familiar surroundings? The idea for the raid came from Jesse and Bob Younger. Cole tried to talk his brother out of the plan, but Bob refused to back down. Reluctantly, Cole agreed to go, writing to his brother Jim in California to come home. Jim Younger had never wanted anything to do with Cole’s outlaw activities, but he agreed to go out of family loyalty.
Copyright © 2023 by Tom Clavin
