Using the recollections and family stories of Marie Barrow and other Barrow family members; the best and most reliable of those accounts written at the time and over the years since; and new research that is still continuing, we will try to tell the story of Bonnie and Clyde as we know it today. They weren’t just cold-blooded killers, and they weren’t just innocent victims of circumstance. Like everybody else of their time and place, they blended good and bad, passion and indifference, fear and courage, hope and despair.
Depending on where you fit in their lives, Bonnie and Clyde could be your dearest son or daughter, your idolized brother or sister, your most faithful friend, or your worst enemy. Clyde could, literally, take presents to his mother on Christmas Eve, then help kill a young husband and father in his own front yard eighteen hours later. He would kill policemen who cornered him without hesitation, but then kidnap others, ride them around all night, joke with them, give them expense money, and let them go unharmed. He would steal money from banks, storekeepers, and service station attendants but faithfully return borrowed china and silverware to a lady at a takeout diner.
Bonnie was tiny, delicate, and cute, and she loved babies. She would get homesick and cry for her mother, paint her toenails, carry around a pet rabbit, read movie fan magazines, and write poetry, but she could also load a .45 automatic, slap around a woman prisoner, and drive a getaway car. She looked fragile, but she drank moonshine, smoked cigarettes (not cigars), and swore like a sailor. She lived out of the back seat of a Ford V-8 for months at a time and endured car wrecks, burns, and gunshot wounds without giving up. That’s not to say that she was the kind of girl to suffer in silence, however. She and Clyde loved each other, but sometimes they fought intensely.
To affirm that Bonnie and Clyde had loyal, loving families and gave them love and trust in return does not change the fact that they also robbed banks and killed people. To point out that Clyde grew up during some of the hardest times our country has ever seen, was changed by a cruel and brutal prison system, and was harassed by local police doesn’t excuse the fact that he chose the life of a criminal. Yet to get a sense of Bonnie and Clyde and their world, we have to look at both the good and the bad—as honestly as we can.
In many of the pictures taken during his outlaw career, Clyde Barrow is dressed in a three-piece suit and looks like a prosperous young businessman. In fact, in one of his more successful robberies, he was at first mistaken for a bank examiner. But despite his polished image, Clyde Barrow, like many other southwestern outlaws of his time, was born and raised on a farm.
Clyde’s father, Henry B. Barrow, was born January 10, 1874, the son of a Pensacola, Florida, shoemaker named James Barrow. Henry was a sickly child and was unable to go to school. He was subject to chills and fever, which the family, in later years, believed were caused by malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the Florida panhandle. Lack of schooling left Henry unable to read or write for the rest of his life, but his quick mind and ability with numbers shone through. Years later, when Henry ran his own business, he would do all the figures in his head. Sometime in the 1880s, after Henry’s mother died, James Barrow decided to move his family to Grimes County, Texas.
Henry and his older brother Frank arrived in Texas when the West was still wild. Names like Sam Bass, “Wild Bill” Hickock, Ben Thompson, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, “Bat” Masterson, Wyatt Earp, “Doc” Holliday, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, “Long Haired Jim” Courtright, Luke Short, Belle Starr, and others were not relegated to history books but appeared in recent or current newspaper headlines. In spite of this, the move to Texas did Henry Barrow a world of good. Away from the swampy area in western Florida, his bouts of fever subsided and he grew into a healthy and strong young man.
There was nothing in Henry’s early life to suggest the violence that would make his sons infamous, but he did cause his father to worry from time to time. Except for the occasional scuffle common to all growing boys, Henry was a rather peaceful fellow, but he loved fast horses and began to frequent the races. These were local affairs, held on Sundays, and very popular with the “sporting” society. They drew large crowds, and a lot of money changed hands. Henry’s father viewed the racetrack as dangerous to a young man’s character and strongly disapproved of Henry’s attendance. By this time, however, Henry was about sixteen years old, and his interest in racehorses was soon to be replaced by something else.
Sometime in 1890, Henry Barrow left home. His father, Jim, had remarried and Henry now had two half-brothers, so he decided it was time to go out on his own. In those days, a strong young man, even with no schooling, could make his way in the world if he was willing to work, and Henry was determined to do just that. He moved northeast about 100 miles to the Nacogdoches area and got a job at a sawmill. There he found something to replace his love of horse races. Her name was Cumie T. Walker.
The Walker family had been in Nacogdoches County for several years, and Cumie lived on a farm with her parents and several brothers and sisters. She was almost a year younger than Henry, born November 21, 1874. The Walkers were strict about their daughter’s upbringing, so no makeup or other worldly extravagances were permitted. Naturally, her dating was carefully controlled as well. The wildest party she had ever attended was probably a Baptist church social. In fact, it may well have been at church that Henry and Cumie met, since he had been raised in that denomination as well. Henry was one of Cumie’s first beaus, and their courtship lasted about a year. On December 5, 1891, Henry B. Barrow and Cumie T. Walker were married at the home of Cumie’s parents near the little community of Swift, Texas. Henry quit his job at the sawmill and rented a small farm, and the young couple settled in to raise a family.
Farming in Texas, or anywhere else in the West in the last few years of the nineteenth century, was a chancy proposition. If you were lucky with the weather and the insects and made a good crop, the market price for that crop was likely to be down. If the market was up, there might be a drought. Tenant farmers like the Barrows, who not only had to make a living but also pay rent on the land, were especially vulnerable to the swings of fortunes common in agriculture. Henry and Cumie were young, strong, and willing to work hard, so they managed to make a living, but they couldn’t seem to get any money ahead. The first two Barrow children were born on the farm in Nacogdoches County—Elvin Wilson “Jack” Barrow, born June 20, 1894, and Artie Adell Barrow, born March 30, 1899—but by the turn of the century, the Barrows were on the move to what they hoped were greener pastures.
By 1903, Henry and Cumie were settled on a new rented farm in Milam County near the town of Jones Prairie. It was there that the next two children were born—Marvin Ivan “Buck” Barrow on March 14, 1903, and Nellie May Barrow on May 12, 1905. 1 A few years later, Henry decided to move north to Ellis County. Near the town of Telico, the Barrows made their last attempt to farm successfully. In Ellis County, the last three Barrow children were born: Clyde Chestnut Barrow on March 24, 1909, L. C. Barrow2 on August 13, 1913, and Lillian Marie Barrow on May 27, 1918 (Marie was actually born in the town of Mabank, not Telico). Seven children had been born over a period of twenty-four years. Clyde’s birth was attended by a midwife named Annie Curtis, the wife of H. A. Curtis of Telico. Mrs. Curtis also made Clyde his first baby dress. Actually, the Barrow clan was small for a farming family at the turn of the century. In those days, farming families were larger due both to the work that needed to be done and to the higher infant mortality rates in rural areas, where quality healthcare was seldom available. On the last count, the Barrows beat the odds. At a time when childhood diseases carried off hundreds of thousands of children—rich and poor—every year, all seven of Henry and Cumie’s children lived to adulthood.
Like all the information Marie Barrow had about her family up to this point, her descriptions of life on the Barrow farm in Ellis County, Texas, come from conversations with older members of her family and access to family records. She was only four years old when they moved to west Dallas.
The economy in Ellis County at the time of the First World War was founded on agriculture in general and cotton in particular. The biggest towns in the county were Waxahachie, the county seat, and Ennis, several miles to the east. Telico, where the Barrows lived, was a small community that provided for the basic needs of the all of the farming families in the surrounding area. There were a couple of dry goods stores, a blacksmithing establishment, and the Telico Cotton Gin, but no post office. The mail came out of Ennis with a rural carrier.
As in most communities in the South and Southwest, the dry goods store owners accommodated their farming clientele according to the annual cycle of planting and harvesting the cotton crop. The farming families purchased on credit what they needed while the cotton crop was growing in the fields during the spring and summer. In the autumn, they would, hopefully, pay off their accumulated bills with the proceeds from the sale of their cotton crop. Sometimes the store owners would buy the cotton crops themselves and deduct the amount of the purchase from their customers’ tab. These stores were where the Barrows traded. Beside the farms in the vicinity of Telico there was also a sand and gravel company, which operated two shifts every day. The men who worked there lived in railroad boxcars on the premises and ate their meals in a cook shack.
Social life in Telico centered around the church and the school. The Telico school was a frame building constructed around the turn of the century. The schoolgirls were required to sweep and clean the school building while the boys brought in wood for the stoves that heated it.
When the Barrow kids were growing up, they weren’t seen as different from other children in the area. Clyde’s early years seemed to have been those of a normal Texas farm boy.
Only one family story about their time at Telico portrays Clyde involved in any kind of trouble. As the story goes, Mr. Tims, a dry goods merchant, one day caught Clyde helping himself by reaching into a glass jar full of candy. After that, Mr. Tims made Clyde whistle every time he came into his store so he would know that Clyde didn’t have his mouth full of candy. This peculiar arrangement only lasted a short while, until Mr. Tims decided that Clyde had learned his lesson.
Something that bothered Marie Barrow about accounts of the Barrow family was the idea that the children were always being “farmed out” to uncles and aunts all over southeastern Texas, even though this practice was not unusual among the large, poor farm families of the time. While it’s true that the Barrow children spent time with relatives, Marie didn’t remember it as being forcibly “farmed out.” She said that all the children enjoyed staying at their uncle’s place. Clyde worked hard on the farm with his cousins, but it wasn’t all work at Uncle Frank’s. They went fishing with Uncle Frank’s kids, and some of the older ones also went hunting. Looking back on it, Marie found it ironic that, although Clyde liked guns, he wasn’t much of a hunter. She said Clyde didn’t like to hunt animals but loved to go target shooting and “plinking.” Clyde would later become well known for his obsessive target practicing.
School picture taken about 1910—possibly in the Corsicana, Texas, area. The boy seated on the far left on the front row is Marvin Ivan “Buck” Barrow, age seven. In the second row, third from the right, leaning to her right to see over a boy’s head, is Nell Barrow, age five. In the back row, the tall girl second from the right is Artie Barrow, age eleven.
—Courtesy Jonathan Davis
Although Clyde showed an early interest in guns on Uncle Frank’s farm, Marie didn’t believe he was “gun crazy.” In fact, the only firearm she can recall Clyde personally owning before he went out on the road after his prison sentence was a leveraction 1892 Winchester rifle in .25-20 caliber, which he purchased in the late 1920s. Marie learned how to shoot with that rifle, and that particular gun remained in the possession of the Barrow family for close to seventy years. Clyde bought an old leather carrying case for the gun and carved his initials (“C. B.”) in it. Recently, this rifle and leather case sold at auction for over $20,000. As a youngster, Clyde was interested in the firearms of the Old West, such as Colt six-shooters and Winchester rifles, just like most Texas boys.
Although farm work occupied part of the year, Clyde still attended school fairly regularly at two different locations. When he lived at his parents’ farm, he went to school in that vicinity; when living at Uncle Frank’s, he attended school at Corsicana. Clyde also attended services at the local Baptist churches wherever he was living. Marie even remembered Clyde being baptized at the little Baptist church near Eureka, Texas, in 1924.
All in all, Clyde’s early years were primarily based in the country in both Ellis and Navarro counties. All aspects of his life, whether working on the farm or attending school and church, were typical of most other young men of his era and locale. If he had stayed down on the farm, the rest of his life might have taken a different turn. However, things changed for the Barrow family in the early 1920s, and these changes would alter the direction of Clyde’s life—and not for the better.1
The stock market crash of October 1929 might have signaled the beginning of the Great Depression on Wall Street, but for the American farmer, hard times were already ten years old. After World War I ended, the agricultural industry of America was staggered when prices for farm commodities collapsed. Cotton had risen as high as fifty cents a pound during the war, and by 1918, farmers were borrowing money and planting it on every acre and fence row they could find. In November, the war ended, but the next spring and summer provided excellent weather and a huge harvest. Although there was cotton everywhere, the wartime demand was gone. Cotton prices fell by 90 percent to five cents a pound, and other commodities followed suit. Farmers at all levels were economically devastated, with the marginal operator, farming rented land, being hit the hardest.1
As if the collapse of commodity prices weren’t enough, in 1920 the dreaded boll weevil appeared in Ellis County. What the national economy did not destroy, the weevil finished off. Many people just gave up on farming and headed toward the cities to try to make a living. Some, however, like the Barrows, tried to hang on. Henry supplemented what he made on the farm near Telico with wages from working at both the Telico Cotton Gin and the brickyard in Ennis, but even that wasn’t enough. Soon he began to see the handwriting on the wall.
The economy wasn’t the only thing that caused the Barrows to consider leaving the farm. By 1922, only the three youngest children were still at home. Marie was just a four-year-old, and the two youngest boys, L. C. and Clyde, were only nine and thirteen. They weren’t going to be enough help, and Henry and Cumie were beginning to feel their forty-eight tough years. The fact was, it was getting too hard to make a crop, and even if you did, you couldn’t make enough off it to live. In 1922 Henry and Cumie and the three youngest Barrows finally gave up and followed their older children to the big city.
The four older Barrow kids (Jack, Artie, Buck, and Nell) had already left home, and none of them stayed in Ellis County. If you wanted secure employment, comforts, and conveniences, you had to move to town. The nearest large city, Dallas, was just a few miles to the north, and that’s where they all went. Now the rest of the family were following.
Jack and his wife were living on Forest Avenue in south Dallas, and he was running an automobile garage that he operated out of his house. They were already building a family and would eventually have four daughters. The two sisters, Artie and Nell, went into the beauty parlor business in downtown Dallas, with a shop located in the Sanger Hotel. Artie later became the first female barber in town. It was Buck’s life that seemed to lack any kind of stability.
The Barrows certainly weren’t the only farming family to pull up stakes and relocate in the city. There was already a steady stream of economic refugees pouring into Dallas from all over central Texas. Since most of these urban immigrants had no place to stay when they first moved into Dallas, tent cities and shantytowns sprang up in many places.
When Henry and Cumie moved to Dallas, the two youngest children sta
yed with them, but Clyde began dividing his time between Dallas and Uncle Frank’s farm. The Barrows’ first residence in west Dallas was at the campgrounds, which were located close to the Texas and Pacific railroad tracks. There were already a lot of other farming families living there in tents and shanties when the Barrows arrived. It was pretty basic living. They weren’t actually living under a viaduct as some versions relate, but the conditions were not much better.
Those years in west Dallas were tough. Government welfare and unemployment programs were unknown in those early decades of the twentieth century, but most able-bodied people, like Henry Barrow, probably wouldn’t have taken it in any case. The only form of public assistance that they ever received was in the form of free bread, supplied by an anonymous benefactor, which was brought into the campground on a wagon. When things were extremely tight, this food was gratefully received by those who had nothing else to eat.
When the Barrow family first arrived at the west Dallas campground, Henry immediately began to earn money to support his family by what was referred to back then as “peddling,” which meant the buying and selling of just about anything that might turn a profit. Henry began his peddling with a wagon and an old white horse that had been with the family for several years.
Henry Barrow’s peddling activities were only done on a temporary basis to keep body and soul together. Marie remembers that they had to live in tents while her father arranged something more permanent. Before long, he began to build a small wooden house, which he intended to move to a permanent location. It was built as the accumulation of money and materials permitted, and it would be several years before it was actually moved off of the campground.
Bonnie and Clyde- A Twenty-First-Century Update Page 2
