Ames also grew familiar with the First National Bank, where the mill kept its accounts. The firm owned about a quarter of the bank, in fact; his father was the vice president and his brother a director, as they had been since it opened on January 1, 1873. It was typical of national banks in southern Minnesota, with a bare-minimum stock capitalization of $50,000, loans of around $100,000, and a vault reserve of some $10,000 in greenbacks—prosperous, in other words, but unremarkable. Adelbert often stepped through its Division Street entrance—it occupied the rear of the Scriver block, a building on the southeastern corner of the square—and chatted with the employees: cashier George M. Phillips; teller Alonzo E. Bunker; assistant bookkeeper Frank J. Wilcox; and bookkeeper Joseph L. Heywood.38 Heywood, who served as treasurer of both the town and Carleton College, was a particularly serious man. Once, Ames learned, he had been happily married, but some time back his wife had grown gravely ill. If she died, she told her husband, she wanted him to marry an old friend and schoolmate of hers, to give their daughter a mother. When she passed away, Heywood carried out his wife’s wishes. Ames, ever appreciative of a sense of duty, remembered the story well.39
Nothing pleased Ames more than his reunion with his brother. “John and I are closer than ever,” he told Blanche—but John’s wife grew cold. “If I am not mistaken, Nellie and I are further apart than ever. I do not think John observes it at all.” It mystified Adelbert. “Nothing has passed between us, Nellie and me, which differs in the least from what our relations have always been.” Far more troubling was his isolation from Blanche. “Our present separation seems to me somewhat different from any previous one and disproportionally long,” he wrote on June 8. “We, both, are taking upon ourselves new parts which, not being fully learned, fit less comfortably than our occupation of old.” The distance inflamed the couple’s barely suppressed quarrel about where they should settle. “All my people are anxious that we should come here and live,” he wrote. Blanche responded immediately. “Still, Sweetheart, in my own mind, I desire very much that we remain here for many reasons,” she wrote from Lowell, Massachusetts. “I am sure I can make you happy here—but I will say nothing about the matter at present.”
Adelbert, too, saw the need to say little about it, but for a very different purpose. “For political reasons, I still hold my residence in Miss., and so can frankly say I am not taking up my residence here at this time, but am here only on a visit.”40 It was a remarkable statement. Here he stood in distant Northfield, with no future before him except the mundane one of business, but he still felt the pull of the war he had left behind. On June 9, he traveled to Cincinnati for the Republican National Convention, where the party’s leading men waged a fierce struggle to succeed Grant. “Yet, to be wholly frank about the subject,” he wrote sadly to his wife, “I would confess that I care but little at best about the political contest we are now in.” The real battle for the soul of the republic—the battle over Reconstruction—had been lost. Ames belonged to a political age that had already passed. Despite the surprise nomination of Ohio’s governor, Rutherford B. Hayes, Ames’s main sensation at the end of the convention was relief. On June 16, he caught the first train east. He visited the Centennial Exposition, spent two weeks by the sea with Blanche, and returned alone to Northfield.41
As Ames enjoyed a summer of calm, dramatic events erupted with volcanic fury across the national landscape. With Independence Day celebrations well under way, the press announced that Custer—Ames’s West Point classmate—and more than two hundred cavalrymen had been annihilated by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors; days earlier the same warriors had thrashed another column of one thousand troops under General George Crook. The nation’s tiny army, already largely withdrawn from the South, marched west to avenge the defeats.42
On July 8, the bloodiest outrage of the political campaign staggered the state of South Carolina. A prominent Democrat, Matthew C. Butler, stormed the largely black town of Hamburg with a white paramilitary company. With cannons and hundreds of reinforcements, Butler smashed a black militia unit that gathered to resist his forces. After killing untold numbers of African Americans, the Democrats captured twenty-five; Butler personally picked out five for an on-the-spot execution. “If you can find words to characterize [this] atrocity and barbarism,” wrote Daniel Chamberlain, the Republican governor, “your power of language exceeds mine.”43
It was merely one atrocity of many. The election in Louisiana’s rural parishes, Senator John Sherman later reported, “seems more like a history of hell than of civilized and Christian communities. The means adopted are almost incredible.” In South Carolina, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wade Hampton—the former cavalry commander for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia—toured the state at the head of hundreds of paramilitary soldiers known as Red Shirts. They no longer feared federal intervention. As one white landlord said to a black tenant, the Democrats would win the election “if we have to wade in blood knee-deep.”44
Hayes struggled to respond to these events. In his nomination acceptance message, he said that the Republicans would promote “the blessings of honest and capable self government,” knowing that the phrase implied an end to federal enforcement of civil rights.45 Tilden, however, advanced swiftly in the North, swinging the twin swords of reform and depression. Hayes and his team began to panic. Despite their decided lack of enthusiasm for civil rights laws, they quickly seized on fears of a newly assertive South. Hayes himself jotted down such slogans as, “Are you for the Rebel South, or are you for the loyal North?” Local chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic turned out in full uniform for party rallies. Speaker Robert G. Ingersoll repeatedly delivered a highly popular, highly bellicose speech. “Every man that shot Union soldiers was a Democrat,” he bellowed. “Every man that loved slavery better than liberty was a Democrat.”46 In many respects, this “waving the bloody shirt” was the mirror image of the Democratic campaign in the South. Both sides wished to reenact the Civil War, only Dixie’s Democrats planned a very different ending.
To Ames in his Northfield refuge, the rising crescendo of partisan hatred was nothing more than the distant thunder of a storm that had already struck and passed on. Like Conrad’s Baron Heyst, Ames had retreated from the world, mystified by its undeserved calumnies, his dignity unbroken. He spent his days bent over the mill’s accounts and pondering the mysteries of wheat. In the evening he galloped his horse, or went shooting with his happily retired father, or penned another letter to his beloved Blanche. On September 7, another day in a chain of days no different from the others, Ames went home for lunch and wrote a quick note to his wife. Afterward he returned to the mill to mail the letter and pore through the books once more. Then he heard gunfire.
ON AUGUST 23, 1876, two hard-looking men strolled into the lobby of the Nicollet Hotel in Minneapolis and requested a room for themselves and a sick friend. The clerk snapped open a registration book, and they signed the names J. C. Horton and H. L. West of Nashville, Tennessee. The manager did not like the look of Horton and West; they claimed to be Grangers, yet they handled the pen with soft, pale hands. He liked it still less when they were joined by three friends the next day: W. G. Huddleson of Maryland, J. C. King of Virginia, and John Wood (or Ward), also of Virginia. The men would storm into the dining room with their hats still on, with an exaggerated bumpkin rudeness, and they spent an hour on the second-floor balcony, amusing themselves by dropping dollars to a poor organ grinder.47
The manager had good reason to be suspicious. The men who checked into his hotel on the twenty-third were almost certainly the James brothers, and perhaps Bill Chadwell or Bob Younger. That night they took a hack to “a notorious house kept by Mollie Ellsworth,” according to press reports. There the madam and Jesse James recognized each other from the days when she kept a bordello in St. Louis. “I used to know him well,” the woman said. She asked Jesse what he was doing “up here,” prompting the bandit to smile. “Oh, nothing,” he replied. “I
am going out into the country for a few days, and will be back soon, then you and I will go to the Centennial.” The hack driver confirmed the story, and the madam was most insistent. “I know that it was Jesse James,” she said.48
No doubt exists about the three men who registered on August 24. The man who signed as King would soon be identified as Cole Younger, the fellow named Wood (or Ward) as Charlie Pitts, and Jim Younger would admit that he was Huddleson, and had stayed at the Nicollet.49 The trio had spent the previous night at the Merchant’s Hotel in St. Paul, where Clell Miller and the eighth man remained.
The outlaws’ interest in St. Paul would have been understandable to Minnesotans of the day. Though a smaller city than Minneapolis, it had earned a reputation as a fast town, with some 240 saloons—70 more than in its larger neighbor. The city had chosen to regulate rather than stamp out its gambling dens and brothels; every month, each of St. Paul’s madams would appear in police court, plead guilty to keeping a house of ill fame, and pay a small fine—obtaining, in essence, a license to stay open another thirty days, provided she ran her businesses in an orderly manner. Thirteen bordellos operated at the time, and hundreds of freelance women engaged in “plain sewing,” to use the local euphemism, walking the streets or operating out of cigar stores. When the Youngers left, Miller and the other man stayed behind to enjoy themselves. The pair spent the night in a gambling saloon, blowing a staggering $200 in the course of play. At one point they caused a small stir by taking off their coats, each man revealing a pair of revolvers suspended from cartridge belts.50
Even as Miller and his companion tossed away their money and frightened their fellow gamblers, Jesse was huddled in his hotel room, finalizing his plans with Frank and the Younger brothers. In many ways, the operation they now discussed was the most significant of their outlaw careers. Not because of the money involved—no unusually large haul awaited them at their chosen destination—nor because of the great distance from their Missouri birthplaces—Huntington, West Virginia, had been just as far. It was because of who they were coming to rob, here in the far North, a target of truly national significance: former general, senator, and governor Adelbert Ames.
Just one month after this final planning session in the Nicollet Hotel, Bob Younger would explain the bandits’ purpose in coming to Minnesota. They had learned, he would say, that “ex-Governor Ames, of Mississippi, had money in the Northfield bank; one of the boys had a spite against him, and so the robbery was planned.”51 Bob would speak these words to a crowd of Yankees, many of them Republicans and Union veterans, so his statement could hardly be considered an attempt to win sympathy. He would be isolated from Cole at the time of his comments, but Cole would repeat the same claim in three successive written accounts. “We had been informed that ex-Governor Ames of Mississippi and General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts had deposited $75,000 in the National Bank,” Cole would write in 1897, “and it was the above information that caused us to select the bank of Northfield.” He would make this declaration in a statement written for a prison warden in Minnesota; so it, too, could hardly be considered a calculated excuse.52
Jesse was most likely both the plotter and the harborer of spite. Cole had hinted that one of the James brothers was the moving force when he said, “You fellows suggested this, and I am just going with you.” By that time, the bandits already planned a mission to Minnesota.53 Jesse had always been the intense partisan who craved the political spotlight. In his letters to the Nashville press in 1875 and to the Kansas City Times in August 1876, he infused almost every sentence with his fury at the Radicals, his fascination with the political situation, and his hunger for heroic stature throughout the South.54
Ames offered a natural focus for his rising anger and ambition. Since taking office as Mississippi governor in 1874, Ames had been doused with a torrent of abuse by the Democratic newspapers of Missouri—abuse that connected him with his better-known father-in-law. (Butler had been given the nickname “Beast” by the rebels for his stern administration of Union-occupied New Orleans.) “When Beast Butler’s son-in-law, Ames, a resident of Massachusetts, was ‘elected’ by Grant bayonets governor of Mississippi,” wrote the Lexington Caucasian, “a dirty brood of nigger barbers, boot blacks and plantation chattels were put in office all over the state.” The Democratic press twisted episodes of white-supremacist violence in Mississippi into examples of Radical oppression, and when the insurrection of 1875 finally crushed black political freedom, the newspapers cheered. Mississippi, stated the St. Louis Republican, “was cursed by the meanest and most despicable tyranny that ever disgraced the soil of the republic.… The Ames dynasty has been literally a stench in the national nostrils.”55
Ames had moved to Northfield in May 1876, just a month before the bandits began to plan their raid. In Minnesota, he had attracted virtually no attention. But a student of the national and Southern press—especially one with “a spite against him”—could have discovered much about this fighter for racial equality. On May 2, for example, the New York Times printed a lengthy interview with Ames. Dixie’s newspapers closely followed the Senate committee that was investigating the Mississippi insurrection, as well as the uproar over the chamber’s refusal to seat the newly elected L. Q. C. Lamar, the revolt’s mastermind. For Jesse, Ames remained an object of hate, an inviting target for an attention-getting robbery, for a very personal political blow amid this climactic campaign.56
In the cloistered privacy of that room in the Nicollet Hotel, the James and Younger brothers firmed up their plans, drawing on Chadwell’s knowledge of his native state, and on a map they had purchased at a nearby bookstore. They decided to split into two groups and approach Northfield in a pincer movement, one party coming from the west and the other from the east. This would allow them to better reconnoiter their escape route, and avoid the suspicions that eight men traveling together might raise. On August 26, they checked out, flashing thick rolls of currency as they settled their bill. Four of them took the train to Red Wing, east of Northfield on the Mississippi River; the other two returned to St. Paul, collected Miller and the eighth man, and then took a train southwest to St. Peter.57
The bandits carried some vital pieces of equipment: revolvers—two apiece, most of them new-model Smith & Wessons—along with cartridge belts and abundant ammunition. Minnesotans lacked the habit of carrying firearms, however, so the Missourians and their two new recruits concealed theirs under long linen dusters. They purchased their horses—all particularly fine ones, each worth at least $150—in St. Paul, St. Peter, and Red Wing.58
A story would later circulate that the gang started to rob a bank in Mankato, only to be frightened away; the tale originated when a man named Charley Robinson claimed, some weeks later, to have recognized Jesse on the street. Cole Younger, however, would explicitly deny these claims, asserting that the bandits remained in two parties until they met at Northfield on the morning of September 7. Contemporary press reports confirm Younger’s account; indeed, no newspaper stories placed all eight men together until that fateful day. It appears that Cole headed the Mankato team, while Jesse led the squad that went to Red Wing. Four men checked into the National Hotel in that Mississippi River town on the night of August 26, signing as Horton and West of Nashville and Charles Wetherby of Indiana. (Again, one man did not register.)59
For almost two weeks they scouted the terrain in and around Northfield, inadvertently attracting attention along the way. In Faribault, “they were noted for their fine physique,” the press reported, with their “pants tucked in boots, long spurs, and peculiar swagger.” They often asked about the roads in their distinctive Southern accents, explaining that they were cattle buyers—a story that was generally accepted, especially since they were considered “jovial and pleasant” everywhere they went. Around the first of September, two of them opened negotiations to buy the farm of John Mulligan, who plowed the dirt two and a half miles from Northfield. They questioned him closely about the town. They seemed par
ticularly concerned about whether it was “a peace-loving, law-abiding” community. “Why,” one of them said, “according to your statement of the Northfield people a very few men so inclined could capture the town, couldn’t they?” Mulligan readily agreed.60
On the morning of September 7, the eight men reunited south of North-field for one last reconnaissance. Around ten o’clock, four of them cantered through town, drawing stares with their smart clothes and excellent horses. George E. Bates, who owned a store across from the bank, remarked to a visiting salesman that he had never seen “four nobler looking fellows.” But, he added, “there was a reckless, bold swagger about them that seemed to indicate that they would be rough and dangerous fellows to handle.”61 Elias Hobbs, the town marshal, reassured another merchant that they were cattle buyers who had visited the town previously, but he started to pay close attention when two of them made an oddly brief visit to the bank. As the strangers poked around the stores and streets, they asked where they might purchase rifles. They were directed to the hardware store of Anselm Manning, who told them he had only shotguns for sale. The outlaws begged off politely, saying they were only interested in rifles.62
When the clock ticked past eleven, five of the bandits stopped for lunch at J. G. Jeft’s restaurant on the western side of the Cannon River, near the railway depot; the others ate elsewhere in town. Jeft had yet to prepare his dinner menu, so the outlaws ordered hearty portions of ham and four eggs each. The men appeared relaxed; they had politics on their minds, and discussed the subject loudly. At one point they offered to bet the restaurant owner $1,000 that Minnesota would go Democratic in the coming election. Meanwhile, Northfield resident John Archer admired their horses tied up outside. “They were all first-class horses,” he said, “and would attract attention anywhere.”63
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