Hobbs Kerry had been blowing lots of money—more than a thousand dollars—and he was not the type of fellow who was flush with cash. The twenty-three-year-old son of a schoolteacher was somewhat of a local tough around Granby, Missouri, a lead-mining boomtown in the extreme southwestern part of the state. The brown-eyed Kerry was of slight build, not weighing more than one hundred twenty pounds, and he stood five feet, eight inches tall. Probably the most noticeable things about him were his large, sharp nose and the way he moved: he was quick and wiry. And he was a pitiful gambler. He lost most of a wad of greenbacks in a matter of days at the faro and poker tables in Granby and nearby Joplin.
On July 31, two undercover St. Louis police officers surprised Kerry in Granby, arresting him at gunpoint. Heavily ironed, he was quickly ushered onto an eastbound train before any friends could come to his aid. An associate of Kerry’s, Bruce Younger, uncle of the infamous Younger brothers, was arrested the same day in Joplin. Both men were accused of participating in the Rocky Cut robbery.
In St. Louis, Chief of Police James McDonough and Larry Hazen, a well-known Cincinnati private detective who worked for the express companies, interrogated Kerry and Younger. The accused men said they knew nothing about Rocky Cut, with Kerry claiming that several “respectable citizens” of Granby would vouch for his whereabouts at the time of the holdup. But Kerry could not explain where he had gotten all the cash he had blown on his recent drinking and gambling spree—he only had $20 in his pockets when he was arrested.
Chief McDonough ordered a special train to transport Kerry and Younger to Sedalia, where he had witnesses waiting to view his prisoners. Express messenger Bushnell did not recognize either Kerry or Younger, but a Mr. and Mrs. Duvall, living twelve miles southeast of Sedalia, positively identified Kerry as one of four strangers who had shown up at their home the Sunday before the robbery. With this identification in hand, McDonough and Hazen pressured Kerry to talk, but he continued to claim he was innocent. At this point, McDonough pulled a letter from his pocket and began slowly reading it out loud. Kerry’s face turned pale as he recognized his own words. The letter had been written to a Granby saloonkeeper, a friend of Kerry’s, and it described Kerry’s efforts to get in the James-Younger gang and also his attempts to persuade the gang to rob the office of the Granby Mining & Smelting Company.
McDonough told Kerry that his officers had intercepted the letter several weeks ago after receiving a tip about the planned Granby holdup. He had hoped to set a trap for the James-Younger gang in Granby, but for reasons unknown, the robbery attempt never happened. However, McDonough had quickly concluded that the Rocky Cut holdup was the work of the same gang, and Kerry’s absence from the Granby area for several days, coupled with his recent return and newfound wealth, confirmed the chief’s suspicions.
Kerry broke down. He admitted that he had been involved in the Rocky Cut robbery and offered to tell everything he knew in exchange for a promise of a reduced sentence. He was not really a bad person, he pleaded; it was Bruce Younger who had “led him into bad ways.” But McDonough refused to make promises. Kerry thought for a moment, the room going silent as McDonough, Hazen, and an Adams Express Company agent anxiously awaited Kerry’s decision. Finally, Kerry said he would take his chances and make a full confession. He revealed that a total of eight men had robbed train number four of the Missouri Pacific. Bruce Younger had not participated, Kerry said, although he knew about the holdup.
Then came what everyone desperately wanted to hear: the names of the men Kerry had ridden with to the Lamine River the night of July 7. Kerry spilled it all. The robbers were Bill Chadwell, Charlie Pitts, Clell Miller, Cole Younger, Bob Younger, Frank James, and Jesse James.
The press aptly nicknamed Hobbs Kerry “the squealer,” and he was the James-Younger gang’s first big mistake. Not only did he tell McDonough all about the Rocky Cut robbery, but he furnished details he had picked up about the gang’s involvement in other holdups: the train robbery at Gads Hill, Missouri, in January 1874, which netted more than $6,000, and the September 1875 robbery of the bank in Huntington, West Virginia, of more than $10,000. Kerry cautioned that the gang was very well organized and extremely wary, employing secret “grips, signs, passwords, [and] signals of danger.” The easiest part of a robbery, he offered, was the getaway, because the bandits had “numerous followers and friends throughout the State.”
St. Louis Chief of Police James McDonough.
(Collection of the author)
Kerry’s confession was an incredible coup for the rotund, sixty-nine-year-old Chief McDonough, who was in his third stint as head of St. Louis’s metropolitan police department (he had been selected as the city’s first chief in 1861). McDonough sported a bushy white mustache and had a reputation for being a little too fond of his liquor, but no one could complain that the chief was inactive; he, or at least his men, had proven themselves to be determined manhunters. They were exactly the type of force the Missouri legislature had in mind when it passed the Suppression of Outlawry Act in 1874 that set aside a “state secret service fund” to finance a special force to capture the robber band.
But McDonough completely squandered his advantage over the James-Younger gang, and his undoing was failing to keep the lid on his investigation. News of the arrests of Kerry and Younger splashed across newspaper pages on August 4, and the names of the men Kerry fingered were published just four days later. Despite a promise to withhold Kerry’s full confession until all the robbers were apprehended, McDonough released it to the press on the evening of August 12, with several newspapers publishing it in its entirety the following day. Some of the detectives complained to the press that McDonough’s indiscretions only served to give “the robbers notice, and will result in driving them out of the country.”
Those detectives were dead right. It was plain to the James-Younger gang that they needed to get away from Missouri for a time. Money was not a problem; they just had to decide where they wanted to go.
TWO
BAND OF BROTHERS
The Younger boys, and the James boys, are as much a terror to the honest people of the southwest as was Captain Kidd in his day to the merchantmen on sea.
—THE EXPRESSMAN’S MONTHLY, 1876
They were all young men. Not one of them was older than thirty-five, and half of them were still single. People thought of them as courteous and good-natured, even jolly. And their Missouri drawls added to their charm. This “twang” sound, with the r’s barely audible, was not as harsh as a Texan’s, or as southern as a Georgian’s. But it stuck out, especially to folks from the North.
Nobody had the slightest inkling these affable men were stone-cold killers. Yet the men of the James-Younger gang were hardened to violence and bloodshed. Many of them had been baptized by fire as guerrilla fighters (better known as “bushwhackers”) in the most savage theater of the Civil War. These outlaws wouldn’t hesitate to pull a trigger and snuff out a man’s life. But they had not always been that way.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Henry Washington Younger was a farmer, merchant, and mail contractor with extensive properties in Jackson and Cass Counties. The family was wealthy enough to have house slaves to tend to the chores and meals for the large Younger family—nine girls and five boys. Thomas Coleman Younger, known as Cole, and his siblings were well-schooled, churchgoing Missourians living in what he fondly remembered as a “garden spot.”
Henry Younger was against the South’s secession but he was also pro-slavery. He feared secession would cause upheaval and unrest, which he thought would lead to the end of slavery.
“He was for the Union,” Cole recalled, “in spite of his natural inclinations to sympathy with the South.”
But Henry Younger’s particular stance didn’t matter to the Kansas jayhawkers who rode across the border to punish and plunder Southerners. Their relentless raiding in the war’s first year alone cost Henry Younger several thousand dollars in stolen and destroyed property. Cole was seventeen
years old at the time, and he left home to join the pro-Confederate Quantrill Raiders. His punching of a much older Missouri State Militia officer at a recent dance party helped this decision along.
“I happened to be rather more popular with the girls,” Cole explained.
Cole learned how to hide out in the brush as a member of Quantrill’s band, and he learned how to fight like a man possessed. But, as with many of his fellow bushwhackers, his fierceness was born of personal tragedy, bitterness, and a fire for revenge.
Now that Cole was a known guerrilla, Henry Younger and his family were even more of a target. In July 1862, militia soldiers waylaid Henry just outside of Westport and put three bullets in his back. The murderers were never prosecuted; after all, it was just one more atrocity among countless others committed by both sides during Missouri’s war years. Seven months later, militia soldiers showed up at the Younger home. Cole’s mother, Bursheba, had been providing food and clothing to her sons, and the soldiers were there to put an end to that.
“They pillaged the house,” Cole recalled angrily, “and forced my mother to set it on fire with her own hands.”
Then in the summer of 1863, three of Cole’s sisters and two of his female cousins were arrested and confined in a three-story brick store building in Kansas City, along with several other young women suspected of spying for the bushwhackers. On August 13, the building suddenly collapsed amid shrieks of terror and a boiling cloud of dust. Four of the women inside were crushed to death, including one of the Younger cousins. Cole always believed that Union soldiers had caused the building to be “secretly undermined . . . with the [intended] murder of my sisters and cousins and the other unfortunate women in mind.” He was not the only one who thought that, and he wouldn’t wait long for vengeance.
Early on August 21, a column of more than four hundred heavily armed horsemen appeared on the outskirts of Lawrence, Kansas, a jayhawker hotbed a good forty miles west of the Missouri border. The enigmatic William Clarke Quantrill rode at the column’s head, and close by rode a young man who had quickly become one of his best and most loyal fighters: Cole Younger. What followed was, in Cole’s words, “a day of butchery.”
“Kill! Kill and make no mistake!” Quantrill shouted to his men that morning. “Lawrence should be thoroughly cleansed, and the only way to cleanse it is to kill! Kill!”
By 9:00 A.M., the guerrillas had massacred more than 150 men and boys, most of them civilians. Many were gunned down in front of their wives and families. One hundred homes were torched, as were dozens of businesses. As the raiders escaped, their pockets and haversacks stuffed with booty, black plumes of smoke rose high into the sky. There was not even the gentlest breeze that mild day, and for hours the smoke could be seen for miles.
One writer later claimed that Cole saved at least a dozen Lawrence citizens from slaughter that day, and there may be some truth in this. In other incidents from his bushwhacker days, he was known as a man who could show mercy to his enemies. But Cole never denied he did his fair share of the killing in Lawrence, and he never expressed a bit of remorse for the attack.
That fall, Cole rode south to Texas with a company of bushwhackers. He later wrote of fighting here and there in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. He also said he’d been part of an astonishing expedition across the plains in 1864 to cut a transcontinental telegraph line in Colorado and, following that, a “secret mission” escorting a Confederate agent to Victoria, British Columbia. These latter exploits were some of Cole’s whoppers (he even said he’d gotten into scrapes with Comanches and Apaches). Whatever Cole’s wartime adventures might truly have been, at the end of the Civil War, he was living in California, at the home of an uncle.
Cole’s brother James joined a small band under Quantrill in 1864. The “brave, dauntless, high-spirited boy,” whom everyone called Jim, was only sixteen years old at the time. In January 1865, when Quantrill slipped into Kentucky with fewer than forty men, Jim Younger was with him. Before the month was out, though, Jim and several companions had been captured by Kentucky Federals at a farmhouse near Harrodsburg and were in jail in Lexington. The bushwhackers were threatened with hanging—on three separate occasions—but nothing happened to them. Jim was lucky; had he been caught back in Missouri, the Federals could not have gotten the noose around his neck fast enough.
Jim was eventually transferred to a Louisville prison, escaped (or was released), and made his way back to Missouri.
Quantrill never made it out of Kentucky. He took a rifle ball to the spine in a surprise attack on May 10. Paralyzed below the shoulders, the once-feared guerrilla chieftain died from his wound four weeks later. On July 26, the last of Quantrill’s bushwhacker followers, just sixteen men, surrendered at Samuels Depot, Kentucky. Among the ragtag group was a twenty-two-year-old veteran fighter from Clay County, Missouri, by the name of Frank James.
Alexander Franklin James and Jesse Woodson James spurred their horses and worked their Navy Colts with a ferociousness equal to any of their fellow guerrillas. On September 27, 1864, they were part of “Bloody Bill” Anderson’s band of eighty men as they thundered into the small town of Centralia, situated on the line of the North Missouri Railroad. Bloody Bill’s nickname was well-earned. He and his followers were famous for scalping and mutilating dead enemy soldiers, not to mention murdering pro-Union civilians. Bloody Bill had turned especially sadistic after one of his sisters was killed and another seriously injured in the Kansas City prison collapse.
On this day, a steam train had the misfortune of arriving at the Centralia depot just as the bushwhackers were finishing sacking the town. Twenty-five Federals on furlough, most of them unarmed, were passengers on the train. Bloody Bill marched the soldiers onto the station platform, forced them to strip, and then joined his men in a cold-blooded execution, sparing only one sergeant for a possible prisoner exchange.
A few hours later, 115 Federals tracked the bushwhackers to their camp three miles away. Instead of finding the eighty culprits, they ran face-to-face into more than two hundred long-haired, revolver-packing guerrillas. Bloody Bill led the single, devastating charge. Many of the Federals were shot down running away in terror—others while begging for mercy. Jesse James, his seventeen-year-old boyish face without a single whisker, galloped straight for the Federal commander and shot him dead.
“We never took prisoners,” Frank James explained years later. “How could we carry them around with us? We either killed them or turned them loose.”
The bushwhackers never had a problem with the killings, but the Federals weren’t troubled by it either. Frank was likely right when he said the Federals would have killed all of Anderson’s men if they’d had the chance. The war in Missouri was a deeply personal one. It made no difference whether you wore a uniform or not. The violence was unforgiving, and, like the Youngers, the James boys had their own reasons for shedding Union blood.
Frank and Jesse’s father was a cultured, college-educated Baptist minister named Robert James. A well-liked “doer” in Clay County, Robert was instrumental in the founding of William Jewell College at Liberty—which thrives to this day. The boys, born in 1843 and 1847, respectively, grew up on a small farm nestled in rolling hills and scattered patches of woods. The James family was not as well off as the Youngers, but they had enough to own a family of slaves and were typically “Southern” in their feeling about that.
Jesse’s birthplace, the James farm, from an 1877 photograph.
(Library of Congress)
In 1850, Robert James left Clay County for the California gold fields. Some say the Reverend James went to find the famed riches that were talked about in blacksmith shops, post offices, taverns, and other places. Others claim he left to preach the gospel. But the Jameses’ neighbors said he left to get away from his wife, Zerelda. She was a tall, strong-willed, and deeply outspoken woman; one acquaintance called her “Captain Zerelda.” If it was to flee his marriage, he succeeded; Robert James died in a California mining camp fr
om an unknown illness just five months later.
Zerelda and the boys stayed on in Clay County, where they grew tobacco and other crops on their two-hundred-acre farm. In 1855, Zerelda married Dr. Reuben Samuel, her third husband, and continued to reign supreme in the family. She made sure the farm and slaves would remain her property through a prenuptial agreement. The remarkable mother of the James boys, as everyone knew, was a force as unbending as a hickory rail.
The outbreak of the Civil War brought both excitement and apprehension to the citizens of Clay County—not to mention suspicion of one another.
“The people were all mixed up and everybody was a spy for his side,” Frank James recalled. “You were for the South and your neighbor was for Lincoln.”
Frank joined a local company in May 1861 and was part of the Southern victories at Wilson’s Creek and Lexington. But he contracted measles and was captured that winter while recovering in a military hospital. The Federals paroled Frank and sent him home, but he could not stay out of the fight—no one could. By spring 1863, he had joined up with the bushwhackers. He rode with Quantrill, Cole Younger, and the other guerrillas to Lawrence. There is no evidence that Frank James spared anyone’s life on that bloody August day.
Jesse was too young to join up, but, as Frank would claim later, the Federals “drove him to it.” Frank had been riding with the bushwhackers for a few weeks when a local militia detachment arrived at the James farm looking for Frank and his comrades. When Jesse refused to give away his brother, the soldiers whipped him until the boy couldn’t speak. The militiamen next found Dr. Samuel, put a noose around his neck, and, as his family watched in horror, strung the man up. They released the rope before Samuel passed out, and he fell to the ground in a lump, tears streaming from his eyes as he gasped for breath. That was enough for the doctor to lead the soldiers to the bushwhacker camp. Upon their arrival, a surprised Frank James ran like the devil, narrowly escaping as bullets whizzed through the brush near him.
Shot All to Hell Page 3
