Frank, Bob, and Charlie were to proceed with the holdup only if there were just a few people on the street. They had to make this decision because there would be no way to consult the others without drawing unwanted attention. The boys were all quite confident; they had been pulling off these jobs for years. Clell Miller was so certain he fished out his pipe and lit it, telling Cole he planned to smoke it during the whole damned robbery.
Frank, Bob, and Charlie rode through Mill Square, passing on their right the hardware stores of J. S. Allen and Anselm Manning and finally they rode by the Scriver Building. Boxes of dry goods and displays of merchandise were crowded around the entrances to the two stores occupying the front of the building: Hiram Scriver’s dry-goods business and Lee & Hitchcock’s general store.
Turning onto Division Street, the three outlaws continued south to the First National Bank, got off their horses, and tossed their reins over the hitching posts. Two of them walked back to the corner. An exterior stairway led down from the second floor of the Scriver, and the two men lounged around this stairway for a few minutes, leaning against the banister and sitting on a wooden box in front of the general store. They seemed to be casually chatting, but they were carefully taking in their surroundings and waiting for Cole and Clell to appear.
Cole rode across the bridge with Clell and saw the guys sitting on the corner up ahead, but Cole also saw quite a few townspeople milling around, and he became alarmed.
“Surely the boys will not go into the bank with so many people about,” he told Clell. “I wonder why they did not ride on through town?”
One of the people in town was J. S. Allen, who had been standing in the doorway of his hardware store when the first three outlaws rode through the square.
“Who are those men?” he said. “I don’t like the looks of them.” Allen left his store and walked toward the Scriver to get a better look. He saw someone he knew and turned to him. “I believe they are here to rob the bank,” Allen said.
About this time, the two outlaws at the Scriver corner saw Cole and Clell at the bridge, and they immediately stood up and walked around the corner and out of sight.
“They are going in,” Clell said.
“If they do, the alarm will be given as sure as there’s a hell,” Cole exclaimed, “so you had better take that pipe out of your mouth.”
Henry Wheeler watched Frank, Bob, and Charlie enter the bank. He took them to be cattlemen. A farmer passing on the sidewalk asked Wheeler if he knew why so many saddle horses were in town. It was a good question, because most folks in that part of the country traveled about in farm wagons and buggies. And there were those dusters the men were wearing, too.
“It made them look kind of uniform,” recalled one Northfield resident.
Inside the Dunn & Riddell hardware store (next door to Henry Wheeler’s father’s drugstore), Mrs. John Handy stared out the glass storefront at the bank across the street. She had also noticed all the saddle horses in town. And in an odd coincidence, she happened to be from St. Albans. This reminded her of that terrifying day back in 1864. She became so strangely fixated on the men that Mr. Riddell was having a difficult time waiting on her.
Alonzo Bunker, the bank’s teller.
(Collection of the author)
She couldn’t even say anything as she watched the three men step into the First National. Suddenly, Mrs. Handy took a sharp breath and blurted out, “They are robbing the bank! I saw the revolvers”—the flash of those nickel-plated six-shooters. A stunned Mr. Riddell watched Mrs. Handy bolt for his store’s back door.
Alonzo Bunker, the First National Bank’s teller, was at work at his desk when he heard the door open and footsteps on the wood floor of the small lobby. The sound was nothing new and only meant a customer had arrived. So Bunker turned from his desk and, like always, moved to the open space at the counter.
But this time three large revolvers pointed at his face.
“Throw up your hands, for we intend to rob this bank,” Frank James shouted, “and if you holler we will blow your God damned brains out.”
Frank Wilcox, assistant bookkeeper.
(Collection of the author)
Bunker first thought some friends were playing a joke on him and he merely stood there. That’s when Frank demanded to know which one was the cashier. Heywood spoke up from his desk: “He is not in.”
The three robbers jumped up and over the counter. Shouting commands, they forced Bunker and Frank Wilcox to their knees. Heywood stood up from his desk but was told to get on the floor with his hands up.
Frank James pointed his revolver at each of them in turn and shouted, “You are the cashier”—while each man denied it. At the same time, Bob Younger and Charlie Pitts searched the men for weapons. Younger started patting Wilcox’s clothes, the smell of liquor clearly on the outlaw’s breath.
Wilcox always kept a large jackknife in his hip pocket, and when Younger felt the knife, he stopped and said, “What’s this?” Wilcox nervously explained that it was only a pocketknife, and Younger let him be and began rummaging around the counter for money.
Bunker realized he was still holding his pen in his hand. As he lowered his hand to place the pen on the counter, Younger saw him and brought his pistol to Bunker’s nose.
“Here, put up your hands, and keep ’em up or I’ll kill you,” Younger said. Bunker’s hand shot back up.
Frank James kept shouting for the cashier. He stepped up to Heywood, who had been sitting at the cashier’s desk, stuck his revolver in his face, and said, “You are the cashier. Now open the safe you God damned son of a bitch!”
Heywood looked up the gun’s barrel at Frank and didn’t move an inch.
Outside on the street, Cole and Clell had ridden up in front of the bank just moments after the three robbers stepped inside. Cole got off his horse, threw a stirrup over his saddle, and acted as if he was adjusting the saddle’s cinch. But the door of the bank had been left open, and Cole could hear the loud voices of the boys inside; he told Clell to get down and close the door. Clell stepped partway into the bank, grabbed the door, and pulled it shut.
J. S. Allen, who was peering around the stairway from the corner of Lee & Hitchcock’s store, had seen the three men in the dusters enter the bank. He couldn’t stand it any longer—he was convinced these men were up to no good. He rushed down the sidewalk, and as he got to the front of the bank, he could see the bearded Joseph Lee Heywood through the plate glass. Allen stepped to the door just as Clell was closing it, and in an instant, Clell was in Allen’s face, his eyes like those of a wild man. He violently grabbed Allen’s collar and pushed a revolver barrel to his nose.
“You son of a bitch,” Clell said through clinched teeth, “don’t you holler!”
By this time, Henry Wheeler had also caught on to what was happening. He got up from his chair and took a few steps into the street. He saw Clell take hold of Allen, and then he saw Allen jerk free and start running toward Mill Square.
“Robbery!” Wheeler shouted. “They are robbing the bank!”
Clell immediately swung his pistol around and fired at Wheeler, the bullet going over the young man’s head.
“Get back, or I’ll kill you!” the outlaw yelled.
Wheeler did an about-face and ran into his father’s store.
The fifty-year-old Allen raced around the corner of the Scriver, his legs moving as fast as they did when he was a child. “Get your guns, boys,” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “They’re robbing the bank!”
Cole got back on his horse and began firing his pistol in the general direction of anyone who made the mistake of showing themselves on the street or even poking their head out of a doorway or window.
At the same time, he was shouting, “Get in, you son of a bitch!”
Jesse, Jim Younger, and Chadwell were waiting in Mill Square, and they immediately put spurs to their horses and began yelling like fiends and shooting their revolvers as they galloped to Division Street.
<
br /> Allen reached his hardware store in seconds and began handing out loaded firearms to anyone around there. It was the townspeople’s money in the bank, and as was the case with all banks at that time, those deposits were uninsured. In effect, the outlaws were robbing each citizen individually, at least what savings they had in the bank, which was plenty good reason to put up a fight.
Farmer Elias Stacy grabbed a shotgun from Allen and raced to the corner. As he stuck the barrel out around the stairway, he saw Clell Miller getting up on his horse. Stacy aimed at the outlaw’s head and let him have it. The charge was only birdshot, but the blast knocked Miller to the ground. He picked himself up and got back on his horse, but he could not shake off the stinging from the pellet-size wounds. Cole glanced over and saw the blood trickling down Miller’s face.
Anselm Manning.
(Collection of the author)
Guns were also coming from the hardware store of Anselm Manning. The forty-two-year-old Manning had been standing behind his counter when the gunfire erupted. He looked up just in time to see Jesse, Jim, and Chadwell gallop through the square, streams of white smoke streaking from the barrels of their revolvers as they fired them. This was not an everyday occurrence in Northfield, but Manning wasn’t especially concerned—at first. His employee, Ross C. Phillips, rushed to the front of the store and asked Manning what all the racket was.
“I think it’s that show that’s going to be here tonight”—the Great Professor Lingard. But Phillips went out the front door and turned toward Division Street, when he nearly ran into two people shouting the alarm. From inside the store, Manning heard someone yelling, “robbing the bank.” A second later, Phillips ran back into the store and headed straight for the glass display case that held the store’s firearms and ammunition.
As gunshots echoed through the square like Fourth of July fireworks, Phillips pulled revolvers and cartridges from the showcase and threw them on the glass top. Manning remembered he had a Remington rolling-block rifle in the store’s window, one he had practiced with in the spring. It used a .45-70 metallic cartridge. Manning pulled out the Remington, grabbed a handful of the heavy cartridges, and ran out the door, inserting a cartridge into the gun’s chamber as he headed for the sound of the gunfire.
When he reached the corner of the Scriver Building, Manning rashly stepped out from the stairway to get a good view down the street. He was immediately drawn to the riderless horses in front of the bank and two men taking cover behind them.
“I knew they were robbers the minute my eye struck them,” Manning recalled. “I drew my gun on them.”
But the robbers saw Manning and his raised Remington so they ducked their heads behind the horses. Undeterred, Manning lowered his gun ever so slightly and blasted the nearest horse, killing the one that belonged to Bob Younger. It collapsed in a heap in front of the bank.
“Jump back now or they’ll get you,” George Bates shouted to Manning from across the street.
Manning darted back from the corner to reload. But when he tried to extract the shell casing, he found it jammed tight in the gun’s chamber—his rifle had just become a heavy club. He ran to his store to get the shell out.
The gunfire increased as the seconds ticked by, as did the shouts and cursing of the robbers. Bates, positioned in the front door of a clothing store, had secured a shotgun and aimed it at the bandits.
But try as he might, he could not get the gun to go off. Disgusted, he tossed the shotgun away and grabbed a fine revolver—only to discover that it was unloaded. Still, whenever a rider came close, he pointed the empty revolver at him from the doorway, shouting, “Now I’ve got you.” Each time, the robber spun his horse and fired at the druggist, who ducked inside amid showers of glass and wood splinters.
Cole, Jesse, and the others were constantly driving away people who were drawn to the commotion on the street. Some townspeople were slow to react, not believing they were actually in the middle of a bandit raid on their peaceful town.
Dentist Danforth J. Whiting was at work in his office on the upper floor of the Scriver Building when he heard the gunshots and saw several doves flitter past his window, flushed from the street below. He poked his head out of the door at the top of the stairs on Division Street and saw “several men on horseback riding up and down the street firing revolvers, swearing and yelling in the wildest manner. Some man, apparently a foreigner, was coming up the sidewalk. They wanted him to run but he only took a natural gait which seemed to enrage one of the horsemen as he rode up near to him firing and ordering him off the street.”
When the robbers spotted Whiting, they yelled at him to get back in the building. He did, but a moment later he stepped out again, and one of the robbers cursed him and fired his pistol. Whiting jumped back.
“I was wondering all the time what all this meant,” Whiting recalled. “A lady in my office said there was to be an Indian show that evening and the show men were advertising.”
Forty-three-year-old undertaker Theodore Miller had a shop immediately next door to the bank and came to the doorway of his shop when the shooting started.
“I thought there was going to be a circus in town, and I stood and watched them,” Miller remembered.
The robbers screamed at Miller to get away, but he was nearly deaf and didn’t move until one of the outlaws shot at him, sending a bullet crashing into the door.
“At the same time, my wife came running down the stairs and told me something was going on in the bank and as she was shouting one of the robbers came right up to the shop and when I saw the pistol I knew he meant business, and I ran to the back door and jumped from the stair.” Miller didn’t say what he did with his wife.
While things were going to hell in the street, the boys in the bank were having troubles of their own. When Frank ordered Heywood to open the safe, Heywood calmly replied, “It is a time lock and cannot be opened now.”
“That’s a damn lie,” Frank shouted.
All the robbers knew about the Yale chronometer lock. Clell Miller had found the newspaper story about its installation at least a week before, had torn it from the paper, and carried it around with him in his pocket. But they knew that no bank would have a locked safe during business hours because the safe’s holdings had to be available to the bank’s customers. The boys were not new to this game, and they knew the cashiers often lied to protect the monies in their charge. And Frank knew Heywood was lying and he would have none of it.
First National Bank floor plan at the time of the raid.
(Collection of the author)
Frank went over to the open vault and stepped inside to try the safe. Suddenly, Heywood jumped up, sprang over to the vault door, and began to slam it shut. Pitts grabbed Heywood’s collar and violently pulled him back.
During the commotion with Heywood, Bunker slowly edged over toward a shelf below the teller’s window, his eyes on a loaded .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver he could see there. But Younger saw the teller’s movement and also spotted the revolver. The outlaw snatched the pistol from the shelf.
“You needn’t try to get hold of that,” Younger said as he slipped the revolver into a pocket. “You couldn’t do anything with that little derringer anyway.”
Frank yelled to Younger to gather up what money there was on the counter, and Younger pulled a grain sack from beneath his duster.
“Where’s the cashier’s till?” Younger demanded of the teller.
Bunker pointed to a small box with some nickels and scrip and said, “There’s the money outside.”
Younger grabbed a couple of handfuls and hurriedly stuffed them in the grain sack, but then hesitated because he was sure this couldn’t be all.
Agitated, Younger pointed his revolver at Bunker: “There’s more money than that out here. Where’s the cashier’s till?”
Younger pulled open a drawer in the counter, saw there was nothing but stationery and slammed it shut. Had he pulled open the drawer next to it, he would have disco
vered approximately $2,000 in cash.
Now all the robbers were yelling. Frank James kept up his abuse of Heywood, whose resistance both surprised and infuriated him. As treasurer of Carleton College, Heywood knew all the institution’s funds were sitting in that safe. If it was stolen, the college would be financially devastated.
“Damn you!” Pitts screamed. “Open that door or we’ll cut your throat from ear to ear.” He drew a large knife as he said this and took hold of Heywood’s hair, jerking his head back. Then Pitts ran the knife’s razor edge along Heywood’s throat, making a slight cut that oozed a thin red line.
Wilcox and Bunker looked on in horror as Heywood struggled to break free. Finally, Heywood twisted out of Pitts’s grasp and started to run away, yelling, “Murder! Murder! Murder!” Frank grabbed Heywood and, in one swift motion, raised his pistol in the air and brought the butt down violently on Heywood’s skull, knocking him to the floor. Frank then dragged Heywood back to the vault door.
As Heywood struggled to get up, Frank fired his pistol above the man’s head. The sound of the revolver blast in such close quarters caused a ringing pain in everyone’s ears. The shot also left a cloud of smoke in the vault.
Frank had purposely missed Heywood, intending to frighten him into cooperating. Bunker, who could not see Heywood well from his kneeling position, thought Frank had just committed murder and that he and Wilcox might be next. With adrenaline coursing through his body, Bunker jumped up and bolted for the rear of the bank. The back door was open, but blinds fastened on the inside blocked half the doorway.
Pitts ran after Bunker, firing his revolver as the man fled. The shot just missed but put a hole in the blinds a split second before Bunker crashed through them and out onto the stairs in the alley. Theodore Miller, the nearly deaf undertaker from next door, was just then at the back of the bank, and Bunker plowed over him.
Shot All to Hell Page 8
