After all the horses had gotten a good drink from the trough, the outlaws decided to give the Faribault men a good scare and began firing their revolvers at the water pump. Wood splinters flew every which way as the bystanders dove for cover. A little girl happened to step into the doorway of the saloon as an outlaw fired, and his bullet just grazed her.
As the robbers galloped down the road and disappeared into the forest, the Faribault men scrambled for their guns. They rustled through their supplies in the back of the wagon, searching for their boxes of cartridges. Once they found the ammunition, they hurriedly loaded their firearms, but the men were not crazy about immediately going after the outlaws. The gang’s demonstration of firepower had made a big impression. But within five minutes, another squad of manhunters arrived in town, boosting the courage of the Faribault men. The entire party, fourteen in number, set off after the bandits.
Bob’s injury, as well as his mount, which was not nearly the same quality of horseflesh as that of his companions, prevented the gang from moving with the speed they were known for. The Faribault posse, despite the wagons they traveled with, steadily gained on the outlaws. Four miles from Shieldsville, the posse caught sight of the bandits in a ravine. The outlaws were out of killing range—the posse had no rifles, which could have done the job at this distance—but the excited possemen opened fire anyway. The outlaws heard the bullets slicing through the air near them, followed by the pops of the guns, and they wheeled around, drawing their revolvers as they did so. The bandits fired at the posse in the distance, their shots so close together it sounded like a single volley.
One of the posse’s bullets hit Cole Younger’s “crazy bone” on his elbow. The lead bullet had lost nearly all its momentum, but it still hurt like hell, causing Cole, who had hold of Bob’s mount, to jerk both his and Bob’s horse about. Suddenly, Bob’s horse slipped and fell to the ground, throwing him off. He screamed in pain as he tumbled, his companions all cursing in confusion. As he scrambled and struggled to pull himself back up on his horse, the saddle girth broke and his horse ran away.
Cole shouted at his brother to get up behind him, which Bob did, though with difficulty. The outlaws then spurred their horses and raced into the nearby woods. The posse cautiously moved to the spot where the outlaws had fired at them, rounded up Bob’s horse and the stolen saddle, but they soon lost all track of the outlaws.
As the sun sank toward the horizon, the gang had the advantage of darkness, but the fading daylight also brought confusion. Most of the boys had purchased Minnesota maps, though they were not especially accurate or detailed, and the bandits would have little time to study them now. “We were in a strange country,” Cole wrote later. “On the prairie our maps were all right, but when we got into the big woods and among the lakes we were practically lost.”
At dusk, the gang confronted a farmer on horseback named Levi Sager. They told him they were after the robbers and asked if he had seen any posses. Sager knew all about the raid, and said he had seen a squad of manhunters pass down the road just a few minutes earlier. One of the gang remarked that the posse was heading the wrong way. The robbers had gone to Shieldsville, he told Sager. The boys continued to pump the farmer for information, finally telling him he would have to guide them to the road to Waterville and lend them his horse.
On what authority? Sager retorted.
The boys just laughed and told him he could go to hell.
One of the outlaws got up on Sager’s horse, but the animal immediately began to prance about. Sager’s horse had never been ridden by a man wearing spurs and it didn’t take too kindly to the outlaw’s long, pointed rowels. The rider tried his best to get the horse to cooperate, but after a quarter mile of fighting the animal, he gave up and let Sager have his cussed mount back. But the gang was not finished with Sager. They forced him to stay with them for much longer than he cared to, only freeing him when they reached a farm field south of Kilkenny, in southeastern Le Sueur County. As Sager hightailed it back home, the gang melted into the darkness.
The robbers found shelter that night in the farmhouse of Lord Brown, who lived on the Waterville road. Whether or not Brown knew who his guests were has never been clear. The shot-up and bloodied outlaws were not your typical houseguests.
Well hidden at Brown’s place, the outlaws dressed their wounds and talked over their plans for the next morning. Even as exhausted as they were, they had difficulty sleeping that night. The James-Younger gang had lost two good men on the streets of Northfield, and they had killed a man—perhaps even two. They had not gotten nearly as far as they needed to, and the Big Woods had left them confused and disoriented. But Jesse, Frank, Cole, and Jim had ridden with the bushwhackers Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. They had been in tight spots before.
And yet, Minnesota was feeling tighter by the hour. All through the night, the manhunters increased in number, reaching at least two hundred men. Parties of horsemen moved in silence over dirt roads and paths. Guards stood watch at bridges, fords, and crossroads. Using this spotty, makeshift picket line, Sheriff Ara Barton of Rice County aimed to stop the robbers’ flight and contain them in the Big Woods, where the posses could eventually flush them out and capture or kill them. Barton and his fellow lawmen felt confident that the next day would bring a new sighting and a fresh trail to follow. Now, as a chill rain began to fall upon southern Minnesota, the manhunters waited anxiously for the morning—as did Jesse James and the gang.
Clell Miller in death.
(Northfield Historical Society)
Clell Miller’s dead eyes were frozen in a look of surprise. His shirtless body had been carefully propped up in a sitting position for Ira Sumner, a Northfield photographer. A dark ribbon of dried blood flowed down from a jagged hole in Miller’s upper chest, and he had large welts on his forehead where Elias Stacy had peppered him with a shotgun. Next to Miller’s corpse was the body of Bill Chadwell, also shirtless. Unlike Miller, Chadwell seemed to glare, his narrow eyes fixed in a look of defiance. He had a small hole above his heart, the fatal wound delivered by Anselm Manning’s rifle, and the dried blood ran in a straight line to his waistband.
Bill Chadwell in death.
(Northfield Historical Society)
Sumner bent over behind his large camera, a black cape draped over his head, and carefully focused the ground glass lens on his subjects. Once it was focused, he quickly slid a wooden plate holder into the back of the camera. The holder contained a single glass plate, freshly coated on one side with silver-sensitized collodion. Sumner then pulled up the thin slide covering the plate, the last step before making an exposure. He next reached around with his right hand to the front of the camera and carefully removed the lens cap, holding it to the side as he counted six seconds in his head. He then replaced the cap and reinserted the slide, after which he removed the plate holder from the camera. Sumner repeated this process for each image made—at least five—after which he went to his darkroom to develop the plates before the collodion had a chance to dry.
The bodies were then carried down the stairs from Sumner’s second-floor studio on Division Street and returned to the vacant store on Mill Square where they had spent the night. A coroner’s inquest was scheduled for 11:00 A.M., and the bodies would need to be stripped and washed clean before then. According to one account, so many people wanted to see the dead robbers that their bodies were displayed for a short time in Mill Square, which became packed with gawkers, sheriffs and police officers from nearby towns, newspaper reporters, posse volunteers, and Northfield’s own citizens, both children and adults. The square quickly filled with the excited chattering of the crowd.
“Every man encountered had his story to tell,” wrote the Minneapolis Tribune’s correspondent, “and the reporter had but to make known his mission and forthwith were opened upon him the floodgates of information.”
Everyone wanted to know who the dead men were. Where did they come from? Why Northfield? People tried to find clues in the
robbers’ clothing and personal items. The shorter one, Clell Miller, wore new-looking clothes under his ulster duster. His shirt, topped with a white linen collar, looked like he had unwrapped it the morning of the robbery. A white linen handkerchief was tied around his neck, and his fur felt hat, “John Hancock make,” was also new and of fine quality, although now it had a few small holes in it. Clell also wore a plain gold ring, gold sleeve buttons, and a gold Howard pocket watch worth $175. For socks, he wore “striped half hose,” and his boots, although of good quality, did not match, one being finer and lighter than the other.
Clell had a leather money belt hidden in his clothing, although it contained no money. A search of his pockets uncovered a Minnesota map, a pocket compass, the Rice County Journal news item describing the improvements at the First National Bank, $5.75 in currency, and a short piece from an unknown Minnesota newspaper listing the “Arab Horse Maxims.” “Whoso raiseth and traineth a horse for the Lord,” read the first maxim, “is counted in the number of those who give alms day and night. . . . He will find his reward. All his sins will be forgiven him; never will any fear come over him and dishonor his heart.”
Bill Chadwell wore a new suit of black clothes worth some $30 and a new colored shirt. His pockets bulged with ammunition, and a cartridge belt circled his waist beneath his suit. He had a fine gold Waltham watch and ten cents in currency. A business card for the livery stable of St. Peter’s Nicollet House was found in one pocket, its reverse side featuring a table of distances for the principal towns of southern Minnesota. Chadwell also had an advertisement for Hall’s Safe & Lock Co., which he had torn out of the Rice County Journal. The advertisement featured a crude engraving of two bearded robbers using various tools to break into a Hall’s safe.
“It’s no go, Jim,” says one of the safecrackers, “it’s a Hall.”
A Saint Paul Dispatch reporter took a tape measure to “the ghastly forms of the two bandits” and carefully examined their wounds. Chadwell’s skin, he noted, was “as fair and soft as a lady’s.” He said nothing about Miller’s skin, but he discovered that Miller had several pellet wounds on his back, indicating the outlaw had been hit by at least two shotgun blasts.
Neither of the dead men carried any personal letters or photographs of loved ones. The Pioneer Press & Tribune said that the “fact that nothing was found on the dead robbers to indicate who they were or where they came from clearly shows that they were professional brigands, probably from Missouri or Kansas, as it is a rule with such, when on marauding expeditions attended with danger of capture or death, to have nothing about their persons by which their names could be ascertained.”
Sometime on Friday, Caleb Peterman of Cannon Falls, fifteen miles away, came to Northfield to view the bodies. The thirty-one-year-old Peterman suspected his ne’er-do-well brother-in-law, Bill Stiles, might have been involved in the raid. Stiles had supposedly written from Texas two months earlier, claiming to have “made a good haul.” “If you want $100 or $200,” he wrote Peterman, “say so.” Stiles had also said he was planning to be in Minnesota in a few weeks and knew where he could make another “good haul.”
Peterman did not hide the reason he was visiting Northfield, and a crowd of townspeople and reporters gathered around him, eager to see if he could identify one of the robbers. Peterman looked closely at Chadwell’s body and told the several onlookers that if the man was Stiles, there would be a scar under his left arm. Someone lifted the arm and, indeed, the scar was there. Peterman didn’t move and refused to say if the outlaw was his brother-in-law. The crowd began urging him to respond, and finally Peterman admitted that the dead man was Bill Stiles.
Peterman said he knew little about Stiles’s background: he had been twenty-three years old and had grown up at Monticello, Minnesota, in Wright County, though his father now lived at Grand Forks, Dakota Territory. The Northfield authorities immediately contacted the father, who did not seem surprised that his son had taken part in the holdup. “I thought he was in Texas,” Mr. Stiles remarked. “I suppose he got in with a lot of them damned pirates.” Mr. Stiles then explained that his son “had always been a wild boy and he could do nothing with him, but he did not think him vicious.”
Peterman’s identification made a lot of sense. Stiles was the perfect local guide for the Missouri bandits. When others later identified the dead outlaw as Bill Chadwell, people reasoned that “Chadwell” was simply one of Stiles’s aliases. According to some newspapers, the bandits had even used the name “Stiles” before. When talking to the Millersburg farmer, the gang had supposedly told him that the “blackleg” they had killed was named Stiles.
But, even though this all made sense at the time, Bill Chadwell was not Bill Stiles. For whatever reason, Caleb Peterman had perpetrated one of the biggest cases of false identification in Minnesota history. And that soon became clear. Several citizens of Monticello, who knew Stiles “almost as well as they know members of their own family,” examined Sumner’s photograph of Chadwell and said they were “perfectly confident that he is not the man,” that the dead outlaw bore no resemblance to Stiles whatsoever. One acquaintance pointed out a problem that should have been obvious to the brother-in-law: Stiles was only five feet, eight inches tall, whereas Chadwell was six feet, four inches. Another associate, who claimed to have been with Stiles in the pinery over the winter, had seen him there as late as May or June. “At that time,” said the informant, “Stiles was trapping and hunting with the Chippewas and did not dare to come out of the woods for fear of being arrested for selling whiskey to the Indians.”
Even Stiles’s father added to the chorus, angrily writing the press that he had never recognized his son in the photographs of the dead robbers, as some papers reported. He asserted having been recently contacted by Peterman, who was also denying much of what was attributed to him in the newspapers. The intriguing letter from Stiles to Peterman quoted by the press did not contain an offer of money, Peterman said. Instead, Stiles was writing from Texas asking for money.
Bob Younger had the last word on this when he later stated that no man from Minnesota was part of the gang. “The name of Bill Stiles,” he insisted, “is simply a reporter’s imagination.”
But over the years, writers and historians would perpetuate the myth of the outlaw band’s Minnesota guide, and more than a few would embellish it, claiming that Bill Stiles was the one who convinced Jesse James that the banks of Minnesota were easy pickings. No writers questioned why the outlaws found it necessary to buy several maps, nor did anyone bother to explore the wealth of evidence, including federal, state, and territorial census records showing that Bill Stiles and Bill Chadwell were two very different young men. The only things Stiles and Chadwell shared in common were their given names, the year of their birth, and their willingness to live outside the law.
As the coroner’s jury convened in Northfield for its inquest on the bodies of what one newspaper described as “the two scoundrels who met with such a richly deserved fate,” Minnesota governor John S. Pillsbury drafted a reward proclamation. He dipped his steel-tipped pen into a bottle of ink on his desk and, with a quick flourish, signed his name to the official document, declaring a $1,500 reward for the capture of the bank robbers. The First National Bank offered a reward of $500, a sum put up by John T. Ames and his brother, Adelbert, on behalf of the bank, which they did because the bank’s president and cashier were out of town and its treasurer lay dead. Any amount larger would have to wait until the officers and directors could convene.
The news of the bank’s seemingly trivial reward caused considerable indignation. The Saint Paul Dispatch commented, “If the brave and heroic Heywood could know that after sacrificing his life in the path of duty and preserving the entire contents of the bank, the owners of that institution offer the paltry sum of $700 [$500] for the capture of his brutal murderers, he would rest uneasy in his coffin and feel that his sacrifice had been in vain.”
Within a week, the First National raised
its reward from $500 to $3,000. Governor Pillsbury also raised the state’s reward offer to $1,000 per man, making for a potential payout of $9,000 if all six robbers were caught. The Saint Paul Dispatch also noted that the governor’s proclamation labeled the robbers “outlaws, which gives every man a right to shoot them down.”
There had been plenty of shooting already, and it was fast becoming apparent that this reward was not for just any outlaws, but rather for the most notorious and feared bandits in the nation. Detective Larry Hazen of Cincinnati, still diligently at work on the Rocky Cut case for the Adams Express Company, could not get to Minnesota fast enough. Eight heavily armed men on horseback robbing a bank in broad daylight, committing bloody murder, and standing their ground in a deadly shoot-out with townspeople? Such ruthless swagger could only come from the James-Younger gang.
Hazen stepped off a train in St. Paul on the evening of September 8. The scrappy, forty-six-year-old Irishman, a bushy black mustache under his nose, stood only five feet, five inches tall. But the little man knew his business, having served as Cincinnati’s chief of police during the Civil War, and he had been working as a detective for the Adams Express Company since 1872.
A newspaper reporter caught up to Hazen, who did not hesitate to blame the Rocky Cut robbers for the Northfield debacle, accurately naming all eight members of the gang who had traveled to Minnesota. The detective made the short journey to Northfield the following day, where he got his first look at Sumner’s photographs of the dead bandits. Hazen, in another testament to the difficulty of identifying the men without accurate portraits or descriptions, misidentified both of them. He said the tall man, Bill Chadwell, was Charlie Pitts, and the shorter bandit, Clell Miller, he named as Chadwell. Not until copies of the photographs had been received by Kansas City chief of police Thomas M. Speers would the dead robbers be accurately identified as Bill Chadwell and Clell Miller.
Shot All to Hell Page 11
