“Get inside, you sons-of-bitches!”
As if on command, three other riders galloped across the iron bridge, yelling like savage Indians, firing their guns this way and that. I leaped from my chair, into the street, still amazed at what I seemed to be witnessing. “They’re robbing the bank!” I yelled.
The men in front of the bank turned to me. “Get in,” one said, “or we’ll kill you!”
Now, since I turned fourteen I have been hunting, and am more than a passing shot. I knew I needed to get my hands on a rifle, but my own En-field hung above the door inside my house. Blocks away A bullet smashed into the column beside me, and I realized I’d never make it to my house. Where? Where?
Mr. Allen’s hardware store? Perhaps Mr. Manning’s? No chance. I’d have to cross the street, now filled with chaos, with galloping outlaws firing pistols, and over to Mill Square. I’d be dead before I got halfway there. Suddenly I remembered the old Army carbine Dr. Dampier had shown me at his hotel. He kept it, he said, and a sack of cartridges behind the counter in the lobby. So I raced to the hotel, hearing gunshots, hoofs, screams, and a booming voice: “Let him go!”
Well, if that man-killer was referring to me, I am grateful they let me go.
Inside, a stunned Dr. Dampier did not comprehend the situation.
“They’re robbing the bank!” I told him. “I need that rifle of yours. And the shells!”
“Son,” the kindly man said, “they’re just playacting. Part of some troupe coming through, performing at the Opera House….”
“I tell you they are robbing the bank, sir. Please!”
I imagine the bullet that shattered one of his windowpanes changed his mind, and he quickly retrieved the carbine.
“Cartridges!” I demanded. “And caps.”
He moved slowly, put two on the counter, then another. “I can’t find the danged sack,” he said, but handed me a tube of percussion caps.
“I’ll take these.” I raced to the front door, stepping outside, met instantly with a shot that sang past my left ear.
“Get back inside, you Yankee bastard! Stay inside, or I’ll blow your damned head off!”
Good advice, I thought, and retreated deeper into the Dampier House. What had I been thinking, stepping onto the streets like that? Upstairs! I bounded the steps three at a time, knowing that a perch on the second floor would provide good cover and a clear aim.
The weapon was an old Smith breechloader, .52 caliber, firing foil and paper cartridges with a percussion cap. Dr. Dampier had carried it with him during the War of the Rebellion. When I reached the second story, I charged into a room, opened a window, and took in the scene. Five men on the streets, all in dusters, shooting, cursing, screaming. A man raced across the street with his son and took cover inside Eldred’s Confectionary. Another man climbed out from the stairs leading to the basement offices of Bierman’s furniture store. Just stood there like a dolt, either drunk or in shock.
For a moment, I simply stared at the battlefield below, seeking out a target, but these men moved rapidly. Elias Stacy, I believe, drew first blood when he charged like a lancer, lifted a shotgun, and blew the pipe-smoking man from his saddle.
The outlaw landed on the boardwalk, yelling something, and Elias pivoted and beat a hasty retreat, diving behind the crates in front of the mercantile while a scraggly bearded fellow on a high-stepping horse galloped past and fired, splintering one of the boxes but missing young Stacy.
I fired twice, rushing my first shot, missing my second by inches at some passing rider. The third cartridge I dropped, and it broke on the floor, spilling powder on the hardwood. Needing more ammunition, I darted out of the room and met Dr. Dampier on the staircase. He handed me a flour sack, and I grabbed it and returned to my fortification, withdrawing another foil and paper cartridge, working it into the breech, capping the nipple, looking out the window, taking it all in again, still hard to fathom.
A man in a duster lays sprawled down Division Street. Men have left the bank. The streets are chaos. Gunsmoke. I hear dogs barking, the musketry of savage fight. It’s like no hunting trip I’ve ever been on.
A rider galloped past, cursing, snapping me from my state of shock, and I fired, missing, but scaring the hell out of him. And then I saw my chance. The pipe-smoking man, who had miraculously survived Elias Stacy’s shotgun charge, was back in his saddle. I took aim, but he bent over, and I cursed, holding my rifle steady. He adjusted his stirrup, and, when he straightened himself, shifting his revolver in his hand, I squeezed the trigger.
A good hunter knows when he has scored a hit, and I did not hesitate, swinging down to reload and recap the Smith. When I looked out again, the pipe-smoking man, who had long ago spit out his pipe, was down, being attended by another outlaw, but I had no clear shot at him. Another outlaw I spied, by the corner stairs, aiming his pistol, trying to get a clear shot at Mr. Manning. I chose him for my next target, drew a bead, let out my breath, fired again.
This time, foolishly, I tried to watch, rather than take cover and reload. This mistake almost got me killed, for, amazingly, my bullet slammed into the outlaw’s right arm, but he tossed his revolver in the air, caught it with his left hand, whirled— somehow must have spotted me in the window— and let loose with a shot. It shattered a pane, inches from my head.
I ducked, reloading, cursing my stupidity.
When I chanced another look outside, I found the man I had wounded in the right arm, screaming something, still by the stairs. Another man, the one who had been adjusting the saddle girth, mounted his horse. I’d kill him next.
Some people, I believe, are blessed with the armor of the Lord. I fired. Mr. Manning fired. Others shot at this scoundrel. The man’s hat flew off, and I am certain my shot tore his saddle horn asunder, while yet another clipped one of his reins. Previously the man had been wounded in the leg, but he did not act like a suffering soul. No, he drew a lethal Bowie knife with one hand, sliced the other rein with the blade, then kneed and spurred his brave horse to his wounded comrade.
I am a man who admires courage, and this man showed more grit than anyone I have ever seen. He got his horse to stop and wheel at the precise moment it reached the stairs. I fired again, but still God’s armor protected this brigand, and, with amazement, I watched him grab the wounded man’s gun belt and lift him into the saddle behind him. Then, without benefit of reins or a saddle horn, riders and steed exploded down Division Street, toward Dundas.
Like that, it was over.
I grabbed the sack of ammunition in one hand, the Smith in the other, and hurried downstairs, outside.
“Grosser Gottl” a gray-haired German lady cried out. She stood in front of Gress’s shoe store, where she broke out sobbing, pointing, not at the dead men, but at the horse Mr. Manning had killed.
I remained standing guard over the body of the young outlaw I had felled when I heard news that Alonzo Bunker, the teller, had been shot and was being treated by a doctor. Then someone yelled inside the bank that Joe Heywood, acting cashier, had been murdered.
The street became a frenzy of activity once again. Men and boys stepped forward with their weapons, from pocket pistols and fowling pieces to rocks and wooden toys. I noticed one man, a coward to be sure, climb sheepishly out of the ice house, his hair and clothes covered with sawdust and mud, and attempt to sneak away toward the river. A mother rushed her child away from the carnage. Dogs came from all directions, sniffing at the corpses.
Conversations broke out about an inquest, about the dead men, who they might be, about the robbers who had escaped. Others still stood around as if dazed, confused, unable to understand what had happened—how long ago had it started? I checked my watch. Not even ten minutes ago.
Others cried.
“We’ll put the bodies of these vermin in the granary for now,” one man said.
Ira Summer, who had opened his photography studio in town shortly after the war, said: “Per-haps it might be best to photograph these two spe
cimens before too long.”
Naturally there were rumors, flying as wild as some of those gunshots only minutes earlier.
The Swede that had been shot had recognized one of the robbers….
The outlaws were riding down Division Street to kill Governor Ames’s family in revenge. (This got Mr. Ames racing down the street to the huge mansion he shared with his family and parents.)
The James-Younger Gang was behind this. (That struck me as pure poppycock…for the time being.)
“We need a damned posse!” Mr. Allen shouted. “Get a wire to Dundas. Maybe we can stop them!”
“How much money did they get?” another voice asked.
“Damned little,” banker Frank Wilcox answered in a cracking voice as he was helped outside. “Joe wouldn’t open the safe.”
Jack Hayes quickly mounted the horse of the bushwhacker I had killed, which a kid had fetched after catching it in front of Mr. Cook’s place on Fourth, and Dwight Davis rode toward us, mounted, ironically, on the other dead bandit’s horse, which he had recovered at Northfield Livery. “We’ll follow them,” Mr. Hayes said. “Try not to let them out of our sight.”
“Don’t get too close, boys,” George Taylor cautioned. “They are desperate men. They have laid Joe Heywood low and shot that Swede from Millersburg.”
“What about Joe Heywood?” Mr. Manning asked. “Someone should inform his wife. And we should get his poor body home.”
“Best clean it up first,” said a pale gentleman, rolling a cigarette in front of the bank door. “Sons-of-bitches blew his brains out.”
“Take my buggy,” Mr. Davis said, pointing toward the livery “You boys catch up, soon as you can get a posse together.”
With that, Mr. Davis and Mr. Hayes took off in pursuit of the outlaws.
“We need to send a telegraph to Sheriff Barton down in Faribault,” Mr. Allen suggested. “And Minneapolis. And Saint Paul. We must trap those desperadoes!”
“Let’s get a damned posse up, now, boys!” Mr. Taylor shouted. “Time’s a-wasting. You with us, Henry?”
I will admit that I did not have a strong desire to ride with the posse, but there is a matter of duty. I had two. “All right,” I said, but detecting my friend Clarence Persons, standing near Skinner and Drew’s Drug Store, I shouted at him: “See if you can get the bodies!”
Excellent cadavers are hard to come by in medical school.
They say up to 1,000 men took part in the search for the Northfield robbers over the following weeks, and I pride myself that I served as one of those, albeit not for long. The Northfield posse was ill prepared, and I cannot be called an exception. One gentleman turned back after losing his dentures. Another lost his gun in the Cannon River. At least neither Principal Mohn, nor posse leader Mr. Taylor, would allow the young boys at St. Olaf to join us.
Twenty-one rode out of Northfield, Mr. Taylor and four others leading the way in a double rig, the rest of us on horseback. We caught up with Mr. Hayes and Mr. Davis at Millersburg, and followed the trail to Shieldsville.
As for me? I felt mighty foolish riding an old plug mule in my stocking feet, gripping the Smith carbine in my hand with the sack of cartridges tied around my horn.
The clouds opened shortly thereafter, a downpour that would continue most of September, and I soon found myself soaked through to the bone. I had no slicker, not even a hat. Luckily my mule gave out (so did, I), and with no great reluctance I returned to Northfield the following day, changed into dry clothes, ate a filling supper, and sought out my friend Clarence Persons.
After a coroner’s inquest and exquisite photography by Mr. Sumner, and a while the following afternoon to let the trainloads of tourists come and gawk at the dead men, the two outlaws had been buried in our town cemetery’s Potter’s Field shortly before my return, but the constable and undertaker had promised to bury them shallow. Grave robbery is not a noble endeavor, but I am a medical student and I killed one of those fiends. I figure I deserved him more than anybody else, and nobody was claiming the man Mr. Manning had slain. As I have previously mentioned, those men had a higher calling than outlawry.
On the evening of September 8th, my friends Clarence Persons and Charles Dampier hired out a buckboard and a Negro, and we began our nocturnal business at Northfield Cemetery. The Negro did not care for it, but did his duty, although he would not leave the wagon. Charles and Clarence lacked much enthusiasm for the idea, as well, but the ground was soft from all that rain—it still drizzled as we set to work around midnight— the graves fresh, and, as the undertaker and constable had promised, shallow.
A dirty, detestable job, but we worked quickly, and few people inspect graveyards on rainy nights after midnight. Our conspiracy went undetected. We dug up the bodies, stuffed them into barrels marked Paint, and had the Negro drive them to Minneapolis depot, where the “paint” was shipped to the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.
On September 10th, I attended the funeral of Joseph Lee Heywood, with most of Northfield, but my mind, I admit, found itself weeks ahead, wondering what would happen back in Ann Arbor.
To answer that question, dear reader, I will skip ahead. Well, I became something of a hero when I returned to school in October. Even the Ann Arbor Courier proudly advertised my coup.
The Students of the Medical Department
Will This Winter Have the Pleasure
of Carving Up
TWO GENUINE ROBBERS!!!,
being members of the
Northfield, Minnesota gang.
The two cadavers were first-rate, impressing not only my fellow students, but also my professors, who singled me out for providing the piece de resistance.
“A prime, young specimen,” one classmate said after we had worked on the pipe-smoking man. “Practically flawless. How, pray tell, did you obtain such a corpse in this remarkable condition?” With pridefulness, I answered—“I shot him!”— savoring the startled expression on the young gent’s face.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LIZZIE MAY HEYWOOD
Pretend they’re shooting fireworks. I like to watch the pretty sparkles in the sky when it’s nighttime. Don’t you? I like to pretend. Usually. Pretending’s fun. Most times, I pretend I’m a mommie and my dolly is my baby. Sometimes we’re baby animals. I’m the mommie horse and dolly’s the baby pony. Or a mommie cat and baby kitty. Or a mommie rooster, which causes Papa to laugh, and a baby rooster. Or, without my dolly, I pretend by myself. I pretend I’m singing in church choir. I pretend I’m pouring tea for the ladies at the church. I pretend I’m talking to Mommie Martha. I pretend lots of things. I have to pretend today, too.
I heard the fireworks today, but it wasn’t nighttime like it was yester-night because I looked out the window in my room where I was playing with my dolly. Her name’s Martha, which Papa says was my real mommie’s name. Now my mommie is Mommie Lizzie—she has the same name as me; how can that be? I never knew Mommie Martha, but sometimes I pretend I did.
So, today, I played by myself in my room while Mommie Lizzie sat in the parlor where she worked on a quilt. She couldn’t let me help because she says I might stick myself and I’m just a baby, though I told her I wasn’t a baby, that I was a baby last year, but now I am five years old. I’m a kid. A little girl, like Papa calls me, though he sometimes tells me I’ll always be his baby girl, but I’m not a baby any more. Not a baby! Baby’s are four or stuff.
So, when I heard all the popping, I got excited, and I grabbed my dolly and ran to find Mommie Lizzie, and I yelled at her: “Fireworks! Fireworks! Let’s go see! Let’s go see!”
Mommie Lizzie, she put her stickpins down and rose, smiling, saying: “Lizzie, it’s not fireworks. Not in the middle of the day. See? And Independence Day has long passed.”
“Maybe it’s special fireworks,” I said.
Now we heard lots of fireworks, and Mommie Lizzie listened harder and walked toward the front door. “It sounds,” she says, “like corn popping.”
&nb
sp; “What could it be?” I asked her. Then: “Let’s go see!”
She opened the door, which made the popping sound louder, and I tried to go down the steps to the edge of Third Street, our street, but Mommie Lizzie grabbed my arm and jerked me back. She was right, though. It couldn’t be fireworks because it was still not dark like it is when we go see the pretty sparkles and it couldn’t be special fireworks because I looked up in the sky and didn’t see any sparkles or things like that.
We heard some other noises, too, but they were too far away for us to understand. More popping. And then Mommie Lizzie got this terrible look on her face, and she brought her hand to her mouth and she gasped for breath, and I asked her if she was all right, but she turned around, and her eyes were so wide, and she shoved me inside, yelling at me: “Get inside, Lizzie! Oh, my God! Get inside, now! Now!”
And we were back in the parlor and Mommie Lizzie was slamming the door shut and sliding the bolt, and I started crying because Mommie Lizzie never pushed me and she never yelled at me and I wanted my Papa, and I cried that I wanted Papa, and Mommie Lizzie knelt beside me and pulled me close and she whispered in my ear: “I want Papa, too.” Then she told me she was sorry for scaring me, but I was still crying, and I told her I had left Dolly Martha on the porch because I had dropped her when she had pushed me.
“She’ll be all right,” Mommie Lizzie said.
“But I want her. I want.…”
“Hush.”
“But….”
“Hush!”
I wanted to run to my room, but what about my dolly? She’s the bestest dolly in the whole wide world and is special to me.
I listened. There was still popping, but I don’t think it was corn popping.
“I hope…,” Mommie Lizzie started, then bit her lip, and she was crying, and I kept crying, and then she hugged me, and scooped me up and took me to the rocker and just rocked me like I was a baby, like I was her baby, but I’ve told you already that I am not a baby any more, and she’s not my real mommie but my new mommie but I love her and she’s a special mommie, but I’m not her baby.
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