How The Dalton Gang Ran Out of Luck in Death Alley

man we got a weird one for you today this fight this raid by the dalton brothers in 1892 on coffeyville kansas is absolutely stunning in how unbelievable it is i've often said you can't make up anything funnier than real life but let's start when it seemed as if the robbery was going to go good and this is an actual quote from a bystander the five men rolled boldly and at a swinging trot raising a cloud of dust which literally enveloped them as they passed down 8th street and that's from my classic gunfights book i i must have spent about a year and a half trying to get all the loose ends of this together and uh sometimes it's just unbelievable like i said and i think you're going to have the same feeling about it um there the idea was bob dalton said we're going to out do our uh our kin the james gang and the youngers they're related to the youngers their mother was a younger and they're going to rob two banks at the same time and out do them and so uh they knew coffeyville very well because they lived there for a short time and so they had a master plan and they rode down 8th street but then something happened so casual so ridiculous that undid the whole raid right off the bat we'll get to that in a minute but they tied their horses uh in an alley and they walked uh there was a five of them bob grant and emmett dalton bill powers and dick brogball and uh the the uh eyewitnesses said that they were wearing false whiskers they had fake mustaches and beards on because bob and grat were from the area and then they were afraid that people will recognize them well that's exactly what happened though is that people just saw right through it and they they knew it it was a wednesday morning a lot of people out on the streets and the three of the robbers went into the condon bank which is on a corner kind of an island like in new york city times square we have a picture of it that shows a panorama of the robbery site there and right in the middle there that little cornucopia building there that's the condom bank they were going to go into that bank and then bob and emmett the two brothers kept walking and they were gonna go across the street uh to the first national bank and simultaneously they would get all the money and they would ride out of town and they could uh sell all their stuff and go somewhere else because there was so much heat coming down on them from the three guardsmen and the three guardsmen were bill tillman heck thomas and chris madsen that already arrested like 300 outlaws sent the rest to prison and they were zoning in on the adult and gang and this was going to be their last hurrah and their big fat payday well of course uh grant dalton led the group that went into the condon bank and the first thing that happened was said this is a robbery and the bank teller said uh sorry the uh the the cell the uh the vault default is locked it's on a time lock and it won't open and gratz says uh kind of flustered but we can wait and so then two more customers come in the bank they take them hostage but outside the bank while he's wasting this valuable time the iceman runs into ishmael's hardware which is caddy corner and he says it's the daltons they're robbing the bank this is how quickly their cover evaporated because everybody in the town knew them and so uh isom's hardware store and another hardware store start handing out weapons and bullets and so within five minutes there's like 15 guys that are there civilians that are armed and so the time is ticking inside the condom bank and he's starting to become grat is leading that charge and so he's becoming a little panic stricken you might say and meanwhile over in the first national bank bob's having a better take of it they got they scooped up some cash they were getting ready to leave but because the guy yelled out that they're robbing the bank now you have three or four guys in front of isims and they're armed and they're ready to shoot at the bank they don't realize that the other banks being robbed at the same time well a guy from about 80 yards away uh one of the civilians fires his shot into the pl the window the the window the plate glass window and hits dick broadwell and because of powers one of the guys gets hit and he goes i got hit i gotta go down so now they're all panicked and once the the guy starts firing now they all start firing there's a famous photo of the uh condom bank where it's just the bullet holes all through the windows and so uh bob dalton um and his brother emmett try to go out the front but what they need is three of the guys in front of eichem's which is like two doors down they fired him so now he's going to go out the back he goes out the back and somebody from aishams was given a pistol and he goes out the back of aishams turns left runs right into bob bob says stop he obviously didn't hear him i didn't understand or recognize that they were the robbers and so bob dalton said i've got to have that man that's a quote from the uh record and shoots him right below the heart and then him and emmett take a uh a hostage north try to make their way around back to their horses well by now all hell is broken loose everyone's armed everyone's shooting at them but now it's going to get worse because the alleyway is a virtual shooting ducks it's like a shooting ducks alley right down in there there there's a representation of it that i i drew about just to give you an idea and they start sending volley after volley after these guys because when the guys left the bank uh somebody said that it uh it was the flow where can i find this it's just a fabulous quote oh here it is the plinking and whizzing of airborne missiles becomes a shower and then a storm isn't that fantastic and so the bullets were just raining on them they're all hit and bob uh and his brother emmett uh came up down a side alley to join the others in the alley where their horses were and then the increase in volume becomes even more and they're all shot bob's shot in the chest goes down uh shot in the hip emmett shot four or five times he gets on his horse to try to leave two of the horses are killed they're killed because of all the the gunfire that's raining down this alley and he gets on his horse and could have escaped with a couple of wounds but instead he turns to go directly into the fire to rescue his brother brother bob does that sound familiar it will when i remind you why uh he allegedly gets up to uh bob and bob says die game it's no use i'm done and a guy steps out with a shotgun and shoots emmett dahl in the back and he falls down in the dust so after all of this shooting uh all four robbers uh four of the robbers are dead and emmett is badly wooded and not expected to live and so he's taken to the farmer's house where he uh recovers but i'll we'll get back to that in a minute so you might say well what would what did the daltons do i mean were they were they robbing banks and trains at their will what kind of outlaws were they uh i love this quote from um little than dalton first of all the daltons all 12 strong had 12 kids okay louis and adelia adeline had 12 kids and one report says 15. i mean i had two kids 15 that's three basketball teams that's that's a that's a baseball team with a deep bench okay that's ridiculous but anyway and it's so no wonder that well yeah five of them are turned out to be bad but the the rest are really uh good people and uh this is the case of uh a littleton dalton who had this to say about uh them being outlaws and i think it just sums up you know we had this idea that the outlaws are out riding around and they're they're living it up in every town and everything and uh because of what i mentioned the three guardsmen they were just methodically going through the oklahoma territory and just taking these guys out i mean it's truly phenomenal uh the the task that they did but here's how much fun the daltons were having according to their family member littleton the last time i ever saw bob or grat was just before the coffeeville ray when the three boys came to my mother's home near kingfisher they had been running and hiding for months their clothes were worn out i gave them all the clothes i had a good stetson hat which bob had on when he was killed and a good coat and overcoat they scarcely thanked me they expected me to keep on putting up for them indefinitely end of quote well that gives you a little bit of an idea that it wasn't all fun and games and uh the exotic life of an outlaw at least in oklahoma in the 1890s uh the background on the boys is kind of sketchy and a lot of things don't uh are hard to verify but we do know that uh three of the uh adult brothers were lawmen uh frank dalton was killed in the line of duty uh one of the older brothers and bob was a deputy marshal uh and and so was emmett who often accompanied him uh out on assignment they uh make the claim that they didn't make enough money so they started selling the illegal hooch to the uh indians and the osage nation and eventually uh bob lost his uh his badge for that then he went out to california where they got more trouble they may have robbed a train out there uh they came back and they tried a couple of train robberies uh one they got uh seventy thousand dollars for but most of them were a bust uh fifty dollars here and certainly um so so they wanted to do this uh one last bank job to make their mark so that they could leave the area and does that sound familiar that's exactly what butch casting the sundance kid said that's probably what every person in the penitentiary says uh to their cellmates from time to time but uh what happened after uh the uh robbery is even more incredible it's it's weird so you you're all familiar with the famous picture of the dalton's laying dead uh and they're lined up side by side that's the most famous photo of them i remember buying that as a kid and one of the photos uh in this series there's a little boy looking through the crack uh they're above broadwell's head and um uh the actual and i i was told when i used to read true west as a young boy that um they were put in the bank window and i thought that was just so cool that the bank said oh yeah you think you want to rob a bank we're going to put you right in the window when you're dead uh but it turns out that they were actually in death alley where they uh killed were killed and somebody uh well 2 000 sightseers came in on the train to see the robbers and so uh you can get a sense of this we have a photograph of all the people in death alley and they're playing with the bodies that sounds horrible but they are they put they lay them on a hay mouth somebody take out of their wagon and they put it up against that building there and they lay them on there and if you remember in one of the photos there's a winchester across their leg and another little boy is looking in the corner and essentially uh people were cutting off the tails of the horses that were dead they were and you could see that a pants leg is missing in the photo that's because people are cutting their own little snippets for a posterity gruesome gruesome gruesome and then it gets worse okay so basically they take these uh four dead guys and they throw them in the j in the in the jail lock them in basically a a little hut back there in the in the alley and they all go home and then they come back in the morning and they open up the hut and they start playing with the bodies again it's this is just too weird to be true but it is true and so they uh are all uh posing with them and doing all these kind of things and then uh lo and behold uh emmett survives and he uh he he does some prison time but he gets out and i think it was on good behavior some some one of those things and he goes to california and uh he becomes a celebrity i just think this is so interesting about uh american life that somebody starts out that's him with uh there in the black hat in the in the middle between charlie soringo who we know and frank miller of the miller brothers uh show the guy on the right we don't know who that is typical thing well hey hey bill get in there get in there pose there people are going to annoy you in 100 years from now no they're not but anyway uh so he he writes two books that do pretty good and he also um uh is in a movie okay movie's a total bust but he actually has a little bit of luck in um uh and in publishing which which is its own uh incredible thing anybody that that makes a money in publishing uh is incredible to me because i know how tough it is uh anyway he uh he all of a sudden he's in hollywood and he's he's befriending uh all these of the big guys and then he's the one emmett dalton is the one who's called uh heck thomas and bill tillman and chris madsen he named them the guardsmen because he claimed that when they were out hiding in the bushes and trying to stay alive that they they they called them the three guardsmen and so isn't it ironic that uh it started uh that the saying which is now well known all over oklahoma came from the outlaw uh emmett dalton now if uh i was when i was describing that to you i think you have to admit that there was sounded similar to another bank raid and that would be the james gang at northfield and that is the fact that um in both robberies uh a quick thinking bank teller lied that the bank vault was not open when it in fact was in fact there was forty thousand dollars in the uh coffeyville bank and the condom bank that they could have uh gotten but uh grant was so dumb or too dim-witted and that he believed the guy and the same thing happened in northfield where the hayward jos haywood would not open the vault there were also uh believed to be a an extra man in both uh raids in the north field that was believed to be a ninth man which is argued about even today and in the uh coffeeville raid there was uh thought to be a sixth man and so that's lines up exactly also in both robberies uh there's a legend that uh a town law man hid and didn't help because you'll notice if we've uh when i was telling you this there really wasn't any lawmen directly involved or not much and certainly none in the northfield one and so they share that little anomaly the next one is just outstanding uh weird to me is that two of the surviving bandits in both rates became the object of affection from women and they sent them bouquet of flowers in both cases in the james uh james younger gang debacle at northfield it was bob younger and in this case the dalton's trying to do coffeeville it was emmett dalton and so he got marriage proposals and all isn't that it just it says so much about celebrity and how bankrupt it is it's just it just blows my mind like i said you can't make up something uh more strange than real life and i think one of the takeaways uh in this um incredible story is that there's a fine line between catching an outlaw and becoming one and uh in the case of bob dalton he was a good lawman and so certainly his brother frank uh and they it's just such a thin line because you go you know what uh people don't want to uh deal with those guys i'm the only guy i can why don't why don't i try it maybe i can make a little uh money out of this um see i think there was one more thing about the uh dalton thing the similarities anyway so uh when i was doing this book i didn't quite understand it and maybe you don't either because it's so complicated they're here they're in the alley they go here but the real uh incredible thing that happens in life is that the smallest tiniest thing can undo an operation uh one of the great generals said that the difference between uh winning and losing in battle is is an eyelash and that's what happened here because bob younger set it up so that they would uh rain their horses in at mccoy's hardware or the opera house which is behind the bank okay and as they came riding down and they were committed they were already in town they saw that the street was torn up and they were paving the street and so they'd taken all of the hitching posts out on the streets so he says uh let's turn right here and so they turn right and they park in the alley which turned out to be as uh emmett said late in life the worst possible place they could have put the horses in the entire state okay and uh if you're like me i have to walk the area that's why i've been to the okay corral that's why i've been to mezcal springs that's why i've been to stinking springs that's why i've been to the number 10 saloon in deadwood because once you're there and you actually walk it you really get a little extra sense of what happened and nowhere is as clear as in coffeyville kansas because when you get on the ground there and you walk up that street toward the condon bank and then you stand in front of where the location of where aisha's hardware was and you look down that alley you're gonna say just like i did oh man that was you know it's just they're sitting there and they had stuff piled up outside of iceland's and they literally had free ammunition and they're just shooting for the fun of it because they just sent a wall of lead down that uh narrow corridor and you couldn't make that up i mean you couldn't the coincidence of and here's the here's the just a really uh depressing part if you uh sympathetic to the daltons if they had been able to put their horses behind at mccoy's or the opera house they probably four of them would have got away and i got away with some money and there's that one little detail that they could have never predicted that they were paving the street there's a there's a metaphor in there i think anyway that's my story on the on the dalton gangs raid on coffeeville by the way coffeyville was named for james a coffee who was had a uh trading post there i thought maybe had to do something with coffee or something but him and another guy i think it was uh oh u.s captain blanton they did a coin flip to who would get the name to town and coffee won and so it's uh forever more uh been known as coffeyville kansas well hey i hope if you like this talk you'll subscribe and hit like at the bottom and do uh send us some uh comments because we really like it when you uh tell us what you would like to hear or if you want to hear more something less of something else it really helps us so thank you and we'll talk to you later you

Channel: True West Magazine

Views: 1,092,843

Keywords: old west, true west, true west magazine, bob boze bell, western history, old western history, history of the old west, western gunfights, gunfights, gunfighters, firearms, old west gunfights, shootout, western shootout, western shootouts, shootouts, earp, lawmen, lawman, old west law, old west lawman, classic gunfight, classic gunfights, gunfight, outlaw, outlaws, old west outlaws, western outlaws, dalton gang, the dalton gang, the daltons, the dalton brothers, coffeyville

Id: a7eWs-4hl44

Length: 20min 39sec (1239 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021