[Music] well good afternoon and welcome to another episode of historical journeys with Dale blanchin today we travel to Northfield Minnesota see behind me the scene on September of 1876 on one of the most famous perhaps the most famous bank robbery in America took place in that little Scandinavian town full of hard-working farmers and merchants and other people that just were not willing on September 7 1876 to give up the hard-earned money in their bank I'd like to thank Dan Knowles for that beautiful music that we started with today Dan Knowles is a banjo player extraordinaire if you look up Dan Noel's banjo you'll find some wonderful things anyway let's jump right into the program today this is a picture of MIDI Lea's magnificent 7-7 brave men who are willing to charge the robbers and do them in but their part comes in later we'll see that when we get to that the story starts back in the days prior to the Civil War with a couple of families down in Missouri Colonel Henry younger and his wife had a rather large family 14 children and all and the the first half of the family was as respectable as can be but something happened with the second half of the family here are the boys in that set Thomas Coleman known as Col Jim John and Bob Bob and Jim and in John and Cole turned to a life of crime you know we'll see the results of that another family living in this house was a James family there's Frank James's younger brother Jesse you've heard of those names I'm sure those those were friends anyway what could have happened to make a nice young son of a Baptist preacher turn into that picture you see on the right well it's hard to tell for sure but a similar thing happened to both families the younger brothers lost their father in the early days of the civil war he was a union sympathizer but it was evidently a union partisan or soldier that killed him and that might have soured them on on all things Union the James brothers lost their father way back about 1850 when he is a Baptist minister decided to go out west to preach to all those miners and the 49ers you know in the gold camps but he took sick and died and they lost their parent I think that maybe had something to do with it but we'll never know for sure one thing we do know is the Cole Younger and Frank James were fast friends and they became members of the Confederate Army and gravitated towards this man Jim may have been along and perhaps Jesse in later times William Quantrill was a guerilla leader in the in the Civil War and you know guerrilla reader leaders are they're just not nice people sometimes Quantrill took his men into the town of Lawrence Kansas you know Kansas was split between the people that wanted Kansas be a slave state and the people who wanted to be a free state quantro being a slave state er took his men into that town and killed about 200 men and boys just a senseless senseless massacre but one of his lieutenants Bill Anderson was even worse and Cole and Frank went to ride with Bill Anderson they were involved in the attack on the town of Centralia and while they were there a train came puffing in not realizing town was being held by these brigands on the train were several dozen wounded and recovering and unarmed Union soldiers when the outlaws boarded the train they shot every one of them in cold blood that was the kind of setting from which the Frank and James at least honed some of their craft I like the picture on the right hand a bloody bill when he got what was coming to him at the end of the war there at any rate at the end of the war there were millions of young men who went back to the farms and the factories and lived a life of usefulness but for the Jameses and the youngers factories and farms had no appeal any longer on the left is their friend Fletch Taylor Fletch organiser led a gang including the younger brothers and the James brothers in what was apparently the first daylight raid on a bank in America Clay County Savings Association Bank in Liberty Missouri and unfortunately a young bystander was killed in that they went on here's Frank and Jesse in 1872 already got about 6 years of crime behind them this is a there are many many gang members composed of shirttail relatives or friends this is one samwell's alias Clell Miller that joined the gang and there were others as well this is a list of the bank robbers that are attributed to them beginning with the Liberty Bank robbery they they were in Missouri they came up to Iowa went over to Kentucky down to Kansas City where there was a big crowd around the world agricultural exposition and they they robbed that injuring a little girl in the process then they turned in 1873 the train robberies they like that stagecoach robberies their biggest take was in 1875 when they robbed two Kansas Pacific train of fifty five thousand dollars it doesn't sound quite as much as a robber might get today but you have to remember to multiply that by 20 or 25 in order to get today's value so that was over $1,000,000 take but in 1876 they robbed the rocky cut train I think it was a fifteen thousand dollars and that was their stake that led them to what was going to be their biggest take of all the First National Bank in Northfield Minnesota here's what they look like Frank and Jesse and at any rate about the time of the Northfield bank robbery they look like fine young men could have been that when you're robbing a bank of course you can't just waltz in and point a gun and say give me the money there are issues to think of where are you going to escape how are you going to keep people quiet during the raid so they don't shoot back how it is all sorts of things that you have to take care of so that the the james-younger gang was had some very meticulous planning for this for this job one question was why Northfield well there's some evidence that the gang was considering other places in southern Minnesota they came in to Mankato for example and looked over a bank but there was a huge crowd of people around it and they thought maybe that their plans have been discovered and abandoned it Northfield was quite a plum because they'd heard there was quite a bit of money there that all those Norwegian and Swedish farmers and had put away but in Northfield you had these two characters Adelbert Ames was a union general that was bad enough for these Confederates but worse than that he was the carpetbagger governor of Missouri boy those southerners hated those northers that came down and boss them around his carpetbaggers but Adelbert Ames his family ran the Ames flour mill in Northfield Minnesota but another thing was that Ames his father-in-law was the famous Benjamin Butler beast Butler spoons Butler they called him a very controversial figure and a very interesting one and he was rumored to have thousands and thousands of dollars in the bank so both Bob and Cole later on said that they they had heard there was 75 thousand dollars in the bank belonging to largely to these two and they were going to both get rich and deal a blow to the Union at the same time whatever the reason was when they came into Northfield you come from the west across the cannon River on this iron bridge there and you come into bridge square looking down from the aims flour mill across the river you see Bridge Square and the building and in the top right the big building is a scriber block to hardware stores in the front and around the side in this picture you can see it if you you see the staircase going up the side there and then you see a horse and a carriage I believe behind and then you see a triple set of arches there that was where the First National Bank was temporarily located for a year so and that was the focus of the raid that was being planned for you know of course in the 1930s all those bootleggers and outlaws had the biggest black car they could think of the fastest engine and and it was the same way with bank robbers back in the 1870s only you got the biggest fastest horse you could think of Albert Lee is a town an hour by today's driving terms away from or maybe a little more than an hour from Northfield but somewhere in there where they the gang got some horses they rode up took the railroad up that was the best way to travel long distances but once they got there of course they they needed transportation so you would like today you'd rent a car back then you would go to the livery stable get a horse this is a picture of Albert Lee with the livery stable down at the bottom of the hill I think that I've been down to that location I think that's right where the Albert Lee Library is today if you're looking for things like that they also scouted out an escape route out west and scouted more banks probably this is the the flanders hotel in madelia minnesota madelia is my hometown and you'll see they figure prominently in the story later on but Cole Younger and another one of the bandits stayed here and talked to the hotel proprietor and they were scouting banks I'm sure in the area but they were also looking for an escape route their planned escape route was going to be going west hanging around the edge of the big woods so they could skip in there and and disappear if there was any any pursuit and that would get them over to South Dakotan from across the state lines and you know the authorities that have no jurisdiction over them after that this is that they also had to purchase of course saddles and gear for their trip this is Bob younger saddled beautiful saddle they have it in the museum there at Northfield there's a reason that Bob saddle is still in Northfield that's because his horse never got out of Northfield these are built Chadwell Spurs you had to have a nice a nice set of Spurs these look like good quality things bill Chadwell was wearing them getting ready to gallop out of town after the raid was finished but there's a reason bill chadwell's Spurs are still in town too and that's because Chadwell never got out of town and of course there were weapons this is a display in the madelia museum Wat Juan County Museum a beautiful little Museum if you ever get a chance to go there they've done a great job well this is their younger brothers display and as you can see a gun used in the capture and two pistols there those pistols are are what this one is what Jim younger was carrying one of his pistols at the time of the battle and this is one that Charlie Pitts was carrying when he was captured and here's an artifact that I found fascinating when I found that the Minnesota State Historical Society had this I immediately wrote to them said can I come up and see that then they said sure what those are linen dusters when you travel in those days you weren't traveling in the comfort and sealed off from the environment and the dust that we have in in cars today you were sitting on top of a horse out in the middle of everything and of course you'd get very dusty on a hot day and when you got to your destination you'd be a mess so to keep that from happening you'd put on this light linen coat a duster they called them and that would gather all the dust when you got your destination take it off you're clean supposedly it was also very handy if you had pistols to conceal and we're thinking of doing a robbery which is what happened the gang was wearing these this is one that was dropped in the street and they don't know for sure whose it is I looked it over pretty closely there's a little fuse little splotches of blood on it but no visible tears as if somebody got shot I wonder if that wasn't Jesse's himself you know Jesse's are Franks and they didn't get wanted quite so much as the rest or maybe maybe charlie pets anyway it was amazing to be able to hold that artifact in my little hand the gang of course could not travel and eat of them all together the raid members that would have aroused suspicion anywhere so they split up into groups twos and threes and they you know they came into town at different times they stayed at different places a couple of them stayed the night before in the National Hotel and Red Wing which is just to the east of Northfield and they stayed two different places as well on the day of the raid when all the equipment was in place all the plans are in place the escape route was mapped out they even had one of the robbers Bill Chadwell who used to live in Rice County and is going to be their guide to get him out of there after they after they got away their plan was to guard the bridge over the cannon River and when they robbed the bank to go west across that bridge cut the telegraph lines and the old building was there to keep posses from being formed after them and escape to the west on the morning of the raid they came into town for a last look of course in twos and threes one group of them had lunch and disputed the coming election between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden and had a little too much to drink apparently but what the the accounts afterwards but then they came out and they met for the last time in this little this little group of trees there's a nice little playground there today but they came out here this is just a mile perhaps west of the bank and they made their last plans and then they began to enter the town that they entered in groups of two and three the first group was composed of Frank James Bob younger and Charlie pits there's an argument about whether whether Frank was a member of that group but I think it's pretty obvious that he was in each of these groups you had one of the one of the younger brothers and you had the James brothers who split up the old James brothers are the old friends cold younger and Frank James I believe were definitely in charge of it Frank on the inside of the bank and Cole overall on the outside of the bank Jessie at this time was just uh he was one of the youngsters still he'd gotten some notoriety about writing too many letters to the editor causing some trouble among the gain but anyway the first group of three came across the bridge cross bridge square and sat down on the wooden curb of the hardware store there in front of the scriber block nonchalantly you know chatting and whittling and acting like for all the world like anything but bank robbers then another group came across the bridge into Bridge Square and or they were down by the bridge anyway this group was composed of Jim younger Jesse James and Bill Chad well their purpose was to guard the escape route for the bank the other two the last two were Cole Younger and Clell Miller and they came they rode across the bridge of course not recognizing the other three who were there and then they came through through bridge square past the three other outlaws not giving any sign that they knew them and they took up their post in the middle of the street you see going off to the left that's a Division Street and that's the scene of the action in the robbery and Cole Younger got off his horse pretended to adjust the girth of the saddle and Clell Miller got off and and anyway that was a signal for the Robert II began the three other robbers sitting on the curb there got up and walked around the corner and back to the bank and inside the bank of course we are indebted to a photographer a day or two after the robber took this picture so we know exactly what things look like inside the bank and they've recreated it pretty much pretty much just exactly as it was today it had that l-shaped counter there and the bank tellers were behind that there was a vault with the door there and out the back on the left you can see there was a door that led out into the alley there's a little room back there were the bank directors and have their meetings a man named Jay s Allen whose name you see at the bottom there had just been in there made a little deposit the blotches you see in the upper right are bloodstains telling us what's about to come in any rate there the persons in there Joseph Heywood was the assistant cashier the cashier and the president of the bank were out in Philadelphia because 1876 was the great celebration of the 100th anniversary of the United States so Joseph Heywood was in charge the other two were Alonzo bunker and Frank Wilcox and they were busy taking care of their business doing their bookkeeping in the in the bank here this is where they were Thomas Joseph Heywood was over on the right and and Alonzo bunker and Frank Wilcox on the other side there and when the door opened you can imagine they looked up to see pleasantly just to see what one of their friends or customers coming in instead what they saw were three outlaws that came piling over through that through that opening in the in the counter there shouting and cussing and and throwing people around and demanding immediately that they opened the safe now this or that the the safe was inside the vault the vault door was open the safe was inside there and they they immediately demand that Joseph they said who's the cashier nobody admitted to it because the cashier wasn't there but they zeroed in on Joseph he would immediately and said you're the cashier opened the safe and Joseph Heywood was a very brave brave man and it costs him his life eventually in this in this fracas but Joseph Heywood said it's got a time lock on it now time locks have been installed on bank vaults because robbers had the modus operandi of most bank robbers was you'd get the bank president out in the middle of the night keep him quiet take him down to the bank and nobody was watching he didn't he'd open up the safe well in order to to let bank president sleep all night they developed time locks that would not open no matter what you did until the proper time in the morning and the the safe at the Northfield my First National Bank had one of those time locks on it Heywood was telling the truth but he wasn't quite telling the whole truth because the fact was the safe had already been opened and all the robbers would have had to do is to go in and turn the handle and they could have gotten into that safe there wasn't $75,000 in there but there was 15,000 and that of course would have been a nice haul of 300 or 400 thousand dollars in today's today's terms there's a question as to why the robbers you know why they were so frustrated inside the bank and I think there are several answers that one of them is the bravery of the men inside who refused to cooperate another one is that that the the bank officials could really smell alcohol on the breath of these guys apparently they had too much to drink Cole Younger when he found about that said if he'd known that he'd called off that rape but at any rate it was the bravery these men and the fact that they just did not have more than a couple of minutes seven minutes or something like that inside the bank because of the townspeople outside at any rate they they didn't try the the door to the safe but they continued to throw joseph Heywood around knocking to the floor shot a gun off by his ear don't to startle him pretended to cut his throat actually cut a little bit but Joseph Heywood remain firm and so did so did the other two this is the safe that they have up there today it doesn't have a time lock it's says Evans and Watson on it that's just representative they put that inside there but there was I found a notice in the newspaper when the First National Bank got their new vault and their new safe it was from the Detroit safe and lock company but the the safest disappeared nobody knows where it is anyway well well the Franken and Charlie were busy abusing Joseph Heywood bob is on a secondary mission masked Alonzo Bunker wears them where's the cash drawer and bunker motioned over to a spot where there some nickels piled up and Bob pulled a sack out of his linen duster and scooped nickels in there but unbeknownst to him if he had gone down I don't know you know this is a reconstruction with the drawers there but if he would have looked in another drawer right close by he would have found about three thousand dollars in change in small bills anyway as the thing proceeded Alonso bunker came to the conclusion that they were going to get killed he could see what they were doing to Joseph he would so he motioned to Frank Wilcox who was kneeling the robber said had them kneeling over at the side there Wilcox was kneeling in front of the little gate that led to the back door bunker motioned to him to move and when the robbers weren't looking Frank Alonso bunker jumped up and bolted for the back door and burst through it into the alley beyond pets immediately saw him go went around that corner there and fired a shot that hit Alonzo Bunker in the back but it wasn't fatal he ran to a surgeon anyway that was another thing to help alert the town people to the fact the bank was being robbed things just did not go well for the robbers inside the bank outside the bank they weren't going any better that's a picture of the door on the side under the triple arches there when when J S Allen who had made that last deposit came out of the bank he walked along the the boardwalk towards that that stairway that you see there and in doing so he passed those three strangers he didn't like the look of those three strangers so he turned around and followed them and was going to go into the bank when an unknown man Clell Miller grabbed him by the shoulder and threw him away saying you can't go in there yes Allen made the immediate conclusion and a correct one that the bank was being robbed and another act of bravery he turned around and ran back around that corner at the risk of getting shot in the back shouting get your guns boys are robbing the bank and immediately a whole lot of things began to happen in both of those hardware stores the proprietors began passing out the guns that they had for sale there with the ammunition the the robbers immediately Cole Younger I'm sure it was fired his gun the three robbers that were guarding the bridge came galloping up to bridge Street that we see going off to the right there and up and down the street firing their guns ordering people off the off the streets shooting at some things there were a group of men in a bar in which I believe was in the basement of this beer Monza store there there would have been a staircase going down they used to call bars dives I've seen this before where they had another level of businesses below the street a little walkway under the board sidewalk and apparently that was the case here I haven't been able to get into biermann's yet when somebody give me permission I was there to get in the basement and see if I can find remnants of that confirm it but any rate there were some some men in a in a saloon they came piling out of that when they heard the shots among them was Nicolas Gus Gustafson a Swedish immigrant who had only been in the country a year and he evidently didn't hear didn't understand the orders get off the street and he got himself shot in the head ran down to the creek the shot proved fatal but only four days later some of the early accounts talked about three men dying two robbers and Joseph Heywood but he was the fourth just a couple days later this is a woodcut that appeared in the name the papers just a few days later you know they couldn't put photography into the paper so they made wood cuts as rather expensive and this one so they they crammed in everything that they could find with the story and being able to decipher it put it into a chronological order is pretty tough but we'll do the best we can and the these two men you know they handed out those guns but there were shotguns and fowling-pieces you know and those are the shotgun is not very good at any range at all and but there were two rifles among the bunch and it turned out that the rifles were the things that did the greatest harm they are Manning from one of the hardware stores and Henry wheeler Henry wheeler was a medical student at the University of Michigan he was back home for the summer just about ready to go back to the University of Michigan he was sitting in front of his father's pharmacy on that the east side of the street when he saw those three men going up when he he saw them he thought they were suspicious so he followed them along he was on the opposite side of the street and then he saw one of the robbers saw Clell Miller grabbed jeaious Allen's shoulder and he knew that they were robbers he went running back shouting about their robbing the bank and thinking about getting his gun in his father's pharmacy one of the two smaller buildings to the right of the first building on the left and then he remembered he had loaned it somebody hadn't brought it back so he ran in the Dampier hotel there because he knew there was an old Civil War gun a rifle mounted above the bar there in the clerk gave it to him they found three four cartridges and he went upstairs to the third floor that you see there where he had a clear shot out the window his first shot he shot at Clell Miller who was riding in the street but he shot high and the bullet hit the wall of the building they'll show you this that depression and the wall and tell you that it probably is hit the building someplace that's as good as any I guess anyway then with his next shot he sighted in a little bit better and Clell Miller was was down there of course shouting and shooting and ordering people off the streets and he had taken a he had taken a blast of gunshot from from a shotgun far away but it didn't disable him the the townspeople immediately set up kind of a line right in front of us as you see some of them there some of them had those shotguns and the robbers as long as they stayed a distance away we're not in any real danger from the shotguns there were also people who had nothing but rocks and apparently the rocks made the outlaws sit up and take notice too but it was a man with a rifles that really did the damage now you can see over on the left on the upper corner of the picture there there's Henry wheeler shooting down he took a bead on Clell Miller and hit Clell Miller just before Miller's just below Miller's right her left shoulder and hit an artery Miller fell to the ground started to raise himself up and fell back down Cole Younger got jumped off his horse talked to Clell and saw the cloud was dead and grabbed clell's weapons and climbed back up on his horse and they show Clell right at the bottom here was actually farther up closer to where the staircase was but they had to get everything into this picture in the mean time then then he dropped the well then he took one more shot when when they're the robbers in a bit you'll see what eventually came out of the bank Bob took a detour that's Bob under the staircase there and he was partly hidden by the staircase from Henry wheeler but Henry wheeler shot anyway and hit Bob in his right elbow which really helped slow the robbers down - it was a valuable thing for the pursuit at any rate there at the bottom of the stairs you see and some Manning Manning had grabbed a rifle and he came around to the corner there and he saw he looked over by the door of the bank and he saw those horses there with robbers behind him sheltering so he shot the horse townspeople to bemoan that that beautiful horse lying in the street should be a little farther Bank back towards the bank door but when Bob came out of the bank expecting to climb on his horse and ride away he couldn't so we took a detour around under the under the staircase there then Manning tried to get the shell out of his gun he couldn't had to run back to the store and pop it out and came back again then he around he was by the corner right there and he and he drew a bead on Bill Chadwell who was farther up maybe 75 yards away they shall build the left body there but he should be farther back and he took so much time sighting in people say hurry hurry showed up shooting and he finally shot in the shot just what you'll see where the shot wasn't bitten Bill Chappell toppled from his horse two robbers down in the meantime Cole Younger was getting shot up he he received like five bullet wounds that's what he had to when he was running away that's what he had to carry with him as it must have been a very very painful trip the it and eventually you know within a few minutes the heat was on so much that that Cole Younger said come on out boys winds endure the banks come on out boys they're killing our men and the three robbers inside came out I said that Bob came out saw this horse was down and and took refuge under the staircase here I don't think the lower staircase was there at the time according to the pictures at any rate as the three came out of the bank we don't know where the order that they came out but the last one turned and just a senseless act turn and put his pistol to the head of Joseph Heywood who was groggy from being beat around and no earthly you know providing no resistance of the robbers the last robber turned around and put his pistol Joseph's Heywood Joseph Haywood's head and killed him just a senseless act you know so many so many times people like Jesse James are saying we talk about they give to they rob from the rich and give to the poor and like modern day socialist politicians but that's just a little freebie there from my political philosophy but the that was simply not true the only reason the only thing these men were out for was money and they just didn't want to work they didn't want to take the trouble being upstanding citizens they wanted to take it away from somebody else and they killed people they killed lots of innocent bystanders and they killed lots of lawmen and they killed lots of bank people and there's just no excuse for the things that they do and they are better exterminated anyway when when the robbers came out of the bank they immediately the ones that weren't dead climbed on their horses and started the head out of town now they couldn't go in the direction they had hoped back across Bridge Square and across the bridge to the west and cut the telegraph line because the townspeople with all those shotguns and rifles had that close enough so they had to take off South out of town Bob of course had no horse he said don't leave me and Cole came back and Bob behind him and and they galloped off to the South out of town and the townspeople you know immediately swarm the streets there were the two bodies of the Dead outlaws and they had a photographer and they took pictures of them of course they had to bury people rather soon back then but it was good for law enforcement to have pictures so they've propped him up you can see where the Bloods running from the wounds there and testifying to the accuracy of those two rifles and of course immediately the word went out to Philadelphia to the bank president about how Heywood was killed and and two robbers killed also I had not realized that this was more than regionally famous until I started researching it this is a picture this is a front page of the Philadelphia public ledger the next day September 8th with a big account of the bank robbery on the front and I've also found in Baltimore papers and it was this really was the most famous bank robbery in American history there's some of them some of the things about getting some spelling wrong and things like that but but generally telling the story from somebody that knew this is on the upper right you see the river there and and you can see a bridge across there where the location of the bridge the iron bridge at that time the rivers were the main impediment to robbers running away and you know so the bridge was very very important they couldn't get across the bridge and their intended escape route going directly west so they galloped down roughly what is is highway 3 there until they got down at the bottom and you can see another bridge across here that's where they found a bridge across the cannon River they also relieved a startled farmer something of one of his horses so that that Bob could have horse Bob isn't doing so well he's losing blood he's falling off it's take time to take care of him but at least he has his own horse there and the robbers took off to the west there was a pursuit two of the people in town mounted the two dead robbers horses and took off after them and they kept him in sight they couldn't get too close because the robbers turn around and Menace them with their guns but they followed him all the way down there too and finally gave up gave up the pursuit but because the robbers did not cut the telegraph lines as their plan was the telegraph immediately began clacking and all over the state people heard the news of the robbery and everybody knew of course that robbery meant reward money and all of a sudden there were hundreds of people something like five hundred people a field by the end of the first day looking for those robbers so things are not doing so well for the robbers from from Northfield you could see Dundas that's where they got across the river they took off to the west they went to shields to Millersburg and shields ville I think was at shields ville they the but Posse coming from from the the county seat and Faribault actually made it there before the robbers did but of course they there was the local watering hole and they decided while they're waiting for robbers to go and have something to drink and it was customary as you know from all those old westerns when you went in the bar you had to leave your guns outside and they left their guns outside and who should come along a minute later but a band of outlaws and how the posse could do is watch very frustratedly I'm sure from inside because the robbers had their guns trained on them robbers could water their horses wash their wounds whatever they wanted and the posse was helpless they galloped on anyway and and got away from their pursuers it took them about a week to get over to down on the lower left you see the town of man kaito now mankai toes on the upper-right they they got through Mankato which became the kind of the headquarters of the search for them because they knew the direction the robbers were going and they threw out picket lines you know on the man the they manned the spots anywhere where they could would have to cross the rivers and and one of them was over the blue there was a bridge over the blue earth River a railroad bridge that bridge is no longer there but you can see I've been down there you can see the abutments that the concrete or stone supports or the bridge took off they got across that in the middle of the night and made it on the lower left you see Lake Crystal and there's those two lakes there well the three lakes and they actually came across you can see that between the two lower Lakes there you can see that narrow neck of land that they had people set up there to guard it but the robbers got through there and had a little I think somebody's hat got shot off but the robbers got through there I lived when I was a ninth grader just right right around the corner from that I didn't have no idea that the famous Jesse James had galloped by there on his way to freedom it was at Lake Crystal that the robbers decided to split up the James brothers were uninjured and the younger brothers were all shot up as I said Bob had five wounds and every Bob had his elbow useless Cole had five wounds Jim had been been shot Charlie pizza with him but the idea was that if the James brothers took off they could draw the pursuit after them and that would give everybody's on foot by this time by the way their horses gave out in the first day or two and they were footing it in the rain and at our time getting any food they they decided anyway it was mutually agreed it wasn't any betrayal of their friends the James brothers took off on their own and the younger brothers took West and it and it worked because the James brothers were cited they made it to South Dakota relieved a doctor of his closing his horse and buggy and they took off and they made it eventually all the way back to to Missouri and when those sightings were there they they pulled the man off of the the Fords and the bridges that were guard him and said well I guess we've lost some of the robbers have got away but that wasn't entirely true the younger brothers and Charlie Pitts traveling with him traveled across the the top part of the screen here and you know they were hiding out they were eating corn raw corn for food it was raining they worn out their shoes they were hobbling with sticks for supports it was just miserable for them but they were still out there and they were still free you see in the center of the screen the town of madelia the county seat my hometown and birthplace there if you follow the the highway just north of town to the west you find you see if you look closely the little town of LaSalle on the north side of the road LaSalle wasn't there in 1876 but it was just half a mile south of LaSalle just on the south side of that roadway where the robbers were eventually captured but in that in that square there right to the northeast of LaSalle is the hansika Slough you can just see the remnants of it it's drained now for farmland but it was a slough then and and they had to struggle to get around it and they were spotted this is a picture in a country road there I don't know why I didn't send her a little bit more in that bridge to the right but that's one of the spots I think where that matches the story where where a bridge would have gotten across the river or where the rhythm would have been a Ford that had been guarded now just right close to that bridge just right off to our right was the home of this teenager Oscar sorrel and with the men down there Oscar go down boy it was exciting to think they were after outlaws and and he'd talked to the men say boy if I ever if I ever found the outlaws you know I'd do this and I do that and he talked to the sheriff and the sheriff said have you ever seen anything you let me know and but they pulled those men but it was on September 21st two weeks after the robbery that some men came walking down the road past the Sorbo residence this is a picture of the spot I went over there to find it there's no house or anything there now but the the road just would just right behind this the men came walking past they turned back and they came up the little lane there to the house and asked for breakfast they said afterwards they wish they hadn't done that but all they had to eat was some corn raw corn they were starving and just in terrible shape so they did anyway when they left Oscar said to his dad he said that was the robbers well his dad who proved it just the imagination of the boisterous teenager you know but resourceful Oscar took his dad out in the road and showed him the footprints of the men that walked away and then the shoes were obviously worn out you could see the the toes in the mud these men were desperate and so finally dad let Oscar take the family horse and he galloped probably pushed that poor horse fell off once mountain back in all the way seven miles back went east to madelia and told the sheriff and the sheriff believed him the sheriff immediately alerted the townspeople and alerted people in st. James Mankato that the robbers have been spotted and he took off over there to the hence coslough he had to had a you know this size of the posse that he collected was growing in about 50 men by the time the robbers were cornered first they they saw him in the slough and as they were mounted the horses couldn't get through that slew but they shouted to him to stop and receive to you knows that I think the robber shot they shot back broke broke coal Miller's walking stick but the outlaws refused to surrender but the outlaws the the outlaws went this is the wat juan river the fork of the wat and juan river there and that's the river bottom where you see all the trees the outlaws went past that going west and they circled back and came in from the south for this they had they were going this is a little bit west of the arthur anderson farm because they could either see or they knew from their advanced preparation there were horses there mister anderson saw him coming ran his horses off in the other direction so the robbers doubled back looking for a place to hide now what you see that field there and the river bottom is owned by him a man named olsen it happens to be my step great-grandfather twenty years later married married my my great-grandmother who was a widow with a bunch of kids and married this old bachelor farmer but anyway mr. olsen owned this the field was upon the upon the you know the the river bottom of course is dug out by the river and the and the fields are up higher and the description of the the account of the capture the robber says the river was it was coming from the west it it touched the bank you can see it on the left then it came out and made kind of a w and touch the bank on the other side and surrounded an area of about five acres and you can see this is exactly what it looks like today there's a clearing on either end and that a bunch of trees right in the middle and that's where the outlaws went and tried desperately to hide themselves hoping obviously they could make it through tonight fall and once again escaped through the posses they there are several pictures it's not known exactly where within that the outlaws work here's a picture from way back then they've got Bob and Jim wrong there but this is a spot you can see looking looking I think south across the to the riverbed there with the trees they're obviously in the winter here's another one rescue picture but I've been back in there though grounded the land is still owned by by a descendants of mr. Olson Adam Olson the old man and owned by my second cousin right now so I got permission to go poking around back in there this is one of the clearings could have been the one you the robbers would have come down from from above in the back there and come down and this clearing and then turned back into the woods there but it was a very great place to hide because they had all these plum thickets another underbrush there you could be six feet away from somebody and not know they were there so made a good hiding place back in there I think it looks exactly the same as it did back then because you know it's not farmable or anything like that it's just sat there in the same same ecological forces working upon it this is where I think was a likely spot someday I'd like to get one of those and ground-penetrating radar and go back in there this is a spot where where they the bank leading through the farm field up above is at the back there and there's a whole bunch of places from the robbers to hide along in there I'm just guessing they would have nestled up against that and waited their fate but anyway we don't know for sure it was right in there someplace though we're within 50 yards of it I'm sure anyway they were hoping that that daylight went in and they'd be able to sneak out but Sheriff glisten second from the left and the picture there a young man he'd been elected sheriff twice and I'm sure he got elected next time after this he wasn't having any waiting until dark he called for volunteers by now there were over 50 men maybe a hundred men he had posted men and the clearings on both end he'd posted men on the north side of the of the river and the upon the field on the Southside and they were all guarding at the robber sure hemmed in then he announced his plan his plan was to Molly called for volunteers bunch of people step forward then he announced his plan and some of those people discovered they had something else to do but seven did not he gathered these seven men together including the proprietor of the hotel Thiele bought in the back there and and five others and his plan was we're gonna form a skirmish line on the east in that East clearing and we're gonna stand a few paces apart each one of us is strung out in a line and we're gonna go in and flush out the robbers well that's these are some pretty brave men too the robbers are concealed you know they've had all the practice they wanted to they were armed heavily with all sorts of revolvers this was gonna be a close fight and and the robbers were going to have the first shot so these were pretty brave men while they went and they they came down that clearing going to the north and they wheeled to the left along the river and within a few paces they flushed the robbers out the robbers had been in the brush and as as coal accounted and gave his account later maybe Bob to Charley Pitt said hadn't we better surrender and Cole Younger very very brave I said nope this is where Cole Younger dies well Charlie Pitts said I can die too and he stood up and fired at the robbers immediately got five shells in him and he was gone the gunfight only lasted probably less than a minute maybe I haven't heard the term thirty seconds but you can imagine the bullets that were flying around there and you hear so much about robbers but when you look at where the bullets landed they clearly were not the sharpshooters among the posse there the was at the sheriff or Thiele watt that got hit but he got hit in a one stem of his pipe or something and bullet did no damage somebody else got grazed a little bit on the wrist but that was it the robbers on the other hand Charlie Pitts was immediately down by five different bullets Cole Younger got hit six more times this is a picture of Cole you can see his right eye swelled up that's because there's a bullet lodged behind it and you got a total of eleven wounds by the time he got done with that two weeks there Jim took a shot in his jaw took a piece of his jaw he never could talk properly that was he was so despondent because of that that him eventually committed suicide Charlie Pitts was dead and Bob younger was relatively unscathed he had his arm was injured from Northfield but but after a short time he shouted we surrender all don't accept me and he was ordered to stand up hold up his hands well somebody up on the bluff above him not knowing that he had surrendered shot at him and hit him in the side he didn't think I was very very kosher but anyway the the sheriff shouted out I'll shoot the next one or something and shoots and that matters came to an end and the famous younger brothers were captured they took him back into town loaded up the body of Charley Pitts and the three robbers and a wagon and they were escorted by that crowd of a hundred men they also met the occupants of a special train was was sent over from Mankato and people came up from st. James and they met this huge crowd as they're going back so the younger brothers had this huge escort all the way back to seven miles into madelia where they were lodged next door to the courthouse in the Flanders hotel and there of course Cole Younger recognized the propriety of the hotel from being there a few days before a few weeks before and they chatted they were kept I think Bob in one room and Jim and Cole and another and how the townspeople came down to see him they let the townspeople in a few times so they could see the robbers among those were some of my ancestors mr. Miz William Cunningham who lived in town at the time and that's one of her family's stories about how they went see the robbers of course the robbers long as they were captured they made the most of it at least now they were they were dry and they were fed and and they had emotions to work on so all they talked about their life of crime and they you know they they really people who are crying when they came out of there these robbers you know repenting of their deeds whatever they did anyway obviously it was to their advantage what they they knew that people had died and back then deaths meant hangings that was a big issue for him while an earlier issue was was vigilante groups coming in and take them taking them away but sheriff Lisbon wasn't having any of that whenever he heard rumors he put the kibosh on that the sheriff was ordered by the Minneapolis police chief's st. Paul did bring the robbers up there but he was a feisty character he said you don't have any jurisdiction he took them over stealthily on a on a train to Faribault the county seat where they're lodged in the rice County Jail Frank was that or Cole was asked who was it that shot that shot Joseph Heywood everybody wanted to know that he said well I'll I'll answer your question tomorrow the next day he handed the person this note and said be true to your friends though the heavens fall Cole Younger never would identify the shooter of Joseph Heywood I think it's pretty clearly Frank Charlie Pitts I don't think it was Bob Charlie Pitts was mean enough to but with Charlie Pitts dead they wouldn't have been endangering him at all to say he's the one that shot Heywood but Cole Younger never revealed it I think that's because it was it was Frank Frank as the leader that grew would have probably been the last one out of there Frank had shot people before and those two Col and Frank were the old buddies they'd been through the war together they'd been through everything together and Cole was just not giving up that information at any rate they were they were represented and their attorneys advised them to plead guilty that wasn't a happy thing to plead guilty to murder because it meant at least a life sentence but in Minnesota the rule was if you the only way you could be hung would be if a jury condemned you to hang if you pled guilty there wouldn't be any jury so you'd get a life sentence and the younger brother very wisely decided to plead guilty Cole claimed later he pled guilty to the murder of Nicholas Gustafson and there were witnesses said they saw him he denied it to know it was one of the town's people that shot Gusterson Cole wrote a great account of all of this do you have to take it with a grain of salt because it's known that parts of it were not exactly true and in any rate they were you could still find the trial papers the hearing papers for their sentencing their pleas and all of that I think they're lodged in the museum that's now in this grabber block in Northfield right next to the bank it's an amazing place to go and see you could stand right in the room where all those events happen and you can they've got lots of resources for research in the building anyway the State Penitentiary was at Stillwater right on the Mississippi River you can see there the penitentiary was within that you shaped wall that you can see and it was doing a thriving business and criminals by 1876 in the facilities that you see there here's the front gate one just would not have been a lot of fun to go in there knowing that you weren't probably going to get out again for the rest of your life these are the cell blocks they're the most modern approved things in 1876 and they first kept them together you know because everybody's afraid that these men were noted Desperados he really didn't identify them as a james-younger gang until several days after the robbery but after that everybody's afraid with their reputation that they'd be somebody to be coming up and trying to free them from jail or wreaking vengeance upon people like poor Oscar Sorbo who who think the family even changed their name to make sure those Desperados were to come up and take vengeance upon them but you know they did their little their little work in prison and actually didn't do too bad there's coal and then wasn't stripes back then it was it was checks like that he's healed of his is his wound there and here they are in some other prison garbs of course they were famous so even from prison there you could you could have their photographs taken getting a little older here and looking very debonair they're still in prison though these photographs sold like hotcakes people had them as souvenirs of the robbery Colavecchia you know he was a model prisoner none of them caused any trouble all the records are united on that they were model prisoners Kola dentally started a prison newspaper there's a library worked in that and he was a nurse for many years this is a prison hospital up there there's an account of one young man who unfortunately was put in the prison and he found himself face to face with Cole Younger he described Cole youngers being pretty big noted robber and he was scared to death but there was even an incident where the prison caught on fire and the youngers evidently helped to guard the lady prisoners and and went docile he back to their shell cells afterwards when the fire was out so they were model prisoners and didn't try to contraband the law or escape anymore they were not too far from home Bob had tuberculosis he lived for thirteen years but died in prison areas their sister Henrietta came up and and they allowed him to put on their civilian clothes and have this picture taken but Bob is within a few weeks of his death at the time of this picture and he did die in prison i and my had a great great uncle there you see Jimmy McAdoo the giant there he was a circus giant in 1898 their circus came through Stillwater and you see the note in their route book there about how the younger brothers members of the famous Jesse James gang can find the state prison here so they were the objects of tourism even back then eventually Jim and Cole were let out of prison first they were paroled on condition they didn't leave the state then they were in Jim ended up killing himself couldn't talk properly couldn't find proper work they wouldn't let him marry Alex Mueller the sweetheart that he wanted to marry the newspaper lady and he did himself in Cole finally was freed on the condition that he didn't come back to Minnesota and he went back to Missouri the gang of course was decimated this seemed like Frank lost his lost his stomach for a crime anymore so Jesse James was left to they they tried some civilian things went down in Nashville but Jesse just couldn't stay away so he formed another gang that's one reason why Jesse James is more famous than the rest is because he kept it up longer and did all of his newspaper writing he even had some mass media newspaper people fronting for him giving him alibis and things so he developed his Rob you know Robin Hood persona but after some it wasn't the same you know the gang members weren't like Frank and cohle who'd been through the war together and had each other's backs he had the Ford brothers and some others and the Ford brothers unbeknownst to him we're making deals with the governor for the reward money if they if they turned Jesse in also one day we know the story he was in his house down there Missouri and the Ford brothers are there and he had taken off his guns and laid him aside climbed up on a stool to straighten the picture and Bob Ford saw his opportunity when it snuck up behind Jesse shot him in the back of the head and these are all these people making sure it is indeed Jesse but at last the only ones left finally out of the whole bunch were Cole Younger and Frank James the two that had started everything in the first place Frank was never convicted of a crime he was sheltered by the people in Missouri who had no no love lost between them and the people in the north anyway he one time turned himself in they had a trial which probably wasn't really that much of a big deal he was acquitted whatever he is charged with and he was a free man never spent any time in punishment anyway for for his crimes he in Cole Cole when he got out Cole they tried even tried a Wild West circuses these were the days you know when Buffalo Bill and Pawnee bill and others are out there but somebody use them there you can see their pictures they're up in a panel on the back the famous outlaws and that was to help track people there to their little Wild West Show eventually you know the I think the mother died and and Frank went back to the old homestead there where obviously he's charging admission of 50 cents and you could buy pebbles from as souvenirs from the James farm and that's what he lived out his life doing I'm sure he had to go get some more pebbles bring him in by the bushel to sell them in the meantime there's Cole Cole became a respectable citizen he would go around giving lectures what life has taught me he never did tell the whole truth about what happened back then he never did never did reveal all of the facts about the trial but he finally died they died within a year of each other here's Cole's grave with his his Confederate marker there Cole Younger captain and in quantrell's company of Raiders the others of course here the pictures of madelia is magnificent seven with sheriff glisten in the middle those suit sold like hotcakes and the men were famous they had to of course they had all that reward money they've been offered they had to divvy it up between dozens and dozens of people here's here's one for J and a are Manning and and J s Allen they got their part and reward money I saw one more sheriff glisten Lisbon got got they gave him a dollar 69 for some expenses along with the rest I found this in the madelia Museum there there's this note somebody that was going to get some reward money from the governor and they wrote this saying don't give it to that attorney that's claiming to represent me he doesn't I guess the attorneys were flocking around seeing an opportunity there anyway in the bank there's a clock in the wall it still says 10 minutes to to the time of the robbery the bank vault is still there they put this plaque in the room about Joseph Heywood faithful until death and books have been written about him with that title as well his widow of course said she wouldn't have it any other way and left a little daughter Lizzie maim and one interesting thing is the banks of course were so appreciative of Joseph Heywood that it was a shame that his widow was left without any income and the the daughter without a father so they took up donations from banks not just in Minnesota you can find the list and the banks all around the country donated money and there was enough to send Lizzie Mae there to college of course Carleton College where her dad had been had been the treasurer and and take care of the family to show the bank's appreciation the prison is gone the wall is still there the wardens still there in the upper left there's a condominium in there now but no outlaws no famous things the Ames mill still there on the other side we're standing on bridge square the building's still there been reformed doesn't look like it did back then no life in Northfield goes on and no banks have been robbed in Northfield since I think the bank robbers learned their lesson it was a wonderful thing anyway the best thing about the story is the bad guys lost and the good guys won when they counted up the money that was missing they found out that the robbers had gotten a total of 26 dollars and 70 cents from the robbery none of those nickels that Bob scooped up from the counter my grandmother who grew up on that property 20 years after the robbery said she remembered people coming down there with shovels and there was a spot they would dig where they were like 13 trees and rojo wasn't able to find it trees evidently gone that was over a century ago she said they would dig there because when the robbers were captured they didn't have money on them so they figured the robbers had gotten a lot of money and they buried it just before they were captured they were going to come back and get it later so people would go down there with shovels and try and dig turn the ground over and try to try to find the buried treasure of course there wasn't any buried treasure because like I say the good guys won that's just the best part of the story well anyway hope you enjoyed that account of the robbery of the Northfield bank by the james-younger gang and their comeuppance by the good people of Northfield Minnesota so anyway look for more programs hoping to have some more out soon we'll keep this going as long as the coronavirus is out there stalking all of our citizens we'll be safe inside and look for more more they sing don't forget to put your comments in the when you watch the program I'd like to know what you think of them like know how you think they could be improved and but that might be it for now appreciate you watching we'll see you next time [Music] [Music]
