Captured

Today’s installment concludes The Northfield Bank Job,
our selection from The Story of Cole Younger by Cole Younger published in 1903.

If you have journeyed through the installments of this series so far, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of four thousand words. Congratulations! For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in The Northfield Bank Job.

Time: September 7, 1876
Place: Northfield, Minnesota

We had been living on scant rations, corn, watermelon and other vegetables principally, but in spite of this Bob’s arm was mending somewhat. He had to sleep with it pillowed on my breast, Jim being also crippled with a wound in his shoulder, and we could not get much sleep. The wound in my thigh was troubling me and I had to walk with a cane I cut in the brush. One place we got a chicken and cooked it, only to be interrupted before we could have our feast, having to make a quick dash for cover.

At every stopping place we left marks of blood from our wounds and could have been easily trailed had not the pursuers been led in the track of our recent companions.

It seems from what I have read since, however, that I had myself left with my landlord at Madelia, Col. Vought, of the Flanders house, a damaging suggestion which proved the ultimate undoing of our party. I had talked with him about a bridge between two lakes near there, and accordingly when it became known that the robbers had passed Mankato Vought thought of this bridge, and it was guarded by him and others for two nights. When they abandoned the guard, however, he admonished a Norwegian boy named Oscar Suborn to keep close watch there for us, and Thursday morning, Sept. 21, just two weeks after the robbery, Oscar saw us, and fled into town with the alarm. A party of forty was soon out in search for us, headed by Capt. W. W. Murphy, Col. Vought and Sheriff Glispin. They came up with us as we were fording a small slough, and unable to ford it with their horses, they were delayed somewhat by having to go around it. But they soon after got close enough so that one of them broke my walking stick with a shot. We were in sight of our long-sought horses when they cut us off from the animals, and our last hope was gone. We were at bay on the open prairie, surrounded by a picket line of forty men, some of whom would fight. Not prepared to stand for our last fight against such odds on the open field, we fell back into the Watonwan River bottoms and took refuge in some bushes.

We were prepared to wait as long as they would, but they were not of the waiting kind. At least some of them were not, and soon we heard the captain, who, we afterward learned, was W. W. Murphy, calling for volunteers to go in with him and rout us out. Six stepped to the front, Sheriff Glispin, Col. T. L. Vought, B. M. Rice, G. A. Bradford, C. A. Pomeroy and S. J. Severson.

Forming in line four paces apart, he ordered them to advance rapidly and concentrate the fire of the whole line the instant the robbers were discovered.

Meanwhile we were planning, too.

“Pitts,” I said, “if you want to go out and surrender, go on.”

“I’ll not go,” he replied, game to the last. “I can die as well as you can.”

“Make for the horses,” I said. “Every man for himself. There is no use stopping to pick up a comrade here, for we can’t get him through the line. Just charge them and make it if we can.”

I got up as the signal for the charge and we fired one volley.

I tried to get my man, and started through, but the next I knew I was lying on the ground, bleeding from my nose and mouth, and Bob was standing up, shouting:

“Coward!”

One of the fellows in the outer line, not brave enough himself to join the volunteers who had come in to beat us out, was not disposed to believe in the surrender, and had his gun levelled on Bob in spite of the handkerchief which was waving as a flag of truce.

Sheriff Glispin, of Watonwan county, who was taking Bob’s pistol from him, was also shouting to the fellow:

“Don’t shoot him or I’ll shoot you.”

All of us but Bob had gone down at the first fire. Pitts, shot through the heart, lay dead. Jim, including the wound in the shoulder he received at Northfield, had been shot five times, the most serious being the shot which shattered his upper jaw and lay imbedded beneath the brain, and a shot that buried itself underneath his spine, and which gave him trouble to the day of his death. Including those received in and on the way from Northfield I had eleven wounds.

A bullet had pierced Bob’s right lung, but he was the only one left on his feet. His right arm useless, and his pistol empty, he had no choice.

“I surrender,” he had shouted. “They’re all down but me. Come on. I’ll not shoot.”

And Sheriff Glispin’s order not to shoot was the beginning of the protectorate that Minnesota people established over us.

We were taken into Madelia that day and our wounds dressed, and I greeted my old landlord, Col. Vought, who had been one of the seven to go in to get us. We were taken to his hotel and a guard posted.

Then came the talk of mob vengeance we had heard so often in Missouri. It was said a mob would be out that night to lynch us. Sheriff Glispin swore we would never be mobbed as long as we were his prisoners.

“I don’t want any man to risk his life for us,” I said to him, “but if they do come for us give us our pistols so we can make a fight for it.”

“If they do come, and I weaken,” he said, “you can have your pistols.”

But the only mob that came was the mob of sightseers, reporters and detectives.

[Epilog: The James Brothers escaped. Cole Younger plead guilty to murder in return for life in prison. Decades later in 1903, he received a pardon on the condition that he leave Minnesota and never return.]

This ends our series of passages on The Northfield Bank Job by Cole Younger from his book The Story of Cole Younger published in 1903. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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