The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself by Cole Younger (positive books to read TXT) 📖

that the robbers had been followed into Nodaway county, Missouri, while we were at Monegaw Springs all that time. Besides those mentioned in my 1874 letter, Marshall P. Wright’s affidavit that he showed Jim and me at Monegaw Springs the morning paper containing the account of the robbery the next morning after it took place, was presented to Gov. Clough of Minnesota in 1898.

It is 250 miles or more and no cross lines of railroad existed to facilitate our passage, so it would be impossible for any one to have made the trip. The shortest rail lines are roundabout, via St. Joseph and Kansas City, so it will be apparent that I could not have been at the Rock Island wreck.


21. THE TRUTH ABOUT JOHN YOUNGER

John, my brother, was fourteen when the war closed and Bob under twelve. One day in January, 1866, John, Bob and my mother drove into Independence to mill, and to do other errands in town, one of which was to get one of my pistols fixed.

A young fellow named Gillcreas, who had served in the militia and was several years John’s senior, hit the boy with a piece of mackerel, and warm words ensued.

“Why don’t you shoot him?” shouted Bob from the wagon.

John told the fellow if Cole were there he would not dare do that, and Gillcreas said Cole should be in prison, and all Quantrell’s men with him. Gillcreas went away, but returned to the attack, this time armed with a heavy slungshot. In the meantime John had gotten the pistol which had been in the wagon. Gillcreas came up to resume the fight and John shot him dead. The slungshot was found with the thong twined about Gillcreas’ wrist.

The coroner’s jury acquitted John, and there were many people in Independence who felt that he had done just right.

When I went to Louisiana in 1868 John went with me, afterward accompanying me to Texas. Clerking in a store in Dallas, he became associated with some young fellows of reckless habits and drank somewhat.

One day, while they were all in a gay mood, John shot the pipe out of the mouth of a fellow named Russell. Russell jumped up and ran out of the room.

“Don’t kill him,” shouted the crowd in ridicule, and John fired several random shots to keep up the scare.

Russell swore out a warrant for John’s arrest, and next morning, Jan. 17, 1871, Capt. S. W. Nichols, the sheriff, and John McMahon came up to the house to arrest him. John made no resistance and invited the officers to breakfast, but they declined and went back down town. Thompson McDaniels called John’s attention to the fact that a guard had been stationed over his horses, and they walked down town together. Tom and John drank some whisky, and while they were waiting Nichols and his party had taken on some too.

“What did you put a guard over my horses for?” asked John, when he entered the room where Nichols was.

“I did not put any guard over your horses,” replied Nichols.

“You’re a——liar,” continued John, “I saw them there myself.”

At this another Russell, a brother of the one whose pipe had been shot out of his mouth, opened fire on John and wounded him in the arm. Thomp. McDaniels shot Capt. Nichols, and in the melee McMahon was shot, as far as I have ever been able to learn, by my brother.

John and McDaniels went out, took the officers’ horses and rode to Missouri.

It developed after the shooting that the same Russell who had opened fire on John had placed the guard over the horses, and that Capt. Nichols had not known of it.

I was away in Louisiana at the time, but on my return several attorneys offered to defend John if he would return for trial, but after a visit at the home of our uncle in California he returned to Missouri in the winter of 1873 and 1874, just in time to be suspected of the train robbery at Gad’s Hill, on the Iron Mountain road.

John and Jim were visiting at the home of our friend, Theodoric Snuffer, at Monegaw Springs, St. Clair county.

Man-hunters had sought us there on a previous occasion when we were all four there. We had come upon the party of 15 suddenly, and I covered them with a shot-gun, demanded their surrender, and explaining that we had not robbed anybody, and wanted to be treated as decent citizens, approached by officers of the law in the regular manner if we were accused, restored their arms to them, and they went back to Osceola.

March 11, 1874, J. W. Whicher, a Pinkerton detective from Chicago, who had been sent out to arrest Frank and Jesse James at Kearney, was found dead in the road near Independence, and W. J. Allen, otherwise known as Capt. Lull, a St. Louis plain-clothes cop who passed by the name of Wright, and an Osceola boy named Ed. Daniels, who was a deputy sheriff with an ambition to shine as a sleuth, rode out to find Jim and Bob at the Springs.

The boys, advised of their coming by a negro servant, sought to convince them, as we had the earlier posse, that they could not have had anything to do with the affair at Gad’s Hill. But Allen, remembering the recent fate of Whicher, drew his pistol and shot John in the neck. John returned the fire and killed Daniels and took after Allen. Side by side the horses galloped, John firing at the detective till he fell from the saddle mortally wounded. John turned to ride back to where Jim was, when he toppled from his saddle and was dead in a few minutes.

The St. Louis detective had fled at the first fire, and lived to tell graphic stories of how it all happened, although he was really too busy getting out to know anything about it.


22. AMNESTY BILL FAILS

The killing of Lull, Daniels and Whicher within a single week was undoubtedly exasperating to the head of the Pinkerton agency, and had he not been personally embittered thereby he probably would not have avenged it so terribly.

In the next January, 1875, a posse of Pinkerton men and others, guided by Daniel H. Asker, a neighbor of the James boys, proceeded to their home near Kearney and threw a bomb into the house where the family was seated. An eight-year-old half-brother of Frank and Jesse was killed, their mother, Mrs. Samuels, had one arm torn off, and other members of the family were more or less injured. But Frank and Jesse were not taken.

There had been a feeling among many people in the state even before that these detectives were unjustly pursuing some of the Confederate soldiers, and I have been told since that Gov. Silas Woodson was on the eve of interfering with Pinkerton’s men when news came that two of them had been killed in an encounter with John and Jim Younger.

At any rate the death of the innocent little Samuels boy made still more pronounced this feeling against the operations of the detectives, and in favor of the members of the Confederate army who had been outlawed by Fremont, Halleck, Ewing and the Drake constitution, ungenerously, to say the least.

This feeling found definite expression shortly after the raid on the Samuels home in the introduction of a bill in the Missouri legislature offering amnesty to the Younger and James brothers by name, and others who had been outlawed with them by proclamation, from all their acts during the war, and promising them a fair trial on any charge against them arising after the war.

The bill was introduced in the house by the late General Jeff Jones, of Callaway county, where my brothers and myself had many friends, and was, in the main, as follows:

“Whereas, by the 4th section of the 11th article of the Constitution of Missouri, all persons in the military service of the United States or who acted under the authority thereof in this state, are relieved from all civil liability and all criminal punishment for all acts done by them since the 1st day of January, A.D. 1861; and,”

“Whereas, By the 12th section of the said 11th article of said constitution provision is made by which, under certain circumstances, may be seized, transported to, indicted, tried and punished in distant counties, any confederate under ban of despotic displeasure, thereby contravening the Constitution of the United States and every principle of enlightened humanity; and,”

“Whereas, Such discrimination evinces a want of manly generosity and statesmanship on the part of the party imposing, and of courage and manhood on the part of the party submitting tamely thereto; and,”

“Whereas, Under the outlawry pronounced against Jesse W. James, Frank James, Coleman Younger, James Younger and others, who gallantly periled their lives and their all in defense of their principles, they are of necessity made desperate, driven as they are from the fields of honest industry, from their friends, their families, their homes and their country, they can know no law but the law of self-preservation, nor can have no respect for and feel no allegiance to a government which forces them to the very acts it professes to deprecate, and then offers a bounty for their apprehension, and arms foreign mercenaries with power to capture and kill them; and,”

“Whereas, Believing these men too brave to be mean, too generous to be revengeful, and too gallant and honorable to betray a friend or break a promise; and believing further that most, if not all of the offenses with which they are charged have been committed by others, and perhaps by those pretending to hunt them, or by their confederates; that their names are and have been used to divert suspicion from and thereby relieve the actual perpetrators; that the return of these men to their homes and friends would have the effect of greatly lessening crime in our state by turning public attention to the real criminals, and that common justice, sound policy and true statesmanship alike demand that amnesty should be extended to all alike of both parties for all acts done or charged to have been done during the war; therefore, be it”

“_Resolved by the House of Representatives, the Senate concurring therein,_ That the Governor of the state be, and he is hereby requested to issue his proclamation notifying the said Jesse W. James, Frank James, Coleman Younger, and James Younger and others, that full and complete amnesty and pardon will be granted them for all acts charged or committed by them during the late civil war, and inviting them peacefully to return to their respective homes in this state and there quietly to remain, submitting themselves to such proceedings as may be instituted against them by the courts for all offenses charged to have been committed since said war, promising and guaranteeing to each of them full protection and a fair trial therein, and that full protection shall be given them from the time of their entrance into the state and his notice thereof under said proclamation and invitation.”

It was approved by Attorney-General Hockaday, favorably reported by a majority of the committee on criminal jurisprudence, but while it was pending Farmer Askew, who had piloted the detectives in their raid on the Samuels residence, was called to his door at night and shot and killed by unknown parties.

The bill was beaten, Democrats and Confederate soldiers