A Minnesota Century: The Story of Cole Younger
By Annie Feidt
October 1999

RealAudio 3.0 | Slide show

The warden needed help evacuating the female prisoners. He handed a revolver to a confessed murderer, the man who, with Jesse James, led the Northfield Raid, one of the bloodiest bank robberies in Minnesota history.

The year was 1884 and the prison was Stillwater, Minnesota. The prisoner with a gun was the notorious outlaw Cole Younger. This month in our Minnesota Century series: the story of a charismatic bank robber who the nation made into a legend because of its fascination with the untamed western frontier.

	See additional pictures of the Cole family.

TO UNDERSTAND COLE YOUNGER, you have to understand the Missouri-Kansas border region he grew up in. Intense guerrilla fighting over slavery destroyed families and farms, creating a war state even before the civil war began.

Cole: I was only a boy, born January 15th, 1844. My brother, James, was born January 15, 1848, and Robert in December 1853. This was before the conflicts and troubles centered on our home that planted a bitterness in my young heart which cried out for revenge.

Cole was not quite six feet tall, husky, with light brown, curly hair. When he was 18 years old, Union troops killed is father. Soon after, he joined a group of Confederate guerrilla fighters.

Cole: This feeling of bitterness was only accentuated by the cruelties of war which followed. I refer in particular to the shameful and cowardly murder of my father, and the cruel treatment of my mother at the hands of the Missouri militia.

The war left Cole angry and destitute. The Northern occupation of Missouri made it difficult for Confederate sympathizers to resume the life they had once known. With few options, Cole decided to join up with two other former rebels, Frank and Jesse James.

Brant: They had a lot of animosity towards the people involved in the reconstruction of Missouri, and they hated being losers and the fact that they could never live their lives as they wanted to live them.

Marley Brant is the biographer of the Younger brothers.

Brant: And Jesse had the idea that maybe if they're not allowing us to live regular lives maybe we ought to make some attacks on their financial institutions, i.e. banks, and get a little retribution and at the same time get a little money so that we can live and our families can at least have food on the table.

Brant says while the James-Younger Gang did commit robberies, many other crimes were unduly attributed to the men. Cole Younger was personally involved in no more than eight robberies - all, with the exception of Northfield, well-planned raids, where nobody was killed. But due to the nation's fascination with the Wild West, Cole Younger and Jesse James quickly became known across the country as cold-blooded killers.

Brant: Pretty soon everyone knew who they were. The media in the east started doing little dime novels which glorified their actions and created legends of Jesse James and the Younger brothers, most of the dime novels had nothing to do with who they really were, but it was fun. It was good reading.

The James-Younger gang was accused of many more robberies than they could have possibly committed.

Cole: Every daylight robbery in any part of the country, from the Alleghenies to the Rockies, was laid at our doors; we could not go out without a pair of pistols to protect ourselves.

Publicly, Cole and Jesse denounced the dime novels as outrageous fabrications, but privately, they enjoyed the notoriety. A prominent Missouri newspaper editor helped glorify their anti-Yankee campaign on the editorial page of local papers.

These men never go upon the highway in lonesome places to plunder the pilgrim. That they leave to an inferior pack of jackals. But they ride at midday into the county seat, while court is sitting, take the cash out of the vault and put the cashier in, and ride out of town to the music of cracking pistols.

In 1876, the James-Younger Gang decided to take their cause to Minnesota … unmistakably union territory. The eight-member gang made plans to hit the First National Bank in Northfield, rumored to be full of union money.

As the band fled from town empty-handed on wounded horses, they left behind four dead, including two of their own. Ultimately, the James brothers got away, but Cole Younger and his brothers, Bob and Jim, were captured 15 days later near Madelia, Minnesota, 100 miles from Northfield.

Cole: Our last hope was gone. We were at bay on the open prairie, surrounded by a line of 40 men, some of whom would fight. We were prepared to wait as long as they would, but they were not of the waiting kind. All of us but Bob went down at the first fire.

While the Youngers were still recovering from their bullet wounds, a judge sentenced the three brothers to life in prison for murder, although Historian Marley Brant says Cole did not kill either of the two men who died in Northfield. Once behind bars, the Youngers became model prisoners, recognizing it was their only hope for parole.

Prison officials quickly granted the brothers special privledges like allowing them to grow their hair out, write two letters a month and smoke a small ration of tobacco. Cole Younger, who once had a $1,500 bounty on his head, worked in the library and eventually settled into a job as head nurse in the prison hospital.

If there was any doubt that the brothers had truly given up their outlaw past, the Youngers put it to rest eight years into their term, when the prisoner cellblock went up in flames. Weapons in hand, Cole and his brothers led all the female prisoners to safety.

Cole: I can say without fear of contradiction that had it been in our minds to do so, we could have escaped from the prison that night, but we had determined to pay the penalty that had been exacted, and if we were ever to return to liberty, it would be with the consent and approval of the authorities and the public.

It was 19 more years before the state of Minnesota consented to Cole's pardon. During that time, his brother Bob died of tuberculosis and his brother Jim committed suicide. In 1901, when he walked out from behind the limestone prison walls, Cole Younger the infamous outlaw was mesmerized by the sight of a new invention: the trolley. Historian Marley Brant.

Brant: So much had happened in the time that the Youngers had been in prison. Changes in society, everyday life, there just wasn't a wild west at the time. People had heard stories about the Youngers, but it harkened back to a time that wasn't really identifiable for a lot of people.

The 59-year-old ex-convict was welcomed back into a society that cared little for his transformation, but was fascinated by his notorious past. He was offered jobs, like traveling the state as a tombstone salesman, where his reputation as a wild-west outlaw would draw customers.

As he boarded a train to Missouri in 1903, Cole knew in order to honor his pardon, he would never return to Minnesota. Brent Peterson, Library Director for the Washington County Historical Society.

Peterson: As he's chugging away from the station at St. Paul, you kind of wonder if he wasn't thinking what he could have done to save his brothers, what he could have done to make his present and his future better. I think by the time he was halfway down to Iowa on the train, he had already figured out what he wanted to do. He wanted to tell his story, he wanted to set the record straight. And now that he had the chance to do it, he was going to do it.

That same year, a Chicago publishing house issued the first edition of "The Story of Cole Younger by himself."

Cole: Many may wonder why an old "guerrilla" should feel called upon at this late day to rehearse the story of his life. On the eve of 60, I come out into the world, to find 100 or more books purporting to be a history of "the lives of the Younger brothers" but which are all nothing more nor less than a lot of sensational recitals.

Brant: He wrote an autobiography that was a complete pack of lies, glorifying his life, not owning up to any outlawry, just glorifying the war days.

Despite the lies about his past, Marley Brant says Cole was sincere in his regret for the harm he had done. But not so committed to virtue that he didn't break one of the terms of his pardon, that he never exhibit himself publicly. Almost immediately, Cole signed on to the "Cole Younger and Frank James Historical Wild West Show," which was briefly popular but ultimately failed because of poor management. In 1909, he started traveling the midwest and south to give a lecture he called "What My Life Has Taught Me."

Cole: Let me say, ladies and gentlemen, that the farthest thought from my mind is that of posing as a character. I do not desire to stand upon the basis of the notoriety which the past record of my life may have earned for me.

Those of you who may have been drawn here by mere curiosity to see a character of a man, who by the events of his life has gained somewhat of notoriety, will miss the real object of this lecture and the occasion which brings us together. My soul's desire is to benefit you by recounting some of the important lessons which my life has taught me.

Now in his late sixties, nearly bald and overweight, Cole didn't want to tell stories about bloody bank robberies and narrow escapes from the law. Instead, he preached the importance of living a good and decent life and told his lecture audience he had learned there was no heroism in being an outlaw. But the audience still thought of Cole as a legendary gunslinger from a dying era, and wasn't ready to give up that image. Even today, almost 100 years after he left Stillwater prison, Cole Younger is remembered as a ruthless and daring outlaw… a reluctant symbol of the old west.