Cole Younger Never Stopped Defending Himself

Cole Younger in 1876

Most outlaws get the last word from a newspaper reporter. Cole Younger got twenty-five years to prepare his own version. 

That’s the thing that makes him different from Jesse James.

 

Jesse died in 1882 with a bullet in his back and a growing legend attached to his name. Cole survived the gunfights and prison, living long enough to watch the Old West become history.

 

Then he wrote a book.

 

Reading The Story of Cole Younger, By Himself is a little like listening to a defense attorney’s closing argument. Again and again, Cole returns to the same point.

 

He was a soldier first, and then an outlaw. Everything started in Missouri during the Civil War.

 

Missouri wasn’t like Virginia or Pennsylvania. The war there wasn’t fought by organized armies. A good portion of it was fought by guerrillas, bushwhackers, jayhawkers, and men settling personal grudges under the cover of military service.

It was a nasty, bloody business.

 

Cole joined Quantrill’s Raiders while still a teenager. Frank James was there. Eventually, Jesse James would be too.

 

Cole wasn’t carrying water or tending horses. He took part in some of the war’s most infamous actions, including Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in August 1863. Around 150 men and boys were killed as the guerrillas swept through the town. To Union supporters it was a massacre. To many Missourians, it was revenge.

 

People have been arguing about Lawrence ever since.

 

Then things got worse.

 

Cole rode with Bloody Bill Anderson, one of the most feared guerrilla leaders in the country. Anderson’s men developed a reputation that bordered on the unbelievable. Stories circulated about scalps hanging from bridles. Prisoners were shot. Retaliation followed retaliation until nobody seemed capable of remembering how it started.

 

Years later, Cole was still talking about those days. The war never really left him. It just changed shape.

 

When the shooting stopped in 1865, some former guerrillas settled down. Some moved west. Some tried farming.

 

Cole Younger drifted into outlawry.

 

By the late 1860s, he was riding with Frank and Jesse James. Together they formed the core of what newspapers eventually called the James-Younger Gang.

 

The gang stayed busy.

 

Banks in Missouri.

 

A stagecoach in Kentucky.

 

Train robberies across the Midwest.

 

In 1873, the gang pulled off one of the most famous train robberies in American history near Adair, Iowa. The robbers removed a rail from the Rock Island line, sending the locomotive crashing off the tracks. Engineer John Rafferty was killed in the wreck. The gang escaped with thousands of dollars.

 

The robbery made headlines from coast to coast. So did the next robbery. And the one after that.

 

The James Boys became celebrities. Cole Younger became a supporting character in his own story.

 

Part of that was personality. Jesse James understood publicity. Cole didn’t.

 

If Jesse was the headline, Cole was usually standing somewhere in the second paragraph. That didn’t mean he wasn’t important. Even enemies respected his nerve. During the gang’s last days, he showed just how much punishment one man could take.

 

The beginning of the end came in Northfield, Minnesota, on September 7, 1876.

 

Nobody knows exactly why the gang picked Northfield. What we know is that it was a terrible idea.

 

The plan called for several gang members to guard the street while others entered the First National Bank. 

 

The townspeople fought back. Storekeepers grabbed rifles. Ordinary citizens armed themselves.

 

The crowd kept growing.

 

Years later, Cole was still replaying the scene in his head.

Cole Younger in the early 1900s

In his autobiography, he described watching more and more people gather outside the bank. Some carried weapons. Others simply stood and watched. Either way, the situation was getting worse by the minute.

 

Cole figured Jesse would call off the robbery. Ride out of town and live to rob another bank.

 

Jesse stayed. According to Cole, that’s when he knew they were finished.

 

The robbery collapsed, and the gang fled. Then came the chase.

 

Posses formed across southern Minnesota. Hundreds of armed men joined the hunt. Newspapers followed every development.

 

The James brothers escaped. The Youngers didn’t.

 

The final showdown came near Madelia. By then the Youngers were wounded, exhausted, and running out of luck.

 

The gunfight was brutal.

 

Newspapers couldn’t agree on how many times Cole was hit. Some said nine. Others pushed the number higher. Whatever the total, it was enough. One reporter said there were enough bullet holes in Cole Younger to kill several men. Yet somehow he survived. Charlie Pitts didn’t.

 

When the shooting stopped, the Younger brothers surrendered.

 

The James-Younger Gang was finished.

 

For many outlaws, that would have been the final chapter. For Cole Younger, it became the longest. He and his brothers received life sentences at Stillwater Prison in Minnesota.

 

Then something unexpected happened. The Youngers became model prisoners.

 

Prison officials praised their conduct. During a prison fire, the brothers helped maintain order rather than use the confusion as an opportunity to escape.

 

That got people’s attention.

 

So did the years. Five became ten. Ten became twenty.

 

The public gradually stopped seeing the Younger brothers as desperate outlaws and started seeing them as aging prisoners. Not everybody forgave them. But plenty of people did.

 

When Cole finally walked out of prison in 1901, he was fifty-seven. Most of the men he’d ridden with were dead. The frontier was fading. The world looked different. So did Cole Younger.

 

Then he sat down and wrote a book. The reviews were generally good.

 

Readers expecting a collection of robbery stories got something else. Cole talked less about banks and trains than he did Missouri, Quantrill, Bloody Bill, and the Civil War.

 

Some reviewers found that refreshing. Others noticed something else.

 

Cole blamed almost everyone except himself. That criticism has followed the book for more than a century.

 

Frank James published a memoir, too.

 

The difference is noticeable. Frank’s book reads like testimony. Cole’s book reads like a man still arguing his case. Again and again he returned to the same years, the same people, and the same questions. You feel he spent twenty-five years thinking about them.

 

Maybe he did.

 

After his release, Cole reunited with Frank James in a Wild West show. Audiences paid money to hear old outlaws talk about the frontier.

 

The irony would have been hard to miss. Twenty-five years earlier, posses had tried to kill them. Now people bought tickets.

 

Cole also spent years lecturing around the country. Reporters who expected a hard-eyed gunman often encountered a thoughtful older man who seemed far more interested in discussing the Civil War than reliving robberies.

 

The older he got, the less interested he seemed in defending outlawry and the more interested he became in explaining it.

 

When Cole Younger died in 1916, he left behind something most outlaws never managed to leave behind.

 

His side of the story.

 

Whether it’s the truth, the whole truth, or simply the version Cole Younger wanted history to remember is something readers will have to decide for themselves.

 

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