James Younger Gang: The Corydon Iowa Bank Robbery

 

The James-Younger Gang spent several days scouting Wayne County, Iowa, before setting their sights on the Ocobock Brothers Bank. The gang’s first choice was the Wayne County Treasurer’s office. They’d learned that it held over $40,000 in receipts and figured it’d be a nice, easy score, but when Jesse, Frank, and Cole Younger walked into the office, the clerk didn’t have a key to the safe. He told them the treasurer had it, and he was away at a town meeting.

 

The boys left, intent on finding the treasurer. But as they rode down the empty streets, they saw the Ocobock Brothers Bank and decided it fit the bill.

Jesse couldn’t have picked a better day to rob the bank. Missouri orator Henry Clay Dean was giving a speech at the Methodist church that afternoon, and most of the businesses in town had closed for the day so they could attend the meeting. 

 

The robbers hitched their horses across the street and walked to the bank. One man waited outside to watch the horses. The other three entered the bank and pointed their Navy Colts at the cashier, Ted Wock. One robber handed Wock a wheat sack and walked him to the safe.

 

“Get up, walk easy, don’t say a damned word,” he said. “Unlock that safe.”

 

The cashier scooped all the money into the sack and handed it to Jesse. Afterward, they bound and gagged the man and left him sitting by the safe. As they walked out, one robber wished Wock a “good day.”

After the robbery, Jesse couldn’t help taunting the crowd gathered to hear Dean speak. A man working at Brant & Dillon’s meat market and grocery store said Jesse interrupted the meeting to tell Dean they had just robbed the bank. As he left, Jesse couldn’t resist adding, “Catch us if you can.”

Another early source said Jesse James asked Dean for permission to interrupt the meeting. “Well, you’ve been having your fun,” said Jesse, “and we’ve been having ours. You needn’t go into hysterics when I tell you we’ve just been down to the bank and robbed it of every dollar in the till. If you’ll go down there now, you’ll find the cashier tied up, and then if you want any of us, just come and take us. Thank you for your attention.”

 

Most of the people at the meeting assumed he was joking. Who could blame them? What robber in his right mind would risk making a clean getaway to play with the crowd?

 

None but Jesse James. He had a habit of doing strange things. He often wrote notes to newspapers proclaiming his innocence, insisting he had been hundreds of miles away from the location on the day of the robbery. After the Gads Hill Train robbery, Jesse handed engineer William Wetton a press release detailing the job as “the most daring robbery on record.”

 

Jesse had a playful side. He enjoyed taunting and teasing the press as much as he enjoyed robbing banks and trains.

 

Finally, someone walked over to the bank to check things out. When they found the cashier tied up and the safe empty, Sheriff J. Nelson Wright formed a posse and chased after the gang while bank officials wired the Pinkerton Detective Agency for assistance.

 

Two days later, Robert Pinkerton joined Sheriff Wright’s posse as they followed the bandits into Daviess County, Missouri. The posse caught up with the gang at George Lee’s farmhouse near Civil Bend. When the boys saw them coming, they jumped on their horses and rode off, but Frank James took a bullet while riding away.

 

Frank and Jesse holed up at General Joe Shelby’s place in Lafayette, Missouri, for nearly two months afterward. It was touch and go with Frank for a while. He was spitting up blood, and no one was sure he’d make it.

Meanwhile, the Ocobock Brothers Bank offered a $1,000 reward for the men and the return of the money. They thought two of the robbers were brothers. They had “light hair and complexion, very short, light whiskers, about five feet eight or nine inches high. One other, same height, dark hair, and whiskers. Can’t describe the other.”

No one was surprised when a letter from Jesse appeared in The Kansas City Times, dated June 24, 1871. “I have just seen an article in the Lexington Register charging myself and my brother with robbing a bank in Iowa.” He claimed to have three witnesses who could prove his innocence “by the best citizens in Missouri” but didn’t see any point in doing so. “The degraded Radical party criticized my alibi and insinuated that I had bribed my witnesses,” so there would be no point. Besides, he would just as soon they “think him a robber as not.”

 

Two months later, Clell Miller was arrested in Clay County, Missouri. The Ottumwa Courier reported Miller was caught by a New York detective “who went down there and lived with the fellow in Clay County, Mo. until he became satisfied of his man, and then decoyed him away from home and gobbled him up.”

 

Miller was taken back to Corydon and tried for the robbery in November 1872, but released for lack of evidence. The mask he wore prevented anyone from positively identifying him.

 

No one is certain, but the robber’s take that day was estimated to be somewhere between $6,000 and $10,000. Not a bad haul for five minutes of work.

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