Legends of the Old West - JESSE JAMES D.C. Ep. 7 | "Manhunt"

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

After the Northfield shootout, the surviving members of the James-Younger gang flee the area. Posses scour the land in pursuit. The outlaws are plagued by terrible weather, rough terrain, and hundreds of manhunters. After a week on the run, the gang is forced to make a difficult choice. Some men will make it out of Minnesota and some won't. Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The James Younger gang had ridden into Northfield, Minnesota with eight men. Now, two of their number were dead on the street. Of the six survivors, four were wounded, and one of those, Bob Younger, was seriously injured. Bob had been shot in the elbow by a.50 caliber slug from an old Civil War rifle. He was lucky his arm was still attached, and he was in terrible pain. And maybe worse than the physical damage was the financial gain from the robbery. Or, more accurately, the lack of gain. After a sustained gun battle in the middle of town that killed two outlaws and wounded four more,

the gang had exactly $26.60 to show for it. And now, as they hurried south out of Northfield at the fastest pace possible, they knew a massive manhunt would be underway any minute. The next two weeks of their lives would be an ordeal unlike anything they'd ever experienced. From Black Barrel Media, this is Season 7 of the Legends of the Old West podcast. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. And this season, we're revisiting the life and legacy of Jesse James. This is Episode 7, Manhoft. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you.

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Download Fortnite on consoles, PC, cloud services, or Android, and play Lego Fortnite for free. Rated ESRB E10+. As the outlaws rode south, the people of Northfield tried to comprehend the gravity of the situation. Two dead outlaws lay on Division Street. Farther down the street, a Swedish immigrant also lay in the dirt. He had suffered a headshot from Cole Younger, but had survived the initial attack, though he would eventually pass away from the trauma of the wound.

And in the First National Bank, citizens discovered the dead body of senior bookkeeper Joseph Haywood. More than 140 years later, there's still no agreement on who killed him, but the two most likely suspects are Bob Younger and Frank James. And then, one hour after the robbery, one of the founders of the bank stood over the shoulder of the telegraph operator and dictated an urgent message. The telegram read, Eight armed men attacked bank at two o'clock. Fight on street between robbers and citizens.

Cashier killed. Teller wounded. Two robbers killed. Others wounded. Send us some men in wounded. Two robbers killed. Others wounded. Send us some men in arms to chase robbers. The telegram went to every town, every detective, and every sheriff in southern Minnesota. It was concise and direct, but it lacked the most crucial piece of information, the identities of the robbers. And that was because the people of

Northfield had no idea who'd robbed them. The town was mayhem after the raid. People streamed in from everywhere to see the damage and the dead outlaws. Speculation about their identities was rampant, but there was no confirmation. Regardless, the manhunt was in motion. Regardless, the manhunt was in motion. Two hours after the robbery, trains left Minneapolis and St. Paul headed south. They were packed with detectives and well-armed volunteers. In towns all over southern Minnesota, telegraph operators ran to the leaders of their communities with news of the raid. Men from every walk of life dropped everything and grabbed their weapons.

They formed local posses to search for the robbers. But unfortunately for the people of Minnesota, the first town that could have caught the gang missed its chance. The small town of Dundas was just three miles south of Northfield. When the six outlaws rode through the business district, they scanned the street for signs of distress. They found none. Despite its close proximity, the town had no clue the raid had happened. The urgent message from Northfield was flashing across the telegraph operator's machine, but the operator had picked that time to be absent from his station. He was gone for more than one hour and completely missed the news of the raid at the critical moment. The outlaws rode through town and no one was the wiser.

On the other side, the gang encountered a man with two horses and a wagon. Bob Younger had been riding double during the escape, and he needed his own horse. The man didn't want to give up one of his two horses, so an outlaw whacked him over the head with a pistol and stole a horse. Almost immediately, the gang saw two men racing toward them on fine horses. The animals belonged to their dead friends, Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell. These two men had chased them from Northfield. The outlaws pulled their guns and commanded the men to stop, and the men did.

The outlaws galloped away, but the two riders followed at a distance. They stayed on the trail and waited for posses to catch up. The gang was still outrunning its pursuers, but the gap was tightening. Two hours later, it closed for the first time. A little after 6 p.m., four hours after the raid, the gang rode into the town of Shieldsville and they stopped to water their horses. The men were sore and exhausted. Bob's elbow wound had bled ferociously as they rushed away from Northfield,

but now he had it in a sling and the bleeding slowed. The outlaws stopped their horses at a water trough. They might have relaxed, but only for a moment. Seconds later, five men stumbled out of a nearby saloon. They were a posse from the neighboring town of Faribault, and they had a wagon loaded with guns next to the saloon. But the wagon was also sitting right next to the outlaws. to the saloon, but the wagon was also sitting right next to the outlaws.

The bandits drew their pistols in a blur of motion. The men from Faribault had just arrived five minutes before the gang, but when they saw nothing amiss in town, they headed into the saloon for a beer, and they left all their guns outside in the wagon. The outlaws kept their guns trained on the Faribault men while they let their horses drink. When the horses were done, the outlaws fired at the water pump to scare the small posse and then galloped out of town. A few minutes later, another posse arrived in town and joined the five men from Faribault. Now with 14 men, they chased the bandits. The outlaws had a good head start, but their injuries and exhaustion slowed them down.

The posse quickly drew within rifle range and fired at the gang. Cole was holding the reins of Bob's horse and guiding it for his injured brother. One of the rifle slugs clipped Cole's elbow and caused him to jerk the reins of Bob's horse. fighting it for his injured brother. One of the rifle slugs clipped Cole's elbow and caused him to jerk the reins of Bob's horse. The horse spun and threw Bob to the ground. The pain in Bob's shattered elbow must have been excruciating.

His horse ran away, and now Cole hauled him up onto his own horse. The gang continued riding and somehow outdistanced the posse. As night fell, the gang was clear of its pursuers. The boys ran into a local farmer and forced him to guide them through the unfamiliar territory. They finally found shelter for the night in a farmhouse near a town called Waterville. They had a dry spot to rest, and they dressed their wounds and made plans for the next day.

They were in a heavily forested area called Big Woods that was full of timber and deep marshes and rivers and streams and lakes and ponds. It was dotted with small villages and individual farms, and it would be their own personal purgatory for the foreseeable future. That night, their chief form of torment began. The rain. While the gang tried to sleep, the manhunt grew and expanded. More than 200 men now scouted the roads, trails, bridges, fords, and river crossings. The outlaws got very little rest that night, and they were in the saddle early the next day. Around noon, they were discovered by one of the small posses in the area.

A farmer fired at them with his shotgun, but he mostly succeeded in scaring his own posse, and the gang slipped by. but he mostly succeeded in scaring his own posse, and the gang slipped by. A half an hour later, the outlaws found a farm and tried to convince a German farmer to loan them two new horses and saddles. When the man justifiably hesitated, they stopped talking and pulled their guns. They took the farmer's son as a guide, and when he was done helping them, they sent him back home. On his way back, the boy met a man who told him about the Northfield raid, and the boy realized he had just helped the most wanted men in the state. One last posse spotted the bandits before darkness fell, but then the outlaws melted into the trees and disappeared like ghosts.

Even though they didn't know the area, they had spent their whole lives in the saddle as bushwhackers and then robbers. They knew how to avoid capture. As the first day after the robbery came to a close, the governor and the bank issued rewards for the capture of the nameless outlaws. Their identities were still unknown, but speculation was rising that they were the most prominent bandits of the time, the James Younger gang. That night, the most bizarre part of the story happened. The most bizarre part of the story happened. Henry Wheeler, the 22-year-old medical student who had killed Clell Miller and wounded Bob Younger, snuck into the town graveyard with a couple classmates.

They found the unmarked graves of Miller and Bill Chadwell, the two dead outlaws. They dug up the bodies, stuffed them into barrels, and rushed them to the train depot. As dawn broke the next day, Miller and Chadwell were speeding east to be used as cadavers for research. Saturday, September 9, 1876, was another miserable day for the outlaws and the manhunters. It rained and rained and rained. The roads turned to mud, and as the outlaws moved west across southern Minnesota, they were virtually impossible to track. There were at least 500 men searching for the six bandits. Special trains shuttled possemen

to the search areas, and the telegraphs operated 24 hours a day. But the rain covered the trail of the outlaws. The area was also home to thousands of feral hogs in addition to every other form of wildlife, and the hogs tore up the ground so that the trail was obliterated. When the posses thought they'd found the trail, they realized they were only crossing each other's tracks as hundreds of men scoured the same ground. But the robbers didn't vanish altogether.

Two boys spotted them near a town called Marysburg. The boys hurried to tell their important news to a Minneapolis police detective who was leading part of the search effort, and the detective ignored them. The Minneapolis detective was locked in a fierce rivalry with his counterpart, a detective from St. Paul. At this point, there was no central leader of the search, and the two detectives hated each other, and they constantly issued conflicting orders.

The conflicting orders opened holes in the dragnet, and the outlaws slipped right through. And the outlaws and the lawmen suffered the same problems. They didn't know the area, and their maps were unreliable. Everyone was lost, hunters and hunted alike. And the constant rain made everyone miserable. Many posse men quit and went home. But the outlaws didn't have that option. They were forced to abandon their horses, and now they were on foot, which provided a new form of misery. Their riding boots were not meant for hours of walking in these conditions, and they tore up the men's feet. As the gang slowly

worked its way southwest, the men scavenged food from fields or stole it from farmhouses. southwest, the men scavenged food from fields or stole it from farmhouses. They rested during the day and marched all night. They skirted Madison Lake and then Eagle Lake, and then they rejoiced when they discovered an abandoned farmhouse about three miles from Mankato. It was their sanctuary for the next few days. The gang stayed at the farmhouse for two days and nights. They rested, stayed dry, dressed their wounds, and tried to make a plan. While they hunkered down, the manhunters found the gang's abandoned horses. The posse was initially thrilled by the discovery, but their joy soon turned to disappointment. The animals were tied to trees, and they'd clearly been there for days. Any tracks made by the outlaws were long gone, washed out by the rain.

At that point, the men of the posse had had enough. On Wednesday morning, September 13th, six days after the robbery, the two rival detectives from the Twin Cities called off the search. They loaded their men onto trains and headed for home. But their dark moods changed that very afternoon when they received their first real lead on the outlaws. At the same time that the big city detectives were calling off their search, the boys were ambushing a farm worker. They startled the worker at about 6 a.m. when he was going out to milk his boss's cows.

They said they were lawmen on the hunt for robbers, but then they pulled their guns and tied the man's hands behind his back. As they marched away from the farm, the gang peppered the worker with questions, and he slowly began to understand what was happening. After less than a mile, they decided to get rid of him. Jesse and Frank wanted to shoot him, but the Youngers were against it. Ultimately, the gang let him go. When he ran back to the farm, he told his boss about the experience.

The farm owner rushed to Mankato to alert the authorities. Within minutes, the telegraph lines lit up with the first reliable report in days, and the detectives were back on the case. The detectives received the report while they were on their trains back to Minneapolis and St. Paul. Both posses jumped off at the first available stop and caught trains to Mankato. When they arrived, they learned a new man was in charge of the hunt, General Edmund Pope. And now Pope had roughly a thousand men at his disposal.

News of the sighting had reinvigorated the search effort, and men had flocked to Mankato from everywhere. And even though the area was crawling with searchers, the gang decided to go through Mankato instead of around it. The boys reached the area at about midnight. It was a dark night, the moon and the stars were hidden by clouds. They crept through the town until they came to a railroad bridge over the Blue Earth River. The outlaws were naturally cautious.

Every bridge and crossing had been guarded by manhunters, so the outlaws assumed this one was too. But as they studied it, they didn't see any guards. The outlaws walked across the bridge single file. They were six barely perceptible silhouettes. But they were not invisible. There were guards watching the bridge. Two men and a boy were stationed out of sight. The boy spotted the bandits and urged the men to shoot, but the men ran away.

The boy ran to General Pope's headquarters and relayed the news. Pope was devastated. The outlaws had disappeared into the unusually thick darkness, and they would be impossible to track until morning. As the outlaws made their way out of the Mankato area, they stumbled onto a watermelon patch and then a chicken coop. They finally had something decent to eat. The next day, when they were about three miles past the bridge, they set up camp at the base of a ridge. three miles past the bridge, they set up camp at the base of a ridge. They built a fire to roast the chickens and tried to hide the flames by rigging their coats and blankets into a tarp. But their camp was only about 50 paces away from the bridge. Despite their efforts to hide the fire, Cole Younger was nervous that they might be discovered. And they were. Just before they enjoyed their chicken breakfast,

they heard yelling near the tracks. Manhunters had spotted the smoke from their cook fire and were crashing through the brush toward the camp. The outlaws hurried away, leaving everything behind, their food, blankets, and bridles. They moved deeper into the woods. They were still free and still alive, but the escape was an extremely close call. If the searchers had crept quietly through the woods instead of charging in with reckless

abandon, the gang would have been caught. It had been exactly one week since the robbery, and that night, the James Younger gang reached its breaking point. An argument erupted in camp. The James boys angrily second-guessed the decision to let the farm worker go. The man had clearly given them away, and now they were in the most desperate situation of their lives. Bob Younger's injury was slowing them down,

and Frank and Jesse were forced to make a difficult decision. They had wives back home, and Jesse had a young son. They thought they could no longer afford to stay with the group. It was time to split up. On a cold, rainy night in the big woods of southern Minnesota, the James Younger gang came to an end. The Youngers and Charlie Pitts gave most of their remaining valuables to the James boys. They kept only a little cash for themselves. There was probably a solemn goodbye, and then the James Boys slipped away into the night.

Around 3 a.m., they stole two big gray mares from a farm, and now they had reliable horses for the first time since they rode out of Northfield. Later in the morning, the man who owned the horses discovered they were missing. He immediately went to General Pope's headquarters and told him about the theft. Now Pope had to confront the possibility that he was chasing two groups instead of one. All day, frantic reports came into Pope's headquarters of two men on Big Gray Mayors, but the manhunters were always one step behind. Frank and Jesse spent the night with a farmer who had not heard about the raid.

They lied about their injuries and left early the next day, Saturday, September 16th. They rode hard all weekend, day and night, and built an insurmountable lead. By Sunday night, they were in the far southwest corner of Minnesota, 160 miles from Northfield. The Gray Mayors were now used up, and as they rode deep into the night, they stole two new sets of horses. By dawn, they had slipped through Sioux Falls and Dakota Territory and were moving toward northwestern Iowa.

As they crossed the Big Sioux River from Dakota to Iowa, they received their final challenge from pursuers. Three men trailed them at a distance. They were advanced scouts for a posse. When Frank and Jesse crossed the river, they turned around and fired at the men. The men fled because for some incredible reason, they were unarmed.

Early afternoon the next day, the James boys had their last big encounter. They were in the area of Sioux City, Iowa when they met a doctor on the road. He was trying to find a farm where a woman was seriously sick and he was lost. He asked Frank and Jesse for help and they said yes, they knew the farm he was looking for and they would help him find it. Then he asked if they were hunting for the men who were wanted for robbery and murder in Minnesota. The doctor knew all about the Northfield raid. At that point, Frank and Jesse dropped the charade and took the doctor prisoner.

They spent the rest of the day riding away from Sioux City, and they finally stopped at around 8 p.m. They exchanged clothes with the man. Now the doctor stood in the road wearing Frank's shirt and pants and Jesse's coat. They told him to run toward a speck of light at a farmhouse in the distance, and he did. For the next two days, the boys rode down through central Iowa. Telegraph lines across the state buzzed with possible sightings of the famous outlaws, but no one caught them. A little over two weeks after the Northfield raid, Frank and Jesse finally made it home to Missouri. The journey had taken an

almost superhuman amount of stamina. But while Frank and Jesse put more and more distance between themselves and the searchers, the Younger Brothers and Charlie Pitts were running out of time. After the gang split up, the Younger brothers and Charlie Pitts continued to trudge through the Big Woods region of southern Minnesota for nearly a week. The heavily forested area had become their own private hell. But now they finally left it behind and they approached a small village called Medelia. Cole and Charlie had stayed in the town a couple weeks earlier when they had scouted the area before the robbery. But this time they weren't looking for lodging. They were looking for horses to steal.

At 7 a.m., the group approached the Sorbel farm outside Medelia. Jim Younger and Charlie Pitts moved forward first. Cole and Bob hung back. Jim and Charlie walked past the Sorbell family farmhouse where they found Mr. Sorbell outside milking a cow. They said a cheerful good morning to him and continued down the road. As they passed the family's barn, they were spotted by Oscar Sorbell. Oscar was carrying pails of milk to the barn for his father, and he knew instantly that the two men in the road were bandits from the Northfield raid. When word of the robbery had reached Medelia, a man named Thomas Vaught leapt into action. He was an old Union Civil War veteran, and he owned a hotel in Medelia.

Cole Younger and Charlie Pitts had stayed at his hotel during their scouting mission. When Vaught learned of the robbery, he immediately thought of the two strangers with southern accents who'd stayed at his hotel just a few days earlier. Vaught recruited two other men, and the three of them took turns guarding a bridge near town. Oscar Sorbel was fascinated by Vaught and the other guards and the excitement of the manhunt. He was 17 years old, but very small for his age. He looked more like a boy than a young man, and he was thrilled when Vought gave him a personal instruction. Vought told him to be on the lookout for bandits, and if he spotted them, he should run straight to Vaught.

And now, Oscar Sorbel had spotted Jim Younger and Charlie Pitts, and he was positive they were bandits. He rushed to his father and told him his theory. His father pushed the idea aside and told Oscar to go back to work, but Oscar couldn't. He was too excited. He ran down the road to see where Jim and Charlie had gone. The two men had entered some woods, so Oscar ran back to his father. Then he learned two more men had just passed the farm, and Oscar was convinced they had just come in contact with the outlaws. He begged his father to let him ride the eight miles to Medelia to tell Mr. Vaught the news. His father finally consented, and Oscar hurried to town. When a mud-splattered boy on an old horse rode into Medelia shouting about bank robbers, most people thought he was crazy.

But Mr. Vaught did not. Neither did the county sheriff. They recruited two more men and went on the hunt. In the woods beyond the Sorbel farm, the Youngers and Charlie Pitts struggled through more marshland. And at that point, Bob Younger was done. He couldn't go any farther. His arm had started to heal over the last two weeks, but not in a good way. He couldn't straighten it, and he couldn't use his right hand at all. He told the gang to leave him behind, but of course they wouldn't. Then they heard riders approaching. They turned to see Vaught and the sheriff and two more men

from Medelia bearing down on them. But now the marshes became their friends. The gang splashed through the marshes, and the posse couldn't follow on their horses. The searchers were forced to ride two miles out of their way. But during that ride, more men joined the posse. The outlaws ran for their lives, but the chase wouldn't last much longer. The Youngers and Charlie Pitts ran toward the Watanwan River. The posse had been forced to take a detour, but it made up ground quickly.

As the outlaws hurried toward the water, they fired behind them at the posse. The posse returned fire, but then lost sight of the outlaws as they ran into tall thickets along the banks of the river. The bandits held their guns over their heads and plunged into the freezing cold river. The water swallowed them up to their chests, but they swam to the other side. They staggered out of the river and hurried across the prairie. They had eluded the posse, but only for the moment, and there was more trouble ahead. A farmer's wife spotted the outlaws and ran to a hunting party on a nearby road. She told the party about the four men with guns who had crawled out of the river near her house. They correctly assumed she had just

discovered the Northfield robbers. The man who led the party was the president of the First National Bank of St. Paul, and he and his son grabbed their shotguns and walked toward the river. The gang came up from the river and saw the horses and wagons of the hunting party. They desperately wanted those horses, but then they saw two men with shotguns or rifles walking in their direction. The outlaws only had pistols and they rushed into some tall weeds near the river. As the bandits hid in the weeds, they could hear the manhunters moving closer, and now there were almost 50 men out there. The small group from Medelia had quickly picked up manpower as it had navigated detours to stay in pursuit. The effort had paid off.

The gang was now cornered in the thick weeds. An army captain had taken command of the posse, and he shouted for volunteers to go into the weeds and flush out the bandits. Now, confronted with the prospect of walking blindly into tall weeds and coming face to face with deadly outlaws, many searchers lost their courage. But seven men stepped forward, including Vought and the sheriff from Medelia. They were going to see the thing through to the end. The seven men dismounted and walked in a line toward the weeds. Some of the willows were five feet high and they easily concealed the outlaws.

The youngers and Charlie Pitts crouched in the weeds and watched the hunters come forward. When the sheriff was about 15 feet from Charlie, Charlie jumped up and fired. The sheriff pulled the trigger of his rifle at nearly the same time. The sheriff's bullet slammed into Charlie's chest. He pitched forward and crashed to the ground, dead on the spot. The youngers leapt to their feet and began firing. Gunfire roared in all directions. The army captain went down.

He thought he'd been gut shot, but the bullet struck his briarwood pipe. All he had was a bruise. The youngers were nowhere near that lucky. They were taking fire from all sides. Jim was shot in the leg. Then his head snapped around as a bullet tore through his mouth and lodged in the back of his throat. He fell forward, unconscious, with blood gushing from his face. Cole took part of a load of buckshot in the back and the head.

Then a ball struck him behind his right eye. He fell down beside Jim, with blood pouring from his nose and mouth. Bob was hit in the chest. He'd been firing with his left hand and now the revolver clicked on empty cylinders. He was the only outlaw still standing and the injury to his right arm prevented him from reloading. Charlie Pitts was dead. Bob's two brothers looked like they were dead, and Bob shouted at the manhunters to stop firing. He would surrender. It was over.

The Youngers were captured exactly two weeks after the Northfield raid. All three brothers survived their terrible injuries. They were tried and convicted and given life sentences. They served their time in the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater. Bob died in prison of tuberculosis. He was 35 years old. died in prison of tuberculosis. He was 35 years old. Cole and Jim were released on parole in 1901 after serving nearly 25 years. One year later, Jim committed suicide in a hotel room in St. Paul, Minnesota. Of the most famous outlaw gang in the West, the James Younger gang,

only Frank James and Cole Younger lived long enough to see each other again. After the disastrous Northfield raid, Frank and Jesse laid low for a while. Frank tried to reform his criminal ways, but Jesse wasn't built for honest work, and he lured his older brother back into the train robbing business. work, and he lured his older brother back into the train robbing business. Next time on Legends of the Old West, Jesse builds a new gang, but it's a shadow of the once feared James Younger gang. Jesse begins a downward spiral into paranoia, and his new

partners begin to fear for their lives. Two of those partners are brothers, Charlie and Robert Ford, and they'll stick with Jesse until the end of his life. That's next week on Jesse James, Director's Cut. Original music by Rob Valliere. Vocal editing by Molly Bonk. Music editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your writer and host, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Please visit our website, blackbarrelmedia.com,

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