1/15/1844 - Crazy times coming, on the Jackson County, Missouri farm of respected landowner (the family has properties in Jackson and Cass Counties, mail contractor, and merchant, Henry Washington Younger and his wife, the daughter of a prosperous local farmer, Bersheba Leighton Fristoe, a boy who will one day make savage history (the seventh child of fourteen she will bring into the world) is born ... Thomas Coleman "Cole" Younger.
Cole
Henry Washington
Growing up, Cole does well in school and attends church with his family every week and will later describe the farm he calls home as a "garden spot." But it is a garden full of snakes and not a good place to grow up at all as the residents of the area struggle with the slavery issue that will soon plunge the entire nation into civil war. Well enough off to afford house slaves for tending to chores and serving meals, Henry Younger is nevertheless a Union man and against the state's secession, a position his son Cole disagrees with emphatically. When the Civil War breaks out in 1861, Henry's position becomes untenable as he loses thousands of dollars in stolen and damaged property as both sides see him as an enemy. Spurred into choosing a side at seventeen when he gets into a fight over a girl at a country dance with a older member of the Missouri militia, Cole leaves home and joins the pro-Confederate riders of school teacher turned guerilla, William Clarke Quantrill, and soon identified as such, his father is the first member of the family to pay the price for his son's decision. Going about his business near the town of Westport, in July of 1862, Henry is shot in the back three times and killed by a member of the Kansas militia. Seven months later, knowing his family has secretly been providing food and clothing to her guerilla son, militia soldiers show up at his mother's home and burn it to the ground. And the atrocities against the Youngers continue when three of Cole's sisters and two female cousins are arrested as spies and jailed in a three-story brick building in Kansas City. On August 13, 1863, the building suddenly collapses and one of the Younger cousins is killed (along with three other women, one of which is the sister of southern guerilla, William T. Anderson, who will earn the nickname, "Bloody Bill" reaping vengeance for her death) ... a death Cole believes was deliberately instigated to eliminate women sympathizing with the Southern cause.
Cole
Bloody Bill
As a Quantrill raider, on November 19, 1861, Cole kills his first man during a skirmish with Federal troops outside the town of Independence, dropping a Union soldier with a pistol shoot from seventy-one yards away. His next killing occurs on Christmas night of 1862 during a search for his father's killer in the barrooms of Kansas City (he is accompanied by Quantrill gunmen, Abe Cunningham, Fletcher Taylor, Zach Traber, George Clayton, and George Todd). Bloody back-and-forth, on August 21, 1863, Cole gets a chance to avenge his family's woes when he participates as one of the 450 guerillas Quantrill leads on a raid of Lawrence, Kansas (a pro-Union locale forty miles west of the Missouri border). A raid Cole will call, "a day of butchery." Gladly killing adult males (about 200 citizens of the town will perish during the raid), but also saving a dozen other citizens of the town, Cole next shows up in Texas when Union forces tear up Missouri looking for the raiders. There, Cole will claim to join the regular Confederate army, and fight Union soldiers in the "Lone Star State," Arkansas, and Louisiana, take part in an expedition to Colorado to cut a transcontinental telegraph line, escort a Confederate spy on a secret mission to Victoria, British Columbia, engage in skirmishes with Comanches and Apaches, and become involved with a sixteen-year-old he meets in Dallas named Myra Belle Shirley, who after the war will become the female outlaw Belle Starr (involved enough that the union of the two produces a daughter named Pearl). Whatever Cole is up to after Lawrence, by the time the Civil War ends, he is a master gunman and living outside of Los Angeles, California with an uncle.
Quantrill
The Lawrence Massacre
Belle Starr
War over, Cole returns to a ravaged Missouri where animosities over what took place during the murderous mayhem of the state have not been forgotten by either side. Denied the ability to vote by the new Missouri constitution unless an individual could swear they hadn't fought for the South during the war (the state's infamous "Ironclad Oath"), automatically accused of a myriad of crimes taking place in the region, Cole and his younger brother Jim (also a Quantrill raider after Cole departs the unit) soon unite with other former guerillas with bad attitudes, including Quantrill veteran, Alexander Franklin "Frank" James, and his younger brother, a Bloody Bill Anderson rider shot in the lung while surrendering in 1865, Jesse Woodson James. As members of the James-Younger Gang, on February 13, 1866, Frank and Cole lead ten other outlaws in what will become America's first daylight bank robbery (an early 1864 attack on a bank in St. Albans, Vermont by a group of Confederate soldiers is considered at the time to be just another act-of-war), a morning raid on the Clay County Savings Association of Liberty, Missouri that fills two grain sacks with loot that nets the bandits $57,000 in cash and gold coin (a princely sum worth $932,896.42 in 2021 dollars), but also takes the life of an innocent bystander, George Wymore, when the gang shoots up the streets leaving town and a bullet kills the young student as he is on his way to classes at William Jewell College. As one of the leaders of the gang, Cole will participate in ten years of train (7), stagecoach (4), and bank robberies (12), along with numerous deadly gunfights, incorporate his younger brothers Jim, John (he will be killed by a Pinkerton detective on March 17, 1874, a death his brother John immediately avenges by killing Deputy Sheriff Edward Daniels and Pinkerton agent Louis Lull), and Bob into the band's depredations, and be one of the few men to survive disagreeing with Jesse.
Jesse & Frank
John Younger
Bob Younger
Gun always at the ready, Cole's most notorious outlaw moments include the desperado being one of the men that robs the Southern Bank of Kentucky in Russellville, Kentucky, a job that almost results in the death of bank president Nimrod Long (1868), the robbery of the Daviess County Savings Bank of Gallatin, Missouri (1869) in which Jesse kills cashier John Sheets, mistakenly believing the man is the Union militia officer that ambushed and killed Bloody Bill Anderson in 1864, the $1,500 robbery of the Deposit Bank of Columbia, Kentucky (1872) that results in Judge James Garnett being shot in the hand as he tries to warn the town their bank is being robbed and the death of cashier R. A. C. Martin from a .45 slug to the head, the robbery of the ticket booth at the second annual Kansas City Industrial Exposition (1872), a job that nets the gang only $900 and gets a little girl accidentally shot, for a $3,000 payday (the bandits are seeking a gold shipment of $75,000) helps derail a train of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad outside of Adair, Iowa, injuring numerous passengers and killing the train's engineer and foreman (1873, the first train robbery west of the Mississippi River), is one of the men that plunders $30,000 from a Kansas Pacific Railroad train outside of Muncie, Kansas (1874), the $20,000 robbery of the Bank of Huntington in Huntington, West Virginia (1875), escaping a posse that captures gang member Tom Webb and kills outlaw Tom McDaniel, and the $15,000 robbery of a Missouri Pacific Railroad train at a spot called "Rocky Cut" outside of Otterville, Missouri (1876). And of course, Cole is a major player in the gang's Waterloo, when the men from Missouri try to take down the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota (the bank is chosen because two of its shareholders are former Union generals, Benjamin Butler and Adelbert Ames) ... ten minutes of mayhem that kills two badmen, two citizens, and wounds Cole, Bob Younger, Jim Younger and Frank James for plunder amounting to $26.60.
Reward Poster
Cole
One of eight bandits that rides into Northfield, Minnesota on September 7, 1876, Cole's assignment in the robbery is to keep people away from the entrance to the bank on the town's Division Street. Pretending to be adjusting the cinch of his horse's saddle, when townspeople begin firing on the robbers, Cole mounts up and begins firing up and down the street and into windows containing commotion curious faces. When outlaw Clell Miller is gunned down (a round from medical student Henry Wheeler severs the outlaw's subclavian artery), Cole jumps down from his horse and tries to help his outlaw comrade, and for his trouble receives his first wound of the raid when he takes a rifle bullet in his left hip. Taking Miller's two pistols, he remounts and calls into the bank that it is time to leave. Message unheeded as bandit Bill Chadwell is dumped to the ground by a round through his chest, Cole rides up the bank entrance again and calls out, "For God's sake come out. They are shooting us all to pieces!" Trying to suppress the gunfire of the townspeople of Northfield, Younger shoots Swedish immigrant Nicolaus Gustavson in the head when the drunken man, not understanding the outlaw's instructions to get off the street stumbles in the direction of Cole's pistols. When Bob Younger is wounded exiting the bank, Cole rides over and pulls his younger brother up on to his mount before riding out of town and into the largest manhunt in the United States to the time. Avoiding posses for two weeks as the gang moves south, Cole refuses to leave his wounded brother when Jesse suggests Bob Younger is impacting the men's escape, and with his brothers and Charlie Pitts, after a gunbattle near the town of Madelia, Minnesota on September 21, 1876, in which Pitts is killed and the other men are all wounded again (Cole will be on the brink of death from four wounds to his back, a wound to his arm, buckshot in his left shoulder, and a bullet round that enters his right jaw, passes over the outlaw's palate arch, and comes to rest in the upper side of his left jaw ... and from riding in the rain for so long without taking his boots off, when his footwear is removed, his toenails pull away from his feet) before finally being captured.
The Northfield Bank
Miller & Chadwell
Pitts
Captured Cole
Prison
Making Crime Pay
Frank James
Cole
But of course, Cole never really leaves at all as his days as a Missouri bushwhacker with Quantrill and his robberies with the James-Younger gang are told and retold up to the present in books, magazines, plays, music, television shows, and at the movies, with memorable portrayals of Cole coming from a host of actors that includes Dennis Morgan (Bad Men of Missouri - 1941), Wayne Morris (The Younger Brothers - 1949), Alan Hale Jr. (The True Story of Jesse James - 1957), Frank Lovejoy (Cole Younger, Gunfighter - 1958), Cliff Robertson (The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid - 1972, with Academy Award winner Robert Duvall as Jesse James), David Carradine (The Long Riders - 1980), Randy Travis (Frank and Jesse - 1994), and Scott Caan (American Outlaws - 2001).
Cole - True West Magazine
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