The Coffeyville Raid

The case

Bob Dalton's plan had a flaw that no amount of nerve could fix: he and his brothers had lived near Coffeyville, Kansas, and people there knew them. On the morning of 5 October 1892 five riders tied their horses in an alley off the town plaza and walked out in a line, carrying Winchesters. Two of them wore false whiskers. A shopkeeper on the square recognised a Dalton before they had reached the first bank door, and the shout went around the plaza that the Daltons were robbing the bank.

The Dalton brothers had begun on the side of the law. Their elder brother Frank, a deputy US marshal out of Fort Smith, was killed by whiskey runners in Indian Territory in 1887. Grat, Bob and Emmett all served as deputies or posse men afterward, but by 1890 they had crossed over, first to horse theft and then to robbing trains. Grat was convicted of a California train robbery he may not have committed and escaped on the way to prison. Between 1891 and the summer of 1892 the gang held up trains at Wharton, Lillietta, Red Rock and Adair in Indian Territory; a doctor was killed by a stray bullet in the Adair fight. Railroads posted large rewards and Deputy Marshal Heck Thomas stayed on their trail.

Bob wanted one large haul that would let them leave the territory, and he wanted, as he put it, to "beat anything Jesse James ever did". He would rob two banks at once in daylight, the C. M. Condon and Company bank and the First National, which faced each other across Union Street. Grat, Dick Broadwell and Bill Powers took the Condon; Bob and Emmett crossed to the First National. Street works had removed the hitching rail they had meant to use behind the Condon bank, so the horses stood in an alley across the plaza, a long run from either door.

In the Condon bank, cashier Charles Ball told Grat that the vault was on a time lock that would open in a few minutes. It was a lie; the lock had already opened. Grat chose to wait. By then men in Isham's hardware store and the store next door were handing out rifles and shotguns, and firing had started through the bank's plate-glass windows. In the First National, Bob and Emmett filled a grain sack with more than $20,000 and left by the back door, where Lucius Baldwin, a young clerk carrying a pistol, came toward them. Bob shot him. In the next few minutes Bob also killed George Cubine and Charles Brown, who had armed themselves near the bank, and seriously wounded cashier Thomas Ayres, who had taken up a rifle in the hardware store.

The robbers converged on the alley under fire from three sides. City Marshal Charles Connelly ran into it from a livery stable without seeing the gang behind him, and Grat shot him dead. John Kloehr, the liveryman following behind, shot Grat. Bob and Powers were killed near the horses. Emmett, who had reached his horse unhurt, turned back to help his dying brother and was cut down by a load of buckshot. Broadwell got onto a horse and out of town, and was found dead by the road about two miles away. By the Journal's reckoning the whole engagement lasted about ten minutes. Four citizens and four outlaws were dead, and Emmett was carried upstairs to a doctor's office with more than twenty wounds.

Photographs of the dead raiders were sold across the country. Emmett survived, in part by talking freely to the townsmen who were threatening to hang him. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in the Kansas penitentiary at Lansing, where he served fourteen years before Governor Edward Hoch released him in 1907. He spent the rest of his life telling the story, in a 1931 memoir and in films, insisting he had not fired a shot.