Cole Younger (1844–1916)

Thomas Coleman “Cole” Younger left his family’s Missouri farm in 1862, at age seventeen, to join William Clarke Quantrill’s guerrillas. In the ensuing months he met Frank James, discovered that his father had been killed by a Union soldier, and lost a cousin who died in the collapse of an old house in Kansas City that served as a Union prison for housing the female relatives of guerrillas. The impact of these personal events and of the larger Civil War seemed to mark Younger and his three brothers, Jim, John, and Bob. After the war the Youngers joined Frank and Jesse James as outlaws and gained notoriety for their criminal acts.

Born on January 15, 1844, Cole Younger began life in a large and affluent family residing in the vicinity of Lee’s Summit, Missouri. His father, Henry Washington Younger, who sired fourteen children, owned several thousand acres of land in Jackson and Cass Counties. By 1859 the family had moved to Harrisonville, where the elder Younger operated a store and held a partnership in a livery stable. That year voters elected him as their mayor.

Technically, Cole Younger became an outlaw before he joined Quantrill. Following an altercation with a militiaman named Irvin Walley, Younger was sent into hiding by his father. Younger armed himself, violating an order by General John C. Frémont, commander of Union forces in Missouri, allowing only those in organized military units to carry weapons. Younger’s brother-in-law, John Jarrette, persuaded him to join Quantrill. A short time later, gunmen shot and killed Henry Younger while he was on his way home from a trip to Kansas City, and Cole blamed Walley for his father’s death.

Younger's mother, Bursheba, moved the family to Jackson County, but militiamen burned their house, leaving the family dependent on relatives. Three of his sisters and two cousins were imprisoned in the building in Kansas City that collapsed on August 13, 1863, killing one of his cousins and several other women. Younger then participated in Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas, on August 21, 1863. He left Quantrill’s band at some point after the Lawrence massacre, but his whereabouts for the rest of the war are uncertain. Younger claimed to have left the state and served in the regular Confederate army (he even filed, unsuccessfully, for a Confederate military pension after the war), but some historians doubt this claim, and no service records have been found to verify it. In the meantime, his brother Jim joined the Quantrill band in 1864, accompanied it to Kentucky in May 1865, and was captured during the engagement in which Quantrill was mortally wounded. Jim Younger was held briefly at the federal prison at Alton, Illinois.

By late 1865, Cole and Jim had returned to Missouri. Jim had taken the loyalty oath prescribed by Missouri’s 1865 Constitution; Cole was still a wanted man. On February 13, 1866, a gang robbed the Liberty, Missouri, bank of some $60,000, killing a student from William Jewell College during the holdup. Though news accounts did not associate Cole Younger with the affair, eyewitnesses identified most of the men involved as members of the emerging James-Younger gang. Other bank robberies in Missouri that were attributed to the gang followed on October 30, 1866, in Lexington; May 22, 1867, in Richmond; and November 27, 1867, in Independence, though Cole Younger was not identified as a participant. On March 20, 1868, gang members robbed the Nimrod Long Banking Company in Russellville, Kentucky. In the robbery, a man posing as “Thomas Colburn” drew his gun on the banker; Colburn, named Coleman in some reports, was in all probability Cole Younger. The robbery netted $12,000. That fall the Younger family moved to Dallas County, Texas, where Cole used some of his loot to establish a cattle business.

Moving back and forth between Texas and Missouri, Younger joined the Jameses and Clell Miller, another former guerrilla fighter, in robbing the bank in Corydon, Iowa, on June 3, 1871. About a year later, on April 29, 1872, the gang hit the Columbia, Kentucky, bank, gaining only $600 and leaving a cashier dead. On May 27, 1873, the Ste. Genevieve Savings Bank fell victim to a $4,000 robbery. The gang robbed its first train near Adair, Iowa, on July 21, 1873. All four of the Youngers took part. The first train robbery in Missouri occurred at Gads Hill, about one hundred miles south of St. Louis, on January 31, 1874. The James-Younger gang took the contents in the express safe and robbed the affluent-looking passengers, proclaiming “that they did not wish to take the hard-earned money of working men or ladies.” Subsequent robberies occurred in Muncie, Kansas, on December 8, 1874, and Huntington, West Virginia, on September 5, 1875, in which the gang stole $30,000 and $10,000 respectively.

To finance an expedition to Northfield, Minnesota, the gang took $15,000 off a train near Otterville, Missouri, on July 7, 1876. Jim Younger, never an enthusiastic robber, refused to join his brothers in that escapade. Apparently, Jesse James planned the Northfield holdup and persuaded Bob Younger to go along. Cole Younger expressed reluctance, but since Bob remained adamant, Cole telegraphed Jim, who had moved to California, urging him to return home.

The Northfield robbery proved a debacle. The gang entered the town on September 7, 1876. Not long after Bob Younger and the James brothers went into the bank, someone alerted the townsmen of the robbery. Armed citizens began peppering Cole, Jim, and the others with gunfire. The outlaws failed to gain entry into the bank’s vault and left with only $26. As they attempted to make their getaway, two of the gang lay dead; Jim Younger had a wound in his shoulder; Bob had received a shot in the elbow that broke his arm; Cole had been hit in the shoulder and the side; Frank James had injured his hand and shoulder when a bank employee tried to close the vault door on him; Jesse received a wound in the side; and Charlie Pitts took a shot on his way out of town and later died. A posse captured the Youngers, but the James brothers managed to escape. The Youngers pled guilty to “accessory to the murder of J. L. Heywood, attacking A. E. Bunker with intent to do bodily harm, and the robbery of the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota.” The court found them guilty and sentenced them to life imprisonment.

Bob Younger died in Minnesota’s Stillwater Penitentiary in 1889. Cole and Jim received paroles in 1901, and Jim committed suicide the following year. Their brother John had met a violent death at the hands of Pinkerton detectives in 1874. Following Cole Younger’s return to Missouri in 1903, he and Frank James briefly worked in a Wild West show named for them. The next year Younger published a largely fabricated autobiography titled Cole Younger by Himself. He worked for the Lew Nichols Carnival Company until 1908, and then toured as a lecturer, delivering a speech titled “What My Life Has Taught Me” until he retired in 1912. When he died in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, on March 21, 1916, his body still bore eleven bullets collected during his days as a guerrilla fighter and holdup man.