Bill stayed on after the others left and straddled the splitbottom chair and stared at me and leaned to slap my face. ‘You stupid idiots. What in tarnashun am I going to do for a living? Huh?’ He bit his lip and slapped my head again.
‘Cut it out,’ I told him.
He said, ‘I’m glad they’re dead. I am! You ruined me in California and now you’ve ruined me here and, by God, that’s the end of it.’ He stood up and kicked the chair away and stalked out in his three-piece tweed suit.
On October 11th, I was slid onto a stretcher and transported in a locked Santa Fe express car to Independence, Kansas, with an escort of six deputies, Sheriff Callahan, Chief U.S. Marshal William Grimes, and twelve railroad detectives. My brother Bill accompanied me and sat on a safe smoking a cigarette that he stubbed out when I asked for a drag. On meeting Grimes, he shook the marshal’s hand and said, ‘Extraordinary job of police work, sir. You had them every step of the way and they knew it. They got just what they deserved.’
My trial was five months after the Coffeyville raid. My brother Bill hired a smart attorney named Joseph Fritch who pleaded me guilty to the second degree murder of George Cubine, and as he expected, Judge J.D. McCue of the Montgomery County District Court dismissed the other charges of bank robbery and murder. Because of my comparative youth, Fritch predicted ten to fifteen years, the minimum penalty for second degree, but the Dalton gang was too famous for that and I was sentenced to life imprisonment at the gloomy Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, which is halfway between Kansas City and Fort Leavenworth.
I was twenty-one years old and still on crutches when I hobbled into prison and a foul, stinking, four-by-eight cell. I wore a black-and-white striped uniform and cap and I was made a tailor in the prison, a trade I’m still good at, and I worked nights on a prison education, studying difficult books in the library until I could make the sentences out, copying down words I didn’t know. I scrubbed the floor and walls of my jail cell with ammonia and kept it obsessively neat: a safety razor next to my shaving mug next to my hairbrush next to the pitcher. I spent my twenties and thirties as a stoic, devoting the last hour of each night to Bible study, and my only true entertainment was the mail from Miss Eugenia Moore.
My notes to her were brief, two or three sentences about what I’d heard of the outside, how prison was, how much I used to enjoy those nights at Big Jim Riley’s ranch when we would smoke cheroot cigars in her blanket-hung room; but she’d respond with nine or ten pages about the past, putting down everything she could recall. At the end of one of her letters she wrote, ‘I keep wanting to ask if you’re lonely, if you’re unhappy, if there’s anything you regret, but those seem such melancholy questions I’m a little ashamed of them. I suppose you are lonely, because I am. I’m lost without your brother Bob. I feel like a vacant house.’
A letter I mailed to her was never answered and another I sent was returned, so I thought she was worn of me until I heard that she too was dead; that she’d walked out of a muffling snow and into a bank in Wichita, Kansas, and demanded the cash drawer from the teller. She got away but she was shot from her horse three miles from town at the start of a blizzard. And when the posse walked up to her she was coated in white except for the splash of her yellow hair and the snow flakes melting into her open brown eyes.
I don’t know if I ever swallowed that story. It seemed a fabrication as likely as that empty grave she arranged for herself in Silver City, and though some have claimed the real Florence Quick was laid to rest in a plot in Cass County, Missouri, I think of her now as alive somewhere in Texas, teaching arithmetic to children, and married to a brakeman on the railroad.
And my information is just as scant about the Doolin-Dalton gang. I heard that my brother Bill had put his law books down and gathered, together with Bill Doolin, Bitter Creek Newcomb, and Pierce, one of the largest gangs that ever scavenged in the West. And in early 1893, they chose to announce the corporation by robbing a train at Wharton, just as we had. But soon Chris Madsen, Heck Thomas, and Bill Tilghman were assigned to head up a manhunt employing one hundred and fifty deputies, and the Doolin-Dalton gang didn’t last long after that. They divided in March of 1894, my brother to wander into Texas where he picked up a scrub gang of his own, Doolin to stay on in the territories with a gang that was picked off one at a time by the law.
Chris Madsen shot down Ol Yountis at his shack in Orlando following a robbery at Spearville; After the Doolin gang robbed a Rock Island train at Dover, Bitter Creek Newcomb and Charlie Pierce hid in a pasture of rotted, barkless trees on the farm of Newcomb’s brothers-in-law, the rustlers Bill, Dal, and John Dunn. But the brothers decided to cash in on the amnesty and money reward promised by a local marshal, and they drove a wagon to his office the next morning with the two bodies so shot up there were shotgun pellets imbedded in Pierce’s and Newcomb’s stocking feet.
And Bill Doolin was walking into a cornfield when Heck Thomas and a posse stood up in a ravine and Bee Dunn let go with a double-barreled twelve-gauge. Doolin broke through four rows of cornstalks keeling away from the posse, and then his dead body collapsed. They stripped Doolin’s shirt off and sat him in a rocking chair and took photographs of him staring at the ceiling. The buckshot looked like pennies on his chest.
I would read what the newspapers said about my brother Bill and I wouldn’t recognize him. He was shabby and filthy and he drank too much, and he might’ve been a little bit crazy. By April of 1894, my brother Bill had an accomplice-to-murder charge in addition to a previous warrant for the death of a deputy sheriff. Then, with his gang of three cowboys, my brother robbed the First National Bank in Longview, Texas. The take was barely two thousand dollars in ten and twenty dollar bills and slain were the city marshal and two businessmen.
Bill Dalton escaped to Ardmore, Oklahoma, where his wife Jenny and the two children were renting the upstairs room of a farmhouse that nine mustached men in dark suits and vests surrounded on the morning of June 8th. Grasshoppers leeched to the possemen’s pants legs and jumped off. The sun was already hot in a blue sky. Deputy Marshal Lindsay peered through a screen at the front stoop to see a girl in a leg-brace seated on a catalogue at the kitchen table, dunking sugared bread into milk. Then Bill was there with his hair mussed and his shirttails sloppy in his pants, putting a bowl in front of his daughter Grace and cutting up the poached egg in it. The girl leaned to look at the deputy marshal; then Bill looked that way too.
‘Come on out with your hands up.’
‘Why don’t you come in for coffee and we’ll chat?’
Lindsay opened the screen door and Bill ducked next to the black stove and the posse in the backyard saw a drape thrown aside as Bill crouched out through the open kitchen window. They shot everything they could at him and window glass shattered and sash wood flew and bursts of paint flakes floated with gun smoke in the breeze as my brother jumped down, somehow unhurt. Bill ran toward a ravine but tripped on a rusted spade and he bent to catch the ground and then Marshal Loss Hart aimed a .44 caliber slug that slammed into Bill’s kidney and exited big as a coffee can at his heart and my brother fell dead as a tire in the weeds, scattering grasshoppers.
He was displayed in a coffin covered with window glass at a mortician’s parlor in Ardmore until he was badly decomposed. Spectators journeyed by train from everywhere and stereoscopic pictures were made and thousands of people crowded the street in front of the mortuary so they could file past and solemnly stare at the last of the notorious Daltons.
22
Seven wardens oversaw my years at the Lansing penitentiary and I surprised them all with my quiet. There was a riot over bread pudding that I refused to participate in. There was a hullabaloo when some prisoners released all the cell doors and escaped up an elevator shaft, but I spent the night on my bunk in my private cell, reading The Virginian. My reward was that I became the first prisoner under sentence of life allowed jobs in town as a trustee. And in 1907, when Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state, I was pardoned after service of less than fifteen years by Kansas Governor E.W. Hoch.
I was thirty-five years old and gimped in the leg and I needed work pretty bad, so I stayed with a family in Bartlesville working as a hired hand on local farms, chopping weeds and baling hay and riding the spring-iron seat of a reaper. And nights and Sundays I courted Julia Johnson just as I had as a boy. I’d sit with her on a porch swing and play my Harpoon, or I’d stroll downtown with her to see a nickelodeon film about vaudeville or train robbery, and at noon she’d ride through the corn rows on a mare and I’d sit against a fence post in blue bib overalls, eating apple slices off a knife blade, drinking lukewarm tea from a jar, grinning at my boots while Julia talked.
Julia and I were married in Bartlesville in 1908 and two years later I was hired as a special officer by the Tulsa police department to scare off the worst of their badmen just by letting them know that one of the legendary Dalton boys was around. Then my wife and I moved west to Los Angeles where John Tackett
and I filmed Beyond the Law and Julia and I had picnics on the beach after Sunday church services, and she’d lift her dress to wade out into the ocean while I sat on the sand in my suit and tie and watched children pay nickels to ride a horse in a roped circle next to the parked Ford Model A’s.
The movie got me script work in Hollywood and it resurrected my name and I traded off that as a real-estate broker and building contractor in the California land rush. I hardly needed to advertise. Smiling loan officers would stand up from their desks whenever I walked into the bank and otherwise self-possessed businessmen would sit enthralled at lunch while I storied. I made more money on one Los Angeles suburban development than I did in all those rustling and train-robbing years in my past, and I deposited it in the construction of a white stucco house much like you see among the parvenu down in Argentina, with red tiles on the floor and a paddle fan overhead in the billiards room and orange flowers big as a child’s face edging the pebbled driveway.
And not long ago my wife and I returned to Coffeyville, Kansas, for a second honeymoon. John B. Tackett invited us back and the Chamber of Commerce provided tickets to a first class Pullman on the Union Pacific’s Zephyr service east. So I spent three days at a club car window smoking cigarettes arid staring out at badlands and hard-up farms with rusted machinery on cinder blocks, and at hired hands who would still stop their trucks and stand on the running boards to watch a train go by. Then we took the southbound Santa Fe and I sat in the morning breakfast car with Julia, gazing at Kansas wheat fields that were green as a child’s green crayon. A porter rolled a luggage cart down the aisle and said, ‘Coffeyville, next stop.’ I poured coffee and slowly stirred sugar in with a spoon, and for some minutes Julia and I sat there in silence like a couple growing dead from a very long marriage, looking out the Santa Fe’s windows at leaning barns and a rusted Model T next to a lug-wheeled tractor, then at a white water tower and grain elevators and the tin-roofed warehouses of Coffeyville.
She smiled across the table at me. ‘Think your hometown’s changed much?’
‘Oh, I suppose. Seems like everywhere you look it’s the twentieth century.’
Then my wife and I stood on the platform between cars as passengers got off the train at the depot. A soldier in brown embraced his girlfriend, a mother with a pheasant feather in her hat straightened her boy’s belt and tie, and a farmer in blue bib overalls stared at me from his bench. John Tackett sidled along the train in his white flannel suit, then discovered our Pullman and saw us and reached up to pump my hand. ‘Golly, it’s great to see you two again! This is a red-letter day!’
He helped Julia down on the porter’s step stool and then I climbed down to the step stool and cinders, using my left leg, and I was introduced to A.B. Macdonald of the Kansas City Star, a man my age in a gray serge suit and a camera case looped over his shoulder, his eyeglasses reflecting white in the sun. He asked, ‘Is this Julia, the sweetheart of your boyhood you talk so much about in your book?’
‘This is she,’ I answered, patting her wrist like a doddering fool. ‘Did you ever read Longfellow’s Evangeline, that wonderful story of how a woman followed after the man she loved, searching for him all her life, from girlhood to old age, and the beautiful words of the poem: ‘Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient, Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion, list to this mournful tradition.’ Remember those lines? I committed them to memory when I was in the state prison. Well, all that Longfellow said of Evangeline’s love and devotion I can say about Julia’s. I owe all that I am to her.’