Coffeyville, Kansas: The Town That Stopped the Dalton Gang

A Teaching with Historic Places lesson from the National Park Service, written by Kathleen Hunter and edited by Fay Metcalf, Marilyn Harper and the program's staff, from the National Register file for the Condon National Bank, studies of Western outlaws, and a newspaper account of the robbery. For history, social studies, geography and government classes; late 19th century.

The Condon Bank building today. Image from the National Park Service's page.

When Luther Perkins put up his new building in Coffeyville, Kansas, in 1890, robbery was far from his mind. The town had come of age, and the elegant building — offices, shops and the new C. M. Condon and Company Bank — would show it. The violent years seemed over; Cole Younger, serving 25 years for a bank robbery attempt, warned young people from his cell against a life of crime.

His Dalton cousins, once Coffeyville residents, did not listen. Bob Dalton meant to outdo the James brothers with a double bank robbery there. It ended with four of the five outlaws dead, and Coffeyville became famous as "the town that stopped the Daltons."

Students will: analyse why outlaws flourished in the middle border states; examine the Daltons' crimes; describe how Coffeyville defended itself; and look for locally famous events and places at home. Materials: a map, three readings and five photographs — one of which (Photo 4) shows the gang's bodies and may not suit younger students.

Inquiry question: what caused this damage? The Condon Bank's entrance after the gunfight, 1892; the newspaper said townspeople fired about 80 shots into its windows. Kansas State Historical Society.

Setting the stage

Kansas had a long history of violence by 1892. Its American Indian peoples were pushed out by cattlemen and settlers after the Louisiana Purchase (1803). The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 let settlers decide on slavery, and fighting over it made the territory "Bleeding Kansas" by 1856. Kansas joined the Union as a free state, but like the other middle border states — Missouri, Arkansas and Indian Territory (today's Oklahoma) — it held both Southern and Union loyalists. Violent men used the war as cover to loot and kill, leaving a culture of lawlessness in which Frank and Jesse James and Cole and Jim Younger terrorised the region.

Map 1: Coffeyville and the sites of the Dalton Gang's robberies. National Park Service.

The federal government had forced American Indian tribes into Indian Territory in the 1830s. In 1889, over their protests, Congress opened two million acres to settlers, and that year the Dalton family left Coffeyville for a homestead near Kingfisher.

Reading 1: Renegades and outlaws

Post-war gangs were often bound by blood or friendship, and outlawry passed down the generations. It began with William Clarke Quantrill, who backed slavery but played both sides — posing as an abolitionist in Lawrence, Kansas, while stealing horses and kidnapping free African Americans to sell into slavery in Missouri. In the war his Confederate guerrillas, "Quantrill's Raiders", traded raids with the pro-Union "Jayhawkers" and on August 21, 1863, murdered 142 people in Lawrence; the area's Confederate commander expelled him and declared him an outlaw. A Union order clearing a large stretch of Missouri along the border, meant to punish his supporters, angered even Union sympathisers and brought him recruits.

His band included Frank and Jesse James and their cousins Cole and Jim Younger, whose father had been killed and home burned by Union troops. After Quantrill's death in 1865 Jesse James led the gang with the same methods — hard riding, hideouts, loot and killing without mercy — and the James and Younger gangs rampaged from 1866 to 1882, schooling later outlaws, the Daltons among them.

Reading 2: The Dalton Gang

Lewis Dalton married Adeline Younger, aunt of Cole and Jim; the family reached Coffeyville by 1886, and thirteen of their 15 children reached adulthood. After Frank Dalton, a U.S. deputy marshal, was killed on duty in 1887, Grattan, Bob and Emmett also became lawmen — until 1890, when Bob skipped bail on a liquor charge and Grat was arrested for horse theft, a hanging offence in horse-dependent country.

Bob then formed a gang, joined over time by Emmett, Grat, George "Bitter Creek" Newcomb, "Blackfaced Charley" Bryant, Bill Doolin, Dick Broadwell, Bill Powers and others.

• California, 1891. Accused of a Southern Pacific train robbery on little evidence, Grat was convicted and sent off to serve 20 years — and, by one account, stole the handcuff key from a dozing guard and dived from the train into the San Joaquin River as it crossed a bridge.
• Four trains in Indian Territory, May 1891 to July 1892: Wharton (now Perry), a few hundred dollars; Lillietta, $10,000; Red Rock, a few hundred dollars and passengers' watches and jewellery; and Adair, where the gang waited on the platform with rifles across their knees, emptied the express car and came through about 200 shots from 11 guards unhurt — three guards were wounded and a town doctor killed by a stray bullet.

Bob boasted he would "beat anything Jesse James ever did — rob two banks at once, in broad daylight." On October 5, 1892, the gang rode for the Condon Bank and the First National Bank in Coffeyville.

Reading 3: Coffeyville says "Enough!"

The C. M. Condon and Company Bank in the Perkins Block, Coffeyville, 1892. Kansas State Historical Society.

The Coffeyville Journal told it two days later under the headline "DALTONS! The Robber Gang Meet Their Waterloo in Coffeyville."

Between 9:30 and 10 a.m. five armed, disguised men tied their horses in an alley. Aleck McKenna recognised a Dalton, saw a rifle aimed at the Condon Bank's counter, and raised the cry.

• In the Condon Bank, cashier C. M. Ball told a robber the time lock would not open until 9:45, three minutes away, and the robber chose to wait. It was a lie — the lock had opened at eight, and the chest held over forty thousand dollars. Before the three minutes were up, bullets came through the windows.
• In the First National, Bob and Emmett took over $21,000 in a grain sack. Leaving, Bob shot Lucius M. Baldwin, George Cubine — once his friend — Charles Brown and cashier Thomas Ayers.

Townspeople armed themselves, nearly all from the hardware store, and covered the alley. The gang had to cross three hundred feet under fire; after about three minutes came the cry "They are all down." Grat and Bob were dead with a man identified as Tom Evans, Emmett badly wounded, and Marshal T. Connelly lay face down between two dead robbers. Dick Broadwell was found dead half a mile out of town. The paper counted eight killed and three wounded. It angrily denied that the town had been warned — no one on the square was armed when the robbers appeared — and mourned that ridding the country of the gang had cost Coffeyville "some of its best blood."

Discuss: Why did three minutes matter so much? Why could the town respond so fast? Why was the paper so keen to deny a warning?

The photographs

"Death Alley", where the gang tied their horses and were shot down, on a postcard of the time. Kansas State Historical Society.

• The bank in 1892. Coffeyville was a prosperous trading and milling town; the Condon, one of its two banks, stood in the wedge-shaped Perkins Block on the plaza.
• The bodies. The dead outlaws were laid on a hay wagon and photographed; an inset shows Emmett Dalton, who survived to serve 14 years. No photos of the townspeople killed seem to exist — why?
• Today. The bank used the building until 1953; the city bought it in the 1970s and restored it in 1992 to its 1892 look, losing the bullet holes. The Dalton Defenders Museum keeps mementos of the raid. Should places tied to violence be preserved?

Activities

1. The myth of the outlaw. Robbers became legends through Wild West shows, dime novels and films — at least two about this gang, one starring Emmett Dalton as himself. Students write a letter as a sightseer in Coffeyville after the raid, then compare how the media treat famous criminals today.
2. Taking the law into our own hands. From Bleeding Kansas to lynch mobs to Coffeyville's armed citizens: debate "It is never acceptable for citizens to take the law into their own hands."
3. Famous events at home. Students ask older residents about a local disaster, trial, strike or crime, check how it was reported, and discuss how it should be remembered.

Sources

• National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places, "Coffeyville, Kansas: The Town That Stopped the Dalton Gang," by Kathleen Hunter. https://www.nps.gov/articles/coffeyville-kansas-the-town-that-stopped-the-dalton-gang-teaching-with-historic-places.htm
• The lesson draws on Paul I. Wellman, A Dynasty of Western Outlaws (1961); Richard White, "Outlaw Gangs of the Middle Border: American Social Bandits," Western Historical Quarterly 12 (1981); and The [Coffeyville] Journal, October 7, 1892.
• The original names the Confederate commander who expelled Quantrill as Gen. James Totten, who was a Union officer; the name is left out here. The photograph of the gang's bodies is not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased, apart from short quotations from 1892; rewritten in hubnx's own words.