The Fall of the Dalton Gang: Twelve Minutes in Coffeyville That Ended an Outlaw Family
At about half past nine on the morning of 5 October 1892, five men in false beards rode into Coffeyville, Kansas, planning to do something no outlaw had ever pulled off: rob two banks at the same time, in broad daylight, in a town where half the population knew their faces. Around twelve minutes after the first shot was fired, four of them were dead, the fifth had more than 20 holes in him and four townsmen were dead or dying in the street. The Dalton Gang, which had spent 18 months robbing trains across Indian Territory, was finished before lunch.
What makes the story more than just another botched robbery is who the Daltons were. Three of the men who rode into Coffeyville that morning had once worn badges.
Quick Answers
What happened? The Dalton Gang tried to rob the C.M. Condon & Company Bank and the First National Bank in Coffeyville, Kansas, at the same time.
When? Wednesday 5 October 1892, starting around 9.30am.
Who died? Bob Dalton, Grat Dalton, Bill Power and Dick Broadwell from the gang, plus four townsmen: Marshal Charles Connelly, Lucius Baldwin, George Cubine and Charles Brown.
Who survived? Emmett Dalton, aged 21, who was shot more than 20 times and went on to live until 1937.
How long did it last? About twelve minutes from the first shot to the last.
Why did it fail? A missing hitching rail, a cashier's bluff about a time lock and a town that armed itself from the local hardware shops.
Who Were the Dalton Gang?
Lewis and Adeline Dalton raised 15 children, moving around Missouri, Kansas and Indian Territory. Adeline was a Younger by birth, which made her boys cousins of Cole and Jim Younger, the brothers who rode with Jesse James. That family connection gets a lot of attention, but the Dalton brothers started out on the other side of the law.
The eldest of the lawmen, Frank, was a deputy US marshal working out of the federal court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, the same court that employed Bass Reeves. Frank was killed on 27 November 1887 in a fight with horse thieves and whiskey runners. Grat and Bob both took deputy marshal commissions afterwards, and young Emmett sometimes rode along as a guard or posseman, as the Oklahoma Historical Society's entry on the gang sets out.
It didn't last. By 1890 Grat had been accused of horse theft and Bob had been charged with bringing whiskey into Indian Territory. The brothers later complained they'd never been paid for work they'd done as deputies, and that grievance became the family's standard explanation for everything that followed. Whether it's the whole truth is another matter. The charges against them came first.
California, Trains and a Leap Into a River
Bob and Emmett headed west to California, where brother Bill was farming and dabbling in politics. On 6 February 1891 a Southern Pacific train was held up at Alila. The express messenger refused to open his car, the robbers got nothing and a railwayman was killed. California in those years wasn't short of outlaws, from the stagecoach poet Black Bart to the Ruggles brothers, but the Daltons got the blame for this one.
Grat was convicted, despite witnesses who put him somewhere else, and sentenced to 20 years. He never served them. He escaped that September, and the popular version of the story has him lifting the handcuff keys and diving from a moving train into the San Joaquin River. Bill was acquitted.
Back in Indian Territory, Bob put together a proper gang. Between May 1891 and July 1892 they robbed four trains: the Santa Fe at Wharton, the Katy at Leliaetta, the Santa Fe at Red Rock and the Katy at Adair. Riders came and went, among them Bill Doolin, George "Bitter Creek" Newcomb, Charley Bryant, Bill Power and Dick Broadwell. The Adair job was the nastiest. Armed guards were waiting on the train, around 200 shots were fired and a local doctor was killed by a stray bullet, according to the National Park Service's account. The hauls were patchy too. Red Rock brought in pocket change.
Why Did the Dalton Gang Choose Coffeyville?
By the autumn of 1892 the gang had a price on its head and lawmen on its trail. Bob wanted one big payday and a getaway, and he wanted to do it in style. As historian Robert Barr Smith puts it in his study of the raid for HistoryNet, the plan was to hit two banks at once, something not even the James gang had managed.
Coffeyville made sense to the Daltons because they knew it. The family had lived nearby, and the brothers could find their way round the plaza without thinking. That was also the plan's biggest flaw. If they knew Coffeyville, Coffeyville knew them.
Bob kitted the gang out for the occasion. Colt factory records show a batch of engraved, pearl-handled .45 revolvers shipped through a St Louis hardware firm on 18 August 1892, about six weeks before the raid, to a buyer using the name A.E. Williams. Each man rode into town with a pair of them. In one of the stranger footnotes to the whole affair, firearms historian Lee Silva found that none of the fancy Colts recovered afterwards had been fired. When the shooting started, the gang used their Winchesters.
The Missing Hitching Rail
Five men rode in from the west: Bob, Grat and Emmett Dalton, Bill Power and Dick Broadwell. Bob had expected to tie the horses close to the banks. Instead he found the street dug up for repairs and the hitching rail gone. They turned into an alley about 300 feet away and tied up at a fence there. It doesn't sound like much, but it meant a long run across open ground with the loot, and the alley itself was a dead end for anyone caught in it.
The false beards fooled nobody. A local man who knew the family clocked them almost as soon as they walked out of the alley, and word went round the plaza that the Daltons were robbing the banks.
Two Banks, One Bluff
Grat, Power and Broadwell went into the Condon bank. Bob and Emmett crossed to the First National. At the First National things went to plan, and the brothers stuffed roughly $20,000 into a grain sack.
At the Condon, cashier Charles Ball told Grat that the vault was on a time lock and wouldn't open for several minutes. It was a flat lie. The lock had released long before. Grat didn't try the door. He stood and waited, and those minutes were all the town needed. Isham's hardware shop and another dealer nearby were handing rifles and shotguns across the counter to anyone who wanted one. By the time Grat gave up and settled for a few thousand in silver and notes, bullets were coming through the bank's windows. Around 80 bullet marks were later counted on the Condon's front, as recorded in the account written by Coffeyville newspaper editor David Stewart Elliott shortly afterwards.
How Did the Dalton Gang Die?
Bob and Emmett left the First National by the back door to avoid the gunfire out front. Behind the bank they met Lucius Baldwin, a young shop clerk holding a pistol, and Bob shot him. Working their way back towards the horses, Bob then killed George Cubine, a bootmaker standing in a doorway with a rifle, and Charles Brown, an older shopkeeper who picked up Cubine's gun when he fell. Brown took three hours to die. The First National's cashier, Thomas Ayres, was hit in the face from about 75 yards and somehow survived.
All five outlaws made it to the alley, and that's where it ended. The men in Isham's had a clear line of fire straight down it. Bill Power was hit as he left the Condon and died beside his horse. City Marshal Charles Connelly ran into the alley and was shot in the back by Grat. Moments later a liveryman called John Kloehr put a bullet through Grat's throat. Kloehr is also credited with the shot that killed Bob, who'd slumped against a pile of kerbstones and was still working his rifle.
Dick Broadwell, badly wounded, got onto his horse and rode clear of the town. He was found dead by the road half a mile out.
That left Emmett. Already hit in the arm and hip, he managed to mount up with the grain sack still in his hand. He could have ridden for it. Instead he turned back and reached down for Bob, and the town barber, Carey Seaman, emptied both barrels of a shotgun into his back.
Eight men were dead or dying and three more townsmen were wounded. Elliott noted that the plaza had been full of bystanders, children among them, and not one was hit.
The Bodies, the Photograph and the Sixth Rider
The four dead outlaws were laid out and photographed, the bodies propped up for the camera in a picture that's been reprinted ever since. Displaying a dead outlaw was routine in the period, and it could get a good deal grimmer than a photograph, as the story of Big Nose George shows. There was talk of lynching Emmett, but he looked so close to death that nobody saw the point. A local doctor, Walter Wells, took 23 pieces of lead out of him.
One question has never been settled. Several people claimed a sixth rider had been with the gang and slipped away. The popular version says it was Bill Doolin and that his horse went lame on the way in. A Wells Fargo detective, Fred Dodge, recorded a different story from an informant: Doolin had been laid up with fever. A Condon bank employee insisted he saw a sixth man galloping off. Robert Barr Smith, weighing it all up, leans towards brother Bill Dalton. None of it has ever been proved, and it's quite possible there was no sixth man at all.
What Happened to Emmett Dalton?
Emmett recovered. On 8 March 1893 he pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of George Cubine and was sentenced to life at hard labour. He turned out to be a model prisoner, and on 2 November 1907, after fourteen and a half years, Kansas governor E.W. Hoch gave him an unconditional pardon, as HistoryNet's profile of Emmett details. The following year he married Julia Johnson in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Then he did what a surprising number of Old West survivors did and went to California. Like Wyatt Earp in his later years, Emmett drifted into the orbit of the film business. He appeared in pictures about his own gang, wrote two books, Beyond the Law and When the Daltons Rode, and made a living in building and real estate around Los Angeles.
In May 1931 he went back to Coffeyville and paid a stonecutter for a simple headstone over the grave Bob and Grat share with Bill Power in Elmwood Cemetery. He died in California on 13 July 1937, aged 66, having outlived his brothers by 45 years.
Bill Dalton didn't get that long. He's thought to have thrown in with Bill Doolin after Coffeyville, and he was shot dead by a posse near Ardmore, Oklahoma, on 8 June 1894. Doolin himself was killed by deputy marshal Heck Thomas in 1896.
The Dalton Gang in Popular Culture
The Daltons have had a longer career dead than they ever had alive. Universal filmed When the Daltons Rode in 1940, three years after Emmett died, with Broderick Crawford as Bob and Randolph Scott in a part the writers made up. Western historian Jeff Arnold's review of the film points out that it cheerfully blames the banks and railroads and clears the brothers of half their robberies, which is more or less how Emmett liked the story told.
Then there's the Eagles. Their 1973 album Desperado, released on 17 April that year, opens with a song called Doolin-Dalton, written by Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Jackson Browne and J.D. Souther. The idea came from a book of Old West gunfighter photographs that Browne had been given as a birthday present, as the band told Uncut magazine. For the back cover, photographer Henry Diltz shot the band, plus Browne and Souther, lying dead and bound at the feet of a posse made up of their producer, manager and road crew. Anyone who's seen the Coffeyville photograph will recognise the pose straight away.
In Europe the name means something else entirely. The Belgian cartoonist Morris put the real Dalton brothers into an early Lucky Luke story, and once René Goscinny took over the writing in 1955 the series gained four fictional cousins, Joe, William, Jack and Averell. They've been the comic's bumbling villains ever since, in a series that's sold upwards of 300 million copies. For millions of French and Belgian readers, the Daltons are four idiots in striped prison suits and not the men who shot up a Kansas town.
Visiting Coffeyville Today: Death Alley and the Dalton Defenders Museum
Coffeyville has never let the raid go. You can still walk Death Alley, where markers show the spots where the townsmen fell. The building that housed the Condon bank is still standing on the plaza. The Dalton Defenders Museum, run by the Coffeyville Historical Society at 113 East 8th Street, opened on 5 October 1963, the raid's 71st anniversary. The name tells you whose side the town is on.
Elmwood Cemetery holds both sides. George Cubine and Charles Brown are buried there. Marshal Connelly was taken to Independence, Lucius Baldwin to Burlington and Dick Broadwell's family took him home to Hutchinson, according to the historical marker at the cemetery. Frank Dalton, the brother who died a lawman, lies a short walk from the others under a tall monument his mother paid for.
For nearly 40 years the outlaws' own grave was marked by nothing but a bent length of iron pipe. Local tradition says it was the rail they tied their horses to. True West magazine's look at the grave isn't convinced, and suggests it was scrap pulled out of the alley and stuck in the ground as an insult. Emmett's 1931 headstone hasn't had an easy time either. It was stolen before the Second World War, replaced in the late 1960s, stolen again in 2010 and found dumped near a creek. It's now cemented in place.
What Coffeyville Changed
The raid is usually remembered as the day ordinary townspeople out-shot a famous gang, and that's fair. But the numbers are worth keeping in view. Four locals died for money that went straight back to the banks. The cashier's bluff and the hardware shop rifles get the credit, though a dug-up street did as much damage to Bob Dalton's plan as either of them.
For the Daltons, it was the end of the line in every sense. A gang that had spent a year and a half mostly holding up trains and living off its reputation was wiped out in less time than it takes to boil a kettle and drink the tea. The reputation survived anyway, largely because the one brother left alive spent the next 30 years telling the story.
FAQ
Were the Dalton Gang related to Jesse James?
No. The link is through their mother, Adeline Younger, whose nephews Cole and Jim Younger rode with Jesse James. That made the Daltons cousins of the Youngers, but they had no blood tie to the James family.
How old were Bob and Grat Dalton when they died?
Bob, the gang's leader, was 23. Grat, born in 1861, was 31. Emmett, the survivor, was 21.
Did the Dalton Gang get away with any money from Coffeyville?
No. Emmett was still holding the grain sack from the First National when he was shot off his horse, and none of the other four got more than half a mile from the banks.
You Might Also Like
Sources
National Park Service, Coffeyville, Kansas: The Town That Stopped the Dalton Gang
HistoryNet, Dalton Gang (Robert Barr Smith, Wild West magazine)
HistoryNet, Dressed to Kill: The Guns Used by the Daltons at Coffeyville (Lee A. Silva)
History.com, The Dalton Gang is wiped out in Coffeyville, Kansas
The Historical Marker Database, Dalton Gang and Defenders Graves
Legends of America, Coffeyville, Kansas and the Deadly Dalton Gang
Best Classic Bands, Desperado: Eagles' Sagebrush Country-Rock Opera
