UBC: Smith, The Last Hurrah of the James-Younger Gang

[truepenny]

Last Hurrah of the James-Younger Gang by Robert B. Smith

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I picked this up at a library book sale for $2, having had enough experience with books about American outlaws to know not to expect much. But it was a delight to read, well-written and carefully researched, and interested in exactly the same thing I'm interested in: how can we assess and sift the primary sources on an event like the Northfield bank robbery and subsequent manhunt and how much of the truth can we recover?

Smith has no patience for Jesse James (neither the legend nor the man) and not the slightest desire to romanticize bank robbers; I appreciated his dry, down-to-earth tone, particularly as a corrective to the self-romanticization of (especially) Cole Younger. He errs slightly in the other direction, but the citizens of Northfield were heroic: Heywood and Bunker and Wilcox inside the bank, all of whom refused to tell the robbers that that closed safe door with its fancy combination time lock didn't mean a thing because the dial hadn't been spun to lock it; Manning and Wheeler and the other men outside the bank who armed themselves and shot back. And Smith is over-emphatic because he is so insistent that we recognize the James brothers and the Younger brothers for what they were--not Robin Hood, not Confederate heroes unjustly driven to bank robbery by the government and the carpetbaggers, but parasites, men who chose to survive by stealing from the very people who looked on them as heroes (being pre-FDIC, the money that the Jameses and the Youngers stole was the money of the depositors, not the money of the (conveniently reified) Bank).

(There's a parallel here with people who have I STAND WITH SCOTT WALKER bumper stickers, but I should probably put it down and back away slowly.)

Smith does an excellent job of assessing the primary sources against each other, surviving bank employees and citizens against surviving bank robbers: Clelland Miller and Charlie Pitts and Bill Chadwell not being able to speak for themselves--and, although that's pure happenstance, it's a pity, because all we have left are the Younger brothers and the James brothers with no chance of a dissenting voice--Joseph Lee Heywood and Nicolaus Gustafson not being able to solve the mystery of which of the outlaws murdered them.

Smith's narrative is engaging and easy to follow and does an excellent job of explaining why an experienced and successful gang of bank robbers ran so grievously aground in Northfield, Minnesota.



View all my reviews

Comments

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Right now I live about a block from where Frank and Jesse lived in Nashville after the was ended. Frank seems to have been content to work as a blacksmith, or possibly a farrier, but it seems neither Jesse or the fuck-ups with them could stand to settle.

Plenty of other men were tormented and had their lives turned topsyturvey by the war, but managed to stay on the right side of the law, no matter how fucked-up their lives were. Maybe I'd be able to summon more sympathy if two of my great-grandfather's uncles hadn't been murdered by partisans like Quantrill's gang during the war.