Cole Younger: From Quantrill Raider to Prison Librarian

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Thomas Coleman Younger was born in 1844 in Jackson County, Missouri, the seventh of 14 children of a prosperous farmer. His father, Henry, supported the Union and was shot dead anyway by a Union soldier from Kansas. Grief turned Cole toward William Clarke Quantrill's pro-Confederate bushwhackers, and by August 1863 he was riding in the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, where guerrillas burned the town and killed roughly 200 citizens. This episode follows how a border war with no rules shaped a particular kind of violent man.

Peace offered no way back. Missouri's new constitution barred former Confederate sympathizers from voting, serving on juries, or holding office, and a core of ex-guerrillas turned to robbing banks. By 1868 Cole was named in a robbery at Russellville, Kentucky, and the James-Younger gang took shape around him, his brothers Jim, John, and Bob, and Frank and Jesse James. The story runs through train wrecking, Pinkerton blood feuds, the ruinous Northfield raid of 1876, and long quiet years in Stillwater prison before a Wild West show and a public conversion.

• In 1873 the gang derailed a Rock Island Railroad locomotive at Adair, Iowa, to loot the express car, which brought the Pinkerton National Detective Agency after them.
• A March 1874 shootout on a Missouri road killed Pinkerton agent Louis Lull and Cole's brother John.
• At Northfield, Minnesota, in September 1876, townspeople grabbed rifles from hardware stores and shot the gang to pieces. Clell Miller and William Chadwell died in the street and the robbers left with nothing.
• Sentenced to life at Stillwater, Cole became the prison librarian and worked as a printer's devil on the Prison Mirror, a newspaper the Younger brothers helped fund.
• Paroled in July 1901, he toured with Frank James in a Wild West company in 1903, was baptized in Lee's Summit, and died there in March 1916 at age 72.