Ayoob Files: Armed Citizens Three, Multiple Bank Robbers Zero
Situation: Multiple armed gang members rob a bank and trigger a shootout they won’t live to regret.
Lesson: Good guys with guns, skill and tactics can be more than a match for hardcore criminals.
Those who read the history of America’s Old West frontier are aware of the stories. In 1876, the dreaded Jesse James/Cole Younger Gang was shot to pieces by armed citizens who decisively thwarted the gang’s bank raid in Northfield, Minn. In 1892, armed citizens did the same when the Dalton Gang found that Coffeyville, Kansas, wasn’t the best venue for armed bank robbery, either.
Far fewer people today are familiar with a similar incident that took place in Meeker, Colo., in 1896. Let’s examine that incident.
The Incident Begins
October 3, 1896, approximately 3:00 p.m. Approaching from the south along the White River, four horsemen ride into the town of Meeker, dismounting in a corral for freight wagons behind the J.W. Hugus & Company building. The Hugus establishment is a central part of the town. It is a large general store, and it encompasses a bank. One of the men, Joe Rolls, remains with the horses. The other three make entry into the Hugus establishment.
The trio hasn’t come to shop at the general store part of the building.
Once inside, they make their way to the bank and enter. All are in their 20s, and all are known by different names. Billy Smith, who sometimes answers to Pierce, is nicknamed — perhaps has nicknamed himself — “The Kid.” One of the men with him is known variously as Jim Shirly and Charles Jones. The third, George Harris, is sometimes called Bain. Pierce takes a position near the front door, and Shirly places himself at the side entrance.
Clerk Joe Rooney, who works at a local hotel, makes a deposit and becomes the last patron of the day to do routine bank business before the robbers open the action. A lady named Mrs. Wildhack attempts to enter but is turned away by The Kid.
And now it goes down.
Shots Fired
Harris takes the lead. He goes directly to assistant cashier David Smith. Shirly shouts for everyone to raise their hands, and, unprovoked, Harris fires a shot past the assistant cashier’s head.
Stunned, the bank employee is temporarily frozen in place. Robber Harris fires another shot past him, accompanied by demands for money.
The robbers have made their first mistake.
Rallying Cry
The gunshots are, of course, heard throughout the Hugus building and outside on the street. Meeker citizen Phil Barnhart is about to enter the bank when he perceives what is happening. He runs outside shouting, “Get your guns, the bank is being robbed!” C.J. Duffy and Tom Shervin join in spreading the alarm.
In the real American West of the 1890s, the general populace didn’t walk around all wearing six-guns like in later movies and TV shows, but firearms were often within reach.
An ad hoc band of armed citizens begins to gather outside. Newspapers of the time will describe them as being armed with rifles, shotguns and revolvers.
The stage for confrontation was set.
Grabbing The Money
Finding the vault door locked, the frustrated robbers take Hugus company manager, A.C. Moulton, at gunpoint, exclaiming, “Here, Mister Cashier, we want you!” They command him to open the vault. Moulton will later describe the gun barrel pointed at his face as “big enough to sleep in.” He obeys.
One of the robbers has brought a bag later described as a “sugar sack.” They begin filling it with cash. Most accounts will later list the amount taken as $1,600, the equivalent of over $55,000 today.
Perhaps deciding that they needed insurance, the gang decides to take everyone in the bank with them as human shields. At gunpoint, hands in the air, the hapless victims file outside with their criminal captors.
Shootout!
As the gang and their human shields exited the building, they had to see the ad hoc militia of armed citizens pointing guns in their direction. The hostages, of course, will have seen the same thing.
The first gunshot victim of the event is Bill Clark, who divides his time between being a deputy game warden and a schoolteacher. He is in the latter role when he hears the two gunshots in his nearby classroom, orders his students to stay put, and runs to the scene. One of the robbers shoots him in the right side of the chest. He is now out of the fight, and the shooting does not go unnoticed by the array of armed citizens.
This does not go unnoticed by the hostages, either. The manager of the Hugus store will later tell the Meeker Herald newspaper that he and his fellow hostages were “getting tired of holding their hands in the air.” So, then, he and several others break and run.
At which time, the robbers, who at that moment still have time to surrender peacefully and save their lives, sign their death warrant.
It happened like this:
“The Kid” is the first to fire at the hostages. Victor Dykeman, an employee of the bank, takes a harmless bullet through his hat and a painful hit or two in one arm. C.A. Booth, a clerk, suffers a grazing scalp wound. W.P. Herrick, another hostage, has one finger traumatically amputated from his hand by a bullet. The line has been crossed. The armed citizens return fire with deadly accuracy.
Charles Jones and William Smith are the first to fall, at about the same time. “The Kid” falls with five bullets in him — down, done, and dead. There will be no forensic investigation as to whose bullets went where, but one historical account holds that all five of those bullets were fired by a single sharpshooting armed citizen named Ben Nichols.
Almost simultaneously, a bullet center-punches the heart of the robber Shirly, who instantly collapses and dies. The fatal shot has been fired by an armed citizen named Simp Hart.
The last of the bandits to fall is George Harris, whom Simp Hart shot in the back as he was trying to flee. He lived for some two hours, during which he named his partners in crime, though many believe he gave false names. His last words before he falls silent forever are “Oh! Mother!”
One of the gunmen, as he goes down mortally wounded, empties his revolver at the crowd while falling and while on the ground. He hits no one. Interestingly, different sources attribute this last act of defiance variously to Harris and “The Kid.”
The shootout has taken only seconds.
The One Who Got Away
Most accounts of this incident mention only the three men who entered the bank, drew guns, and carried out the robbery and the hostage-taking. Only the aforementioned historian Tom Clavin seems to consider the fourth gang member, Joe Rolls, who gave a new meaning to the old saying, “hold your horses.”
Behind the building, he was out of sight, out of mind, and out of the line of fire of the armed citizen rescuers, none of whom would have been in a position to even know he was there. Hearing the gunfire and astutely figuring out what was going on and what his and his fellow criminals’ chances were, he jumped in the saddle and “got out of Dodge.” He was never arrested or charged for the attempted robbery and attempted homicides that took place that day in Meeker, Colo. Clavin describes him as a man who had been no more than a horse thief and a poor one at that prior to the attempted holdup, and Clavin found no record of him ever committing any crime more risk-prone than horse theft thereafter.
“The Rest Of The Story”
Tom Clavin is one of my favorite contemporary historians of the Western frontier. In his 2024 book Bandit Heaven: the Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West, he explains the would-be bank robbers who went to Meeker were amateurs — “wannabes” who had taken Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as role models. It turned out they were a very poor imitation of the real Wild Bunch. He describes them as a “Junior Wild Bunch” who had been entranced by stories of Butch and Sundance’s derring-do and rich plunder from the banks and trains they had robbed.
They were, in essence, imitating the role models their bad judgment had led them to choose. Their poor imitation of a glamorized 19th-century version of what today is called “thug life” ultimately cost three-fourths of them their lives and led to the wounding of four innocent victims.
Casualty Count
A casualty count depends on what those counting consider a casualty. In this incident, if you look at just the fatalities, the final score was “Good Guys 3, Bad Guys 0.” If you look at who got hurt, all three actual Bad Guy robbers were killed and none wounded, but there were four innocent people hurt by the gunfire. While some have suggested the misnomer “friendly fire” caused some of those wounds, that seems bogus: The consensus of reporters at the time and historians later is that all wounds on innocents were inflicted by the criminal gunmen, not the righteous rescuers. One man’s lost finger was actually the only permanent wound. It appears the hostage shot in the arm recovered completely. The graze wound on another’s scalp was inconsequential. And the part-time lawman shot in the chest, the first of the innocents to be hit? Fortunately, it appears to have been an “adynamic wound,” that is, one that did not incapacitate or threaten life. Reports indicate the warden/teacher was a very heavy-set man, and the bullet seems to have simply passed through a fat roll on the side of his chest. He was said to have remarked afterward that if he had lost 50 lbs. before the shooting, the bullet wouldn’t have hit him at all.
This was a much better casualty ratio in favor of the Good Guys than any such “armed citizens versus bank robbers” case I have researched. In the Northfield Bank Raid, the robbers killed three civilians while the armed citizens killed two of the band, Clell Miller and Bill Stiles, and wounded all the remaining perpetrators, including Cole and Bob Younger and Frank and Jesse James.
In the Coffeyville raid, four of the five bandits were killed by armed citizens, while the sole survivor of the gang, Emmett Dalton, was captured and survived an amazing 23 wounds from bullets and buckshot pellets. Unfortunately, the “death score” was 4 to 4: The gang murdered the town marshal and three citizens, at least two of whom were unarmed and helpless.
We have space here to discuss one more such incident, not far in time or space from the Meeker case we are focusing on. In September of 1893, in Delta, Colo., a trio of armed robbers hit the Farmers and Merchants Bank. When cashier A.T. Blachly did not deliver the money quickly enough to suit them, one of the robbers shot him in the neck, killing him instantly. The robbers grabbed as much money as they could and rushed to the door. Assistant cashier H. H. Wolbert grabbed a revolver, but the robbers took him at gunpoint and ordered him to drop the gun. He did. The robbers made their exit on horseback.
The local newspaper The Sun reported at the time, “Men rushed for revolvers and guns and then ran toward the bank. Among them was W. R. Simpson, a young hardware merchant, whose shop was across the street from the bank. He picked up a rifle and started up the street. As the robbers came out of the alley and crossed the street, Simpson fired, and one of the robbers fell, the top of his head being fairly taken off by the ball. Simpson then ran to the alley and fired after the other two fleeing men. He shot twice, killing first another man and then his horse. The second man was also struck in the head. The remaining survivor escaped across the river.”
No survivable wounds anywhere in that one. Three people dead, one helpless innocent victim, and two of the three men responsible for his murder. “Good Guys 2, Bad Guys 1.”
Lessons
There is an old saying that holds true: “The younger serpent has the strongest venom.” Police who have dealt with violent juvenile offenders know it to be true. They may not yet have developed compassion or sympathy. They may not have yet felt intimations of mortality and may think they are immortal and invulnerable. And they may not yet know what they are doing.
Modeling on Robert Leroy Parker, also known as Butch Cassidy, and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh aka the Sundance Kid, they had missed a cornerstone of Cassidy’s success as a robber: He had been scrupulous not to hurt anyone or even fire a gun if he didn’t absolutely have to. History is clear that Cassidy never killed anyone until his last day on Earth when he and Longabaugh shot it out with Bolivian soldiers, inflicting some fatalities, and then went out in a mutual death pact. It is generally accepted that “Butch” shot “Sundance” in the forehead and then shot himself through the temple.
Virtually everyone who studied the Meeker Bank Robbery Shootout concluded that if George Harris hadn’t fired those first two shots inside the bank to intimidate the cashier, no one would have recognized that there was a bank robbery in progress … the armed citizen posse would not have been alerted and had time to gather up outside … and the robbers would have probably escaped with the money, and with their lives, with no shots fired and no blood spilled on either side.
Ironically, the amateur robbers had left the sack of stolen money behind in the bank.
Don’t steal from those who desperately need to keep what you are trying to steal. Today, we are all told, “Let the thieves take the bank’s money, it’s insured.” It wasn’t insured then. FDIC did not come into being until 1934, almost 40 years after the Meeker incident. The “Junior Wild Bunch” wasn’t just stealing the bank’s money; they were stealing the money of the innocent depositors of Meeker, who needed that money to feed their children and keep roofs over their heads.
Motivation Matters
When armed citizens fight back against dangerous criminals, often a single hero will emerge to lead the “fight for right.” In the Meeker incident we focused on here, it was the citizen Simp Hart, who killed two-thirds of the would-be murderers who died that day. In the Coffeyville fight, a majority of the Bad Guys were put down by John Kloehr, a cool-headed sharpshooter with his Winchester rifle. In a 2017 article on the True West Blog, Mark Boardman writes, “In some remembrances 14 years later, Kloehr claimed to have been the man who killed four of the robbers and wounded another. He did kill Grat Dalton and probably fired fatal shots into two others, but many guns were firing. Kloehr was a hero, but not the only one.” In Northfield, by contrast, the credit for stopping the bad guys seems to be equally spread between multiple courageous, straight-shooting citizens.
In Closing
Apologies if the names sound confusing. Each of the three armed robbers who died had at least two names that they went by. The historical accounts vary as to their names. But if I had labeled them “Perpetrators 1, 2 and 3,” it wouldn’t have been historically correct. In the source materials, robber Jim Shirly’s name is variously spelled with and without an “e.”
I realize I am writing for a gun magazine, and herewith apologize for not having more details for the readers on the firearms involved. None of the historical resources seems to have that information. There is a small museum in Meeker, Colo., which has an exhibit related to this incident. I apologize again for not having been there, but pictures I’ve seen of that display show the iconic guns of the period: Colt single-action revolvers and Winchester lever-action rifles. Accounts indicate that only handguns were used by the Bad Guys; the long guns were deployed by at least some of the Good Guys. Do we need to mention that if you know a gunfight is coming up, you would rather have a long gun than a short one? Okay then: point already made and, I presume, taken.
Some of those Colts and Winchesters are on display at the White River Museum in Meeker. See MeekerColorado.com.
A final point. Suppose an anti-gunner reads the above and sneers, “That’s all from olden days. Where were your vaunted armed citizens when the North Hollywood Bank Robbery went down and the two perpetrators shot more than a dozen people before the cops finally killed them?”
My answer would be, “The potential rescuing citizens at that Bank of America incident were in Southern California, a quarter of a century before the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Bruen decision, in a time and place where the only private citizens who could get carry permits were millionaires and movie stars, none of whom were present. You see, for the real first responders — citizens immediately present when the deadly danger breaks out — to be able to deal with it, they need immediate access to firearms. If there had been armed citizens in that bank on that day in 1997, when suspect Matasareanu was emptying his illegally possessed full auto AK47 into the ATM, as soon as his partner Phillips looked away, a competent armed citizen could have drawn and shot them both down … and none of those innocent victims would have been shot.”
