In praise of a Painted Wagon

Early Nitty Gritty Dirt Band including Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Jackson Browne.

Odd, but in a good way

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Several things stand out in one of my odd favorite movies. First, is unsettling musical combinations and surreal coincidence of Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood in singing roles. Second, is several bizarre links to Colorado in a strange classic hit film of weirdness in which one of the characters steals the name of Colorado historic character Horace Tabor — and longtime Colorado-based Nitty Gritty Dirt Band has a cameo appearance. Additional evidence, I guess, of the Californification of Colorado. And I mean that in a good way.

Paint Your Wagon is a 1969 Western musical film starring Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, and Jean Seberg. The film was adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from the 1951 musical Paint Your Wagon by Lerner and Loewe. It is set in a mining camp in Gold Rush-era California, and directed by Joshua Logan.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was founded around 1966 in Long Beach, California, United States, by singer-guitarist Jeff Hanna and singer-songwriter-guitarist Bruce Kunkel, who had performed as the New Coast Two and later the Illegitimate Jug Band. Trying, in the words of the band's website, to "figure out how not to have to work for a living," Hanna and Kunkel joined informal jam sessions at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. There they met a few other musicians: guitarist-washtub bassist Ralph Barr, guitarist-clarinetist Les Thompson, harmonicist and jug player Jimmie Fadden, and guitarist-vocalist Jackson Browne. 

As Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the six men started as a jug band and adopted the burgeoning southern California folk rock musical style, playing in local clubs while wearing pinstripe suits and cowboy boots. Their first paying performance was at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, California.Browne was in the band for only a few months before he left to concentrate on a solo career as a singer-songwriter He was replaced by John McEuen on banjo, fiddle, mandolin, and steel guitar. McEuen's older brother, William, was the group's manager, and he helped the band get signed with Liberty Records, which released the group's debut album, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, during 1967. The band's first single, "Buy for Me the Rain,"was a Top 40 success, and the band gained exposure on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, as well as concerts with such disparate artists as Jack Benny and The Doors.

Mainly as a novelty act, the Band made an appearance in the 1968 film For Singles Only and a cameo appearance in the 1969 musical western film Paint Your Wagon, performing "Hand Me Down That Can o' Beans". The band also played Carnegie Hall as an opening act for Bill Cosby and played in a jam session with Dizzy Gillespie.

G. Brown, of Colorado Music Experience, tells the tale of Nitty Gritty Dirt Bands move to the Centennial State.

"In 1971, the band left Los Angeles to relocate in the Colorado mountains, the members settling into their respective wooded communities. The move was perhaps the singular most important element contributing to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s rise in stature, both commercially and creatively," wrote Brown.

Success arrived with the band’s fifth album, Uncle Charlie and his Dog Teddy. The thread of Hanna and Ibbotson’s acoustic guitars and brother-like harmonies, McEuen’s banjo, Thompson’s mandolin and Fadden’s utilitarian prowess gave them a unique sound. Hanna’s take of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles” made the Top 10 pop charts, and the follow-up singles “Some of Shelley’s Blues” and “House at Pooh Corner” were also hits.

That eclectic album was listened to by the children of traditional country music icons Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Maybelle Carter and others, including Jimmy Martin from Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys. As new Colorado residents, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band went to see the Earl Scruggs Revue perform in Boulder in the spring of 1971 at Tulagi. It was Scruggs’ picking that had made banjo a lead instrument over two decades prior, giving bluegrass a distinctive style. McEuen apprehensively asked Scruggs if he would consider recording with the Dirt Band. Scruggs said he’d be proud to.

“He had come to see us at a concert we did at Vanderbilt University,” Hanna said. “Before he left the room, we said, ‘Would you think about playing banjo on one of our records?’ And then months later, he played Tulagi. And we had come up with this idea…

“The catalyst? Randy and Gary had been listening to our records—they were into this country-rock aspect. And having grown up in Nashville under the tutelage of the greats—their Sunday dinners with Merle Travis coming over—they saw the potential for something as well. And they nurtured this along with their father. Earl was our liaison,” reported Brown.

"The next week at Tulagi, Doc Watson also enthusiastically consented to take part. The collaboration led to Will The Circle Be Unbroken in 1972, under the aegis of McEuen’s brother and band manager William McEuen out of Aspen. Risking their chart success, the band outlined plans for recording a selection of traditional country numbers to be performed in conjunction with the original musicians who had greatly influenced them. Some of the old-time greats were at first skeptical at first of the Dirt Band members and their amplified instruments. The long-haired musicians had their own preconceptions. Common ground was found when the traditional musicians saw how respectful the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was toward them and their work, as well as how serious the young players were about their own music, writes Brown, of Colorado Music Experience.

The band allowed the spotlight to fall on the old masters, and the resulting album—an unprecedented, groundbreaking three-LP set, recorded two-track live, with no mixing or overdubs—elicited appreciation from both rock and country listeners, and received two Grammy nominations. It even sold well, producing a gold album, the first for Scruggs, Carter, Watson, Martin, Roy Acuff and others. Circle was inducted into the Library of Congress as “one of America’s most important recordings”; Rolling Stone called the American music anthology “The most important record to come out of Nashville.”

The geographic transition to Colorado had brought an immediate host of fresh, attentive new faces to the front of stages, the personification of all the things the band stood for conceptually, and locals claimed the group for their own. The band recorded a string of classic albums in Aspen and at Caribou Studios near Nederland, according to Brown of Colorado Music Experience.

“There was a general feeling of unity, of having a home base, working in Colorado,” McEuen told Brown. “It was hard to feel that way in Los Angeles, even though that’s where most of us came from. Colorado in the 1970s was where a lot of people were finding a new direction. That effect was felt in the song ‘Rippling Waters,’ which became a Dirt Band standard.”

In 1976, after Russian and U.S. State Department dignitaries were sent to see the band in Colorado, the Dirt Band became the first American group selected by the Soviet government to tour the USSR, spending a groundbreaking month in Russia, Armenia, Georgia and Latvia playing to live audiences and appearing before an audience on Moscow Television of an estimated 145 million people.

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band members came and went. Bob Carpenter, based in Aspen during the 1970s with the band Starwood, joined the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and became an invaluable addition on keyboards and vocals. The back-to-back hits “Make A Little Magic” with Nicolette Larson and “An American Dream” with Linda Ronstadt, both released under the name the Dirt Band, made the Top 20 pop charts.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was then recast as a hugely successful charting country band. Manager Chuck Morris, whose attention had been trained on concert promotion in Denver, steered the band onto country radio. The band eventually had 15 consecutive Top 10 country songs. Originally recorded in 1983, “Colorado Christmas” has remained a radio staple around the holidays.

“But in the 1980s, our focus was Nashville, in terms of making albums,” MeEuen said. “Things change. It was difficult to work flying in and out of Aspen.”

In 1986, the “20 Years of Dirt” anniversary concert in McNichols Arena in Denver was a sell-out, with guests such as Ricky Skaggs, Emmylou Harris, Doc Watson, John Prine and others. By the 1990s, Ibbotson was the only member who remained in Colorado, and he left the band after a tour in 2004. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band continued to record and tour, celebrating “50 Years of Dirt” in 2016.

Paint Your Wagon was shot near Baker City, Oregon, beginning May 1968 and ending that October. Other locations include Big Bear Lake, California and San Bernardino National Forest; the interiors were filmed at Paramount Studios, with Joshua Logan directing.

The film was released at a time when movie musicals were going out of fashion, especially with younger audiences. Its overblown budget and nearly three-hour length became notorious in the press. Eastwood was frustrated by the long delays in the making of the film, later saying that the experience strengthened his resolve to become a director. According to Robert Osborne, Marvin drank heavily during the filming, which may have enhanced his screen appearance, but led to delays and many retakes.

Marvin was known for his ability to play an authentic drunk, i.e, his Academy-winning performance in Cat Ballou.

Marvin was originally cast as Pike Bishop (later played by William Holden) in The Wild Bunch (1969), but fell out with director Sam Peckinpah and pulled out to star in the Western musical Paint Your Wagon (1969), in which he was top-billed over a singing Clint Eastwood. Despite his limited singing ability, he had a hit with the song "Wand'rin' Star." By this time, he was getting paid $1 million per film, $200,000 less than top star Paul Newman was making at the time, yet he was ambivalent about the movie business, even with its financial rewards.

From the promotional  trailer of Paint Your Wagon

Enemies or friends: Pioneer family struggles

Minnie Buce Carrigan

Carrigan began writing and speaking about her 1862 experiences

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com 

My own family struggled with it. Enemies or friends? 

My great-grandmother Minnie Buce Carrigan described the horror in her book, "Captured by the Indians."

"My father began talking to the foremost Indians. My brother has told me that father asked them to take all his property but to let him and his family go," wrote Minnie Buce Carrigan. 

"But the Indian replied in the Sioux language, "Sioux cheche," (the Sioux are bad.) He then leveled his double barreled shot gun and fired both barrels at him. He dropped the baby--she was killed--and running a few yards down the hill, fell on his face, dead. The same Indian then went to where my mother had sat down beside a stone with little Caroline in her lap, reloaded his gun and deliberately fired upon them both. She did not speak or utter a sound, but fell over dead. Caroline gave one little scream and a gasp or two and all was over with her. The cry rang in my ears for years afterward. My father was thirty-three and my mother thirty years of age when they were so cruelly murdered by the Indians."

She was captured, and then finally liberated 10 weeks later.

Yet, she later worked as a cook on the Rosebud Sioux reservation. My Granddad Owen, grew up there.

A memorial in Find A Grave, by Bill Wilcox, talks of Minnie Buce Carrigan's life.

"Minnie (Wilhelmina) was born in Germany to parents Gottfried and Wilhelmina Buce (sometimes spelled Buse or Busse). In 1858, Gottfried, Wilhelmina, and their three children, August, Minnie, and Augusta, came to America and settled at Fox Lake, WI where daughter Amelia was born. 

In the spring of 1860, with five other families, the Buce family moved to Minnesota. After spending a short time in Cannon Falls, where daughter Caroline was born, the family moved farther west to Renville County and settled in the northwest quarter of Section 35, Flora township, an area known as the Middle Creek settlement." 

Another daughter, Bertha, was born here. Several Middle Creek settlers were killed by Indians in an attack on August 18, 1862, the first day of the Dakota uprising. On that day, Minnie's brother, August, was sent to a neighbor's place (the Roessler family) on an errand and found everyone there murdered. The Buce family then fled to a cornfield. 

Later, when they attempted to reach a wooded area, the Indians discovered them and killed Minnie's father and mother, her sister Augusta, and sisters Bertha and Caroline, who were in the arms of their parents. Minnie and her surviving siblings, August and Amelia, were taken captive and spent ten weeks among the Dakotas before all captives were freed at Camp Release. Following their release, the siblings were parted and taken in by three separate families. 

"By age 15, Minnie was on her own, working in the summers and going to school in the winter. In 1879 she married Owen Carrigan. They had six children and farmed in the southeast quarter of section 22, Boon Lake township. On April 13, 1898, she was appointed postmaster of Lakeside, a position previously held by her husband. Mr. Carrigan died in 1898 at Hutchinson, Minnesota, and is buried there. Minnie died in 1912 and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, two and a half miles west of their farm site," according to Wilcox.

Minnie Buce Carrigan was seven years old in August 1862, when she witnessed the deaths of her mother, her father, and four younger siblings at the hands of Dakota warriors at her home on Middle Creek in Renville County, Minnesota. Carrigan and her ten year old brother, Charlie,  were held captive for six weeks.

In 1884,when she was twenty-nine, Carrigan began writing and speaking about her 1862 experiences. Her best known story is Captured by the Indians.

"Carrigan’s story about a soldier named Louis Thiele was square one in my inquiry into Indian hating in Minnesota in the wake of the U.S.-Dakota War. More about “Indian Hating” in a moment. First, the story Carrigan recorded, dating to late September or early October 1862:" notes research by Carrie Zeman.

“One day while she was staying at Camp Release, Mr. Thiele came into our tent. He told Mrs. Krus how the Indians had killed his wife and child. He assured her that her husband was alive and that she would soon see him again. Then he went on talking about how he and a half-breed named Moore, buried the dead. They had buried quite a number before he had courage enough to bury his wife and child. When he came upon their bodies the dogs had eaten most of them and there was nothing but a few pieces of their clothes. He said he knelt down beside them and cried, prayed, and cursed the Indians, all in one breath. He swore that he would shoot Indians all the rest of his life. At last the half-breed could stand it no longer and asked Thiele if he was going to kill him, too. Mr. Thiele did not answer at which Moore threw down his spade and went away, leaving him to bury his dead alone," according to Carrigan's narrative.

"After burying what dead he could that day, [Thiele] started for the Fort, not caring where he went. With nothing to eat but corn and wild plumbs [sic], he wandered until he met Sibley’s men. He asked the General to let him have some soldiers to bury the dead. General Sibley could not send a force until two weeks later and there was nothing left of the bodies but bones and clothes. They simply dug a hole beside the skeletons, rolled the bones in and covered them up.”

"The story caught my attention for two reasons," says Zeman. "First, I thought I had already encountered 'Mr. Thiele' –Louis Thiele, who first showed up on my historical radar in 1999 as a farmer from Flora Township, Renville County, listed as a refugee at Fort Ridgely during the war, where he reported that his wife and child had been killed," Zeman wrote.

"Second, researching a very early Dakota War novel, I had read Louise K. Barnett’s classic book The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism 1790-1890. In it, Barnett identified a stock character in popular mid-19th century American frontier fiction called an “Indian Hater.”

In 1851, American historian Francis Parkman explained the phenomena of Indian Hating: “It is not easy for those living in the tranquility of polished life fully to conceive the depth and force of that unquenchable, indiscriminate hate, which Indian outrages can awaken in those who have suffered them. The chronicles of the American borders are filled with the deeds of men, who, having lost all by the merciless tomahawk, have lived for vengeance alone; and such men will never cease to exist so long as a hostile tribe remains within striking distance of an American settlement.” (quoted in Barnett, 129)

Louis Thiele was one of the citizen soldiers besieged at Fort Ridgely when Van Vorhes penned the “ANNIHILATION” manifesto on August 22.

"But is there proof that Thiele ever did more than threaten to kill Indians in revenge?

"Later, I re-read the accounts of the discovery of Justina Kriegher by members of the Birch Coulie burial party. Kriegher, a German settler wounded on the first day of the war and left for dead, survived for weeks on the prairie, too weak to do more than crawl. When two of Sibley’s soldiers saw a figure creeping toward them through the grass, one soldier raised his rifle and took aim at the head of flowing dark hair. The other stopped him. The soldier who almost shot Kriegher, supposing she was an Indian, was Louis Thiele," notes Zeman.

"Thiele also showed up again as a witness in three of the 1862 Military tribunal trials of Dakota warriors accused of murdering civilians in Flora Township, Renville County. When President Lincoln had the nearly 400 death conviction sifted for evidence of murder of rape, only 39 of the convictions were allowed to stand–including all three against whom Thiele testified. Two of the three were executed on December 26, 1862."

"Later in this series, we’ll meet Louis Thiele again in the story of the attack outside New Ulm on the wagons of chained prisoners being transported to Mankato.

"150 years and too many wars later, we are more aware of the deep and lingering effects of trauma people sustain when they are victimized or witness the victimization of people they love. I can’t imagine what Louis Thiele experienced in 1862," says Zeman.

But historians currently argue that “moral restraint” was the factor that kept ethnic cleansing in Minnesota from crossing the technical line into genocide in the wake of the war. Isn’t it esoteric to insist that body counts are the sole measure “moral restraint” when we know the camps of soldiers guarding the Dakotas were populated with avowed Indian Haters like Louis Thiele?

"Minnie Carrigan’s brother, Charlie (August) Buce, only ten years old when their parents were killed, also grew up to be a soldier, and, it seems, an Indian Hater, says Zeman.

Carrigan wrote:

“My brother left for Montana at the age of 19. When we were at Camp Release he came one day and told me that he saw all the Indians that were to be hung but the one who killed our parents was not among them. He cried and said, “Yes, he is a good Indian now. Just wait until I get big I will hunt Indians the rest of my life and will kill them, too, if I can find them.” For two years after we parted he would write to me regularly but then we heard no more of him. I am inclined to think that he was killed at the time Gen. Custer made his last stand, for that spring I received his last letter.”

On December 26, 1862, United States Volunteers of the State of Minnesota carried out the largest mass execution in U.S. history at Mankato after the Dakota War of 1862. Companies of the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th Minnesota Infantry Regiments, and Minnesota Cavalry oversaw the hanging of 38 men: 35 Santee Sioux and three biracial French/native American, for their involvement in the war crimes committed during the uprising.

The crimes included intentional killings, mutilations and rapes of hundreds of unarmed civilians. A USV military tribunal reviewed nearly 500 cases, of which 303 received a death sentence, but President Lincoln requested the court files. He reviewed them, placing the rape cases at the top, and pardoning 265. Episcopal Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple urged leniency to which Lincoln responded that he had to take a balanced approach. His position and dismissals were unpopular in Minnesota. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the event a large granite marker was erected that stood at the site until 1971, when the city took it down. 

Today, a different monument marks the execution site. Across the street are two monuments to the indigenous people in what it called Reconciliation Park. The Blue Earth County Library, Main street and Reconciliation Park cover the immediate vicinity of the execution site.

Younger Minnie Buce Carrigan

Fleagle Gang hung on a finger print

"The Fate of the Fleagle Gang". 
Now listen my friends and I'll tell you
A story of bandits so bold
Way out in Lamar Colorado
They robbed the town's bank of its gold.

Two innocent bankers were murdered
And another one carried from town
In a cabin way up in the mountains
The poor fellows body was found.

Then one of the bandits were wounded
And begged for relief from his pain
They went for a doctor to aid him
And later the doctor was slain.

As last in an Illinois city
One of the bandits was found
Ralph Fleagle then made his confession
For the law had at last run him down.

His body will soon lie in slumber
Out there 'neath the clear western skies
For robbery and cold blooded murder
Ralph Fleagle now goes forth to die.

He walks without fear to the scaffold
The black cap is placed on his head
The sherrif [sic] steps on the trigger
Ralph Fleagle the bandit is dead.

But Ralph's brother Jake was not captured
For two years he wandered at will
And then down at Branson Missouri
He came to the end of the trail.

It was there on the old station platform
Where Jake Fleagle made his last stand
But one fatal shot from the sheriff
The law had at last got their man.

Oh! Why are these young men so foolish
To think they can murder at will
When there is that mighty commandment
That teaches us "Thou shalt not kill."

Now listen young men let me tell you 
Take warning before its to late
You'll fid on that great Judgement Morning
You can't stack your cards against fate."

___ Fate of the Fleagle Gang,  Bud Billings

Whole gang paid price for murders

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

“Bank robbing is more of a sure thing than farming.” said writer Allan Dare Pearce, in his book, "Paris in April." But when it comes to that, it is not always clear what thing, we (or the bank robbers, for that matter) may be sure of.

The Fleagle Gang of bank robbers and murderers were eventually found and executed or killed after robbing the First National Bank in Lamar, Colorado. The case was the first in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used a single fingerprint as part of the evidence leading to a conviction. They were also suspected to have committed a series of previous bank robberies over a 10-year period.

Ralph Fleagle

On May 23, 1928, Ralph Fleagle, his brother Jake Fleagle, George J. Abshier, (a.k.a. Bill Messick), and Howard "Heavy" Royston, came in to Lamar, Colorado to rob the First National Bank, according to newspaper accounts and former newspaper publisher N. T. Betz' book (2005). The Fleagle Gang: Betrayed by a Fingerprint.

Jake Fleagle

They met at a ranch near Marienthal, Kansas, shortly before the robbery, but Jake Fleagle had planned on robbing the Lamar bank for some time. The Fleagles, together with Abshier, had carefully scouted the bank on several occasions before they decided to commit the crime

George J. Abshier

The gang had maps of the roads of Prowers County, Colorado, and the brothers had been inside the bank building and knew its layout. Abshier said they had weighed the "possibilities" and decided that it was a job for no less than four men, so they recruited Howard "Heavy" Royston.

Howard "Heavy" Royston

When they left Kansas on May 23, about 3 a.m., the men had license plates from Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and California to throw any witnesses off their track. Each man was heavily armed.

The drive took about six hours, but the plan required them to wait until the afternoon to commit the robbery. At about 1 p.m., they went into action.

E. A. Lundgren, a one-armed teller at the bank, was waiting on a customer when he saw the men come into the bank and heard one shout, "You sons-a-bitches get them all up!" and another yell, "Hands up!"

A. N. Parrish

In the noise and confusion of the moment, Bank President A. N. Parrish ducked into his office and pulled out a Colt 45 he called "Old Betsy" and fired at the closest bank robber from the door to his office, hitting Royston in the jaw.

Then, by all, accounts, all hell broke loose.

The bank teller, William Garrett and Miss Vivian Potter, another bank employee, later said two of the gunmen struggled with customers and most of the gang members were shouting to their victims to either lie down or put their hands up. Abshier, who later confessed to his role in the robbery and its aftermath, recalled:

"I grabs hold of the man standing alongside of me, shoved him to the floor; told him to get down. I wanted them out of the way of the bullets."

During the struggle, Amos Newton Parrish, the bank president, who had shot Royston in the face, was subsequently shot and killed. Jaddo Parrish, the son of the president, a bank employee, was also killed in the fusillade.

Jaddo Parrish, the son of the president, a bank employee

The bandits loaded their booty — $10,664 in cash, $12,400 in Liberty bonds, and almost $200,000 in commercial paper — into pillowcases and grabbed two hostages. The original plan had called for the gang to take Jaddo Parrish as hostage, because they felt that his father would not pursue them and risk his son's life, but, when Jaddo was killed, the gunmen took other hostages.

The gang, along with hostages Eskel A. Lundgren and a teller named Everett Kesinger, headed out to the car by a back door and drove out of town. After fending off the sheriff in a car chase that ended at a crossing on Sand Creek northeast of Lamar, where the robbers used rifles to disable the sheriff's car, the gang got away. Ralph Fleagle was driving the 1927 blue Buick Master Six getaway car.

During the car chase the gang released the one-armed teller Lundgren. Kesinger pleaded that he had a wife and new baby, and asked to be let go, but the bandits refused, forcing Kesinger to ride on the floor of the back seat of the car while Royston in the front seat used a pillowcase to catch the blood from his wound.

The gang arrived back in Kansas by nightfall. Royston, who had been shot by the bank president, needed medical attention, so the gang tricked a local doctor into coming out from his Dighton, Kansas home at night by telling him that a young boy's foot had been crushed by a tractor.

Dr. W. W. Wineinger 

When Dr. W. W. Wineinger arrived at the ranch, he discovered the ruse, but treated Royston's wounds. After he finished, the gang bound him up and blindfolded him, took him out of the ranch, shot him in the back of the head with a shotgun, and rolled his body and his Buick into a ravine north of Scott City, Kansas. Dozens of citizen posses crisscrossed the counties along the Colorado border in search of the getaway car.

The Fleagle brothers took Kesinger to a shack near Liberal, Kansas and shot him. The body was discovered about three weeks after the bank robbery.

The gang divided the loot and separated. Abshier drove Royston to Minneapolis, Minnesota to be seen by a dental surgeon. From Minneapolis, each man went to a different area of the country.

Abshier went to Grand Junction, Colorado.  Royston headed to San Andreas, California.  Ralph Fleagle ended up in San Francisco, California. 

It took police about 13-months to track down the owner of the single latent fingerprint left on the windows of Dr. Wineinger's car. 

Jake Fleagle was arrested by Detective Paul Quyle after Quyle found a cache of weapons in a house he had rented him in Stockton, California in March 1929. His fingerprints were sent to the Bureau of Investigation (later known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation) in Washington, D.C., where they were identified as Jake Fleagle's and connected to the Lamar bank robbery. The Stockton Police had released Jake after fingerprinting. 

Ralph Fleagle was arrested first in Kankakee, Illinois, and after flying back to Kansas and being booked in Lamar he was taken to Colorado Springs, where he eventually confessed. 

Ralph agreed to provide authorities with information about the rest of the gang in exchange for the release of his two brothers Fred and Walt Fleagle. A nationwide manhunt for Jake resulted in his death in a shootout on a train in Branson, Missouri, in October 1930 after his brother had been hanged in Colorado. Royston was captured at his home in San Andreas, California, and Abshier was arrested in Grand Junction, Colorado.

The three were tried first in Lamar, Colorado, and in a sensational series of trials in October and November 1929, and they were all sentenced to hang.

Their appeals to the Colorado Supreme Court did not succeed, and the men were executed over a two-week period in mid-July 1930. This was the very first time the FBI used a single fingerprint to convict someone of a crime, and was a major success for the Bureau.

The car and doctor's body were spotted from the air by a Colorado National Guard airplane that had been brought from Denver to aid in the search. 

Even today treasure hunters scour the west looking for the caches of loot supposedly buried by skinflint Ralph Fleagle. Credible rumors, but little proof, abound about unrecovered loot buried in California, Kansas and possibly Missouri. There is evidence that Ralph invested much of his money, and possibly owned an apartment building in San Francisco, where he had been living before being arrested in Kankakee, Illinois. Ralph's wife Margaret was sent away by the Fleagle family shortly after Ralph was hanged in Colorado, but there is no evidence of where she went.

In "Outlaw for My Neighbor, The Jake Fleagle Story," written by Kathleen Van Busker, the story of the Jake Fleagle gang information was drawn from news reports in the White River Leader (Oct. 16, 27, Nov. 13, 1930, and Feb. 3 and 22, 1931), written by Editor Rockwell Fletcher who was present at the time of the capture at Branson, and from an article originally written by Ralph C. Taylor for the Pueblo, Col., Star Journal and Sunday Chieftain, May 15, 1960, based on research of the Postal Inspectors’ reports. 

Also included are reports from two persons who were locally involved. There have been many changes in law enforcement methods and organization since 1930. The story would happen differently today.

"On October 14, 1930, law enforcement officers captured bank robber-murderer Jake Fleagle at the Branson depot. Fleagle's crimes were committed in Colorado, and Tanya County law officers were little involved in either the search or the capture. The story is, however, of historical interest in the White River Valley, not merely because the final dramatic scene was played out in Branson, but because local people reacted in so many different ways to the realization that men accepted as neighbors turned out to be murderous fugitives," according to Van Busker.

On the morning of May 23, 1928, four strangers with guns entered the First National Bank in Lamar, Col., and ordered bank employees and customers to raise their hands above their heads. As the gangsters stuffed $290,000 into moneybags, the elderly president of the bank, A.M. Parrish, pulled a loaded pistol from his desk drawer and fired into the face of one of the bandits. Before Parrish could fire again, the bandits turned their guns on him and the banker fell dead, still clutching his weapon.

J. F. Parrish, cashier of the bank and son of the slain banker, rushed to his father. A second volley from the bandits’ guns, and the younger Parrish, too, lay dead. Then, taking as hostages the assistant cashier, E. A. Cosigner, and the bank teller, B. A. Lounger, the gunmen shoved the bags of cash into a waiting car and sped away. Someone had telephoned Sheriff L. B. Alderman, who picked up the chase eastward on Highway 50. A short distance from Lamar, the gunmen stopped to shove Lounger from their car, a move that enabled the sheriff to overtake them. The bandits, using Cosigner as a shield, fired at the sheriff and his deputy who were about 280 yards away. It was an uneven match. The bandits had rifles and the officers had shorter-range pistols. Sheriff Alderman and his deputy were not injured but had to give up the pursuit because rifle bullets had damaged two spark plugs on their car.

Quickly organized posses fanned out in every direction, but no trace was found of the gunmen. Witnesses were not able to identify them. It would be many months before the four would be positively identified as Jake Fleagle, his brother Ralph, Howard Royston and George Abshier.

The four men fled to the horse ranch of Jake Fleagle, northwest of Garden City, Kansas. Royston, who had been shot in the face by Parrish, was in great pain. His anguished pleas for medical aid finally caused his companions to send Abshier to Dighton, Kansas, for help. Telling Dr. W. W. Weininger that a farm hand had been hurt, Abshier induced the doctor the doctor to accompany him to the Fleagle ranch. 

Dr. Weininger at once realized the man had been shot, and although he had not yet heard about the Lamar killings, he was certain to associate the two once he returned to Dighton and heard the news. After Royston's wound was treated, the murderers decided to dispose of the two men who could identify them. 

They took Dr. Weininger to a lonely canyon 22 miles north of Scott City. After blindfolding him and telling his he could return to Dighton after they were out of hearing, Jake Fleagle shot him in the back of he head with a shotgun. In removing the blindfold to see if the doctor was dead, Fleagle got some blood on his hands. The doctor's body and his car were then pushed over a cliff by Fleagle and his companions. In the process, the blood-stained fingerprint of Jake Fleagle was left on one of the car windows.

The hostage bank cashier was also blindfolded and told that he could return to Lamar after his captors were out of hearing. Jake Fleagle shot him in the back of the head with a revolver.

Now began the long search, which would involve law enforcement officers from coast to coast, last for two and a half years, and contribute heavily to awakening cooperation among the various law enforcement agencies. Chief among the searchers were Postal Inspector Charles W. Pfaffenberger and the chief of police of Colorado Springs, Hugh D. Harper, who was loaned to the Colorado Bankers' Association for as long as it would take to track down the vicious killers and bring them all to justice. You will meet some of the other lawmen as the story progresses. Suffice it to say, that, once involved, each officer stayed on the trail to the conclusion at Branson, so that the final confrontation took on the proportions of a law officers' convention.

Sheriff Alderman was scouting western Kansas in a low-flying airplane when he sighted Dr. Weininger's body and the wrecked automobile. That crime was soon linked with the bank killings. The interior of the doctor's car had been wiped with a damp cloth to remove fingerprints. However, R.S. Terwillinger, fingerprint expert of the Garden City police department, did find one fingerprint on the outside of one of the rear window. That was the lone tangible clue through which officers hoped to identify the murderous quartet. Terwillinger removed the glass and photographed the fingerprint. A copy was sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. Copies were sent also to police all over the country with the admonition to commit the print to memory.

On June 22, 1929, nearly a year later, a mail train on the Southern Pacific Railroad was held up at Hay Point near Pittsburg, California, and $17,000 in cash was taken out of the United States mail. A man calling himself William Harrison Holden was arrested at Stockton, California, as a suspect in that holdup, but was not held. His fingerprints, forwarded to the FBI, were identified as those of Jake Fleagle, who had been sent to the McAlester, Oklahoma, Penitentiary in 1916 to serve a year for second degree robbery.

An FBI expert noticed something familiar in the pattern of the right index finger. He searched his memory for an association but it was days before he linked it with the Kansas-Colorado fingerprint. Police now knew that the right index fingerprint from the doctor’s wrecked car belonged to Jake Fleagle.

Garden City police recalled the Fleagles living on an unproductive homestead nearby. There they found Jake’s father; mother and a brother, Fred. All three had large sums of cash on them and had made large deposits in a Garden City bank in previous months. They said Jake had made the money on the stock market and had sent it home to the family.

Lengthy questioning of Fred Fleagle brought the admission that mail addressed to a certain box in Garden City was from Ralph Fleagle. Postal Inspectors put a close watch on the box and this surveillance was rewarded when a letter arrived bearing a return address of a post-office box in Kankakee, Illinois. A watch was put on the Kankakee box and when Ralph Fleagle called for his mail, he was apprehended without a struggle.

Placed in the Colorado Springs jail, for many weeks Ralph Fleagle denied knowledge of the Lamar bank holdup. Finally he told the prosecuting attorney he would identify his companions if the authorities would agree not to request the death penalty. The promise was made, and through Fleagle's information, Howard Roystan was arrested in San Andreas, California, and George Abshier was picked up in Grand Junction, Colorado. 

These suspects also were taken to Colorado Springs and confessed to the bank robbery after extensive questioning. The three bandits were tried, and the prosecutor, true to his word, did not ask the death penalty for Fleagle. However, the jurors decreed death for him, as was their right, and also ordered the hanging of the other two.

More than two years after the Lamar slayings, Abshier and Royston died on the State Penitentiary gallows at Canon City the night of July 10,1930. One week later, Ralph Fleagle was hanged. None of the men gave information about Jake. The search for Jake Fleagle continued.

At the time of the three hangings, Jake Fleagle had been residing more or less openly, for about eight months, in the tiny state line community of Ridgedale, Mo., under the name of Walter Cook.

The "Cook brothers" were peaceful, roughly-clad chicken farmers living quietly in an oak-shaded white cottage beside Highway 65, a mile or so north of the Missouri-Arkansas border. The matter of greatest concern to them, apparently, was the setting of eggs for their white leghorn hens. Neighbors and friends said the boys always seemed "such nice fellows". They were genial, obliging and always had plenty of money to spend. 

True, they didn’t work much. Walter (Jake Fleagle) took care of the 160 chickens and "Lee" worked a little on the highway. They dressed in the rough fashion of the hills and never "showed much money", except in a few poker games played in the shabby frame cottage when rain slowed work for the highway crews.

Lee didn’t look "a great sight" like his brother, but many brothers do not resemble each other and the hardships of hill life are apt to carve faces into rugged wrinkles. Lee had brown hair and was heavier than Walter. He had a sort of knot on the front of his neck and one on the back, from an old scar. He had a ready smile and did most of the talking. Walter, it was understood, was suffering from lung trouble and had to rest. He sunned himself on the porch of the cottage, fed and watered the chickens, and walked in the deep forested canyon which ran along the back of the house under a protecting ridge. There were no close neighbors and there was little to disturb his "rest cure."

Members of the highway crew who were building the new route past the place did call at the house frequently. One of the road crew who spent a night at the house said he was shown a revolver under the mattress of the bed.

Walter always had his .45 Colt on him and at one point drew it from his shirt, then put it back again and grinned. No one thought anything about the matter. Horseplay was popular in the hills.

Once a visitor discovered a machine gun in the Cook home. "Where‘d y’ get that, Walter?" he inquired curiously, inspecting the weapon.

"Got it when I was in the World War," Cook explained casually. "It’s just a keepsake."

"Walter spent some of his time reading published accounts of Jake Fleagle’s escapades. Among the stack of papers found in the hideout when officers raided it shortly after Fleagle’s capture were a number of detective magazines. One of them, a recent issue, gave a detailed account of the bank robbery at Lamar, Col., and of how the gang leader had for two and a half years eluded the law in its relentless efforts to track him down."

"There was a picture of Hugh D. Parker, the chief of police of Colorado Springs, whose search continued. There were also pictures of Jake Fleagle, a profile and a full face view. These had been defaced with a sharp instrument so anyone seeing them would not recognize Walter Cook’s resemblance."

"A savage police dog was kept chained to a steel wire that ran from a front yard tree to the ramshackle frame building used as a garage. When visitors approached, he ran forward, wire singing as he pulled at his leash and growled. The neighbors wondered a bit at such precautions against chicken thieves."

Blanche Cary, whose parents, William and Alta Kay Cary, ran the Ridgedale store then located two miles further north on 65, has some very strong memories of the Fleagles. In later years, William Cary would hold a postmaster’s commission for his store, but in 1930 he merely picked up neighbors’ mail in Hollister and brought it out, as a convenience. Blanche recalls:

"The Cooks lived in the Collins house. The Collins had sold out and left without people knowing anything about them. The Cooks would come to the store. We were about the only store for quite a few miles out there. I don’t believe they got any mail through us. They’d come for groceries and gasoline.

"He‘d call them Walter and Lee. But they were hard to identify. Seemed like each time they cane to the store they had on different clothes and their hair had changed.

"I sold Jake a french harp. He came in one evening and wanted to look at them and I opened my big mouth and said, ‘Aren’t you Walter Cook?’ he said ‘Yeh," and I said, ‘Hell, I never know you.’ Hell, I guess that was just exactly what he wanted to hear! My dad told them that time and again, He‘d always have to ask them who they were.

"They’d always offer a $20 bill in payment. He couldn‘t always make change, so we’d tell them to pay next time. They always did.

"They’d come to the canning factory behind the store to talk to their friends and several times they’d leave their car at the store, out by the kerosene tank. Went somewhere at night and would come and get it before morning.

"They didn’t do a whole lot of talking. They were people of few words. I heard a lot of stories, but the fact is that the two men lived out there in that house, they came and went, and so far as I know nobody knew what they were up to. Nobody questioned it. Nobody thought about it. They had some chickens and they said their wives were teaching, or one of them was supposed to have been a nurse, and they would come later."

While efforts were being made to locate Fleagle, another ‘bad man," one Harry Lee Watson, who had built himself an expensive secluded home in the wooded hills of Texas County and was making it a hangout for high-powered bandits, was arrested. It was learned through Watson that Jake Fleagle was hiding out in the vicinity and visiting nearby towns to obtain supplies, and that he might be mailing letters on the Missouri Pacific Line between Carthage, Mo., and Newport, Ark.

Samples of Fleagle’s handwriting, obtained from the Fleagle ranch, had revealed that the outlaw used a distinctive letter D, and when on July 30, 1930, Governor Adams of Colorado received a letter pleading for clemency for Ralph Fleagle, authorities quickly spotted the telltale D in the "Dear Sir:’ of the letter.

Immediately circulars of Jake’s handwriting were mailed to postal employees all over southwest Missouri. Finally one of Fleagle’s letters was detected on the Carthage to Newport mail train, addressed to a man in California. Postal inspectors were forbidden to open mail, but they delivered the letter required the recipient, an old buddy of the long-missing Fleagle, to open it in their presence. Jake wanted to meet his old friend, and asked him to insert a classified ad in the Wichita, Kansas Eagle. The friend, agreeing to work with the postal inspectors, inserted the ad. Jake responded by writing his buddy to meet him in Yellville, Arkansas, on October 14, 1930.

Lawman involved in the hunt for members of the Fleagle Gang.

In the meantime, midwestern lawmen had not been idle. Apparently a comprehensive check was being made of stores and postoffices along the rail line. Blanche Cary relates what then happened to her mother at the Ridgedale store:

"Several weeks before Fleagle was shot, Dad and my sister and I were visiting relatives in Oklahoma for four or five days and mother stayed behind to take care of the store. The postal inspectors came by and talked to mother and showed her some pictures, and asked, "So you recognize any of these men?’ She said, 'Well, this one looks like one of the Cook brothers.’"

"The inspector didn’t say, ‘That’s who it is.’ He said, "We sure thank you. We’re looking for the bank robber, Jake Fleagle, and we think we’re pretty close to getting him. It would be best if you just keep our conversation quiet.’

"Mother kept it quiet all right. She was scared to death. She didn’t tell anybody about it. She didn’t even tell Dad or us after we got back home, for fear we would let something slip."

On October 13, at least 25 lawmen — postal inspectors, detectives, railroad agents from St. Louis and Little Rock, police officials from Colorado and Los Angeles, virtually every man who had participated in the long search and the apprehension of Ralph Fleagle and Royston and Abshier converged on the White River Line, Detectives were deployed along the line between Aurora, Mo., and Cotter, Ark. Several were detailed to be at the Branson station. Eight men were to be on the passenger train that passed through Branson before noon.

Tourists, then as now, were much a part of the Branson scene, and. predictably, family stories surface from time to time that add a new dimension to the Fleagle story. Several years ago Jerry and Mary Morrisey retired to Branson. They recall that Jerry’s parents and. brother were in Branson at the time;

The Morriseys had enjoyed their tour through the ruggedly beautiful Ozarks, aflame with the reds and. golds of fall, but on October 13, 1930, driving north on Highway 65 through Arkansas was an exhausting experience. When they crossed Lake Taneycomo on the Main Street Bridge, the almost new White River Hotel was a welcome sight. John and Elizabeth Morrisey, of Topeka, Kansas, and their grown son, Joe, who was on vacation from his job as a bank examiner in Muskogee, Oklahoma, checked into the hotel, anticipating a good night’s rest.

They had scarcely extinguished the lights, however, when the hotel erupted in a commotion that was to continue for hours. Men moved swiftly and far from silently, back and forth down the halls, talking in loud voices filled with tension.

By morning, the sleepless travelers were in no mood to explore Branson. They loaded the car and departed for home. In Topeka blazing headlines revealed the source of their sleeplessness. The White River Hotel had, for that one memorable night, been headquarters for all those lawmen, bent on bringing the career of the notorious bank-robbing, murdering Fleagle to an end.

Jake Fleagle, alias Walter Cook, and Lee Cook, drove through Branson Tuesday morning at 10 or 11 o’clock. Jake bought a ticket back to Hollister, and the two men waited in their Ford sedan until the south bound train arrived. Fleagle was clean shaven, but shabbily dressed. He wore an old. felt hat, blue overalls and a blue serge coat, and he had on a pair of heavy, dark-rimmed glasses.

On the train were five police officers, two from Kansas City, two from Los Angeles and one from Colorado Springs, and also three postal inspectors. The men who had been following Fleagle for so long had studied the bandit’s photograph and physical characteristics so that when he got off the train someplace along the White River Division that morning he would be known at once.

Through the coach window they spotted Fleagle coming up the Branson platform. The officers moved toward the passenger car entrance. As Jake came into the vestibule and was about to take the first seat, facing back through the car, they approached and ordered him to "Put ‘em up", but Fleagle reached for his gun. One report says he had his finger on the trigger. One of the officers fired into his stomach. Fleagle’s gun hand was grabbed by another officer, and though he was said to have struggled fiercely, he was soon handcuffed and put in leg irons. The lone bullet had emerged from Fleagle’s back and was later found embedded in the sill of the coach window.

It all happened in a moment. Occupants of the train scarcely realized what had happened and there was little or no commotion or excitement among them.

Before he lapsed into unconsciousness, the wounded man admitted he was Jake Fleagle, but answers to other questions were evasive.

Dr. Guy B. Mitchell, and the Whelchel ambulance, were called and the bandit was taken to Dr. Mitchell’ s office. After an hour, he revived enough that it was decided to take him to Springfield for hospital treatment. He was again carried to the ambulance and left

Branson under heavy guard. at 1:30 p.m. for the Springfield Baptist Hospital.

With Fleagle’s consent, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. C. W. Russell of Springfield performed an operation in an attempt to save his life, but the .38 calibre bullet had cut off the blood supply to Fleagle's bowel and poison had set in. Jake died Wednesday morning without discussing the case, other than to claim to have come into Branson on the local freight on the 13th, and to have spent that night down around the depot. He never mentioned the house south of Hollister or the partner who had lived with him there.. In his last hours of delirium he alternately called for his mother and cringed in fear that the officers still were hunting him.

The officers who had been on the train refused to reveal which one of them had fired the shot that brought Fleagle down. It had been an organized effort all along and no one was going to be given individual credit for the capture. Detective Lieutenants Chester A. Lloyd and Harry Wilde, of Los Angeles, did however telegraph their headquarters from Branson as follows:

"Man got on train this station. Put up fight. Pulled gun. Lloyd grabbed gun arm. Wilde forced to shoot him. May die.

(Signed) Wilde and Lloyd."

There were people in Branson who recognized the wounded man as Walter Cook. The officers, never revealing any prior knowledge of the location of the hideout, drove at once to search the house.

Lee Cook was not there. He had apparently been waiting to board the train at the Hollister station. Then the train failed to arrive on time and word spread of a shootout at the Branson station, Lee drove away in the Ford sedan.

At the house, the officers found linesmans’ tools including pole climbers and wire cutters, tacks which could be used to stop pursuing cars, and that stack of papers and magazines. There were also some expensive suits of clothes.

The inside walls of the house were covered with building paper. Tearing away the paper revealed a veritable arsenal of guns and ammuniton between the studding. In case of sudden attack, the defenders needed only to poke their hands through the paper to grab a gun.

The house, situated right beside the highway, with the tangled ravine just outside the back door, seemed to have been well chosen for the outlaws’ purposes. The goings and comings of the occupants would be unlikely to excite suspicion and there was an ideal escape route should the road be cut off.

No money was found on the place and Fleagle had only some small change when he was shot. After the police left, curious neighbors collected pieces of the tarpaper for souvenirs. They also tended the chickens and the anxious dog.

After Fleagle's death, his fingerprints were taken and sent to the FBI, where the right index print was found to be identical with that lone print from the window of the slain doctor’s automobile.

Jake’s mother claimed his body and took it Kansas to be buried beside her other bandit son, Ralph. And later his father appeared to arrange for an auction of the animals and household effects, minus all those guns, which the law had confiscated.

Mrs. Cary had at least two more visits from the postal inspectors. Almost immediately after the shooting, the inspector came by the store to thank her for her help in confirming Fleagle ‘s identity and
whereabouts. Only then did she tell her family of her fearful travail. For Mrs. Cary’s safety, any indication of her assistance was carefully screened from press releases, and the incident was not mentioned to neighbors, some of whom seemed to have disapproved of all those outside policemen coming in and killing "Cook".

Many months later, an inspector came back to Ridgedale to the Carys’ store, to tell them that Lee Cook had been caught. The officers did not identify Lee Cook further, nor give any particulars about his career or capture.

By that time the story had been told and retold by many neighbors and written up in the papers, and Mrs. Cary told her family to simply forget she was ever involved in it.

The affair had several strange repercussions and sidelights. Bankers in Nebraska, faced with 16 bank robberies in 16 months, offered a bounty of $3,000 for "each bank robber killed in the act", and in Texas a bounty of $5,000 was offered, and paid five times in five years. The danger of such a. solution became apparent when two men were found to have been lured into bank robbery in Fort Worth so that four other men might collect $10,000 for killing them.

In Stone County, an embezzler hiding out from his Kansas City pursuers was spooked by the Fleagle capture and when he disappeared from his already known hideout home, police suspected that he, too, was a member of the Fleagle gang. He was lucky that in his apprehension he was not also gunned down.

And in Montague in southwest Christian County, a Law Enforcement League was organized in November, 1930, in order to "forestall the possibility that crooks and criminals might make the Ozarks their rendezvous while cities are busily engaged in ridding themselves of their public enemies." The movement was "to investigate suspicious newcomers in the community and ascertain their business in coming to the Ozarks".

And, of course, the whole Fleagle affair was immortalized in verse and song. On January 22, 1931, the White River Leader carried on its. front page the words to a Bud Billings Ballad, advertised inside the paper as available on a Victor recording, detailing "The Fate of the Fleagle Gang".

The Fleagle case was the first time FBI fingerprint examiners were able to connect a single print left on a piece of evidence with an actual person, thus proving that person’s involvement in a crime.

Learn more about the Fleagle case at The Big Timbers Museum, which showcases an exhibit about the case.

It all began in May, 1928 when four men—Jake Fleagle, Ralph Fleagle, Howard Royston, and George Abshier—filed into the lobby of Lamar’s First National Bank and held up a bank teller.

Bank President Amos Newton Parrish fired a shot at the gang, hitting one of the men in the jaw, but was then shot in the head. Parrish’s son, John Festus, was heading for a gun when he was shot in the back, the bullet lodging in his heart.

The remaining bank employees then handed over $238,000 in cash, municipal bonds, and gold redeemable Liberty Bonds to the Fleagle gang before they sped off with two bank employees as hostages.

Prowers County Sherrif Lloyd E. Alderman chased the Fleagle gang and found their abandoned Buick and unharmed hostage on the side of the road. Alderman continued the chase and discovered the bandits at Big Sandy Creek where they engaged in a shootout. Alderman’s pistol was no match against the bandits’ long-range rifles, so he retreated while the Fleagle gang took off into the prairie.

About 33 hours after the robbery, Alderman got a call from the Garden City, Kansas police. A local physician was missing, and last seen driving off with strangers in need of medical assistance. The next morning, the doctor’s car, with his body inside, was discovered at the bottom of a ravine.

More than two weeks after the robbery, a Kansas family discovered the body of the fourth victim, the other bank teller who’d been taken hostage.

A fingerprint was discovered on the side of the physician’s car. Local investigators sent copies of it to agencies around the country.

Al Ground, a specialist at the Bureau of Investigation in Washington DC, took special interest in the fingerprint, memorizing its loops and whorls. In 1929, he processed a new fingerprint card from a man who called himself Willian Harrison Holden and who had been arrested and released in California.

Ground not only discovered that Holden’s 10 fingerprints matched a man called Jake Fleagle, but that one was a perfect match from the Colorado and Kansas murders.

With this damning evidence, all but Jake Fleagle were captured and convicted for murder and armed robbery in 1929. The three men were hanged at the state penitentiary in Canon City in 1930.

Jake Fleagle was finally found in October, 1920 after the U.S. Postal Service used handwriting analysis to trace him to Branson, Missouri. During the attempt to arrest him, Jake Fleagle he pulled his pistol and was fatally shot in the stomach by the officers.

Country rock icon Parsons sang saddest song

“In my hour of darkness,
In my hour of need
Oh Lord grant me vision
Oh Lord grant me speed.”

__ “Return of the Grievous Angel,” Gram Parsons

Influence spread from Boulder to Birmingham in early '70s

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Boulder was important to the development of country rock in the early 1970s but it was a dangerous, drug-addled scene, where survivors were lucky to get out alive. And just as Hunter S. Thompson noted, "the music business is cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." Gram Parsons, and his experiences here in Colorado and the West, were evidence of that, and I think he, and his story, is in the running for the title of one of the saddest singers of all time.

Parsons was born in Winter Haven, Florida, and developed an interest in country music while attending Harvard University. He founded the International Submarine Band in 1966, but the group disbanded prior to the 1968 release of its debut album, Safe at Home. Parsons joined the Byrds in early 1968 and played a pivotal role in the making of the seminal Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. After leaving the group in late 1968, Parsons and fellow Byrd, Chris Hillman formed The Flying Burrito Brothers in 1969; the band released its debut, The Gilded Palace of Sin, the same year. The album was well received but failed commercially. After a sloppy cross-country tour, the band hastily recorded Burrito Deluxe. Parsons was fired from the band before the album's release in early 1970. 

Emmylou Harris

Emmylou Harris assisted him on vocals for his first solo record, GP, released in 1973. Although it received enthusiastic reviews, the release failed to chart. His next album, Grievous Angel, peaked at number 195 on the Billboard chart. His health deteriorated due to several years of drug abuse culminating in his death from a toxic combination of morphine and alcohol in 1973 at the age of 26. 

By 1968, Parsons had come to the attention of the Byrds' bassist, Chris Hillman, via business manager Larry Spector as a possible replacement band member following the departures of David Crosby and Michael Clarke from the group in late 1967. Parsons had been acquainted with Hillman since the pair had met in a bank during 1967 and in February 1968 he passed an audition for the band, being initially recruited as a jazz pianist but soon switching to rhythm guitar and vocals.

Although Parsons was an equal contributor to the band, he was not regarded as a full member of the Byrds by the band's record label, Columbia Records. Consequently, when the Byrds' Columbia recording contract was renewed on February 29, 1968, it was only original members Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman who signed it. Parsons, like fellow new recruit Kevin Kelley, was hired as a sideman and received a salary from McGuinn and Hillman.

Chris Hillman

In later years, this led Hillman to say, "Gram was hired. He was not a member of the Byrds, ever. He was on salary; that was the only way we could get him to turn up." However, these comments overlook the fact that Parsons, like Kelley, was considered a bona fide member of the band during 1968 and, as such, was given equal billing alongside McGuinn, Hillman, and Kelley on the Sweetheart of the Rodeo album and in contemporary presscoverage of the band.

"Being with The Byrds confused me a little. I couldn't find my place. I didn't have enough say-so. I really wasn't one of The Byrds. I was originally hired because they wanted a keyboard player. But I had experience being a frontman and that came out immediately. And [Roger McGuinn] being a very perceptive fellow saw that it would help the act, and he started sticking me out front."said Gram Parsons reflecting on his time with the Byrds:

 
Sweetheart of the Rodeo was originally conceived by band leader Roger McGuinn as a sprawling, double album history of American popular music. It was to begin with bluegrass music, then move through country and western, jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock music, before finally ending with the most advanced (for the time) form of electronic music. 

However, as recording plans were made, Parsons exerted a controlling influence over the group, persuading the other members to leave Los Angeles and record the album in Nashville, Tennessee. Along the way, McGuinn's original album concept was jettisoned in favor of a fully fledged country project, which included Parsons' songs such as "One Hundred Years from Now" and "Hickory Wind", along with compositions by Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Merle Haggard, and others.

According to G. Brown, of Colorado Music Experience, in a Chris Hillman Profile, Hillman and Parsons were pivotal in the development of country rock.

Flying Burrito Brothers

Staying with the Byrds for four years and six seminal albums, Chris Hillman then departed with Gram Parsons to develop acoustic country sounds in a new band dubbed the Flying Burrito Brothers. He remained with the band until its demise in 1971. At that time, he was the only remaining original member.

In 1972, Stephen Stills offered Hillman a partnership in the formation of Manassas, and he moved to Colorado. It seemed a comfortable solution to post-Burrito depression.
“Stills had showed up when the Burritos played at Tulagi in Boulder,” Hillman said. “After the show, we went up to his real nice cabin in Gold Hill and hung out.”

In Manassas, Hillman emerged as Stills’ musical foil, collaborating in the writing and contributing vocals as well as instrumental versatility. When Manassas disbanded after two years of road work and two albums (which he co-produced), Hillman produced Rick Roberts’ second solo album, “She Is a Song.” He then joined forces with J.D. Souther and Richie Furay in the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band. The group recorded two albums, the first earning a gold record, and toured nationally before splitting up in the summer of 1975.

Back in Colorado, Hillman prepared his first solo album, Slippin’ Away, a summation of his rock, bluegrass and country roots, aided by old Burrito, Manassas and S-H-F pals. It peaked at #152 on the Billboard album chart in June 1976.

Amidst the recording of Slippin’ Away, Hillman began to utilize his talents behind the board in the studio, producing the demo tapes which led to Firefall’s contract and Dan McCorison’s self-titled solo album.

“There were some good times in Boulder,” Hillman said. “On the plus side, there was a lot of interesting music coming up. There were a couple of clubs that were fun to play, and I had a lot of fun working with people.

Flying Burrito Brothers at Joshua Tree

“Unfortunately, there was a very heavy negative lifestyle prevalent. Drugs all over the place—a lot of cocaine. I think there was a dealer on every corner. It affected me. It affected everybody. And some people died. It was very excessive. I think the ’70s were a very strange time in the history of this country, but, boy, there was some bad stuff going on in Boulder then.”

Barney Hoskyns, the co-founder and editorial director of online archive Rock’s Backpages and the author of – among other books – Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons.

Keith Richards, Gram Parsons, Anita Pallenberg, Phil Kaufman, Tony Foutz, in L.A. in 1969.

"Then along came Rolling Stones guitarist Mr Keith Richards, who was both the making and the unmaking of Mr Parsons," says Hoskyns.

"After a Byrds show in London in July 1968, when he joined the Stones on a late-night visit to Stonehenge, Mr Parsons embarked on a musical love affair with “Keef.” The tradeoff was a simple one: Mr Parsons was seduced by Mr Richards’ outlaw cool, Mr Richards by Mr Parsons’ Southern charm and deep knowledge of country. Rich-kid dilettante that he was, Mr Parsons immediately jumped ship from The Byrds, claiming Mr Richards and Ms Anita Pallenberg had urged him not to travel to South Africa with the group. The bromance continued when Mr Richards and Ms Pallenberg came to LA to finish work on the Stones’ Let It Bleed.

Gram Parsons at Rolling Stones Altamont Festival

“Keith came in with Anita and this skinny Southern boy in crushed velour trousers and silk scarves,” recalled Phil Kaufman to Hoskyns, then working as a Jagger-styled “executive nanny” for the Stones. “They went out and spent a lot of money on country records, and I would sit there and play DJ.”

"Mr Parsons’ troubled past was always going to catch up with him. “Here was a kid with a lot of talent but zero discipline,” according to Hillman, and reported by Hoskyns, who eventually had to sack Parsons from his own band.

“Suddenly he had one foot in country music and the other in the rock’n’roll glamour world.” Compounding the problem was Sir Mick Jagger’s jealousy of the Richards-Parsons bond. When Parsons and teenage girlfriend Gretchen Burrell joined the Stones’ circus in their Côte d’Azur tax-exile, they were quickly asked to leave. “I really don’t remember the circumstances of the departure clearly,” Richards noted disingenuously in his bestselling Life. “I had insulated myself against the dramas of the crowded household.”

Back in California, according to Hoskyns, Parsons moved into Sunset Boulevard’s Chateau Marmont hotel – then a den if not a gilded palace of iniquity – and began running around with fellow rich kid Mr Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day and producer of The Byrds.

“Gram thought he was too much of an artist to be understood by the industry,” Melcher said later. “He was one of these people who thought it was great to die young.” At the Chateau, Mr Parsons forsook heroin but drowned himself in tequila, becoming unfashionably fat in the process. Yet somehow he bestirred himself again, possibly motivated by the Top 40 of the Eagles, who’d smoothed the bittersweet pain of his alt-country music into massive commercial success. 

“Nobody gave a shit about Gram, he never sold any records,” said Pamela Des Barres, another of Mr Zappa’s GTOs. 

“No one took him seriously except people such as Don Henley, who was definitely watching him.”

 Redemption came for Parsons via a folk singer he heard in October 1971 in a Washington DC bar called Clyde’s: a year later – playing Conway Twitty to her Loretta Lynn – he flew Emmylou Harris to California for the sessions that produced 1973’s wonderful GP. The backup musicians – paid for out of Parsons’ own pocket – included the core sidemen who played behind Presley in Las Vegas.

(They also played on Mr Parsons’ posthumous and equally gorgeous 1974 album Grievous Angel.)

“It all seemed pretty chaotic to me,” Ms Harris confessed to Hoskyns, 40 years after the GP sessions.
“Gram was drinking off and on throughout the sessions, but he was such a sweet, generous, kind person. There was no meanness in him at all.” 

In the spring of 1973, Harris set off with Parsons and road band The Fallen Angels on a tour that took them from Boulder to New York City.

“I really felt Gram was on a road to recovery through the tour we did,” she said. “The drinking was going away and the fog was lifting.” Thus the popular song later by Harris, "Boulder to Birmingham"

Clearly it didn’t lift high enough. Parsons had just filed for divorce from Burrell when, in the early autumn of 1973, he drove out to the California desert town of Joshua Tree with three drug buddies. He overdosed on heroin on the night of September 18, and was pronounced dead in the early hours of the next morning.

 “He’d cleaned up, and that was the reason he died,” said Keith Richards. “He was clean and took a strong shot. It’s the one mistake you don’t want to make.”

Phil Kaufman – by now The Fallen Angels’ road manager – honored Parsons’ express wishes when he intercepted the singer’s casket at Van Nuys Airport and drove it back to Joshua Tree in a stolen hearse. There at Cap Rock – where Parsons had once spent a peyote-fuelled night with Richards and Pallenberg – Kaufman soaked the corpse with gasoline and dropped a lit match on it. In the starry darkness of the desert night, the flames lit up Cap Rock like illuminations.

Since first performing with Gram Parsons in Boulder in the early '70s (and getting fired), Emmylou Harris has played in Colorado many times over the years. Two years after Parsons died from an accidental overdose in 1973, she wrote one of her biggest hits, "Boulder to Birmingham," about her life with Parsons, and on her most recent effort, Hard Bargain, she wrote another tune about Parsons called "The Road." Jon Solomon of Westward, spoke with Harris about her and Parsons getting "fired," the new album, writing songs in open tunings and working with the Fray on "Boulder to Birmingham," which appears as a bonus track on that act's new album, Scars and Stories.

"Oh gosh, I'm trying to remember. I should know the name of the club. But we asked to play this bar in Nederland on the night we were supposed to play in Boulder, and then we had our next date in Austin. So we just went there early since we got "fired," and since we had time to work out beginnings, middles and ends and we got so many encores, we didn't have any extra songs. So we just started the set over again. Then, as we would travel along in the bus we would start working up more songs and hit them at sound check and add a few songs here and there. But that was quite an adventure."

Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons

I can still remember every song you played 

Long ago when we were younger and we rocked the night away. 

How could I see a future then, where you would not grow old? 

Such fire in our belly, such a hunger in souls. 

I guess I've grown to love you in those words so often tired 
Seen that we were traveling under some old lucky sign 

I know I didn't say it then and no one was to blame 
But the road we shared together once will never be the same. 

Hey all along the way 
Won't be coming round again.
Hey was a song I played.
And on the wings of a song, I'll fly away. 

I wondered in the wilderness for a while I was so lost. 
To everything there is a season and every blessing has it's cost. 

So I took what you left to me and put it to some use 
When looking for an answer with those three chords and the truth. 

I come down from the mountain I come walking in your shoes. 
I was taken for a glambler when I had no more to loose 

For he put me on that path and how could I refuse. 
And I would spend my whole life out here working on the blues. 

Hey... Ay Hey. Hey. Ay. Hey. Heeeeeeeeey. 

So I carried on, you can't be haunted by the past. 
People come people, go and nothing ever lasts. 

But I still think about you wonder where you are. 
Can you see me from some place up there among the stars? 

But down here under heaven there never was a chart 
To guide our way across this crooked highway of the part?

And if it's only all about the journey in the end 
On that road I'm glad I came to know my old friend. 

Hey all along the way 
Won't be coming round again.
Hey was a song I played.
And on the wings of a song, I'll fly away. I'll fly away.

__From "The Road," Emmylou Harris