The Bank Robbers Had Guns. Iowa Farmers Had Telephones

 

Abner Hicks (Sioux City Journal. December 30, 1903)

On the morning of December 16, 1903, burglars hit the Citizens’ Savings Bank in Quimby, a small town in Cherokee County in northwest Iowa. They got inside, attacked the safe with explosives and left with thousands of dollars in cash and a stack of notes worth considerably more.

 

It looked like another successful small-town bank job.

 

Fifteen hours later, two of the men were surrounded in the countryside near Sheldon. They had three revolvers, a magazine gun, and hundreds of cartridges. They surrendered without firing a shot. The other two men made it all the way to Kansas City before authorities caught up with them.

 

The four men who eventually went to prison were Charles White, John Wicks, Elmer Dunning, and Abner Hicks. Their mistake wasn’t robbing the bank. It was trying to escape across northwest Iowa in 1903.

 

Bank robberies had become a problem in Iowa. The men who did it were sometimes called yeggmen. They traveled, often by railroad, looking for banks in small towns where police protection was thin and safes could be attacked at night. They didn’t need a teller to cooperate. They needed explosives.

Nitroglycerin could do what a revolver couldn’t. Get inside the building, work the explosive into the safe, stand back and hope the door came off before half the town woke up.

 

Small banks were attractive targets, and during a stretch beginning in November 1903, burglars struck banks at Mapleton, Green Mountain, Yetter, Quimby, Garden City, and Luton. The Northwestern Banker noted that the successful attacks were happening in the smallest towns. Bigger banks were getting harder to crack. Small-town banks were not.

Charles White (Sioux City Journal. December 30, 1903)

Quimby was next.

 

The burglars went to work before daylight on Wednesday, December 16. Exactly how long they spent inside the Citizens’ Savings Bank isn’t clear, but they got what they came for. The official banking record put the cash loss at about $3,300. Another account, from the Iowa Bankers Association, said the burglars secured nearly $4,000 in money and about $75,000 in notes.

 

The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported that the men entered through a window and used four explosive charges on the vault and safe. The safe had cost about $4,000 and was advertised as burglar-proof. By morning it was wrecked. The newspaper said the burglars had worked without leaving officers “a good clue to work on.”

 

They hadn’t worked quietly. The bank stood across the street from a hotel, where five guests heard the explosions. None apparently raised an alarm. There may have been warning signs earlier in the night. Five suspicious men had reportedly been seen hanging around the hotel, but no one connected them to what was about to happen.

 

The difference probably came down to what was being counted. Either way, the men left Quimby carrying a considerable amount of property. Then the word began to spread.

 

The robbery had taken place in an Iowa that was changing quickly. Automobiles were still uncommon. Police radios didn’t exist. Rural roads could turn into mud, and a sheriff trying to find fleeing criminals across miles of farmland had few obvious advantages. But northwest Iowa had something new. Telephone wire.

John Wilson (Sioux City Journal. December 30, 1903)

Farmers had been stringing rural telephone lines across the countryside. By 1903, those lines connected farmhouses and towns throughout the region. News of the robbery moved from house to house, followed by descriptions of suspicious men and reports of where they had been seen. The Marshalltown Evening Times-Republican described the rural telephone system as a “perfect network of wire over northwest Iowa.”

 

The Humeston New Era told much the same story. Telephone bells began ringing in farmhouses along the route the robbers were believed to have taken. Reports moved from one rural line to another, allowing authorities to follow men who otherwise might have disappeared into miles of northwest Iowa farmland.

 

That network began closing around the fugitives. Sheriff Price at Sheldon received information over the lines and gradually narrowed the search. Farmers joined in, bringing whatever weapons they had available. The newspaper described a crowd armed with weapons “of all sorts.” It wasn’t much of a police tactical unit. It was an Iowa farm posse.

 

About fifteen hours after the robbery, two of the fugitives were located roughly six miles southeast of Sheldon. Other reports placed them in or around a cornfield. The two men appear to have been Elmer Dunning and Abner Hicks, described by a St. Paul newspaper as Sioux City gamblers.

 

The Des Moines Register offered a less flattering description. Authorities considered Dunning and Hicks “hard characters” and guarded them carefully after their arrest. The newspaper reported that the pair had been implicated in other bank and post office robberies in the region. Whether they were responsible for those crimes was another matter, but the police clearly did not consider them newcomers.

John Wicks (Sioux City journal. December 30, 1903)

They were prepared for trouble. Authorities found three revolvers, a Colt magazine gun, and hundreds of cartridges. Against a couple of deputies, that might have been enough. Against a countryside that knew where they were, it wasn’t. Dunning and Hicks surrendered without firing as the farmers closed in.

 

Before their capture, the fugitives tried to get rid of the evidence. One report said they threw away a package containing gold, silver, and paper currency. Authorities recovered more than $1,300 of the bank’s money from the men or near the place where they were caught.

 

There was only one problem. It wasn’t all there.

 

Two men had been caught, but a large part of the loot was still missing. Investigators began looking at the men Dunning and Hicks knew. Letters provided some clues, and the names of accomplices started appearing in newspapers. One was John Wicks. Another account identified a man called “Jersey” Flinn.

 

The hunt soon took an unexpected turn through a woman in Sheldon. Her name was Mrs. E. Bowers, the wife of a blacksmith, and according to the Sioux City Journal, she had been involved with Dunning. Investigators believed Dunning’s relationship with her might lead them to the rest of the gang.

 

They were right.

 

Mrs. Bowers told investigators about Dunning’s associates and helped point them toward Wicks. The Journal reported that Dunning had given her money after the Quimby robbery and that she had gone to Sioux City and spent some of it. Detectives followed the trail and began using what she knew to track the missing men.

Elmer Dunning (Sioux City Journal. December 30, 1903)

Flinn disappeared from the case. Wicks didn’t. Neither did Charles White.

 

Wicks was about 40 years old and used more than one name. The Journal described a man in the investigation using the aliases John A. Day and John Johnson and reported that Wicks had closely clipped hair and a sandy mustache trimmed in what the newspaper called a “bull dog style.” Investigators also had another advantage: Wicks had missing fingers, giving police something more useful than a common name when they went looking for him.

 

The investigation had now moved well beyond the Cherokee County Sheriff. Sioux City police were involved. So were Pinkerton detectives. Chief Davenport of Sioux City worked with the Pinkertons and Kansas City authorities as investigators followed information supplied by Mrs. Bowers.

 

The trail eventually led to Kansas City. By the beginning of January 1904, newspapers reported that Wicks and White had been arrested there in connection with the Quimby robbery. One account also mentioned a man named John Wilson, but Wilson, like Flinn, disappeared from the final prosecution. Wicks and White were brought back to Iowa.

 

Authorities now had the four men they wanted: White, Wicks, Dunning, and Hicks. But they still wanted the money.

 

Abner Hicks helped them find some of it. After his arrest, he took officers to a haystack north of Cherokee, where they recovered another package connected with the robbery. The discovery fit the Iowa Bankers Association’s later account of what happened. The burglars hadn’t simply carried everything away. Some of the stolen property had been hidden.

 

By the time the case was over, the association reported that most of the cash had been recovered and all the notes had been returned. What had looked like a major loss for a small Iowa bank was being pieced back together from pockets, discarded packages and hiding places.

 

The case moved fast.

 

On January 18, 1904, barely a month after the safe was attacked at Quimby, the four men appeared in court at Cherokee. White, Wicks, Dunning and Hicks pleaded guilty.

Des Moines Register (December 30, 1903)

Judge Wakefield sentenced each man to seven years in the Iowa penitentiary at Anamosa.

 

The Iowa Bankers Association had another reason to be pleased. Bankers had grown tired of paying for wrecked safes and watching burglars disappear, so the association had established a protective program and offered a $1,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of bank burglars. That was serious money in 1903.

 

The Quimby case became an advertisement for the program. Four burglars were caught. Most of the cash was recovered. All the notes came back. Four men pleaded guilty and went to prison. The $1,000 reward was paid, and the bankers put up another reward for the next gang.

 

The message wasn’t subtle. Rob an Iowa bank and somebody might make a year’s wages helping catch you.

 

Quimby was only one stop in an extraordinary run of attacks on Iowa banks. On November 14, burglars struck the First State Bank at Mapleton. Five days later came Green Mountain and Yetter. Quimby followed on December 16, Garden City the next night, and Luton on January 2.

 

The amounts varied wildly. At Mapleton, the recorded loss was just 57 cents. Green Mountain lost $958, Yetter $1,200, Garden City $538 and Luton $640. Quimby was the big one at $3,300 in the official banking tally. The Northwestern Banker later calculated the combined losses from those six successful burglaries at $6,693. Almost half came from Quimby.

 

The banking magazine noticed a pattern. Burglars were avoiding bigger institutions. Safe manufacturers were improving their products, and larger banks could afford better equipment and more protection. So thieves moved down the ladder to smaller towns with smaller banks and fewer police.

 

Quimby probably looked like exactly the place where four men could blow a safe and disappear. There was one flaw in the plan. Small towns had people watching, and now those people had telephones.

 

There was no central dispatch coordinating the pursuit. No squad cars spread across the county, and no radio alert went out across northwest Iowa. There were farmhouses, party lines, telephone operators, and neighbors who knew which roads strangers had taken. A sheriff in Sheldon could learn what a farmer several miles away had just seen, and another farmer could pass the information to the next house.

 

A fugitive could outrun a sheriff. He couldn’t outrun information moving through a wire.

 

That was what Dunning and Hicks encountered after leaving Quimby. Every mile they traveled potentially created another witness. Every farmhouse could become a reporting station. Every telephone bell could tighten the circle. By the time they were six miles southeast of Sheldon, the countryside had effectively organized itself against them.

 

The men still had their guns and ammunition. They may have thought those things gave them control. When they found armed farmers coming from several directions, they gave up.

 

There are pieces of the story that remain unclear. Newspapers don’t always agree on precisely how much money was taken. Early reports identify suspects who never appear in the final prosecution. The exact roles of White, Wicks, Dunning, and Hicks inside the bank aren’t well established in the surviving accounts.

 

We know who was convicted, that Dunning and Hicks were caught first, and that Wicks and White were apprehended later. Assigning each man a particular job inside the bank would require evidence that the surviving reports don’t provide.

 

There’s also the question of what the men were doing before they arrived in Quimby. Dunning and Hicks were described as Sioux City gamblers, but that raises more questions than it answers. They may have been professional bank burglars or simply men moving through the same gambling rooms, saloons and criminal circles. Whether they were connected to any of the other Iowa bank burglaries that winter remains unclear.

 

The Des Moines Register reported that Dunning and Hicks had been implicated in numerous bank and post office robberies around the region. That didn’t make them guilty of those crimes, but it helped explain the precautions taken after their arrest and the speed with which investigators began digging through their associates.

 

The timing makes the question tempting. The night after Quimby was hit, burglars attacked the Farmers’ Bank at Garden City and used nitroglycerin there too. Dunning and Hicks were already in custody. Whether White, Wicks, or their associates had anything to do with Garden City is another matter. Similar methods aren’t proof of the same gang.

 

One person thought the Quimby story deserved to be preserved almost immediately. In June 1904, only six months after the robbery, Iowa bankers gathered for their state convention. Among discussions of bank money orders, currency, and conservative banking was a presentation by E. D. Huxford of Cherokee.

 

The title says something. Six months later; the robbery was already worth retelling to a room full of Iowa bankers. Quimby had been one of the biggest bank burglaries in a string of attacks across the state, but the money wasn’t what made the story unusual.

 

The burglars had picked a small town for the obvious reasons. There were few police, no patrol cars, and no radio network to spread the alarm. What they hadn’t counted on was a new technology spreading across rural Iowa. Telephone lines connected farms that only a few years earlier had been isolated from one another.

 

That changed the odds. Information moved faster than the men carrying the money. Dunning and Hicks had three revolvers, a magazine gun, and hundreds of cartridges when the farmers closed in.

 

They never fired them.

 

Within fifteen hours of the robbery, they were prisoners. Within weeks, White and Wicks had been caught. A month after the safe at Quimby was blown open, all four men had pleaded guilty and were headed to Anamosa for seven years.

 

The robbers had enough firepower to fight their way out of trouble. What they couldn’t outrun was a telephone call.

 

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