The Train Robbery That Put Early Iowa On Edge

 

An early newspaper depiction of the Council Bluffs train robbery

The men who robbed the Burlington Fast Mail Train No. 8 in Council Bluffs on November 13, 1920, didn’t ride horses or wear masks. They didn’t wave revolvers from the saddle or disappear into canyon country like dime novel bandits.

 

They were local boys.

 

Boys who knew the rail yards. Boys who knew the schedules. Boys who knew that one train rolling through town that night carried more wealth than most people would see in ten lifetimes.

 

By sunrise, they had stolen millions.

 

Council Bluffs was built on rails. Freight trains rattled through at all hours. Passenger coaches came and went. Mail runs cut through the darkness. Stock cars groaned. Couplers slammed together like gunshots. Steam drifted across the yards in white clouds. Lanterns swung through the night in the hands of switchmen and brakemen. The whole place smelled of coal smoke, hot iron, grease, mud, and livestock.

 

If a man wanted to vanish into noise and confusion, there were easier places to fail and few better places to succeed.

 

Burlington Train No. 8 looked like any other fast mail run. Cars loaded with sacks. Clerks sorting letters under dim light. Men hauling packages and registered pouches. Nothing about it advertised fortune.

Inside The Drake Park Bank Robbery Des Moines 1921

 

The crowd outside the Drake Park State Bank after the robbery

The four men who walked into the Drake Park State Bank on July 13, 1921, didn’t look like bank robbers. They were dressed like ordinary customers. Men wanting to cash a check or ask about a loan.

The bank sat in a busy Des Moines neighborhood. Inside, it was a normal summer day. Clerks counted money and worked their books. Customers drifted in and out. Nobody paid much attention to the four strangers.

Then the guns came out.

One man covered the lobby with a revolver. Another jumped the counter. The others rounded up employees and shoved them toward the rear, barking orders. Police later suspected “Lucky” Tommy O’Connor was one of the men inside. Several bank employees identified him as the robber who drove them toward the safe.

Inside A Daring Iowa Bank Robbery That Almost Worked

Poke Wells

Poke Wells (Charles Knox Polk Wells) was one of those guys you didn’t want to mess around with. A Jesse Jams wannabe. Some say he was a friend of the James boys. Maybe even rode with them. But there’s no proof of that. What’s certain is that Poke robbed a few trains. Tried his luck at banks, and that’s where things went sideways.

He rode into Riverton, Iowa, on July 11, 1881. Before the day was over, his name was splashed across front pages all over the Midwest.

 

Poke’s autobiography said his partner was a man named Wilson. That might be, but early reports pointed to Bill Norris. That’s how outlaw stories go. People toss out names and wait to see what sticks. In the end, his partner’s name doesn’t change the story, other than he blamed the entire affair on him. “Wilson,” he said, “now insisted on being initiated as a bank or train robber.”

 

Poke and his partner didn’t rush in blind. They spent a day or two looking over the country around Riverton. They inspected horses owned by Mr. Parsley and Mr. Burks, thought better of buying them, then stole a pair from Mr. Anderson instead.

The Daring Bank Robbery That Ended With Fire And A Dead Body

 

Orlando Wilkins pointed a shotgun at Cashier A.W. Leach and demanded the cash

Orlando Wilkins and Charles W. Crawford walked into the Adel State Bank on the morning of March 7, 1895, figuring they could scare one cashier, snatch the money, and be gone before anybody knew what hit them.

 

Instead, they kicked off one of the wildest bank robberies in Iowa history.

 

The Iowa State Bystander called it “unparalleled in the criminal annals of the state.” It sounds like newspaper thunder, but the facts backed it up. Wilkins ended the day dead after taking three bullets. Six townspeople were wounded, and for a few minutes, the streets of Adel sounded like open war.

 

Two men walked into the bank around 8:45 a.m. They told cashier A. W. Leach they wanted to make a deposit. Leach turned toward his desk, expecting coins, paper, and another dull morning. He got a rifle shoved in his face instead.

Booze, Bad Decisions, And Robbery In Long Grove

Stockmen's Savings Bank in Long Grove Iowa

The automobile had changed everything. In the past, men robbed banks on foot or horseback. Now they could now roll into a town, strike, and disappear down country roads before a sheriff could arrive. Small towns with one bank and a handful of streets suddenly looked vulnerable. A quiet place could be cleaned out in minutes. Newspapers across Iowa and the Midwest called them auto bandits.

Long Grove sat ten miles north of Davenport and had a population of about 150. Strangers stood out like a sore thumb. That’s why the Hudson touring car drew attention as it rolled into town on December 15, 1921.

William Clausen, a truck driver for Tri-City Bottling Works, saw it pull up and felt something was off. Then, just as quickly, he watched it move on and let the moment go. He didn’t connect it to anything until the shooting started and the whole town seemed to crack open at once.

The Iowa Butter Caper of 1936

By the time the creamery whistle blew, the butter bandits were
halfway to Omaha.

It started with a whisper on the prairie wind. A creamery gone quiet. A padlock twisted off its hinge. And a cold room, empty as a banker’s promise.

Nobody thought much of it at first. Maybe some farmhand swiped a few pounds to make ends meet. But when another creamery went dry a week later, and then another—Fenton, Kimballton, Palmer—the folks in northern Iowa started to sweat. Something slick was afoot.

By July 1936, seventeen creameries had been hit. Butter, cheese, even the odd crate of eggs—all gone. Not a fingerprint left behind. The local boys in blue were baffled. “The robbers are evidently expert burglars,” one sheriff muttered, “and gone with their loot before we even knew there’s been a burglary.”

They called them the Butter Gang.

It wasn’t a name that scared you at first. Butter doesn’t exactly scream danger. But these boys weren’t knocking over milk wagons—they were hauling off tons of the stuff. One night in Palmer, they cleaned out 3,553 pounds in a single haul. That’s nearly two tons of prime Iowa butter, worth a small fortune in Depression dollars.

John Dillinger & Baby Face Nelson in Iowa

John Dillinger

MASON CITY, Iowa. March 13, 1934. Mid-afternoon. The Dillinger gang rolls in—guns hungry, plans uncertain. Their target: the First National Bank.

They tore across North Federal Avenue in a blue Buick—rear window gone, replaced by a firing port. Inside, members fan wide: Hamilton, Van Meter, Tommy Carroll. Outside, Nelson, Dillinger, all eyes. No hesitation. No mercy.

President Willis Bagley is talking with a customer near the front door. He hears the engine roar, and bolts toward his office. Van Meter backs up, presses the gun. He fires through the closed door. Bagley ducks as splinters scatter. Bullets slap the wood. Van Meter finally bursts through into the lobby. Bagley later recalled, “He fired several bullets through the door in an attempt to force his way inside.” Another teller told reporters, “It sounded like a war had started right inside the lobby. You couldn’t hear yourself think.”

The bank explodes into noise. Screams. Vault doors slamming open. Cash drawers yanked. Hamilton steps up with a canvas sack bulging. He’s tense; his fingers tremble. One employee whispered later, “You could see it in his eyes—they were scared too. It wasn’t just us.”

Bonnie & Clyde in Iowa

Bonnie Parker & Clyde Barrow

They came into Iowa under gray skies, their Ford V-8 rumbling across the Mississippi River bridge at Fort Madison. Clyde bragged his car could outrun anything on the road, and he wasn’t wrong. “That Ford’ll leave the law in the dust,” he once said, grinning through cigarette smoke. What he couldn’t outrun was the legend chasing him.

The Barrow Gang—Clyde, Bonnie, Clyde’s brother Buck, Buck’s wife Blanche, and young W.D. Jones—had been moving north from Missouri, leaving behind wrecked cars and dead silence. Iowa was just another stop.

Their first run-in with Iowa law came that summer near Dexter, west of Des Moines. They holed up in an abandoned farmhouse, living on canned beans and stolen meat. Clyde had a habit of finding foreclosed farms—places left empty by families who’d lost everything. They stayed quiet, hoping no one would notice.

Henry Nye spotted their mud-caked car parked in the woods and called Sheriff C.A. Knee of Redfield. “Didn’t look right,” Nye said. “Strangers don’t hide out here unless they’re running.” Within days, state patrolmen and Dallas County deputies were closing in.

Before dawn on July 24, 1933, the law surrounded the house. They thought they were catching drifters. Instead, they found the Barrow Gang.

Jesse James & The Adair Train Robbery

Jesse James

The Civil War taught Jesse and Frank James a lot more than how to fight. It taught them how to rob, plan, and disappear. By 1873, they’d turned those wartime lessons into a cold, professional craft—bank robberies, stage holdups, and the occasional daylight shootout. Yet none of it compared to what happened on the night of July 21, 1873, along the lonely rails outside Adair, Iowa.

It was the first successful robbery of a moving train west of the Mississippi River. The Reno brothers in Indiana had done it seven years earlier, but Jesse and Frank were about to take it to another level.

Before Adair, the James-Younger Gang had tried their hand at a few banks. None paid off like they’d hoped. In Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, they expected $100,000 and left with less than $4,000. At Gallatin, they killed a cashier, nearly got killed themselves, and rode off with a pitiful $700. Jesse was tired of small change. This time, he promised, would be different.

He sent Frank and Cole Younger north to Omaha to scout a shipment of gold and silver—bullion from Cheyenne bound east. Meanwhile, Jesse, Clell Miller, Bill Chadwell, Jim Younger, and Bob Younger waited in the Iowa hills near Adair. The plan was bold and brutal: derail the train, rush the express car, and vanish before the law could even telegraph their names.

No one’s certain how Frank and Cole learned the train’s schedule, but word came that the bullion would pass through Iowa on July 21. Modern historians believe their intelligence was off—Jesse may have robbed the wrong train, missing the real shipment by a day. Either way, the gang wasn’t turning back.