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.