Near Mankato, the surviving gang members split up. The Younger brothers and Charlie Pitts went one way, and Frank and Jesse James went another. The latter turned out to be luckier, as the posse continued after Cole and company.
Eighty miles and two weeks later, the not-to-be-denied Northfield posse caught up to and pounced on their prey near Madelia, still in Minnesota. In the ensuing gun battle, Pitts was killed, and the Youngers, after being filled with even more lead, surrendered. Though some citizens were sorely tempted to do so, the brothers were not hanged and were instead soon tried for murder. After the guilty verdicts, the outlaws were sentenced to twenty-five years in the state prison at Stillwater. Bob did not see the end of his prison term, dying in 1889. Jim was paroled in 1901 and immediately fell in love with Alice Miller, a newspaper reporter. Barred from marrying her by the strict terms of his parole, Jim died by suicide. Cole was also paroled in 1901 and managed to get by, dying fifteen years later.*
Compared to the shot-up Youngers and the dead Miller, Chadwell, and Pitts, the James brothers had gotten off easy—Jesse took a bullet in one thigh, and Frank was hit in one leg. The injuries did not prevent them from galloping out of Minnesota, and they kept going. Somehow, despite hundreds of pursuers and a nationwide alarm, Frank and Jesse managed to keep riding all the way back to Missouri.
The Northfield disaster seemed to have knocked the stuffing out of the James boys, though, and they quit their outlaw ways. They relocated and lived quietly in Nashville. Frank, in particular, thrived in his new life, farming in the Whites Creek area. But Jesse did not adapt well to peace, so this mundane existence lasted only until 1879. A restless Jesse, with a hesitant Frank in tow, pulled a new gang together and returned to robbing banks, trains, and stagecoaches, beginning on October 8, when they took on a train near Glendale, Missouri.
It was the holdup of a Chicago and Alton Railroad train in September 1881 that put the new governor of Minnesota, Thomas Crittenden, in such a lather that he convinced the state’s railroad and express executives to put up the money for a large reward for the capture of the James brothers. In a related event, that December, when a gang member, Wood Hite, was killed during an argument, one of the men arrested for the crime was Bob Ford. He made a deal that in return for being let off the hook and being promised the reward, he would become a member of the James Gang.
As it turned out, he did more than betray the James brothers. Ford shot Jesse in April 1882 at the latter’s home in St. Joseph, Missouri. Ford and his brother Charley surrendered to the authorities, pleaded guilty, and were promptly pardoned by Governor Crittenden. Escaping a fate similar to his brother’s, on October 4, Frank James surrendered to Crittenden. Supposedly, Frank turned himself in with the understanding that he would not be extradited to Northfield to face charges there. The only two times that Frank was brought to trial for the gang’s activities, he was acquitted.
Frank James was done with the outlaw life for good. In addition to teaming up with Cole Younger as a pre-vaudeville act, he kept up a lifelong correspondence with Bat Masterson, whom he had befriended in the 1870s, and he hosted curious visitors to Jesse’s grave at the James family farm. Like Cole Younger, Frank died at the age of seventy-two, in 1916.