The five men followed one of the main roads into Coffeyville, one that the Daltons recalled became Eighth Street when it entered the town. As they neared Coffeyville, they were noticed by several people riding to and from it. Perversely, to reduce the risk of being recognized, the Daltons had clumsily disguised themselves with false beards, mustaches, and sideburns. Long cloaks concealed their weapons—heavy Colt revolvers as well as Winchesters. As they intended, they appeared to be a party of deputy United States marshals on official business.
The ruse seems to have worked. However: “Even in frontier country where any man might wear a gun without arousing comment, five heavily weaponed men riding together should have caused some interest,” writes Robert Barr Smith. “Perhaps it was the day; bright and bracing, a clear, wonderful morning, the kind that makes people eager to work and achieve. Still: Somebody should have wondered.”
As they rode up Eighth Street—the three brothers side by side, the two other men trailing behind—many eyes were turned upon them, but, they hoped, without the slightest suspicion. In a history of Coffeyville published for its centennial, one citizen was colorfully quoted, “Indian Summer was here, with its mild sunshine and purple haze. The bandits, like young Lochinvars, came out of the West.”
The gang’s plan included tying their horses on the north side of Eighth Street, in front of the opera house, diagonally across the street and behind the Condon Bank. There, the horses would be readily accessible when the need to flee came. But right away, they encountered their first complication: A municipal project requiring that the street be torn up to install curbs and gutters was underway, and the old hitching post had become history.
So instead, after Bob scanned their surroundings, he led the gang to an alley that ran directly off the street. They tied their horses to a wooden fence at the rear of a lot owned by Charles Munn, who was a city police judge. Apparently, not one of them realized this was an unwise decision. True, the hitching post near the banks had been removed, but there had to have been other options to tie their horses than a fence down an alley that was a good three hundred feet—meaning, a long run—from the banks.
Perhaps they were too focused on the next step in the plan. According to David Stewart Elliott’s account, “Quietly forming in lines as they had been riding, three in front and two following, the men walked at an ordinary pace down one alley, in an easterly direction toward the Plaza.” They carried their Winchesters at their sides.
An opportunity to sound an alarm was lost. A stonecutter who was working on the Eighth Street project had been in the alley to examine a pile of rocks. He was not a resident of Coffeyville, and he must have assumed that a group of heavily armed men was a common sight there. The stonecutter emerged from the alley after the outlaws and simply turned to go back to work on the street.
Most likely, no one in the gang saw that, moments after they left the alley, an oil wagon pulled by two horses turned in to it. There it came to a halt and stayed put, partially blocking the entrance to the alley and access to where the outlaws had left their horses.
With the exception of the hitching post disappearance, downtown Coffeyville was as Bob, Grat, and Emmett remembered it. Facing south, the Condon Bank sat on a triangular space of ground in the center of what was the main plaza. To the east, directly across the street, was the First National Bank. It was in the center of a row of stores that faced west. The Isham Brothers’ Hardware Store was the first store south of the First National, and on the other side of it was the Rammel Brothers’ Drugstore.
From Ninth Street to the alley on the west side of the plaza were six shops in a row: Slosson & Co. drugstore, Lang and Lang’s General Store, A. P. Boswell’s General Store, Wilhalf’s General Store, the Coffeyville Post Office, and the Reed Brothers’ General Store. And across from the alley were Mitchell and Ulms’ Restaurant, Wells’ Dry Good Store, and McKenna’s Dry Good Store. It would appear that the city was prosperous indeed, given the overlap of some of the stores, and of course the two thriving banks facing each other on the plaza.
Everyone seemed to be going about their business … but that was not quite true. A few people here and there noticed the group of men bearing rifles sauntering through the plaza. However, no strong suspicion was aroused. It was the time of year when men hunted, so by itself, carrying rifles was not ominous. If anything caused some curiosity, it was the fake facial hair the Dalton brothers sported.
In close order, the five gang members crossed Walnut Street from the alley to the Condon Bank, Winchesters held snug against their legs. Grat, Dick Broadwell, and Bill Power entered the Condon Bank, and Emmett and Bob strode across Union Street to the First National Bank.
But not fast enough: They had also been noticed by a man named Aleck McKenna, who was sweeping the sidewalk in front of his dry goods store. Unlike the oblivious stonecutter, McKenna, instead of retreating inside his shop, took a second and closer look. His eyes followed the three men who had entered the Condon Bank. He thought, despite the disguise, that he recognized one of the men as Grat Dalton. Then, with an unobstructed view through a large plate glass window, he could see a man pointing a Winchester at the cashier’s counter.
McKenna called out, “There go the Daltons!” Then one of the street workers shouted to the people inside a store, “The Daltons are robbing the bank!” The advantage of surprise had barely lasted a minute.
Very soon, half the businessmen around the plaza knew what was going on, and the message quickly passed throughout the town. As Emmett recalled, “From then on things went so rapidly” that the action blurred at times.
Right after Grat entered the Condon Bank, he had indeed pointed his Winchester at the cashier while Power and Broadwell took positions at the door. The stunned employees staring at Grat—and no doubt noticing his incongruous facial hair—were Charles Carpenter, a bank officer, and Thomas Babb, a bookkeeper. It was Carpenter who had the Winchester pointed at him after the three thieves entered.
“We have got you, goddamn you,” Grat said. “Hold up your hands!”
Carpenter raised his hands. But the bandits had not noticed Babb, who was sitting at a desk near the vault. The bookkeeper was not so shocked that he didn’t have the presence of mind to furtively slip into the vault—or, as David Stewart Elliott would later put it, Babb “discovered the character of the men before they discovered him.” Not so fortunate was a customer, John Levan, who picked the wrong time to transact business at the Condon Bank. As soon as he entered, Power and Broadwell had him lie on the floor.
Another cashier, Charles Ball, heard sounds coming from the lobby. When he walked out from the back to investigate, he encountered the gun-toting gang members and Carpenter. Grat stepped behind the counter and gave Ball the grain sack. He instructed the cashier to hold it open while Carpenter—reluctantly, but without risking a bullet—gathered the money on the counter and in the cash drawer and dropped it all into the sack.
Another surprised citizen was Luther Perkins. He had an office above the Condon Bank, and out his window, he’d happened to see Bob and Emmett enter the First National. Suspecting the two men were up to no good and wanting to warn the Condon employees, Perkins had gone down the back stairs to Walnut Street behind the bank and come in by the back door. He got far enough to see Carpenter covered by a Winchester, and he immediately backed out, shutting the door behind him. Perkins hurried back upstairs to join two coworkers, Joe Uncapher and J. H. Wilcox, who were at the window waiting to see what transpired.
Back downstairs, Babb’s few minutes of being undetected ended. Having put everything they had swiped up into the sack, Carpenter and Ball were ordered into the vault. As he followed them behind the iron screen that partitioned the vault from the lobby, Grat found the trembling bookkeeper cowering behind a rack of books. Grat “gave the young man a terrible cursing,” according to Elliott, and had him emerge with his hands up.
Things looked promising in the vault area: The doors of the safe were open, revealing three canvas bags. Grat told Carpenter to empty them into the sack the cashier carried. He watched with satisfaction as silver coins flowed from the bags.* That done, there was one other target—a bulletproof chest, with a combination lock. Grat told Ball to open it.
“I can’t,” replied the cashier. “The time lock is on a setting.”
“What time will it open?”
“Nine thirty.”
Grat demanded, “What time is it now?”
The cashier made a point of looking at his watch and responded, “It’s nine twenty.”
As Robert Barr Smith put it, “Charley Ball was an immensely courageous man, or an immensely foolish one, depending on your point of view. He blandly laid his life on the line for his employer’s property, in spite of all the threats and curses and the leveled Winchesters.” Ball was also aware that there “was no FDIC to cover his friends and neighbors”—whatever thieves made off with would not be replaced.
A quick-thinking Carpenter reached out and pretended to be unable to turn the chest handle, indicating it was locked. Convinced, Grat announced, “We’ll wait.”
In the space of only a few seconds, Grat had made several serious mistakes. First, he believed Ball, who had the presence of mind to lie. Yes, the combination lock was on a time setting, but it had opened at 8:00 a.m., one hundred minutes earlier. Grat could have simply swung the door open. Second, apparently not having a watch, he accepted that it was 9:20 when a glance at a clock on the wall would have told him it was 9:40. And third was the decision to wait. This could have turned out well, because inside the chest was at least $40,000 and presumably Ball would have run out of excuses.
But a shock wave of violence was about to strike an unsuspecting city. As David Stewart Elliott put it a tad floridly, “The people of Coffeyville were never in the enjoyment of more peaceful and comfortable surroundings than on the eventful morning of October 5, 1892. People came and went and vehicles moved about in ordinary numbers until about fifteen minutes before 10 o’clock, when the most remarkable occurrence that has ever taken place in the history of our country came upon the peaceful city like a flash of lightning from a clear sky.”
“After the initial alarm, it’s certain that people at different points of the plaza excitedly passed the news around,” reports Lue Diver Barndollar in What Really Happened on October 5, 1892.*
And then they started moving, fast. With a bank robbery underway—as they were soon to learn, two bank robberies—the first priority was to get hold of guns. This they did with amazing alacrity.