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Time Machine: Jesse James was here … or was he?
Bandits robbed South Amana store in 1877
The Gazette offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
In 1927, 45 years after notorious outlaw bandit Jesse James’ death, The Sunday Gazette and Republican published a special report about a night in April 1877 when the general store in South Amana was robbed, perhaps – but probably not – by James.
The story starts on that dark April night with intermittent thunderstorms rolling through. Teenagers Emil Wolf and Charles “Carl” Ratzel, hired by the store owners as clerks, lived in rooms above the store. They had a dog and a single unloaded .22-caliber revolver for security.
The bandits broke into the store, tying up Wolf and ordering Ratzel to open the store’s safe at gunpoint. When Ratzel said he didn’t have the combination, one of the robbers said, “I saw you open it this morning.”
With a gun barrel pressed behind his ear, Ratzel fumbled with the lock until he finally succeeded in opening it. The gang took what later was reported to be about $2,000 – around $70,000 in today’s dollars.
After tying up Ratzel, the bandits fled to Marengo, where they caught the morning train.
After an hour, Ratzel managed to free himself. He released Wolf and contacted authorities.
A few months after the robbery, the Green brothers of Marengo were arrested as they tried to sell postage stamps they’d stolen from the store’s post office. When they confessed to the robbery, they said Jesse James and some of his gang were accomplices.
Story’s evolution
In 1933, Amana Society President George Heinemann, 89, told The Gazette about “the hair-raising incident of when Jesse James and his gang broke into the store, bound the clerks and broke the safe.”
The story of the robbery was revived in 1953 after a fire swept through the South Amana store, doing $25,000 in damage.
“The story of the Jesse James robbery at South Amana undoubtedly will continue to pop up periodically through the years. It’s a good story and has lots of action,” Gazette staff writer Ed Murphy wrote in 1953. “But it isn’t true.”
He proceeded to prove his point.
“The outlaws drove up in an open wagon. How many men were in the gang has never been determined. In any event, they attacked a rear door on the ground floor and sawed out the lock. The two boys upstairs had been awakened by their dog by that time.
“Reports here vary. Some say the outlaws first called up to the boys and asked them to open the store so they could make a purchase, and that they did not saw out the lock until the boys refused.
“Another version is that the robbers entered the store before the boys awoke and that Carl Ratzel called down a ventilator: ‘Is there anybody down there?’ One of the outlaws answered, ‘Yes, it’s Jimmy, and I want to see you.’
“All the reports agree that the outlaws mounted the stairs and burst into the boys’ bedroom with drawn revolvers. Emil was lashed to his bed and Carl was taken below and ordered to open the safe.
“He pretended that he couldn’t open it. One member of the gang told Carl he had seen him open the safe a few days before.
“After much nervous fumbling, the frightened youth got the safe open. The robbers rifled it and then left, after first tying Carl to his bedposts.
“This report of the South Amana robbery was pieced together from versions told by William Heinze and Dr. William Moershel, both now dead.
“Both men wrote out their versions and gave them to Peter Stuck, now the Amana Corporation secretary. Mr. Stuck blended the two reports into a feature story which was published in The Gazette on Nov. 13, 1927.”
James was elsewhere
But files from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency stated that Jesse and Frank James were in Kentucky and Tennessee in 1877, the year after the botched Northfield, Minn., bank heist that left many members of the James-Younger gang wounded or dead.
The Younger brothers were captured, and Jesse and Frank James headed for Kentucky and Tennessee.
“There is no record of their having committed any crime again until Oct. 7, 1879, when they robbed a train at Glendale, Mo.,” the 1953 story said. They also robbed a bank at Riverton, just inland from the Missouri River in western Iowa in 1881.
Circumstantial evidence further suggests the James brothers weren’t in Amana:
* Three years after the South Amana robbery, Ratzel and Wolf said the robbery netted the bandits $1,000 in cash and $680 in stamps. Ratzel said the thieves were surprised at the amount they got. Jesse James would have considered that total amount a pittance.
* James Horan, author of “Desperate Men,” published in 1949, reasoned that James and his men would not have arrived in South Amana in a wagon or at night. The gang “generally rode into town in broad daylight and had safes opened for them by the simple expedient of asking a clerk to change a $100 bill, thus obliging him to go to the safe for what, in those days, was a large sum of money.”
James was shot and killed in his home April 3, 1882, at age 34. He is buried near his family’s home in Kearney, Mo.
Story persists
Nonetheless, the story connecting the James brothers to the South Amana robbery persisted.
It was reported again in 1956, 1959, 1975 and 2021, the latter reporting a “vintage newspaper clipping taped to the wall” about a holdup in Upper South Amana in 1877.
Over the years, the story kept changing, but the general store embraced it. When it added the Amana Pottery space in the 1970s, a sign on the side of the building said, “Jesse James Was Here.”
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