Dime Novel Desperadoes: The Notorious Maxwell Brothers

Epilogue: The Story Life of the Maxwell Brothers

Epilogue The Story Life of the Maxwell Brothers After Ed’s death and Lon’s disappearance, they continued to be famous outlaws, at least for a time, because of the stories that were told about them. While those accounts were generally inaccurate because they were folkloric or fictionalized, they provide insight into the significance of the Maxwell brothers for American culture, and they illustrate the rise of the outlaw hero in the later nineteenth century. More deeply, the story life of the ill-fated brothers helps us to understand why Americans were, and still are, fascinated by such violent lawbreakers. Until sometime in the twentieth century, the general public lived not by facts or news reports, but by stories—narratives that appealed to them and warranted retelling. People seldom checked the accuracy of what they heard, or read, and in fact, they usually had no means to do so. Folklore, unrecognized as such, was common in every locality, often arising and spreading like wildfire as the public mind strove to “get the story” about some compelling person or event. Unrecorded details were consciously or unconsciously supplied, the story’s emotional impact was heightened, connections were made to familiar places and people, and acceptable meaning was slowly derived from it all. By that means, tales became more dramatic and significant—but always, unfortunately, less accurate. The preceding chapters on the Maxwells illustrate time and again how i-xvi_1-408_Hall.indd 291 3/22/11 2:00:34 PM 292 Epilogue the public mind worked—and how often the newspapers reflected circulating inaccuracies. But many folkloric items about the outlaw brothers were not mentioned in this account of their lives, simply because those rumors and stories would have made the narrative even more complicated than it already is. However, such items indicate the impact of the Maxwell brothers on the public mind—and reveal the storytelling context of the dime novels that were inspired by their career. Every county that had some relationship to the Maxwell saga developed folkloric rumors and stories about the outlaws, usually to intensify their lawbreaking and connect them with a specific locale. For example, an 1889 newspaper item from Colchester, in McDonough County, summed up their career in this way: They [the Maxwells] rapidly advanced in crime, and for the next dozen years their depredations were numerous in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and adjoining states. They were identified with a gang of horse thieves who for some years flourished in the Illinois River bottom near Beardstown. One of the “stations” of this gang, it was afterwards found, was at a house two miles west of Macomb on the Colchester road. . . . The brothers then went to Wisconsin . . . and from 1876 to 1882 terrorized the western portion of that state; and their arrest rewards , aggregating several thousand dollars, are still unpaid. They were the most desperate criminals that ever made their homes in that state. . . . The article also asserts that “many of the crimes charged against the James brothers were actually perpetrated by the Maxwells,” and it provides a dramatic retelling of the gunfight at Durand, in which the desperadoes fire their Winchesters from the hip, killing the Coleman brothers before either “could press the trigger of his cocked and leveled gun.” The message is clear: The Maxwells were renowned bandits and peerless gunfighters whose activities had once embraced the Macomb-Colchester area. In Wisconsin, popular storytelling heightened the already dramatic account of Ed’s death by claiming that “on the drive down from Menomonie, [the captured desperado] predicted that he would never leave Durand alive,” and by also asserting that, as Ed was being led from the courthouse, “he raised his manacled hands to utter defiance, and offered to take on two men at a time.” His lynching was the story of the century in Pepin County, told and retold until it symbolized outlaw daring and defiance. i-xvi_1-408_Hall.indd 292 3/22/11 2:00:34 PM 293 Epilogue For similar reasons, many of the folks in Calhoun County refused to believe that it was not the infamous Maxwell brothers who had gunned down Sheriff Lammy in late September of that same year, despite Ed’s flat denial of the act. They could not surrender the notion that their world had been touched by fascinating desperadoes whose enormous evil underscored the heroic goodness of their lawman who had been so willing to risk his life...