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Show LAST SURVIVOR '' I k" k ' I ;:;:kMt ; 1 1 ' ;iv. - v-.' - Emmett Dalton in 1931. When this buttle ondoJ, in "Death Alley" lay three dead men, another who was dying (Marshal Connelly) and the badly bad-ly wounded survivor of the bandit ban-dit gang, Emmett Dalton. Three of the outlaws' horses had also been slain. In the whole fight, which lasted only a few minutes, four bandits and four citizens were killed and three citizens and one bandit wounded. But in those few minutes plenty of lead had been whistling through the air. No less than 80 bullet marks were found on the front of the Condon bank alone. As soon as news of the bloody encounter was flashed over the surrounding country, the ubiquitous ubiqui-tous "sightsteers" who always rush to the scene of a tragedy began pouring into the town, literally lit-erally by the trainload. The dead bandits were lined up and photographed photo-graphed to provide a "souvenir" of this historic occasion. Not content with this, the more morbid-minded began cutting pieces of cloth from the dead bandits' clothing and did not desist until they had taken every stitch from Bob Dalton. Threats of Lynching. The desperately wounded survivor sur-vivor of the bandit gang was carried car-ried to the office of Doctor Wells over the drug store, across the Plaza from the Condon bank. There three doctors began digging dig-ging out of his back the buckshot that had come from Carey Seaman's Sea-man's shotgun. Although it was doubtful if he would live, a mob soon gathered with a rope and threatened to lynch him, but Doctor Wells and David Stewart Elliott, editor of the Coffeyville Journal, dissuaded them from their purpose. A week later Dalton was removed re-moved on a cot from Coffeyville to the county jail at Independence. Independ-ence. On March 8, 1393, he pleaded guilty to a technical charge of murder in the second degree and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the state penitentiary peni-tentiary at Lansing, Kan. He proved to be a model prisoner during the next U years, so when his application for a commutation commuta-tion of sentence came up, many state officials and newspaper editors edi-tors urged that it be granted. As a result he was given a full pardon par-don by Gov. E. W. Hoch on November No-vember 2, 1G07. From that time on there was no more law-abiding citizen than this former member of the ' desperate des-perate Dalton Gang." In his later years he made his home in California, engaged in the real estate business and prospered. He also worked in motion pictures, pic-tures, both as a scenario writer and actor and helped in producing produc-ing a film, "Beyond the Law." It was a picturization of the deeds of the Daltons not to glorify the careers of his bandit brothers but to point out the moral of "crime never pays." Return to Coffeyville In 1931 Dalton returned to Coffeyville Cof-feyville to visit old-time friends and to care for the graves of his two brothers who are buried not far from the place where on an autumn morning nearly 40 years earlier he had .seen their careers brought to an end in a blaze of gunfire. MacDonald also tells of the scene when Emmett Dalton visited vis-ited the graves of his brothers. As he gazed upon the little plot of ground where they lie, he said, "Well, it's a good place in which to sleep the last long sleep." Then pointing to the row of graves, he added: "I challenge the world to produce the history of an outlaw who ever got anything any-thing out of it except that ... or else to be huddled in a prison cell." "And that goes for the modern bandit of the skyscraper frontier of our big cities, too. The machine ma-chine gun may help them get away with it a little better and the motor car may help them in making an escape better than to ride on horseback as we did, but it all ends the same way. The biggest fool on earth is the one who thinks that he can beat the law, that crime can be made to pay. It never paid and never will, and that's the one big lesson les-son of the CofTeyvilie raid." |