Dalton Gang Hideout, Meade

Near the town of Meade, Kansas, stands a modest wood-frame farmhouse that local tradition connects to one of the most audacious criminal families of the frontier West: the Dalton brothers. The house was built in eighteen eighty-seven by John Whipple for his new wife Eva Dalton, sister of the outlaw gang. And beneath the property runs something far more dramatic than anything above ground: a ninety-five-foot tunnel connecting the house to the barn, with concealed doors at each end.

The Dalton Gang came out of Missouri and Indian Territory. Brothers Bob, Grat, and Emmett had started their careers on the right side of the law, serving as federal law enforcement officers in Arkansas and for the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. But they began stealing horses to supplement their meager wages, and once they crossed that line, they kept going. By eighteen ninety, they had organized into a genuine outlaw gang, specializing in train robberies across Kansas and the Indian Nations.

The Meade connection exists in legend more than document. Local lore held that the brothers used their sister Eva's home as a safe house between crimes in eighteen ninety-one and eighteen ninety-two, slipping in and out through the hidden tunnel when pursuers came close. No hard documentation of their presence in Meade after eighteen ninety has surfaced, which the museum itself acknowledges. But legend has a way of attaching to place.

The end came on October fifth, eighteen ninety-two, in Coffeyville, Kansas. Bob and Emmett walked into the First National Bank while Grat and two confederates entered the C.M. Condon bank across the plaza, both at the same moment, a scheme so brazen no one had tried it before. A citizen recognized them through their false beards. By the time the shooting stopped, four townspeople and four gang members lay dead in what the town called Bloody Corner. Bob and Grat Dalton were killed. Emmett took twenty-three bullet wounds and survived, served fourteen years in prison, then lived quietly until nineteen thirty-seven.

In nineteen forty, the Meade Chamber of Commerce purchased the old Whipple property. The Works Progress Administration reconstructed the tunnel and barn in nineteen forty-one. Today it operates as a museum, tunnel and all, offering a walk through ninety-five feet of frontier myth.