True West: Thug Life - Clell Miller

Think that you've had a tough day?
Clell Miller (left) and Bill Chadwell
just chilling after being killed

On 07 September 1876, eight men of the James-Younger Gang rode into the town of Northfield, Minnesota, bent on conducting a daring daylight bank robbery.  Three men (Jesse James, Bob Younger and Charlie Pitts) entered the bank while the other five (Frank James, Cole Younger, Jim Younger, Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell) stayed outside to stand guard and whoop it up in the streets, keeping people inside.  They counted on the townspeople being docile, not willing to fight for a bank.  They were wrong.  Everywhere they met resistance; from a bank teller not willing to open a safe, to townspeople armed with rifles from hardware stores shooting it out with the robbers.

Inside the bank, an assistant bank cashier (Joseph Heywood) was killed by the robbers for not cooperating.  In the streets, a recent immigrant from Norway, Nicolaus Gustafson was shot in the head.  It may have been that he didn't understand the warnings given in English to get out of the street.  It is also possible that he thought this was part of a wild west show that was supposed to be in town that evening. The townspeople fought back, reportedly wounding all of the gang members at some point.  Bill Chadwell was shot and killed by Anselm R. Manning from the Sciver Building.  Across from the bank, medical student Henry Wheeler took aim from the third floor of the Dampier House Hotel, killing Clell Miller.

Miller's Confederate States gravestone

The surviving six robbers rode off with a take of $26.10, mostly in rolls of nickels.  This was far from the thousands of dollars that they thought would be handed over by the bank staff.  The gang had read that entry to the vault was blocked by a time lock.  It was, but the lock hadn't been set.  If the gang had just tried to open the vault themselves, they could have made off with $17,000- $18,000 easily.

For two weeks, the gang felt their way through the backcountry of Minnesota, pursued by posses and pickets, trying to make it back to Missouri.  The men split up into two groups near Mankato; the James brothers rode back to Missouri, but the Youngers and Pitts ran out of luck at Hanska Slough near La Salle, Minnesota on 21 September.  In the shootout here, Charlie Pitts was killed and the Youngers captured.

Where's Clell?

In the aftermath of the robbery, the bodies of Miller and Chadwell were photographed for later identification and buried.  Much discussion has taken place recently as to what happened to the men's bodies.  One story is that the bodies were buried in the paupers section of the cemetery in Northfield.  Clell Miller's father came to Northfield, claimed his son's body and took it back for burial in Muddy Fork Cemetery in Kearney, Missouri.

Grand Forks skeleton

It is also possible that Henry Wheeler took one or both of the bodies for dissection in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  When  Miller's family heard of this, his father or brother went to claim the body.  After dissection, the remains were unidentifiable.  Supposedly, Wheeler kept Miller's body, since that was the robber he had shot.  The Miller family was given a body, possibly Chadwell's, to bury in Missouri.  Wheeler prepared the skeleton and took it with him to Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he opened a medical practice.  Upon retiring in 1923, Wheeler donated the skeleton to a local lodge of the Odd Fellows.  Wheeler was reported to have claimed that the skeleton was Miller's.  The skeleton was auctioned in the 1980's and bought by a private individual.

The world was a different place back then.  Public hangings, legal or vigilante were public spectacles.  People would crowd around the bodies for a picture,  If someone died, pictures would be taken of the bodies, especially if the deaths occurred in a notable event, such as this shoot-out.  Pictures would be sold for keepsakes.  People would cut pieces of clothing or even body parts off of the deceased for souvenirs.  Bodies of outlaws would be displayed as "Crime does not pay" advertisements.   Doctors might take bodies for dissection, skeletal preparation or even tanning the skin and making shoes or bags.  Such treatment would be considered ghoulish, cruel, indecent or some such stripe today.

Superimposed images of Grand Forks skull and Clell Miller

James Bailey, a native Minnesotan who is a professor of forensics at the University of North Carolina - Wilmington, has taken an interest in the case since 2010 and has performed an investigation of the skeleton.  By overlaying a CT image of the skeleton over the death picture of the Northfield robbers and aligning specific reference points, it is possible to exclude Bill Chadwell as the origin of the skeleton, but it is consistent with Clell Miller.  Attempts to obtain DNA from a femur (upper leg bone) of the skeleton failed, and the owner of the skeleton balked at removing teeth for DNA analysis.  Bailey and a representative of the Miller family have also failed to obtain a clear exhumation order for the remains buried in Missouri for DNA testing.  A judge did grant an exhumation order in 2012, but it was canceled when ground-penetrating radar picked up four graves in a row, without it being clear which one was supposed to be Clell Miller's.  Who is buried in Clell Miller's grave?  The world may never know.

Who was Clell Miller?

In the grand scheme of things, Clell Miller has become a mere footnote to the outlaw era in the Midwest.  A James gang member shot dead by a medical student while robbing a bank in Northfield, Missouri.  What path brought him there?

1870 US Census Entry for Miller Family - Clay County

Either Clell or Ed Miller

Clay County, Missouri forms part of the northern bank of the Missouri River.  This area of the state was populated mostly by families from Kentucky and Tennessee, and maintained cultural links to the South, including slavery.  The link was so tight that the Missouri River valley became known as Little Dixie.  The area could be very clannish, as many of the families had moved to Missouri from the same settlements of Kentucky and Tennessee.  The James, Hite, and Miller families all lived in the community of Danville, Kentucky before coming to Missouri.

Clell's parents were Moses W. and Emeline Thurmond Miller.  He was born Clelland (Cleland, Cleander) Miller on 15 December 1849.  He grew to be about 5' 8" and had dark auburn hair.  He was reputed to be fun-loving; the clown of the bunch.  When Clell was about 5, the battle over slavery in Kansas Territory broke out.  Guerrilla bands of pro-slavery Missourians (bushwhackers or border ruffians) and anti-slavery northerners (Jayhawkers) fought skirmishes along the border of Missouri and Kansas Territory.  The fighting and environment was lawless and harsh.  At about 14 years of age, Clell ran off and joined up with "Bloody" Bill Anderson's band of Confederate guerrillas.  In his three day stint serving the Confederacy, he fought in only one battle, being captured in the skirmish at present-day Orrick, Missouri that left Anderson dead.

Likely because of his age, Clell was not summarily executed, but taken to St. Louis and imprisoned in the Gratiot Street Prison.  His father came to St. Louis to procure Clell's release.  To do so, they had to assert that they had been a Union-supporting family and that Clell had never taken up arms against the Federal Government.  That was stretching it.

After this, Clell was apparently back on the family farm.   In the 1870 Census, he is enumerated with his family and his occupation is listed as farmer.  He must have joined up with the James and Youngers about 1871.  He was arrested for participating in the 03 June 1871 Corydon, Iowa Ocobock Bank robbery, but acquitted in a jury trial.  Here he stated that he was not a member of the James Gang, but might as well join them, since his reputation had been injured so much at the trial.  He participated in a long string of robberies and killings with the James Gang up until that September day in 1876.

Anatomical features drawn on death photo

The killing shot

This death picture of Clell Miller is one that I have seen in Old West magazines since the time I was about 10.  I always looked at it and wondered how he was killed by a single shot that doesn't appear to be through his heart or lungs, and just how bad his acne was (or if he'd been kicked and beaten by the Northfield crowd after he was killed).  Doing some background reading, I found that before the fatal shot, Clell had taken two shotgun blasts from Elias Stacy's shotgun, one to the face and a second in the back. The first shot knocked Miller out of the saddle, but he remounted and then was hit by the second shot, before Wheeler's shot struck the death blow just below the left shoulder. I understood why that shot was fatal shot when I learned some anatomy.

The recent interest in Clell Miller has produced a variety of images comparing his body, the Grand Forks Odd Fellows skeleton and his wounds.  One of these shows quite clearly that Wheeler's rifle shot probably hit Miller in his left subclavian artery, which branches directly off of the aorta.  With the heart pushing large amounts of blood out of the artery, he probably bled out in a matter of minutes. Without first aid from someone who knows exactly what to do, that is still a fatal wound.  Cole Younger and Charlie Pitts tried to get Clell to a horse, but the amount of blood they saw on Miller convinced the others that he was dead.  Miller's death really shook the gang, and it was then that ALL of them understood that they were beat and would be lucky to escape.  Some witnesses reported that after the others had left, he tried to get to his hands and knees, then fell over dead.  From entry to the bank until now, seven minutes had passed.

Ed Miller and Jesse James

After Clell's death, the Miller family's association with the James did not end.  That may or may not have been their choice.  After the loss of the best of their gang, Jesse and Frank started gathering up a new gang after laying low a while.  Ed Miller became part of the crew with Clarence and Wood Hite (James' cousins), Charlie Ford, and Dick Liddil, among others.  These men were nowhere near the caliber of the Youngers, They didn't have the forceful personality of Cole Younger for discipline and Frank began to lose his appetite for the outlaw life.  Drink, loose lips, in-fighting and paranoia pervaded this later version of the gang.  Depending on who you talk to, Ed Miller started talking too much about the Kansas City Fair robbery or about a robbery in the planning.  One day in 1881, Ed Miller and Jesse James rode off together, but only Jesse returned.  Kansas City newspapers reported Ed Miller's death in October 1881.  For what it's worth, the Miller family maintains that Jesse and Ed faked Ed's death, so he could leave the outlaw life and spent the rest of his days in Tennessee.

Ben and Clell

Getting there

Where exactly is here?  Clell Miller's memorial marker, at least, is in Muddy Fork Cemetery on MO-33, just north of Kearney, Missouri.  He shares a marker with his father and sister.  Benjamin and I were tooling around looking at James Gang tombstones after he got off of work early one day.  He was installing plumbing in the Casey's store in Kearney.  Jesse James' grave is just down the road from Muddy Fork in Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

Waypoint:  Latitude: 39.4195036 N; Longitude 94.3707784 W

Clelland D. Miller
Died Sept 7, 1876

Moses W. Miller
May 26, 1798 - Jan 3, 1879

Francis M. Miller
Died Sept 21, 1874

Further Reading

Northfield Bank Robbery

Exhumation order approved

Exhumation order canceled

Ice Age: Where There's Water, There's a Way

The Ice Age

Wisconsin shore St. Croix River Dalles

The Wisconsin glacial period lasted from about 85,000 - 11,000 years ago.  During this time ice covered most of North America north of 38 degrees north latitude to a depth of 2 miles.  As the ice sheet melted about 10,000 years ago, the meltwater filled parts of the basins of modern Lakes Superior, Huron and Michigan.  The natural drainage of this lake was to the east, but a lobe of the glacier blocked that exit.  Water from an area of ice sheet the size of Minnesota and a mile deep filled glacial Lake Duluth until water level was 400-500 feet above the level of modern Lake Superior.

Rounded and polished boulders

When the water overtopped the hills forming a natural dam on the southwest side, the water ran in torrents down the modern Bois Brule and St. Croix River Valleys for years.  The water cut easily through Cambrian sandstones, but ran over the top of harder rock.  South of here, the rush of water cut deeply into sandstone forming a huge waterfall.  The erosive action of the water cut away the foot of the fall and marched upstream and the lip broke loose, eventually cutting into the hard basalt that would form the narrow chute we call the Dalles of the St. Croix River.  The force of the water running by here is likened by park interpreters as that of a fire hose.  Only the water was full of sand, rocks and boulders.  These can be seen in the smoothness of the rocks polished by the action of that sediment-laden water.

But Doctor Hoffman, where did the sand, rocks and boulders come from?  Wow, great question, glad you asked.  As the Midcontinent Rift formed, water and cycles of freezing and thawing wore down the basalt and the dirt filled the rift valley.  In lakes and rivers of the rift valley, sandstones and shales were deposited.  Add to that the material that was scooped out by glaciers during the ice ages and deposited at the margins of the glaciers as they melted.  Turn on the jets from an overtopped glacial lake dam, and it scours out the loose stuff just like a power washer pushing dirt across your porch or driveway.

Fun Potholes

Small pothole cut through rock

As a torrent of water runs over a rocky bed, there are areas where eddies form.  These swirling circular currents will start to scour out a depression in the rock with the sand and rocks that it moves.  If a rock rolls into the depression and cannot move out, the water may be able to rock it and roll it around, smoothing the rock into a round grindstone.  These grindstones can then swirl around the perimeter of the hole, cutting it deeper.  Interstate Park has the highest known concentration of these features and some of the deepest known potholes.

Pothole

The flow of water out of Lake Duluth may have continued for hundreds of years.  Only when the Superior lobe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted did the water flow downhill toward the east.  One can only imagine how much water and force was required to carve out the St. Croix Dalles and these potholes.  It must have sounded much like it would standing at the bottom of Niagara Falls.  The small pothole figured above is only about six inches across and about two feet deep, tunneling through the entire rock layer.  There are over a hundred potholes in the boundaries of the park that are much larger than this.  We were actually standing in a twenty feet deep pothole when we took the picture of the left, which shows another pothole that was cut even deeper.

Grindstone

Conglomerates

Conglomerate on rocks

Scoured potholes, grindstones, a gorge cut through tough rock, and rounded boulders all point to a huge flow of water through here.  Not just water, but water full of boulders, rocks, pebbles, and sand.  How can we be sure? As we were hiking through the woods, we came upon some rocks at least 30 feet above the current level of the water covered with conglomerate.  This mixture of sand and pebbles solidified after one of these tremendous floods and cover the rocks in places.  The water flowing out of glacial Lake Duluth would have been chock full of this stuff, ideal for cutting through rock.  The pebbles in the photograph range up to about 1 inch in width.

Creation of the Park

The basalt in this area was perfect for making gravel for building material, a business venture proposed by a group of St. Paul businessmen in the 1860s.  Public interest to preserve the scenery was piqued and influential people like George Hazzard and William H.C. Folsom led the push for preserving the Dalles.  George Hazzard was a travel agent, Chamber of Commerce chair and secretary of the Red Rock Camp Meeting Association, which pushed for the combined Minnesota and Wisconsin park idea.   Folsom led the legislative push to establish the Minnesota side of the Park.  The Minnesota side was established in 1895 and was the second Minnesota State Park, while the Wisconsin side was established in 1900 as the first Wisconsin State Park.

Deep pothole

Rock with several small potholes

Getting There

Waypoint: Latitude 43.3936727 N; Longitude 92.6709847 W
Street Address: US-8/St. Croix Trail and Milltown Rd., Taylors Falls, MN 55084


On I-35 north of the Twin Cities, take Exit 132 to Taylors Falls (US-8 East).  The entrance to the Park (Milltown Rd) is in Taylors Falls just west of the bridge to Wisconsin.  There is another part of the park in Wisconsin (hence the name Interstate State Park)

Pothole filled with debris

Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Continental Rift

Wisconsin side of St. Croix Dalles as seen from Minnesota

One of my favorite questions to ask students in Biogeography or Evolution is "What evidence do you see around you of a changing Earth?"  It is an important question; one of the many that were just starting to be addressed as Charles Darwin set foot on the HMS Beagle.  Our time on Earth is so fleeting and the time required for massive change is so long, that it is no wonder that many people assume that the Earth is essentially as it always has been.  If only time machines were a thing.  Where are Doc Brown and Marty McFly when you need them?

Nadienne blending in

The evidence is there if you open your eyes and ask the right questions.  Many places exist that act as our time machine, allowing us to see structures on Earth that have been hidden for hundreds, millions, or even billions of years.  One of my favorite evidences for a changing Earth has to be Interstate State Park, which flanks the St. Croix River in Minnesota and Wisconsin, just north of the Twin Cities.  Here, Ice Age floods have scoured out a record of a time when the North American Craton (core continental crust) began to tear apart into new continents about 1.1 billion years ago.

Volcanic Rocks...In Minnesota and Wisconsin?

Pillow lava with flood basalt deposited on top

A lot of people are surprised to hear that there are deposits of basalt or other volcanic rock in places where there are no obvious volcanoes, but they are here.  When I walked down into one of the park valleys, even knowing that I was looking at basalt I was still a bit surprised to see signs of classic pillow lavas.  This lava breaks out to the surface underwater, and the water cools the surface of the lava, but the inside keeps flowing which causes big blobs of basalt to form as in the bottom half of the picture at right.

Bubble pattern shows successive volcanic episodes 

Reading the record in the rocks (yes, I do see the world in equation form and process diagrams), it is possible to see evidence for at least seven basalt flows at Interstate State Park.  When a basalt erupts to the surface, gases escape from the molten rock, and bubbles of gas are trapped in the thicker cooling rock at the surface of the deposit.  Looking closely at the rocks, you can see a layer of bubbles from one eruption, then see a smooth deposit with few bubbles from the next eruption, then the incidence of bubbles increases as you move upwards, until the cycle repeats itself.

Multiple volcanic episodes seen...bubbles...no bubbles...bubbles...no bubbles...bubbles

Some of those bubbles can be quite

Amygdules in basalt

large.  Over the course of a billion years, and under a pool of water like Lake Superior and its ancestral precursors, water percolates through the rock and drags minerals into these cavities.  When the concentration of mineral gets high enough, they crystallize.  Several of the rocks here contain amygdules of quartz and feldspar.  In the Lake Superior basin, many of these deposits are banded in beautiful reds and browns from iron, forming the famous Lake Superior agates.  These rocks were released from their lava prisons by cycles of freezing and thawing, then tumbled and transported south by glaciation.  We find them (rarely) in northern Missouri, and they are relatively common in the Mississippi River valley north of Missouri.

A large Lake Superior agate

The Midcontinent/Keweenawan Rift

Arms of rift in red with direction of rifting indicated

Most of the rocks in this volcanic system lie buried, but the metals that they contain create a gravity high that can be measured.  The system runs from Lake Superior east into Michigan, southwest into Kansas/Oklahoma and perhaps north to Lake Nipigon in Ontario, Canada.  The basalt ranges from two to twelve miles in thickness, and is buried by as much as six miles of sediment in some places.  Surface exposures are found only around Lake Superior and south through the St. Croix River valley.

The crust of the Earth is relatively thin and broken into a variety of continental and oceanic rocks.  These plates move with respect to each other, driven by the tremendous heat engine that is the mantle.  Seafloor spreads from an upwelling of magma that seeps through to the surface depositing igneous (volcanic) rock that is relatively dense.  Deposition of new material here will push two plates apart.  Heated magma will also rise and strike the bottom of the plate, dragging it along by conveyor action.  Eventually, two plates are going to collide with each other.  Oceanic crust is denser than continental crust, and tends to slip under the continental crust, pushing on the edge of the continent, elevating the continental edge.  A deep trench is evident where this subduction is taking place.  Gravity and density work together and pull the subducting plate downwards.

Stages of rifting - Midcontinent Rift stopped between steps  5 and 6

As the oceanic crust melts, the water in it superheats and may start melting the continental crust, far away from the subduction zone.  The rising plume of magma will cause a dome to form in the crust, eventually the heating by the magma will cause the lithosphere (crust and upper layers of mantle) to become more plastic and stretch.   The lithosphere will sag under the weight of the overlying crust, causing faults (breaks) to form in the crust, forming a series of valleys and ridges.  Magma may find its way to the surface in the region of the mantle plume or intrude into pre-existing rocks further away.  The valleys may fill with water, as with the Rift Valley Lakes in East Africa.

As igneous rocks are deposited in the rift, the rift widens.  If rifting continues long enough, a new ocean will open up, separating the continental land mass.  This process is easiest to see in East Africa, where a triple-junction has opened from a mantle plume under Ethiopia.  Extension of the rift to the northwest is tearing the Arabian peninsula free from Africa, and the Mediterranean Sea will be connected to the Indian Ocean, as well as the Atlantic. Rift extension to the southwest will separate the African Plate into the Nubian Plate and Somalian Plate, with an oceanic corridor between them.

East African Rift triple junction

Round and round

Pillow lava overlain by flood basalt

This predicts a cycle of events in which oceanic widening pushes continental landmasses together into a supercontinent.  Rifts that appear in the supercontinent results in oceanic intrusion and the landmasses float apart into separate continents.  Continued seafloor spreading pushes the landmasses together again and another supercontinent  forms.  Currently, spreading of the Atlantic Ocean basin is pushing the Americas away from Europe and Africa on the east, while the Pacific Ocean is closing on the west and the Americas and Asia are getting closer.  The 2011 earthquake in Japan caused Japan to shift closer to North America by 13 feet.  The usual rate of plate movements is about the same as the growth of your fingernails.

Rodinia reconstructed showing mountain building areas (green)

The Midcontinent rifting took place when the continents were assembling into the supercontinent of Rodinia.  Minnesota was located very close to the equator and directions were rotated about 90 degrees from present (west now was north then).  The mantle plume for the Midcontinent Rift was under present-day Lake Superior.  The rifting resulted in quite a bit of volcanic action which is evident on the surface in the north.  Pillow lavas which were deposited at the bottom of rift lakes were overlain by later flood basalts that erupted from fissures in the Earth.  From Iowa south, the volcanics rose up into pre-existing rocks, but probably did not break through to the surface.

Continental movement prediction for the next 250 million years

Rifting lasted for 15-22 (ish) million years, then stopped.  This break nearly opened up a way to the ocean; it is the deepest rift known to have healed.  Geology of the region suggests that the crust in this region thinned to 25% of its pre-rifting thickness.  The region of Lake Erie was about continents edge at the time of this rift.  The East Coast of North America was added through later collisional events.  During the formation of Rodinia, it is thought that the North American craton collided with the Rio Plato, Amazonia and Baltica cratons, resulting in the formation of mountains.  This mountain building episode is called the Grenville orogeny, and may have put enough pressure on North America to halt the spreading of the rift and reverse it.  Many blocks of reverse faulted crust can be found, being pushed upwards by compression.

Rio Grande Rift

Continents will continue to move, stretch and break as long as there is molten rock on the interior of Earth.  There is some thought that the New Madrid fault zone between Missouri and Tennessee is the product of a failed rift.  Active rifts abound, famously including the East African Rift.  The magnificent lava fountains of Iceland are formed by the Mid-Atlantic Rift reaching the surface of the water.  In North America, there are several active rift zones, including Death Valley and the Rio Grande River Valley.  Hotspot plumes of mantle trace a path in the Hawaiian Island chain and across Idaho into present day Yellowstone National Park.  Present models suggest that 250 million years from now, the landmasses of Earth will again coalesce into a supercontinent, this time called Pangaea Proxima.

Getting There

Waypoint: Latitude 43.3936727 N; Longitude 92.6709847 W
Street Address: US-8/St. Croix Trail and Milltown Rd., Taylors Falls, MN 55084


On I-35 north of the Twin Cities, take Exit 132 to Taylors Falls (US-8 East).  The entrance to the Park (Milltown Rd) is in Taylor Falls just west of the bridge to Wisconsin.  There is another part of the park in Wisconsin (hence the name Interstate State Park) just across the bridge at Taylors Falls.

Further Reading

Interstate Park - MN DNR

Midcontinent Rift System in Iowa - Aerial Surveys