Quail Hunter

The Wittenberg map in our last blog showed the “BRIDGE WHERE POSSE HID IN 1922 WHEN ‘QUAIL HUNTER’ KENNEDY WAS KILLED”. Here are the details.

John F. (“Jack”) Kennedy (yes, same name as the future president) was a notorious railroad bandit who was a suspect in a series of train robberies in the late 1890s. But despite bragging incessantly about his exploits, Jack proved almost impossible to lock up owing to well-planned alibis, lack of witnesses, poor legal processing, etc. He received the nickname “Quail Hunter” after claiming to authorities that he was hunting quail when found with a .44 Colt, a sawed-off shotgun, and a lantern with a red cloth wrapped around it, something that could be used to signal and stop trains. He was finally convicted in 1899 and served thirteen years in the Missouri Pen before being paroled in 1912. For a while Jack seemed to have reformed. He went on a tour, lecturing about the perils of his previous occupation. It is said that he played a train robber in the movie Beating Back, and Jack himself claimed that the movie portrayed his adventures. But Jack had not reformed and eventually went back to holding up trains, though this may have been more for fame than for fortune.

The morning of 2 Nov 1922 “Quail Hunter” held up a Frisco train, the "Memphis Flyer," near the little town of Seventy Six, Missouri. He and an accomplice uncoupled the passenger cars, and drove the locomotive south down the track past the Wittenberg station, where John William Summers was working. (Before his life of crime Kennedy had worked briefly as a locomotive engineer for the Southern Pacific.) "Quail Hunter" then stopped the locomotive near a bridge across the Brazeau River just south of the train station, where a getaway car was waiting. But there had been an informant and eleven armed lawmen (postal inspectors, RR detectives, sheriff's deputies) were also waiting.

 

Bridge where “Quail Hunter” met his end (photo 2011).

“Quail Hunter” Kennedy and his young accomplice were killed in the ensuing gun battle. The incident made papers around the country. Some of the John William Summers’s kids likely saw the bodies. Wittenberg grade schoolers were marched past “Quail Hunter’s” open coffin and told not to get in any trouble like that guy.