Quail Hunter

The Wittenberg map in our last blog contained the note “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 reliable witnesses, poor legal processing, etc. He received the nickname “Quail Hunter” after claiming to authorities that he was hunting quail when, following a fall from his horse, he was found with two Colt revolvers, a sawed-off shotgun, a mask and false whiskers 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 twelve years in the Missouri Pen before being paroled in 1912. Following his release, Jack claimed to have reformed. He went on tours, showing a film he made of him robbing a train and giving lectures (he called them “sermons”) about the importance of honesty. But Jack had not reformed and eventually went back to holding up trains, though this may have been as much for fame as fortune.

In the early morning of 3 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 off with the locomotive and the mail and express cars. A few miles down the track, they stopped the train, robbed the mail clerks of several pouches, disconnected the locomotive, and drove 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. John William Summers and his family likely saw the bodies. Hundreds of spectators filed past the bodies of the two slain bandits at the Wittenberg undertaker’s establishment.