Jamie Pamela Rasmussen - The Missouri State Penitentiary: 170 Years inside The Walls

With whatever precaution, prison escapes always have been occurring, and always will be.Augustus W. Alexander, secretary of the Missouri State Board of Guardians (1873)

The year is 1905.

Four inmatesEd Raymond, Harry Vaughan, George Ryan, and Hiram Blakeapproach Deputy Warden R. W. See at the Missouri State Penitentiary. To his surprise, the inmates are armed with Colt .44s and explosives. Warden See pulls out his pistol, but the inmates, anxious for freedom, fire first. The warden is wounded in the hand, and the inmates take him prisoner. They demand that he order Captain John Clay to open the prison gates and the men advance, hustling the warden ahead of them and picking up two other hostages on the way.

Captain Clay sees the approaching inmates and quickly takes action. He tosses the keys to a guard on the other side of a heavily barred door. With a shout of rage, Vaughan shoots Clay in the head, killing him instantly. The inmates then rush to another gate, kill the guard there, and set explosives to blast the gate. The first blast fails to leave a hole big enough to crawl through. As the inmates hurry toset a second charge, guards sound the alarm, alerting local police and townspeople.

Finally, the explosions create a larger hole, and the four men wriggle through to freedom. They take off down the railroad tracks that run next to the prison. Shots ring out, and Blake goes down. He's taken to the prison infirmary where he later dies, but the other three escapees reach the railroad depot a few blocks from the prison at the foot of Monroe Street and commandeer a freight wagon. In the wagon, they race down Monroe Street. Police and townspeople shoot at the convicts, and the convicts return fire.

On Dunklin Street, at the Capital City Brewery, it has been business as usual until the telephone rings. The voice on the line warns the president of the brewery, Jacob Moerschel Sr., about the approaching convicts. The brewery employees rush out to watch in fascination and terror: historian Gary Kremer reported in his book Heartland History: Essays on the Cultural Heritage of the Central Missouri Region that one of the employees later recalled, We saw them driving south for some distance, the horses galloping and running at great speed, followed by citizens afoot, and by horse and buggy, exchanging gunfire, Western Movie style. As the wagon full of convicts passes, Moerschel steps out and gets a secure grip on the reins of the wagon's horses. Vaughan raises his gun to shoot, but it doesn't go off. Police rush in to arrest the convicts.

Vaughan, Raymond, Blake, and Ryan were added to the long list of Missouri State Penitentiary convicts who escaped only to be recaptured almost immediately. Ryan, in a bid for leniency, agreed to testify against his confederates. He explained that a released convict had smuggled weapons over the wall for them and that they had planned to hijack a train and blow up the bridges as they went.

Although the details are more fanciful, the escape of November 1905 was only one of thousands of escapes from the Missouri State Penitentiary over its 168-year existence. Such escapes and attempted escapes are born of the eternal struggle between dangerous men and the society they prey upon. Many people feel a fascination with escape attempts, fueled by stories like this. For most of our nation'shistory, this struggle has continued to play out in the courts and the prisons, and the Missouri State Penitentiary has epitomized American prisons.