John Hallwas - Dime Novel Desperadoes: The Notorious Maxwell Brothers

Dime Novel Desperadoes

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The Notorious
Maxwell Brothers

John E. Hallwas

University of Illinois Press

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

First Illinois paperback 2011
2008 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

The Library of Congress cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Hallwas, John E.
Dime novel desperadoes : the notorious
Maxwell brothers / John E. Hallwas.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03352-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Maxwell family.
2. OutlawsIllinoisBiography.
3. OutlawsWisconsinBiography.
4. BrothersIllinoisBiography.
5. BrothersWisconsinBiography.
6. IllinoisBiography.
7. WisconsinBiography.
8. IllinoisHistory19th century.
9. WisconsinHistory19th century.
I. Title.

F546.M39H35 2008
977.3'0410922dc22 [B] 2008002174

Paperback ISBN 978-0-252-07804-0

Dime Novel Desperadoes

is dedicated to the following archivists, genealogists, and local historians who responded to many inquiries during a period of several years, generously shared their knowledge and their accumulated records, and helped to bring this long-forgotten story to the modern public:

Walter Brieshke, Illinois Department of Corrections (retired)

Catherine Dodson, Davee Library, University of WisconsinRiver Falls

Gary L. Jacobsen, Maxwell family genealogist, Colorado

Marion C. Johnson, Fulton County (Illinois) Historical Society

Terry Mesch, Pepin County (Wisconsin) Historical Society

Stanley N. Miller, Cumberland County (Pennsylvania) Historical Society

Kathy Nichols, Archives, Malpass Library, Western Illinois University

Brent T. Peterson, Washington County (Minnesota) Historical Society

Catherine Renschler, Adams County (Nebraska) Historical Society

Kevin Thorie, Library Learning Center, University of WisconsinStout

Donna (Maxwell) Tivener, genealogical researcher, Ohio

Stephanie J. Zeman, Davee Library, University of WisconsinRiver Falls

It is very easy to blame a wrongdoer; it is very difficult to understand him.

attributed to novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky

By the time we reach an age at which we can critically reflect on who we are, we are already somebody we did not choose to be.

Douglas V. Porpora, Landscapes of the Soul

None of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control.... Perhaps it would be more honest to say, My decision [or act] was determined by internal forces I do not understand.

Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind

For men who have lived... on a diet of contempt and disdain, the temptation to gain instant respect [with a gun] can be worth far more than the cost of going to prison, or even of dying.

James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic

Criminals are made by environment and circumstance.... The worst thing you can do to a criminal is to put him in a class by himself, to treat him as if he were a creature set apart. He is just an average man who has gone wrong....

bandit Henry Starr, in George D. Hendricks,
The Bad Man of the West

The facts are, Lon, we seem born to be unfortunate, [said Ed]. We have been wronged, and when we retaliate... the world turns against us. We are branded as outlaws and hunted as if we were wolves.

We seem likely to never get justice here, said Lon.

the Maxwell brothers, in a dime novel,
December 31, 1881

No outlaws who achieved nationwide notoriety have been so thoroughly forgotten as the Maxwell brothers. Except for occasional retrospective newspaper items and one poorly researched article in Real West magazine, they have not received any historical attention. Even supposedly thorough reference books, such as Bill ONeals Pimlico Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters and Jay Robert Nashs Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen and Outlaws, fail to mention them, while including hundreds of less noted figures.

Surely one reason is geographical: The Maxwell brothers committed most of their crimes, including the one that made them notorious, east of the Mississippi River, in Illinois and Wisconsin. Had they killed lawmen from two counties in a gunfight at Deadwood or Tombstone, or had they been the focus of a huge multistate manhunt in the far West, they would still be well-known desperadoes. This suggests an ongoing problem with scholarship on American outlaws: Historians have usually limited their focus to the region west of the Mississippi River, simply because so much outlawry took place there. ONeal, for example, refers to no gunfighters who developed their reputations east of the big river, while Nashs list of 1,100 outlaws mentions only the Reno brothers and a few other figures from that area.

Also, the outlaw career of the Maxwells was brief, essentially confined to the summer of 1875 and the summer and fall of 1881. During most of the intervening years, Ed, the instigator of their lawbreaking, was in prison, and Lon, after a much shorter term behind bars, was struggling to go straight.

The recovered story of the Maxwells is important not just because it adds two figures to the short list of American outlaws who achieved national attention in their own time, but also because it provides insight into the character of violent men and sheds light on a notably violent era in American history.

The notorious Maxwells received so much newspaper coverage, which included several interviews of Ed and letters by both brothers, that their psychological makeup can be readily reconstructed. They provide a compelling case study of rootless, alienated men whose inner problems fostered ongoing conflict with societyand made them dangerous. By the same token, we can understand Ed and Lon well enough to regard them as complex figures who had positive qualities too and felt disrespected by others and oppressed by powerful forces. Neither monsters of evil nor innocent victims, they were very much like the rest of us, which makes for sympathetic comprehension of their struggle and emotional engagement in the story of their unfolding destiny.

The Maxwell saga also reminds us that identities are deeply related to cultural values and social conditions. Individuals become who they are partly because of where they live, who they know, and what they experience or struggle with. For that reason, Dime Novel Desperadoes reflects in some detail the rural and small-town world of the Maxwell brothersa world of destabilizing westward movement, frustrating failure, extreme poverty, frontier rowdyism, conflict over Civil War issues, prejudice against landless workers, escalating crime, ineffective courts, and harsh, often counterproductive penitentiaries. It is not surprising that the Maxwell story symbolizes the anxieties of an era. Indeed, it reflects perennial forces that prompt disorder in American culture.