Collecting American Outlaws
Wilbur Zink has preserved the Younger Gang’s history in more ways than one.
By: Jana Bommersbach 08/25/2009
Growing up in Missouri in the 1930s, Wilbur Zink loved listening to family legends as he sat at the kitchen table.
The one that most impressed him was the story of his grandfather, David Crowder, who was a teenager when the Pinkertons killed John Younger in 1874. A shopkeeper’s son in Roscoe, Missouri, Crowder stood guard over the body. Guarding a dead man? Zink says that’s not as strange as it sounds, considering what often happened to the bodies of the infamous: “The custom in those days was to cut off an ear and pickle it, or show off a body at a Wild West show.”
Roscoe wasn’t far from Zink’s own home of Springfield, and that family tie inspired him to study what became his first book, The Roscoe Gun Battle. That research led him to seek out items owned by the Youngers and their partners in crime, Jesse and Frank James. Zink amassed thousands of items, which would ultimately inspire him to save the Younger homestead.
“The first thing I got was Jim Younger’s violin,” says Zink, from his Scottsdale, Arizona, home, where he and his wife have wintered for the last 28 years before returning to Springfield. As he notes, Jim ended up in prison, where he was visited by an old sweetheart who had gotten married and had a daughter. Jim gave the little girl his violin, the only thing he had to offer as a gift.
Zink knew none of that when he wrote to the daughter decades later. His interest in this elderly woman was really to find out about her late mother, who had written a historical novel about Missouri. He wondered if she had left behind any research that could be valuable to his own work. Unfortunately, she had not, but the inquiry led to a friendship, as Zink learned the woman was all alone, having survived a husband and a son who would have been Zink’s age. “She favored me,” he says, and their friendship led to a wonderful gift—she gave him Jim Younger’s violin, which he has to this day.
“I [then] bought Cole Younger’s spurs,” he remembers, selling them along the way. He owned Jesse James’ gun belt, bought from a collector who’d gotten it through a pallbearer at Jesse’s funeral. He owns Jesse’s gold tie pin, and he eventually bought the entire “James Family Collection” of 25 letters from Frank James to his wife Anna, written while he was in jail awaiting trial. Zink is turning that treasure trove into another book that will be named after a command Frank included in the letters: “Burn These Letters.” Zink calls that collection his “most exciting” find.
“I’ve spoken all over Missouri on the James family and the Youngers,” Zink says, estimating he has given more than 100 speeches to civic and religious gatherings on the history of their own backyards. Those lectures were given on top of his two day jobs; he was a Ford dealer for 50 years and a pastor for small Christian churches.
While he collected these pieces of history, he came across a building that he decided should be saved for history’s sake—the Younger homestead.
Comments (1)
I have authentic wanted posters of belle star and jesse james; also a newspaper clip from late 1800
Post A Comment