Vitals

Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger, infamous bandit gang co-leader and ex-Confederate guerrilla

Northfield, Minnesota, September 1876

Film: The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid
Release Date: June 14, 1972
Director: Philip Kaufman
Costume Designer: Helen Colvig

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

150 years ago today, the James-Younger Gang further bloodied its infamous history when eight bandits outfitted with matching beige dusters and Winchester rifles rode into Northfield, Minnesota, intending to rob the First National Bank… but the small farm town fought back, arming themselves from hardware stores and sending the six surviving—and badly wounded—bandits fleeing with far more lead in their bodies than loot in their sacks. Two weeks later, only Frank and Jesse James remained at large after the three wounded Younger brothers were captured and another gang member killed.

The gang’s violent failure in Northfield marked the beginning of Jesse James’ downfall as the wild west’s arguably first outlaw king. Six years later, Jesse was betrayed and killed by his youngest recruit, Bob Ford, prompting his weary older brother Frank to ultimately surrender. Cole Younger and his brothers Bob and Jim would continue to languish in prison, though only Cole and Jim survived to be paroled in July 1901 as Bob died of tuberculosis more than a decade earlier. Jim committed suicide fifteen months after gaining his freedom, leaving Cole the lone surviving Younger.

Cole reconnected with Frank James, who retired from crime after his surprising acquittal decades earlier, and the two toured the South on a lecture circuit. The seventh of fourteen children, Thomas Coleman Younger long outlived all three of his younger criminal brothers when he died in his hometown of Lee’s Summit, Missouri in March 1916.

Filmed in Jacksonville, Oregon, The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid centers around the planning, execution, and fallout of the James-Younger gang’s attempted robbery on September 7, 1876, though writer/director Philip Kaufman presents it through a quasi-cinéma vérité, revisionist lens that strips down Jesse James’ undeserved folk hero status as Robert Duvall portrays him closer to the mercurial bandit killer he was reported to be in real life. The narrative focuses more sympathy around Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson) as the cooler-headed visionary opposing Duvall’s almost maniacally troubled Jesse, who envisions the Northfield bank robbery as an opportunity to continue fighting on behalf of the long-dead Confederacy.

“Ain’t that a wonderment?” Robertson’s Cole often exclaims out of sincere fascination for technical achievements ranging from a boxing toy to a steam engine. Born two days after the 47th anniversary of the gunfight on September 9, 1923, Robertson’s easy charm makes him a fine candidate for this version of Cole Younger… and I’m sure the balding bandit would have appreciated Robertson’s full head of hair while portraying him.

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What’d He Wear?

“You’re cattle-buyers… I could tell by your coats!” an unsuspecting Minnesotan greets the bandits on screen, referring to their off-white dusters. Aside from the many historical liberties made in service to its unique narrative, The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid accurately depicts the James-Younger gang descending upon the titular town in pale linen dusters.

These light, long, and loose-fitting coats originated among American horsemen to protect their clothing from trail dust… hence the name “duster”. They remain intrinstically associated with the wild west thanks to the Northfield incident and movies like Once Upon a Time in the West.

Contemporary newspaper clippings and the captured Jim Younger’s actual duster in the Minnesota Historical Society collection reflect a different type of garment than the full-sleeved, ankle-length coats worn by Cliff Robertson and his castmates portraying the gang. Made from an unbleached beige linen, the actual gang-worn dusters are considerably shorter at only 44 inches long with a club-collared cape layered over a sleeveless base. This base has large, low-positioned patch pockets and an additional welt at hand level on the left side—either to access a set-in pocket or a hole passing through the garment so the wearer could access a holstered revolver.

As Cole Younger, Robertson wears a more traditional “badass longcoat” that extend downs to his ankles. His mid-weight beige twill duster has eight large camel four-hole buttons arranged in two parallel columns for a full 8×4-button double-breasted closure extending from his waist up to the ulster collar he turns up at his neck, foregoing the single-button throat latch extending from the left side of the collar. Cole’s duster has set-in sleeves with plain-finished cuffs, and he tucks books into the large squared patch pockets over the hips. His long single vent up the back was characteristic of equestrian dusters, making them easier to wear on horseback.

Mark Lee Gardner’s excellent nonfiction volume Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West’s Greatest Escape describes Cole Younger wearing a “broad-brimmed hat,” represented in this film with Robertson’s well-traveled brown felt slouch hat. The hat has a brown grosgrain band and matching trim around the brim, which is curled around the edges including the slouch hat’s characteristically more dramatically upturned left side. A brown rawhide chinstrap hangs low from inside the hatband, looped through a sliding round gold-toned pendant with sunburst-style etching around a small white cabochon in the center.

Even after his clothes are bloodied early in the narrative during a failed law ambush, Cole wears the same costume throughout The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid. Rather than a continuity error, this seems to be presented as a character trait as Cole’s heavily worn tailcoat shows signs of regular mending—specifically red threading over both elbows—suggesting that he prefers relying on hardy, trusted clothes rather than buying the latest fashions.

This woolen frock coat is made from a diamond-birdseye tweed, comprised of an olive geometric grid organizing the pattern into repeating brown-dominant diamond-shaped cells that each have an olive “eye” in the center and colorful flecks that add rugged texture consistent with tweed’s sporting origins. It follows authentic period design with narrow shoulders, rear tails, and a horizontal seam around the coat’s waist line. Additional seams curve out and down from each armhole to the waist seam, with an olive recessed vestigial button placed at both intersections on the back of the jacket above the tails.

Cole’s tweed frock coat has short and full-bellied quasi-peak lapels that end high over his torso above a closely spaced five-button single-breasted front, the lowest button aligned with the waist seam. The straight hip pockets have narrowly welted openings, positioned above an inch below the waist seam. The sleeves have plain-finished cuffs without buttons, vents, or other onamentation.

He always wears his frock coat over a brown-and-gold-on-beige houndstooth single-breasted waistcoat (vest). A full-bellied shawl collar frames the low V-shaped opening above a three-button front that Cole typically wears only partially fastened. The vest has two lower-positioned hip pockets, with his gold pocket watch tucked into the left pocket and strung “single Albert”-style on a gold open-link chain across that side of the vest.

Cole’s eggshell cotton shirt may have once been pure white before it faded to this muted cream shade through frequent wearing and washing in his years as a frontier outlaw. Though the shirt’s conventional design of an attached spread collar, plain button-up front, and squared single-button cuffs could still easily be found in stores 150 years later, the collar shape and the shirt’s overall fuller cut reflect 1870s-era sartorial sensibilities with a ready-to-wear philosophy befitting the James-Younger lifestyle more than the fussier detachable collars typically found on dress shirts of this era (as recently discussed via Timothy Olyphant’s style as Seth Bullock on Deadwood.)

Cole typically dresses up his look with a black silk square-ended string tie, knotted in a messy bow.

Cole’s gun-belt is an unfussy swath of mid-brown edge-stitched leather, wide around the waist (with its cartridge loops) and tapered in the front where it fastens through a large curved gunmetal single-prong buckle. Shot All to Hell describes Cole and Jesse as both wearing “wide cartridge belts” in the immediate aftermath of the robbery, though I’ve found little other description of the actual outlaws’ rigs from that day.

Robertson’s screen-worn rig follows the correct old west style with a simple holster looped over the right side for a strong-side draw, rather than the low-slung Buscadero holsters popularized in early western films without actual frontier-era provenance.

Cole’s woolen flannel flat-front breeches are a dark, muted shade of taupe-brown. Despite the wide belt loops around his waist, Cole foregoes a trouser belt or braces, leaving his trousers to sag just below Robertson’s natural waist with only his gun-belt outside of them pressing them in place. (Integrated trouser belt loops did exist at this time in the 1870s, though they wouldn’t become as prevalent on men’s trousers for another half-century.) The full-top “frogmouth” pockets are an equestrian-informed western style, positioned at a slant to allow easier access on horseback.

He tucks his trouser bottoms into the calf-high shafts of dark-brown leather riding boots, styled with pull tabs on each side of the straight-cut tops. Unlike the real-life Clell Miller, who was reportedly wearing two different colored boots from different makers when he was killed at Northfield, these boots match.

The James-Younger gang shows a preference for pale salmon-colored cotton long johns, most clearly seen while bathing before their big bank job. As he never takes off his “lucky vest”, Cole evidently only wears the bottoms that end at his ankles, showing his light-gray socks.

Cole tells a group of children that his bulletproof “lucky vest” was crafted specially for him by a Kansas City harness-maker named J. Dudley Dobbs. “Made out of quarter-inch leather, sun-dried and brine-soaked… fourteen times in fourteen years, makes a fella wonder if he chose the right line of work,” he quips of having been shot more than a dozen times through the vest.

Cole shies away from flashy, unnecessary accessorizing, though he does don a set of round-lensed, silver-framed eyeglasses on the train north to Minnesota. This small affectation serves more to subtly disguise Cole as a non-threatening greenhorn rather than the cunning co-leader of a dangerous bandit gang.

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The Guns

Winchester Model 1892 Saddle Ring Carbine

“Our national sport, gentlemen, is shooting and always will be,” Cole presciently tells the group lined up for the Northfield vs. St. Paul baseball game, where he openly carries his lever-action Winchester Model 1892 Saddle Ring Carbine as part of his scheme with the bank’s assistant bookkeeper Frank Wilcox (Robert H. Harris), hoping to instill enough fear into the townspeople that they’ll recover from the Panic of ’73 and again stash their money at the First National Bank.

Cole later punctuates his statement by shooting the baseball out of the air—winning the game for Northfield as this destroys the ball while they’re ahead. As this gathers interest in shooting, Cole leads a demonstration for the locals and even crafts a unique sight specifically for the young Henry Wheeler (Barry Brown) on his Sharps rifle, who would ironically use this same rifle against Cole’s gang the following day… his optics now adjusted well enough to allow him to fatally wound Cole’s comrade-in-arms Clell Miller (R.G. Armstrong). But I digress.

Like its iconic Model 1873 predecessor, the Model 1892 was built to fire pistol-caliber rounds like .32-20, .38-40, and .44-40 Winchester Center Fire (WCF), as well as varmint rounds like .25-20 WCF and the 1930s-era .218 Bee. Ammunition capacity relied on the length of the under-barrel magazine tube, so a 20″-barreled Saddle Ring Carbine like Cole uses would take a couple less rounds than the full-length 24″-barreled Sporting Rifle. More than a million Model 1892 rifles were manufactured until production ended in 1941.

Colt Model 1878 Double Action Revolver

At first, I assumed Cole Younger’s nickel-plated six-shooter was one of the same Colt Single Action Army “Peacemaker” revolvers used by the rest of his gang that have been ubiquitous in western cinema since Edwin S. Porter began rolling his 35mm Edison in 1903. However, a closer look at the frame revealed a distinctive hump over the lockwork. This had me investigating my screenshots even more closely until I spied a cartridge-width groove recessed along the right side of the frame between the cylinder and hammer: one of the clearest cosmetic tells that Cole’s screen-used revolver is actually a Colt Model 1878 Double Action with a 5½-inch barrel.

The Model 1878 was Colt’s larger-framed evolution of its first mass-produced double-action revolvers introduced the previous year (the Model 1877 “Lightning” and “Thunderer”), also designed by Colt factory manager William Mason. While the Model 1878 was mechanically descended from the Model 1877 concept, both the Model 1877 and 1878 revolvers were aesthetically inspired by the successful Single Action Army (SAA)—right down to the familiar rounded ejector housing staggered down to the right of the barrel.

Colt marketed the Model 1878 as the “Frontier” and, likely capitalizing on the SAA’s reputation, the “Double Action Army”. It was offered in the same blued, nickel, and case-hardened steel finishes as the Single Action Army, with barrel configurations ranging from a compact 2½ inches up to the same 7½-inch barrel as a “Cavalry” SAA. A total of 51,210 Model 1878 revolvers were manufactured before Colt ended production in 1907, turning its attention to more modernized double-action revolvers like the New Service and Police Positive.

Over the course of this nearly thirty-year production timeline, Colt offered eight calibers for the Model 1878 Double Action, ranging from .32-20 and .38-40 Winchester Centre Fire (WCF) through .38 and .41 Long Colt up to British Commonwealth rounds like .455 Webley and .476 Eley, though the most popular chamberings were .44-40 WCF and .45 Long Colt—echoing consumer preferences for the Single Action Army.

Of course, a Colt Model 1878 Double Action revolver (or any double-action Colt revolver, for that matter) would be anachronistic for a scene set in September 1876. While it was likely chosen to allow Cliff Robertson to easily fire multiple shots without having to master thumbing back the hammer each time as he would on a single-action revolver, it also aligns with the movie’s characterization of the forward-thinking Cole “Ain’t that a wonderment?” Younger to arm him with a handgun that hasn’t even been developed yet.

The Real Cole Younger’s Revolvers

In real life, the actual Cole Younger likely raised hell in Northfield with a nickel-plated Smith & Wesson No. 3 Russian (First Model), a top-break single-action revolver chambered in .44 Russian. Fitted with an eight-inch barrel and ivory grips, this revolver (serial #28009) was taken from a wounded Cole by Sheriff James Gilspin after the Younger brothers were captured near Madelia two weeks after the raid.

Also captured at the time was Cole’s second, smaller revolver: a single-action Moore’s Patent Firearms Co. Belt Revolver (serial #880) with a six-inch barrel and a unique early swing-out cylinder system that takes seven rounds of .32-caliber rimfire ammunition. These fascinating brass-framed revolvers were manufactured by Daniel Moore’s company in Brooklyn for only two years at the start of Civil War. Less than 6,000 of these were made before production abruptly halted in 1863 after Smith & Wesson successfully pursued Moore for infringing the Rollin White bored-through-cylinder patent.

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How to Get the Look

A direct interpretation of Cliff Robertson’s wardrobe from The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid would almost certainly look just like cosplay, but that doesn’t mean someone can’t find inspiration and modernize this into a professiorial autumnal look: a uniquely woven brown tweed sports coat over a houndstooth waistcoat, cream shirt and dark tie, dark brown trousers and boots, and a classic trench coat more aligned with a rainy day than raining bullets.

• Beige linen ankle-length duster with 8×4-button double-breasted front, ulster collar, large patch hip pockets, and long rear vent
• Brown-on-olive diamond-birdseye woolen single-breasted 5-button frock coat with wide-bellied peak lapels, straight narrow-welted hip pockets, plain cuffs, and rear tails with two decorative back buttons
• Brown-and-gold-on-beige single-breasted 3-button waistcoat with shawl collar, low V-shaped neckline, and two pockets
• Dark taupe-brown woolen flannel flat-front trousers with slanted full-top frogmouth front pockets
• Eggshell-white cotton shirt with attached spread collar, plain button-up front, and single-button squared cuffs
• Black silk square-ended string tie
• Dark-brown leather riding boots with pull tabs
• Light-gray socks
• Light-salmon cotton long underwear
• Brown edge-stitched leather cartridge belt with curved gunmetal single-prong buckle and right-side holster
• Dark-brown felt slouch hat with brown grosgrain band, brown grosgrain edges, and brown rawhide chinstrap with gold sunburst-and-cabochon pendant

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

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The Quote

It ain’t hard gettin’ shot, it’s the gettin’ back up.