Bonnie and Clyde, clowning for the camera in 1933
Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (kneeling at right) and the posse that ambushed Bonnie and Clyde in Louisiana in May 1934
Bullet holes in Bonnie and Clyde’s car after the ambush
Introduction and Historical Context of Bonnie and Clyde
Although their career in crime lasted only two years, from 1932-34, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow became legendary outlaws during that brief period, dying violent deaths at the hands of a posse led by the equally legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. There have been at least five films based on the couple’s escapades, including Gun Crazy (1949) and most importantly Bonnie and Clyde (1967). This latter film was a major influence on many subsequent movies, and the portrayals of the couple by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway made them unlikely heroes of the youth rebellion and counterculture of the 1960s. George Fame recorded a pop music version of “The Ballad and Bonnie and Clyde” a year after this movie was released, and it was often heard on the radio in the late-1960s and 1970s (Appendix II). In reality, most of the movies and books are “grossly inconsistent with historical facts” and records available from the time (Milner 1).
Bonnie and Clyde’s world was a highly harsh and brutalized one compared to the relative prosperity of the 1960s, though, a society of violent class and racial hatreds, In the South and Midwest in the 1920s and 1930s, small farmers and sharecroppers hated the banks and large landowners, while the Ku Klux Klan thrived among poor whites, resulting in the “frequent lynching of blacks and shooting and pistol-whipping of Mexicans, Indians, and Orientals” (Milner 8). During the depths of the Great Depression in 1930-33, over 10,000 banks failed, “swallowing nearly $3 billion in depositor’s money, which simply vanished” (Milner 3). In big cities, the unemployment rate rose to 60-80% and malnutrition became commonplace, while over one-third of farmers lost their land and agricultural prices fell 65% in three years. In this historical context, with widespread fear and resentment of the wealthy, bankers and big capitalists, Bonnie and Clyde appeared to be a “modern day Robin Hood and Maid Marion”, redistributing some of the money to the poor (Milner 4).
Bonnie and Clyde were indeed famous in their time, particularly because of their romance and the fact that the banks and police they targeted were widely hated during the Great Depression. This was an era of rampant crime in which the Prohibition gangsters like Al Capone were still active, while new gangs of motorized robbers and killers like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson roamed the rural areas of the nation’s heartland with impunity. Bonnie Parker contributed to their legend from the start by submitting her amateur poetry to the newspapers, including her own version of “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” (Appendix I), which anticipated their violent deaths at the hands of vengeful lawmen. No one will ever know how many robberies and murders they committed, although at times they were daring enough to raid even National Guard armories for weapons and break other gang members out of prison. They ranged as far north as Minnesota and Illinois, but the bulk of their crimes occurred in Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri. Even after their deaths, other former members of the Barrow gang continued on in the same style until being arrested, executed or gunned down by the police. Interestingly, the revelations of the gang members also led to the resignation of Col. Lee Simmons, the head of the Texas prison system, after a public investigation in 1935 proved him guilty of corruption and brutality. This was ironic because Simmons had hired Frank Hamer as a special agent in early-1934 with orders to shoot the Barrow gang on sight, and he had in fact killed Bonnie and Clyde within three months after receiving his commission.
Background of Bonnie and Clyde
Clyde Barrow was born in 1909, one of eight children of the impoverished and illiterate tenant farmers, Henry and Cumie Barrow. He came of age in a semi-frontier society in Texas that still admired outlaw heroes like Jesse James and Cole Younger. According to relatives and gang members, he had a sociopathic and unpredictable personality, with a “volcanic temper inherited from his parents, a frustration that grew from his family’s devastating and grinding povertyand an insatiable lust for fast, sleek automobiles” (Milner 2). For a time after his family fled their hardscrabble life on a tenant farm, they lived under a viaduct in Dallas, Texas because they could not even afford to rent a slum apartment (Hendley 4). Eventually, Henry Barrow found employment in an iron foundry and then opened a small store and gas station, which failed during the Great Depression. Clyde was also quite talkative and charming when not given to sudden fits of explosive rage and violence. He was quite close to his brother Marvin (Buck), who was part of the gang for only a relatively short time in 1933 before being mortally wounded in a gunfight with the police. Clyde did not drink at all, while Buck was an alcoholic and had a very subdued and sullen personality compared to his younger brother.
Bonnie Parker was born in Oklahoma in 1910, three years after it became a state, and originally her family was not as impoverished as Clyde’s. Her father Henry followed the respectable trade of bricklayer until his death in 1914 or 1915, at which time his widow Emma moved with her three children to the Dallas slum of Cement City, where they lived with her parents. Unlike the Barrow’s, Emma was also devoutly religious and regularly attended the Baptist church (Hendley 6). She never dated at all until she was fifteen, and was mainly known as a “good student” who “frequently won prizes for writing essays, reciting poetry and spelling” (Milner 16). She was working as a waitress in Dallas when she met Clyde at a friend’s house in January 1930, and found that they both had a taste for cocoa and chocolate. Although Clyde had been involved briefly with two other women before this time, after encountering Bonnie it was love at first sight, and he “never romantically considered another woman again” (Milner 15).
Clyde and Buck Barrow were already heavily involved in criminal activities by this time, so Bonnie could have had no illusions about the type of man he really was. At a young age, both brothers already had experience with bootlegging, car theft, and armed robbery. In 1929, Buck was wounded by police while fleeing from the scene of a burglary, shot in the knee after the getaway car that Clyde was driving crashed into a tree (Milner 8). At this time, Buck also met Blanche Caldwell, who was like Bonnie also from Oklahoma. She was from a broken home as well, raised by her father Matthew, a part-time minister, after her mother Lillian had left home and divorced him. Blanche had been married to an abusive alcoholic named John Callaway, whose treatment of her was so violent that she was “unable to bear children” (Barrow xxix). She ran away to Dallas in 1929, where she soon met Buck Barrow, just around the time he was sentenced to four years in prison. They were married in 1931, after her divorce from Callaway was finalized and he had escaped from prison. She persuaded him to give himself up and return voluntarily to prison, where he remained until the completion of his sentence in March 1933 (Barrow xxx).
Bonnie and Clyde’s Crime Spree, 1932-34
At this late date, it is virtually impossible to be certain how many robberies and murders the Barrow gang committed, and even Bonnie and Clyde protested that the police and newspapers regularly blamed them for crimes they did not commit. In addition, members of the gang also acted either on their own accord or split off and formed separate gangs that were involved in acts in which Bonnie and Clyde were not even present. As their fame (or infamy) grew, however, it became convenient for the media and law enforcement to exaggerate the size and daring of their criminal activities. Clyde received a two-year prison sentence for auto theft and burglary in March 1930, not long after he met Bonnie. He escaped from jail using a gun she smuggled in to him, but was soon recaptured and sent to the brutal prison farm at Eastham. In late-1931, he killed a convict trustee named Ed Crowder, and then deliberately cut off one of his own toes so he could be sent to the prison hospital at Huntsville. After his parole in February 1932, he supposedly swore vengeance on the entire prison system for inflicting so much sadistic treatment on him (Barrow xxxviii).
On March 25, 1932, Clyde’s true crime spree began when he joined Ralph Fults and Raymond Hamilton in robbing the Simms Oil Refinery in Dallas and then the First National Bank in Lawrence, Kansas. Shortly afterward, Bonnie and Fults were wounded in a shootout with a sheriff’s posse in Kemp. Texas and Bonnie was jailed for several months. At this time, Clyde killed a storeowner in a robbery in Hillsboro, Texas and Deputy Sheriff Eugene Moore in Oklahoma (Barrow xxxix). Hamilton also began robbing banks independently, as did other members of the gang, and was arrested in Michigan in late-1932 before being returned to Texas. Clyde and his childhood friend W.D. Jones killed a man named Doyle Johnson in Temple, Texas in the process of stealing his car in January 1933, and not long afterward Clyde also killed another deputy sheriff in Dallas (Barrow xl). When Bonnie and Clyde robbed a bank in Missouri in early-1933 they also abducted a police officer named Tom Persell and “spoke freely of numerous bank robberies” (Barrow xl).
Buck and Blanche joined the gang shortly after he was released from prison in March 1933, and they already began to formulate a plan to raid the prison farm at Eastham to release Hamilton and other gang members. After being extradited back to Texas, Hamilton had been sentenced to 167 years for various crimes and an additional 99 for murder. In April 1933, Blanche and buck travelled with Bonnie and Clyde to Joplin, Missouri, and in a shootout that ensured when police surrounded their rented apartment, two officers were killed (Barrow xxxi). Meanwhile, Blanche, Buck, Bonnie and Clyde robbed a bank in Okabena, Minnesota and had to “shoot their way out of town” (Barrow xli). When Bonnie was severely burned in a car accident that summer, Clyde sent for her sister Billie Jean to take care of here in their hideouts in Arkansas and Iowa, while soon afterward Buck and W.D. Jones were involved in another gunfight that lead to the death of Deputy Sheriff Henry Humphrey (Barrow xlii). Soon afterward, they robbed the National Guard Armory at Enid, Oklahoma to obtain more weapons.
While hiding out at a motor court in Platte City, Missouri on July 19, 1933, the gang was surrounded by police and Buck was mortally wounded in the gun battle while Blanche sustained injuries that eventually led to the loss of sight in one eye. They fled to an abandoned amusement park in Dexter, Iowa, where they were again surrounded by a posse. Blanche was captured here while Buck died soon afterward in a local hospital. Bonnie and Clyde were wounded in the gunfight, as was W.D. Jones, but they managed to escape by fleeing on foot across country (Barrow xxxii). Blanche was sentenced to ten years in prison, plus an additional year on federal charges, and was released in March 1939 (Barrow xxxiv).
Clyde was determined to avenge his brother and carry out the raid on the Eastham prison farm, and he obtained the weapons for this attack by robbing another National Guard armory in Platteville, Illinois. Although Bonnie and Clyde were wounded in a shootout with Dallas sheriffs in November 1933, they evaded capture once again and carried out the Eastham raid in January 1934 (Barrow xliv). One guard was killed while Hamilton, Henry Methvin and three other convicts were freed. After this, the gang again began robbing banks in Iowa and Oklahoma, but the Eastham attack turned out to be the downfall of Bonnie and Clyde. Col. Lee Simmons, the head of the Texas prison system, was enraged and embarrassed by the attack, so he hired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer in February 1934 with orders to find the gang and “shoot everyone in sight” (Barrow xliv). Hamer recruited five handpicked deputies for this task as the gang continued to rob banks in Missouri and Texas, and killed two Texas State Highway Patrol officers in April 1934 (Barrow xlv). On April 6, 1934, Clyde and Methvin also killed a police officer named Cal Campbell in Oklahoma before moving north to Iowa to commit more bank robberies. Hamer learned that Bonnie and Clyde were hiding out on Methvin’s family farm in Gibsland, Louisiana, and approached his father, offering Henry a pardon in exchange for his cooperation in setting up an ambush. Bonnie and Clyde suspected nothing until the last minute on May 23, 1934, when Hamer and his men opened fire on them from a concealed position, ridding them with rifle and machine gun bullets (Barrow xlv).
Conclusion: The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde
Even after the death of Bonnie and Clyde, some former gang members like Hamilton and Fults continued robbing banks and engaging in shootouts with the police until well into 1935. They even managed to escape an ambush by over 100 National Guardsmen in Mississippi, causing the governor to declare a state of emergency. Hamilton was then recaptured in Texas, sentenced to death in the electric chair, only to escape again. He was captured for a final time in April 1935 and executed in May, along with Joe Palmer, another one-time member of the Barrow gang (Barrow xlvi). It was certainly one of the most incredible crime sprees in U.S. history, leaving a trail of violence and mayhem across the nation’s midsection, and this was in an era when criminals seemed larger than life. Indeed, it was really the end of the American outlaw era, when gangs in motor vehicles replaced those on horseback, as in the Wild West legends. Frank Hamer was also a Texas lawman who seemed to have emerged out of a frontier legend, and in fact had been employed for many years taming extremely violent towns in remote areas. Physically, he also towered above the rather diminutive Bonnie and Clyde, who had been left rather short and thin because of their impoverished backgrounds. Hamer was over six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds, while Bonnie was not quite five feet tall and Clyde not much larger in stature (Milner 6). In reality, they were children of poverty, deprivation and brutalization, very much unlike the glamorous and beautiful young people played by Beatty and Dunaway in the 1967 film.
There have been many books about Bonnie and Clyde and at least five motion pictures, with the first one being made in 1937, just three years after their death. Certainly the family of Frank Hamer, who died in 1955, did not care for how he was portrayed in the 1967 movie while Blanche Barrow was upset that it showed her to be a “screaming horse’s ass” (Barrow xx). In reality, she was not nearly so helpless and innocent as the image on screen, since she too drove getaway cars and participated in robberies and shootouts with the police. Most of the movies and sensationalistic media stories should be considered part of the mythmaking and hero worship of two rather brutal criminals, although in there are a few more reliable sources. Bonnie’s mother and Clyde’s sister Nell also wrote an account of their lives in The Fugitives, which was published in 1934. Just about all the information concerning their early lives of hardship and poverty comes from this source, although obviously from two persons who were highly sympathetic to them. W.D. Jones, who was Clyde’s close friend in childhood and then a gang member who told the police everything he know after being captured, also wrote an article in 1968 called “Riding with Bonnie and Clyde” (Milner 2). Blache also began writing one of the most revealing accounts of all, which she began early on during her time in prison but remained unpublished at the time of her death in 1988. She was often worried that she might be charged with murder, so she presented herself as a victim “blinded to reality by her deep, intense love for Buck Barrow” (Barrow xx). Undoubtedly, this was also the main motive that Bonnie had for remaining with Clyde to the death, and both women knew very well that the Barrow brothers were already career criminals at the time they first met them. They were all products of a certain time and place, and an extremely harsh and deprived background, which is also why so many Americans experiencing the nightmare years of the Depression could identify so readily with them. All of them can be understood within this context, which is not to condone or glamorize their crimes or turn them into working-class heroes. If such heroes are needed, there are many better candidates from that period who qualify.
WORKS CITED
Barrow, Blanche Caldwell. My Life with Bonnie and Clyde. University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Fame, George. “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” (1968). You Tube. Uploaded November 10, 2007.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBQ0FR_rQ5Q&feature=player_detailpage
Guinn, Jeff. Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde. NY: Simon & Schuster, 2009.
Hendley, Nate. Bonnie and Clyde: A Biography. Greenwood Press, 2007.
Milner, E.R. The Lives and Times of Bonnie and Clyde. Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.
Parker, Bonnie. “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde”. History Matters. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5061/
APPENDIX I
Bonnie Parker, “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde”
“We, each of us, have a good alibi
For being down here in the joint;
But few of them are really justified,
If you get right down to the point.
You have heard of a woman’s glory
Being spent on a downright cur.
Still you can’t always judge the story
As true being told by her.
As long as I stayed on the island
And heard confidence tales from the gals,
There was only one interesting and truthful,
It was the story of Suicide Sal.
Now Sal was a girl of rare beauty,
Though her features were somewhat tough,
She never once faltered from duty,
Sal told me this tale on the evening
Before she was turned out free,
And I’ll do my best to relate it,
Just as she told it to me.
I was born on a ranch in Wyoming,
Not treated like Helen of Troy,
Was taught that rods were rulers,
And ranked with greasy cowboys. . . .
You’ve read the story of Jesse James
Of how he lived and died
If you’re still in need of something to read
Here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow Gang,
I’m sure you all have read
how they rob and steal and those who squeal
are usually found dying or dead.
There’s lots of untruths to these write-ups
They’re not so ruthless as that
Their nature is raw, they hate all law
Stool pigeons, spotters, and rats.
They call them cold-blooded killers
They say they are heartless and mean
But I say this with pride, I once knew Clyde
When he was honest and upright and clean.
But the laws fooled around and taking him down
and locking him up in a cell
'Til he said to me, "I’ll never be free,
So I’ll meet a few of them in hell."
The road was so dimly lighted
There were no highway signs to guide
But they made up their minds if all roads were blind
They wouldn’t give up 'til they died.
The road gets dimmer and dimmer
Sometimes you can hardly see
But it’s fight man to man, and do all you can
For they know they can never be free.
But all in all, our troubles are small
'Til we get like Bonnie and Clyde.
If a policeman is killed in Dallas
And they have no clue or guide
If they can’t find a fiend, just wipe the slate clean
And hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.
There’s two crimes committed in America
Not accredited to the Barrow Mob
They had no hand in the kidnap demand
Nor the Kansas City Depot job.
A newsboy once said to his buddy
"I wish old Clyde would get jumped
In these hard times we’s get a few dimes
If five or six cops would get bumped."
The police haven’t got the report yet
But Clyde called me up today
He said, "Don’t start any fights, we aren’t
working nights, we’re joining the NRA."
Is known as the Great Divide
Where the women are kin, and men are men
And they won’t stool on Bonnie and Clyde.
If they try to act like citizens
And rent a nice flat
About the third night they’re invited to fight
They don’t think they’re tough or desperate
They know the law always wins
They’ve been shot at before, but they do not ignore
That death is the wages of sin.
Some day they’ll go down together
And they’ll bury them side by side
But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.”
Source: Bonnie Parker, “The Story of Suicide: The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”
APPENDIX II
George Fame, “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” (1968)
“Bonnie and Clyde were pretty lookin' people
But I can tell you people They were the devil's children,
Bonnie and Clyde began their evil doin'
One lazy afternoon down Savannah way,
They robbed a store, and high-tailed outa that town
Got clean away in a stolen car,
And waited till the heat died down,
Bonnie and Clyde advanced their reputation
And made the graduation
Into the banking business.
"Reach for the sky" sweet-talking Clyde would holler
As Bonnie loaded dollars in the dewlap bag,
Now one brave man-he tried to take 'em alone
They left him Iyin' in a pool of blood,
And laughed about it all the way home.
Bonnie and Clyde got to be public enemy number one
Running and hiding from ev'ry American lawman's gun.
They used to laugh about dyin',
But deep inside 'em they knew
That pretty soon they'd be lyin'
Beneath the ground together
Pushing up daisies to welcome the sun
And the morning dew.
Acting upon reliable information
A fed'ral deputation laid a deadly ambush.
When Bonnie and Clyde came walking in the sunshine
A half a dozen carbines opened up on them.
Bonnie and Clyde, they lived a lot together
And finally together they died.
