July 2013-
In 1893, the Dalton Gang attempted to rob two banks at the same time in Coffeyville, Kan. All the members were gunned down by armed citizens and died in their boots, all except the youngest of the Daltons, 27-year-old Emmett.
Surviving nearly two-dozen bullet holes in him, Emmett would spend the next 14 years in the Leavenworth federal penitentiary until he was pardoned and released. The sole surviving Dalton had every intention of beginning a new law-abiding life. Until, that is, he ran across my grandfather and heard his idea about airplanes.
If he was anything, my grandfather was a grand storyteller. As a young boy who came to his house each Sunday afternoon, fresh from Sunday school, I ran from my parents 1959 Buick up his driveway and onto the porch just listen to the tales from his life in Oklahoma Territory.
He showed me a newspaper clipping about the time he squared off in the street for a gunfight. (My grandfather won, fortunately for me.) He was part Osage Indian, enough to be cut into a share of tribe’s considerable bounty from the oil boom that had dominoed across Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas in the early 1900s. Buying Pierce-Arrows and drunkenly driving them out of gas, just to leave them and buy another, was all in a day’s fun.
It may have been that tribal pipeline of money that attracted Emmett Dalton to my grandfather. In those days you left prison with little more than a handshake. To the possibly reformed bank robber, my grandfather represented a meal ticket, and for my grandfather, Emmett was a chance to befriend one of the West’s true celebrities, a genuine Dalton and someone who was blood kin to the likes of outlaws Bob and Cole Younger.
When my grandfather suggested the two become partners in owning a pool hall, the latest iteration of the saloon business, it was the beginning of a lifelong relationship.
According to my grandfather, he and Emmett were at the snooker table one afternoon when three men from Kansas approached them. The tallest, Walter, introduced himself and his associate Lloyd. The kid they had with them, Clyde, shook hands but did little more than smile.
While they never spoke of it directly, the three men had apparently heard of my grandfather’s eagerness to dole out his money, and approached him with a business proposition. Would he be interested in getting out of the saloon business and bankrolling a new company that would build flying machines?
To try and seal the deal, the three men brought drawings of their ideas. Here was an airplane that would soon be in every garage, they imagined. Another design would be of intense interest to the United States military. A government contract like that one alone could make them all rich. Why wouldn’t Emmett and my grandfather join with them in an idea whose time had come?
The aircraft designs had been hand-colored to make them look like they were literally flying off the paper. And in the front open cockpit sat a pilot, a daredevil hero of this new 20th century invention.
Was this the future for two anachronisms with too much time on their hands, but an eye on the sky?
Of course a decision like this was nothing to be hurried, and not to be attempted at all without a thorough discussion between the two new partners—probably over two tall glasses of rye.
But from the beginning, my grandfather told Emmett this could be a golden opportunity, that the airplanes were surely the future. Hell, the West they’d loved and lived in was dying. The buffalo were gone, fences had killed the life of the cowboy and what little was left of Manifest Destiny was manifesting itself into cities! Maybe taking to the air was the only place left to have a decent life? Was it the last great adventure?
My grandfather admitted he could imagine himself in one of those leather helmets and a pair of goggles, a pure white scarf around his neck, flying over a rolling prairie where he once moved so freely with just a horse… and besides, my grandfather also imagined that an airplane could be business tool, a wonderful way to take advantage of this partnership’s combined talents: they could use an airplane to rob banks.
Like many great epiphanies, my grandfather’s idea was simple in its brilliance. After Emmett employed his considerable expertise in making a large withdrawal from a local bank or railway express car, my grandfather would fly him hundreds of miles away, eliminating the need to stash strings of horses along the getaway route in order to stay ahead of the posses.
No lawmen had airplanes, so there was no way anyone could catch them! And anytime they wanted, they could just land and repeat the whole process over again. How, on God’s green earth, could such a plan fail?
In my grandfather’s mind, this idea of using an airplane as a getaway vehicle was nothing short of an epiphany. He could imagine himself employing these three men immediately to make airplanes specially fitted for their missions.
There could be special compartments to store bags of money or gold coins, and one of the airplane designs my grandfather had looked over had a big gun mounted right up front. Now THAT was a practical design, my grandfather thought.
And with Emmett’s connections, perhaps the two partners could make a living in aviation selling similar airplanes to other highwaymen trying to make ends meet in a changing world.
My grandfather imagined that he would become the center post of this operation once he learned how to fly. He envisioned himself flying high over the scene of the crime, while his partner handled his expertise in a bank below.
But as often is the case, not everyone looks at aviation for everything it can be.
As tempting as it was, Emmett refused the scheme. My grandfather never learned to fly, and the three Kansas businessmen—Walter Beech, Lloyd Stearman and Clyde Cessna—left Oklahoma and drifted north back across the border into Kansas to look for believers elsewhere.
Emmett Dalton moved on to California and my grandfather lived the rest of his life a few miles from where he grew up. Just before he died in 1937, Emmett Dalton called my grandfather to reiterate his lifelong point about the folly of aviation, telling my grandfather about some fool woman who had just disappeared somewhere in the Pacific while trying to fly around the world. But again his chiding fell on deaf ears. To my grandfather, flying would always look like the last best thing left to do.
Screenwriter, philanthropist and good guy Lyn Freeman has been writing aviation articles since before John Glenn joined the Marines. He is the former editor of Plane & Pilot magazine, founder and current chairperson of the Build-a-Plane organization, a master scuba diver, a championship table tennis player and an all-around Renaissance man.
