Cora Hubbard: Female Bank Robber in Missouri

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With cash in hand, Sheets herded Shields and Manning out of the bank ahead of him, and he and Tennyson marched the two bank officials at a ‘lively trot’ through the street along the same route the outlaws had come, keeping the bankers in front of them to discourage bystanders from shooting. Along the way, Tennyson relieved Manning of his $15 silver watch. When the party reached the stable, Sheets, Tennyson and Hubbard mounted up and headed out of town to the northeast, the same way they’d come in. One of the bandits celebrated their escape with a shot fired into the air as they rode away.

A mile down the road, the outlaws came upon Floyd Shields, the cashier’s 11-year-old son, riding a bay mare named Birdie, and Tennyson took the animal in exchange for his own mount. In Pineville, a posse hastily formed and followed the trio out of town. When the gang changed directions, circling around Pineville, someone came back to town to report that the brigands were headed toward Indian Territory. News of the robbery and a description of the bandits were quickly telegraphed to Noel, a small town five miles to the southwest. The outlaw who’d remained at the stable was identified as ‘a small young man or boy, part Indian.’

Late in the afternoon, about two miles south of Noel, a search party from Pineville got beyond the fugitives and joined another posse from Noel at the crossing of Butler Creek to lie in ambush. When the robbers rode down a gulch toward the creek as expected, the six-man posse opened fire. Both Tennyson and Sheets were filled with buckshot, Sheets’ horse was gravely wounded, and Cora Hubbard had her revolver shot out of her hand. The robbers managed to return fire, slightly wounding one of the deputies, but Birdie, the horse Tennyson was riding, became frightened and bolted away, separating Tennyson from his partners. Meanwhile, Hubbard and Sheets wheeled their horses around and made their escape back up the gulch through heavy timber before Sheets’ horse collapsed and died.

The posse turned its attention to Tennyson. They found Birdie grazing not far from the scene of the gunfight with her saddle still on but her bridle missing. At midmorning the next day, August 18, a report reached Southwest City, in the extreme southwest corner of Missouri, that a man answering the description of one of the robbers had taken breakfast earlier that morning in Indian Territory six miles to the west and paid for it with pennies. This seemed to confirm that he was one of the outlaws, since many pennies had been taken in the robbery. A posse headed by Joe Yeargain of Southwest City set out on the trail, and that evening at a lonely cabin 20 miles inside the territory, they found a wounded man in possession of a bridle, a .45 Winchester, a .45 revolver and $121.50 that had been taken in the robbery. Tennyson was captured without incident and brought back to Southwest City, on to Pineville the next day, August 19, and then to nearby Neosho, where he was housed in the Newton County jail.

Tennyson identified his sidekicks, and when word spread that one of them was a woman, the news was greeted with exaggerated excitement. The headline of one area newspaper called Cora Hubbard the ‘Second Belle Starr,’ referring to the famous female ‘outlaw’ in Indian Territory who was shot to death by an unknown person in 1889. Another headline read, ‘Female Bandit Rivals the Daring Deeds of Belle Starr and Kate Bender,’ the latter being the leading spirit of a murderous family that killed eight people in southeast Kansas in the early 1870s. When authorities extracted from Tennyson the additional information that Hubbard and Sheets were from Weir City, a posse led by Yeargain and cashier Shields set out for the fugitives’ hometown.

Meanwhile, Hubbard had dismounted a rider at gunpoint near the scene of the shootout in southwest Missouri, securing a horse for her partner, and the duo rode west toward Kansas. They didn’t stop until they reached Parsons, about 70 miles away. From Parsons, Hubbard took a train back to Weir City on the morning of August 21. Sheets promised to follow in a day or two, and from Weir City the pair planned to escape to Iowa.

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Tags: Historical Figures, People, The Wild West, Wild West, Women's History

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