Red Crown Tourist Court - The Gun Battle

The Gun Battle

All the preparations, reinforcements, and armaments made the Red Crown firefight something no other Barrow Gang gunbattle to date had been: a fairer fight. At Stringtown, Joplin and Alma, officers had wandered into encounters with the Barrows totally unaware that they were about to go up against gunmen with vastly superior weaponry — and with no compunction about using it quickly and ferociously. "The poorly armed cops expected to confront small-timers whose firepower was equally limited," writes Jeff Guinn of the earlier confrontations, but tonight's encounter would be "a coordinated assault by well-prepared, well-armed officers aware of exactly who they were up against."

By 1 a.m., the revelers had mostly departed the Red Crown Tavern, so Sheriff Coffey, Captain Baxter and eleven patrolmen, county cops and Jackson County officers commenced their operation. Accounts differ in details, but Coffey certainly advanced on the cabins; he may have been accompanied by Baxter and possibly others, carrying one or more massive shields made out of thick boilerplate, "like medieval knights." Significantly, the two Jackson County officers pulled the armored car up to block the cabins' garage doors — so the gang was completely hemmed in. Coffey rapped sharply on the door of Buck and Blanche's cabin. Blanche called out that she wasn't dressed, to which Coffey replied, "Well put your trousers on and come out yourself." He then asked where the men were, and she told him, as loudly as she could so Clyde would hear it, that they were in the other cabin.

Clyde did indeed hear it — and he and Jones unleashed a mighty torrent of fire, joined almost immediately by Buck, all three shooting their BARs right through the windows and doors of the cabins. Coffey's nineteen year-old son Clarence was watching from behind and later said his father "was pushed back like he was hit by a high-pressure hose." The boilerplate shield stood up to actual penetration, but the BARs' impact was literally staggering to the sturdily-built sheriff. The flying glass and wood chip debris abraded the officers, but they were able to fall back, miraculously without being hit by any outlaw gunfire. They returned the fire, but even their substantial, .45-caliber Thompson "sub-guns" were no match for the bandits' thundering Browning output: one BAR slug exiting the cabin penetrated the rear wall of the kitchen in the Tavern, passed through both walls of a stove and wound up lodged in Coffey, Jr's arm; others penetrated Tavern walls at both ends of the place, and several ricocheted off the pavement of the Slim's Castle parking lot. People for miles around heard the gunfire on the quiet night air.

Inside their cabin, Clyde and Jones dashed through the internal door to the garage and prepared to get the car loaded and started, but when they peeked out the garage door, they saw the armored car blocking their exit. The vehicle outside was not a military or Brinks-truck style armored car, but a normal-appearing automobile with bulletproof glass and extra boilerplate embedded in its body for protection; the problem was, it was not all that bulletproof. The outlaws opened fire on it immediately and the armor-piercing rounds from their BARs found their way inside: driver George Highfill was hit in both knees and either the horn button or the horn itself was hit and it began blaring in an unyielding wail. The posse assumed this was a cease-fire signal and they did just that; many fell back. One headlight had been shot askew into a straight-up beam, and Highfill decided his machine was just not up to this particular challenge, so he backed it away from the action, and the cabins' garages were no longer barricaded. To add to the confusion, an officer back behind the cabins fired off a tear gas rocket that overshot (considerably) the cabins and came down across the road in the Slim's Castle parking lot — with the gas then blowing back over to fog the officers' eyes on the Red Crown side.

Clyde Barrow recognized a stroke of luck when he saw one — the main impediment to his escape just backed away — and he bundled Jones and Parker into the car, easily accomplished through the internal door. Buck and Blanche were not so lucky, though; there was no such door between their cabin and the garage — they had to come out into the open to get to the car. When they made their dash, the officers opened up again with their large caliber "Tommy" guns, and a bullet hit Buck in the left temple and exited out his forehead. He was firing his BAR at waist level when he was hit, and it continued to fire in an arc skyward as he was knocked off his feet. Eighty-one pound Blanche and her brother-in-law manhandled her limp husband into the car while Jones laid down cover fire.

His party all aboard, Clyde roared past Holt Coffey and the others, straight out of the Red Crown parking lot and onto Highway 71. The posse loosed one final, blistering volley at the car, many slugs finding their marks: one Thompson burst raked over the rear window and sent slivers of shattered glass into both eyes of Blanche Barrow, and a fragment of bullet into her head, right at the hairline.

The car disappeared into the night. One posseman, patrolman L.A. Ellis, tried to muster support for an expedition of pursuit, but got no takers.

As the smoke — and the tear gas — cleared, the lawmen took stock of their assault. Despite the large number of rounds expended by the outlaws (by far the most of any of their gunbattles), injuries to the officers were minimal. Sheriff Coffey had two scratches on his neck from buckshot, but he was so proud and "bragged about being shot by the Barrow Gang and living to tell about it, Whitecotton and Ellis decided not to ruin the Platte County sheriff's story by revealing that he had been hit by friendly fire ." Coffey's son Clarence was abraded by debris dislodged by a bullet that penetrated the Tavern's kitchen, and Deputy Highfill had wounds in each knee from his duty as armored car driver.

In the cabin occupied by Parker, Jones and Clyde Barrow, they found all five of the sandwiches fetched by Jones from Slim's Castle uneaten, but all five soda bottles empty. There also was a syringe kit for giving injections, leading to short-lived speculation that the Barrow Gang were all junkies, but the kit was just a remnant of the medical bag they stole from Dr. Fields several weeks before in Enid when they also stole his car. More impressive, though, was the arsenal the gang was forced to leave behind: as many as six BARs, forty-seven Colt .45 automatic pistols — it had been some successful burglary at the Enid armory on July 7 — and, sadly, the personal sidearm Buck and Jones had taken off the body of Marshall Humphrey, whom Buck had killed in Alma, Arkansas on June 23.

The following day, people came to the Red Crown from all over. In its July 21 issue, The Platte County Landmark described the day-after scene as "a large crowd of sightseers" converged to get a look:

"The cabins presented a torn up appearance Thursday morning, bearing many evidences of the terrible battle. Bullet holes were everywhere, through doors and windows, some from outside, some fired from inside. Mirrors and other articles in the cabins were shattered. Several bullets found their way through the station proper but failed to hit any of the many visitors who had been warned of possible trouble and made to stay indoors."