Photos by John Cross
All eyes are on what some believe is the skull of Charley Pitts, who was a member of the Jesse James gang that robbed a Northfield bank. Shown here (from left) are instructors Kate Blue and Jim Bailey, and graduate students Lecia Sims and Nate Meyer. They are all working on figuring out if the skeleton is indeed the remains of Pitts.
This defect in the sternum of what is believed to be Charley Pitts' skeletal remains looks to be about the size of a bullet.
Once the instructors and students are done, the skeleton will probably stay with the university, although it probably won't stay intact. It will exist in pieces for students in future science classes to study.
When he was alive, he was a scoundrel, a varmint, a no good lowdown hellraiser who went around robbin' banks and shootin' people.
He got in with the worst of 'em — Jesse James and the Younger brothers. But when that famous meeting of the posse and the outlaws took place near Madelia, he went down shooting, in a gunfight famous for stopping a notorious group of Old West hoodlums.
His name was Charley Pitts, and if you can believe the loosely documented history, his may be the bones that have resided in the basement of the Northfield Historical Society Museum since 1981.
Today, however, those bones are sitting in a biology lab in Minnesota State University's Trafton Science Center, where a pair of professors and a couple of graduate students hope to find conclusive evidence that proves the bones either are, or are not, the remains of Pitts.
Anthropology professor Kate Blue is examining the skeleton. Law enforcement professor Jim Bailey will lead the background investigation into what happened to Pitts' remains after the gunfight, and whether the bones in the lab are indeed Pitts'.
Graduate students Nate Meyer and Lecia Sims are doing legwork, digging into old newspapers and trying to find out what exactly happened to Pitts.
"This is new for me. I'm not into skeletal analysis," said Meyer, a cultural anthropology specialist. "I don't even want to touch the bones."
Sims, meanwhile, isn't quite as squeamish.
"This is right up my alley," she said.
The bones found their way to Mankato from Northfield after Bailey, attending a re-enactment of the Northfield bank robbery, read an article about the skeleton in the basement of the Northfield Historical Society Museum.
Pitts' story is a sketchy one, but it goes something like this:
He met up with the Jesse James gang in Missouri (which happens to be Sims' home state, hence her interest). Eventually, they came to Northfield that fateful day in 1876 and tried to rob the bank. A gunfight ensued and two members of the gang, Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell, were killed.
The rest of the gang fled but split up at some point. James and some followers went west, and the Younger brothers and Pitts headed down toward Madelia.
They were met by a posse, and another gunfight ensued. Pitts was killed, and the Younger brothers were captured.
The story of Pitts' body's whereabouts gets a little cloudy here.
Some say it was snatched up by a medical student right away for use in anatomy. Others say it was first sent to St. Paul where it lie in the custody of the surgeon general. Some say a medical student grabbed it after it went to St. Paul. And some say it went all the way to Chicago.
At some point, the bones wound up at the now-defunct Stagecoach Museum in Shakopee, where they stayed for decades. But eventually, the Stagecoach Museum shut down for good, and the bones were transferred to the Northfield Historical Society.
And that's where they stayed, tucked away in the basement, until September. That's when Bailey, after reading a newspaper article in Northfield during a reenactment, asked the museum if it would relinquish the bones to the university for the sake of education. The museum agreed and the bones came over.
Since then, Blue already has begun an analysis.
She has done a skeletal inventory. She also plans to take extensive photographs, enter the skeleton's information on a database that can determine ethnicity, and take X-rays.
They also may do a facial reconstruction, which could provide an idea of what a face on that skull would look like. From there they could compare it to photographs of Pitts.
"(Jim Bailey and I) will be writing a paper on the skeletal analysis to present at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference next year in Denver," Blue said. "We then hope to turn it into a publication."
Preliminary analysis shows the skeleton is that of a male, 5 feet 8 inches tall, primarily Caucasian, and about 40 years old.
One blemish on the bones is particularly intriguing. On the sternum there is a defect, a section of bone that is missing. It is roughly circular, and Blue said it could be a bullet wound.
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