With his bowler hat and three-day beard, George Ebeling certainly looked the part of a wild-west desperado, and over the previous two and a half years, he did his best to play the role as well. Unfortunately, train robbery just wasn’t his forte.
Ebeling broke into the business of train robbery at age twenty-three when, on August 15, 1908, he and his partner in crime, William Lowe, hit a Northern Pacific Train in Idaho. Their take in the heist totaled $60. It would turn out to be one of their most successful robberies.
After they spent the money (which didn’t take long), they went back to work. This time, they hit a Great Northern train in Washington and ran away with a paltry $20.
Hoping to find a greater cache back in Idaho, they robbed another Northern Pacific train on April 29, 1909, but the frustrated fiends only managed to steal $12.
Heads hanging low, they returned to Washington. They had slightly better fortune when they hit another train near the town of Hillyard. This job netted them $30.
Buoyed by the Hillyard heist, the duo decided to hit a train in Seattle. With Ebeling disguised as a conductor, they hopped aboard the Great Northern as it slowly pulled through a tunnel just after it left Union Station. They decked one of the train operators and filled a satchel with greenbacks before jumping off when the train slowed on its approach into Interbay.
From Seattle, the robbers traveled to Missouri, where they hoped to lay low for a while. But the gold bug had bitten both men, and they just couldn’t keep their noses clean. On January 21, 1910, they robbed a Missouri Pacific Train near Glencoe—sixteen miles west of St. Louis—with what must have felt like a bonanza: $502 recovered from six Post Office pouches (the express company disputed this figure and claimed the pair only stole $155). Now hunted in three states by Federal Marshals, postal inspectors, and private investigators alike, the train robbery “firm of Lowe & Ebeling” as one crafty reporter dubbed them, went on the lam.
Meanwhile, James Ryno—a hardboiled detective from Detroit—began to track the thieves through their intimates. Ryno interviewed a woman from Tacoma named Marle Sutherland. The frightened woman said that a man she knew as Richard Howley boasted about the robbery. Officials posted a king’s ransom of $5,000 reward for the capture of Howley and his as-yet-unidentified partner in the Seattle heist.
Ryno’s lead turned out to be a red herring of sorts. Following his capture, Howley went to trial in 1910, but since witnesses could not place him at the scene of the crime, he was released.
The long arm of the law caught up with one of the real bandits with the capture of William Lowe on Wednesday, February 9, 1910, in St. Louis. A career criminal, Lowe spilled his guts to Post Office Inspector Dickson. He detailed his short and unsuccessful career as a professional thief, including one of his earlier jobs—a train robbery in Blue Cut, not far from Kansas City, in 1898.
Lowe said that the gang included five men, including Jesse James, Jr.—son of the notorious Missouri outlaw. In what papers described as one of the area’s most sensational crimes, the crew dynamited the express car, pilfered its contents, and rode off into the sunset.
In exchange for rolling over on the other bandits, Lowe was given immunity for that crime. Police rounded up the other four men, who later stood trial. The most noteworthy defendant, Jesse James, Jr., was defended by friends in high places who successfully argued that their client was a mere victim of his father’s reputation. James walked but Lowe, who also confessed to the Missouri heist and named George Ebeling as his accomplice, wouldn’t be as lucky. He faced hard time for the Missouri robbery.
The next day—Thursday, February 10, 1910—investigators found Ebeling in Hot Springs, Arkansas, hotel and slapped a “come-along” over his wrist. Pressed by postal inspectors, he verified Lowe’s story and confessed to taking part in the Missouri robbery. He insisted, with a hint of braggadocio in his tone, that their take was over $500, although Missouri Pacific officials tried to downplay the crime by claiming the pair made off with only $155.
According to Ebeling, the two men overpowered the conductor and fireman. While Lowe operated the train, Ebeling rifled through the mails. They leaped off the train and hoofed it thirty miles to St. Louis. Ebeling explained that en route, they buried the revolvers and even led a crew to unearth them. With his confession on the books, George Ebeling had little choice but to plead guilty to his part in the crime.
The eighteen-month crime spree of the “Lowe & Ebeling” firm, which ended with their confessions, had netted just $1,024.
Two weeks after their arrest, the two hapless train robbers faced a jury for their crimes. Among the more compelling witnesses was an elderly landlady who rented a house to the two desperadoes. She testified that Lowe and Ebeling brought two dozen sticks of dynamite to her home for safekeeping two years earlier, in 1908. Postal Inspector Dickson’s team of investigators found the explosives cache exactly where the old lady pointed her bony finger. The jurors pressed their backs against their chairs as the prosecuting attorney entered the sticks as evidence that the team had a long history of violent smash-and-grab type thefts of material shipped under the aegis of the US Mail Service.
Found guilty, each man received stiff sentences in the Federal Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. The court ultimately decided that six packages of money equated to six separate offenses, so Ebeling received six sentences of between one and three years each. As prisoner #7092, he would potentially spend the next fifteen years laboring away with a pick-ax at the prison’s quarry.
After serving the first three year term, Ebeling decided to appeal his case on the basis that cutting into six Postal packages constituted just one crime and that, based on this logic, he had paid his debt to society after three years. The District Court refused his application for a writ of habeas corpus. His hopes dashed against the rocks, he returned to the quarry to finish out his sentence of hard labor.
The restless Ebeling, however, just couldn’t stay put. After serving nearly six years, he seized the opportunity to escape his incarceration. Armed with homemade shanks, Ebeling and fellow convicts Charles Hendrickson and William, scaled the wall of the prison quarry and jumped an outbound train. Investigators spotted the men attempting to slip off the train in the Santa Fe yard. Ebeling gave up without a fight, but fifty-two-year-old Hendrickson bolted, only to be run down by Topeka police officer who had joined in the manhunt. For their efforts in tracking the fugitives, the officers received a reward of $100.
For George Ebeling, a decade inside Leavenworth may have been hard time, but it wasn’t wasted time. He made the acquaintance of Frank G. Bigelow, a wealthy Milwaukee banker doing ten years at hard labor for ten counts of violating Federal banking laws. Found guilty of mishandling bank funds in 1905, Bigelow’s sentence put him in Leavenworth, where White Collar criminals rubbed elbows with felons such as George Ebeling. It would become a friendship that would perhaps save Ebeling from returning to a life of crime. Released in 1911 after spending six years behind bars, Bigelow returned to Milwaukee, where he returned to the risky business of speculation. Within a year, the man who nearly bankrupted the First National Bank of Milwaukee he had amassed a second fortune as a commodities trader. Bigelow may have changed his prison uniform for a three piece suit, but he never forgot Ebeling and promised the former train robber a job upon his release.
By 1914, Ebeling tried for a second time to escape his sentence, this time through the proper legal channels. While he worked at the prison quarry at Leavenworth, his appeal of the District Court’s decision traveled all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the justices debated whether or not a single act of stealing six postal packages equaled one illegal act or six separate offenses. On June 1, 1915, the court rendered its verdict and supported the District Court’s earlier decision to deny Ebeling’s writ.
Escape attempt aside, Ebeling’s fifteen-year term ended in May, 1925. Now fifty years old, the aging train robber decided to take up Bigelow’s offer of a job. He traveled to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he accepted a position from his former cellmate and fast friend.
The cool five hundred (half of the $1,000) George Ebeling earned as a train robber cost him dearly. His career earnings came out to just $33 for each year he spent in Leavenworth. But it was even LESS than that because his sentence was based solely on his part in the Missouri robbery, which may have netted as little as $155. Ebeling’s take was half of that, which equates to $5 for each year in Leavenworth!
George Ebeling, perhaps one of America’s least successful train robbers, died in Steele, Minnesota, in 1937 at the age of sixty-two.
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