Robbers and Bandits
Grattan, Robert, and Emmet Dalton were experienced horse thieves and bank robbers. In trying to outdo their second cousins, Bob and Cole Younger of the infamous Jesse James gang, the Daltons staged two bank robberies at the same time in their former hometown.
Abandoned by their father, Lewis Dalton, the fifteen Dalton children were raised by their mother, Adeline Younger Dalton, a devout Sunday-school teacher. Raised in a frontier region that now forms the border between Kansas and Missouri, they experienced the tensions brought on by the Civil War (1861–65) and Reconstruction (the period of rebuilding that followed the Civil War). The family moved several times in a short span of time, pulling up stakes in Montgomery, Kansas (near Coffeyville), to settle on a farm in Missouri, and later moving to the Cherokee Nation, in what is now Oklahoma.
Of the large brood of Dalton children, three died in youth and seven (three girls and four boys) became law-abiding citizens. Ben, the oldest boy, remained with his mother, while three others took up farming in California. Franklin Dalton became a United States deputy marshal in 1884.
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