On September 16, 1889, Robert Ewing “Bob” Younger—the youngest of the Younger brothers and a member of the James–Younger Gang—died at Minnesota State Prison in Stillwater. He was 35 years old. Prison and historical records associate his death with pulmonary tuberculosis, then commonly called consumption.
Younger was captured with his brothers Cole and Jim after the failed Northfield bank raid of September 1876. Following their arraignment and guilty pleas in connection with the raid, including the killing of Northfield bank cashier Joseph Heywood, the three brothers received life sentences and were transferred to Stillwater that November. Their notoriety made them among the prison’s most recognized inmates.
Bob’s death came nearly 13 years after his capture. His final illness brought a quiet end to a life shaped by Missouri’s Civil War-era border violence, postwar outlawry, flight, defeat, and confinement.
His body was returned to Lee’s Summit, Missouri, where he was buried in Lee’s Summit Cemetery. Cole and Jim remained at Stillwater until their paroles in 1901. Jim died by suicide the following year; Cole lived until 1916.
Bob Younger’s death remains a sober marker in the history of the James–Younger Gang—not a romantic ending to an outlaw legend, but the conclusion of a life defined by violence and its consequences.
Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
