Frank Quigg: From Umpire to Outlaw

This article was published in the SABR Deadball Era Committee’s February 2026 newsletter.

Kansas was a wild place in the 19th Century. When the time came for statehood, its status as a Slave State or a Free State was to be determined by a vote of its inhabitants, so advocates from the North and South flooded into the territory in an effort to tip the scales in favor of one or the other. When admitted to the Union on January 29, 1861, it was all a moot point; seven Southern states had already seceded and the first shots of the Civil War were mere weeks away. Kansas was by default a Free, Northern State, but in getting there had been steeped in violent bloodshed.

Twenty-five years later, the wounds were still raw. In September of 1890, the town of Atchison held a memorial event, a “sham battle,” at their fairgrounds. About ninety men, black and white, poured onto the field to do battle, led by make-believe Union and Confederate commanders. A cannon fired throughout the melee, as aging veterans attacked one another with crutches and canes. Men who had missed out on the original war belted one another with sword handles and rifle butts. Young boys, raised on their grandfathers’ war stories and longing for the glory of mangling a Yank or Reb, joined in, while women and children sipped lemonade and watched with amusement from the sidelines. Behind them, fist fights broke out and faces got smashed. It was all in good fun.

One 16-year-old boy raised a Union flag and charged across the grounds to plant it in the mouth of the cannon at the southern end of the field. He got there just in time for the big gun to be fired; there was no cannonball, naturally (though since this was 1890 Kansas, could you really be sure?), but his face was peppered with tiny clumps of sizzling gunpowder. “It will take Dr.Campbell the balance of the month to get all the powder out of his face,” chuckled the Atchison Weekly Patriot.1 The 16-year-old in the middle of the sheer Kansas chaos that rattled the teeth of the residents of Atchison was Frank Quigg — frontier-tough, which is what it took to one day survive a season as an umpire in the Iowa League.

Frank was no Wild West urchin. At 17, he went to Philadelphia for college and was a genuine lawyer and son-of-a-lawyer from one of the most well-to-do families in Atchison. He was as much a ballplayer as student, and spent the years playing madcap, 1890s-style ball wherever opportunity arose, from Kansas and Missouri to Texas and Tennessee. He built a reputation as a reliable pitcher, but also as a hardcore drinker. Much later, as his playing declined, the Leavenworth Standard suggested “his downfall is due to bad habits.” His playing career staggered to a halt in the town teams of Kansas in the last part of the decade, pausing briefly for a patriotic sojourn with the First Ohio Volunteer Regiment in the Spanish-American War.

Quigg decided if he couldn’t take the field, he would take charge. In 1903 he labored to organize Oklahoma City’s first long-running ballclub, but he was squeezed out and the team moved ahead without him. Determined to stay in the game, he took up umpiring in his home state that summer. The next year he was hired by the new Iowa League, where he was so uncompromising and loud (“with a voice like a Wisconsin bull frog”) that people both loved him and loathed him. In a league where umpires were regularly attacked by players and fans alike, it was a harrowing way to make a living. But opponents generally backed down in the face of Quigg’s firm countenance, and he was the only arbiter to withstand the entire Iowa League season.

Quigg’s superpower was knowing how to shut them down. Once, the Burlington bleacherites howled so loudly and uncontrollably that he couldn’t make his pregame announcement. The police had to step in to quiet the crowd. He finally pronounced, “When the snakes stop hissing and the rabble ceases showing its displeasure, I will announce the batteries.”2 Players knew that when he did blow a call, he would balance the scales with a call going the other way later on in the game. Still, the point was finally reached when grievances from every Iowa manager added up, and he ultimately got the axe midway into 1905. His reputation assured that he would never be out of work for long.

Over the years he officiated in one league after another, to generally high praise. At one point, he was approached by a touring group of Japanese players and investors who sought to recruit him to help organize their leagues back home; he ultimately declined to migrate to Tokyo. Everywhere he went, people called him “Senator” Quigg for his lawyer-like sense of authority and elocution. “Umpire Quigg is said to be a spellbinder and politician of considerable ability. When there is a prospect of a prolonged discussion over any of his decisions, he calmly pulls his watch and announces to the contestants that the ‘polls will soon close.’”3 Not everyone appreciated his demeanor, though, and he withstood fists and missiles from spectator and ballplayer alike; sometimes he got cold-cocked from behind, because he was such a threatening figure that even the toughest of the tough might be disinclined to challenge him face-to-face.

His status grew during a long stint down in Texas, and by 1908 when he landed in the South Atlantic League, he was being scouted as potential umpire material for the majors. For Quigg, the big league dream was within reach.

Just as suddenly, things went south. Always the man in charge on the diamond, he became disoriented on the field and overnight was unable to do an umpire’s job. The South Atlantic League fired him in no time, and he couldn’t last long in any other league he tried. He wandered the country and ended up back in Oklahoma City where, at the close of 1909, he hooked up with a genuine outlaw named Frank Carpenter, who had knocked off the post office in Golden, Colorado, just weeks before. Armed with a satchel of stolen stamps, Carpenter recruited Quigg and a third hombre, Harry Dilbeck, with his sights set on a slightly bigger target: the First State Bank in Harrah, a little town on the Rock Island Railroad just east of Oklahoma City.

The gang of three would-be Jesse Jameses sauntered into an Oklahoma City pawnshop run by a fellow named Gomez, where they unloaded the stamps and perused the shelves for various tools of the larceny trade. While they did their shopping, they jabbered away … something along the lines of: “We could use a stick of that dynamite … better make it two … and them there fuses. And that jimmy ought to work to pry open a door.” As they assembled their kit, they boastfully laid out the plan for the New Year’s Eve heist while shopkeeper Gomez listened silently at the counter. They topped off their shopping spree with a pair of well-worn six-shooters, packed up their booty and left.

Not long after, local U.S. Marshal Jack Abernathy got wind of suspicious packets of stamps that were turning up around town; the breadcrumbs led right to Gomez’s pawnshop. It wouldn’t have been Gomez’s first strike, so the seedy shopkeeper quickly spilled out a diversion. “This is small potatoes,” you can picture him sputtering, “but if you let me off the hook, I can tell you all about the real action, the big bank job that is happening later this week.” Marshal Abernathy began assembling his posse.

Back with our bank-robbing gang, there was plenty going on behind the scenes. What Quigg and Dilbeck didn’t know was that Frank Carpenter was harboring a secret.

Somewhere along the line, Carpenter must have realized that the odds were low for the success of this particular trio of bandits. Or maybe he simply saw an easier route to a “score” on this heist. In any event, Carpenter snuck away from his compadres for a little while to pay a visit to the Marshal’s office, where he spilled the beans about the whole Harrah First State Bank job, in return for a supposed cash reward that may have only existed in his imagination. He insisted that Quigg himself was the brains behind the operation. The deputy he spoke to was surely bemused; the Marshal and his men already knew about the upcoming New Year’s Eve plot, and their job kept getting easier and easier. Besides, of Carpenter’s three-man gang, there was only one man who was actually wanted by the law, and the deputy was looking right at him.

So it came down that, at one a.m. on Friday, December 31, a trio of desperados rode furtively into Harrah, South Dakota, hitched their horses and buggy in a secluded area, and crept under the moonlight to the alley side of the town’s little bank building. Adjacent was the Harrah Post Office – post offices being familiar territory for Carpenter – and they spent a fair amount of time trying to jimmy open the door. Failing that, they slunk around to the front. While Carpenter and Dilbeck kept watch, Quigg worked to remove the glass window in the door.

In the darkened windows of the hotel directly across the street was U.S. Marshal Abernathy, watching the scenario unfold. In the shadows of the surrounding buildings were a dozen other lawmen, shotguns cocked. They were waiting for the trio to gain entry into the bank so they could advance, trap them inside, and take them alive. But it was taking Quigg forever to simply get the window off the door. Just then came a huge commotion. It was one o’clock in the morning and a giddy teenager was racing down the street, firing a pistol and singing at the top of his lungs, his galloping steed leaving a cloud of dust in its trail. This country boy had been to a New Year’s Eve country dance, with rollicking tastes of kisses from his country girl, and was hellbent on waking the whole country up. The Carpenter gang froze, thinking a posse had arrived. The jimmy dropped — CLANG — from Quigg’s hands. Carpenter and Dilbeck started for the alley. And out of the darkness, the Marshal’s men opened fire.

Quigg dug into his pocket for his gun, the rickety revolver obtained from Gomez’s pawnshop in exchange for two-cent stamps. Squinting into the darkness across the street, he squeezed the trigger.

The next day, a newspaper reporter was beside himself in admiration as he panted his own version of the story: “Quigg stood his ground and although volley after volley was poured at him, he did not give an inch until he fell. Mortally wounded in four places, Quigg returned the fire until a bullet from the gun of one of the officers went through his heart.”4 It reads like a glorious dime novel, but it didn’t exactly go like that.

Instead, when Quigg pulled the trigger, he got nothing but an empty click. Nothing. The pistol from Gomez’s pawnshop was worthless.

A rain of shotgun fire came down upon poor Frank Quigg, though it was said that it was a bullet from noble Abernathy’s rifle that ultimately pierced his heart. Hit in the chest and stomach eighteen times, he was probably, as they say, dead before he hit the ground, thudding to Mother Earth at the same instant as his ineffectual pistol. Dilbeck scuttled as far as the post office back door and huddled there until his capture. Carpenter was mortally wounded as well, despite his broad gestures to remind the officers that he was the snitch who was cooperating with them. Though he lingered a while before expiring, he was the biggest fool on the scene, moaning and bleeding to death on a Harrah side street.

It’s a scene that belongs in a flickering silent movie, three hapless clowns on a ridiculous and felonious misadventure. And it would be nice to end Quigg’s story with this bit of comically fatal slapstick. But of course, there’s more to the tale.

Two years earlier, in the spring of 1908, umpire Frank Quigg was settling into his Macon hotel room following a hot and humid Sally League game. Preparing to enjoy a cooling bath, he slipped and cracked his head on the rim of the tub. No one knows how long he was out cold or how much blood was spilled. Any medical care would have been minimal as he couldn’t have afforded a hospital; besides, he was a ballplayer at heart and eschewed doctors. His mind was never the same again. In the weeks that followed, his performance as an umpire spiralled downward until he could no longer find work.

Quigg took to haunting the towns where he had long ago starred on the ballfield, seeking any kind of job to no avail. He was arrested for vagrancy in Marion, Ohio; after being jailed overnight, he was ordered by the mayor to take the shortest road out of town. He spent time in a Texas sanitarium and, being an American war veteran, was held in the Soldiers’ Home in Leavenworth for three weeks. His widowed mother lived in a fair amount of luxury back in Atchison — after his father’s death, she married into further affluence — but in her new home he was unwelcome.

He managed to latch onto an umpiring job in the Texas League, but Quigg’s gig only lasted for a matter of weeks. One day, he was mobbed by forty rabid Oklahoma City fans after a game full of bad calls. After that he stuck steadfastly to the safety of one spot in the middle of the diamond, where he called entire games. No one knew what was going on with the great old umpire, but he was soon out of work for good. With nothing left but a lifelong reliance on drink, Frank Quigg had become a “desperado” in every sense of the word: in desperate need of food, work, money and support.

Finally came “rock bottom” in Harrah.

Word of his death as a would-be bank robber spread fast, accompanied by every punchline you would expect.

“This Umpire was a Real Robber,” quipped the Washington Post. “Noted students of this species of mankind agree that there is no good umpire but a dead umpire.”

 

Author’s Note

This article is excerpted from the first volume of the author’s newly released Iowa League project, Fort Dodge and the Bawling, Brawling, Hard-Balling Iowa League, Scotnik Press, 2026.

 

Notes

1. Atchison Weekly Patriot, September 20, 1890.

2. Burlington Hawk Eye, August 9, 1904.

3. Burlington Evening Gazette, May 6, 1904.

4. Oklahoma City News, December 31, 1909. A pair of Hall of Fame brothers, Paul and Lloyd Waner (born 1903 and 1906), were young boys in Harrah at this time. As they later pointed out, “You can spell that backwards or forwards.” A detailed article by Leif Rudi Ernst about the Harrah robbery was published in the Journal of the Wild West History Association, December, 2008. Ernst makes the compelling case for the Carpenter double-cross theory; this was also suggested in some contempo-rary reports but doesn’t account for Carpenter being gunned down along with Quigg. It’s also suggested that Quigg was the brains behind the attempted robbery; knowing what we do about his state of mind (or lack thereof) he seems to fit the role of a patsy more than a mastermind, but anything’s possible. The Journal ac-count is pretty authoritative, but based almost exclusive-ly on one deputy’s self-aggrandizing account. It seems like everyone had their own version of the Legend of the Carpenter-Quigg Gang.