Darn Fools by Dustin Rice

On June 10, 1933, there was a hot evening. Jack and Sam Pritchard, along with Lonnie Cartwright, Sam’s son-in-law, sat down to home-made ice cream. It was their one treat those days, and they’d all taken turns cranking the machine. Looking up, Jack saw a car racing down the road that ran past their farmhouse. Just look at that darn fool, if he don’t slow down he’ll run off in the river. Jack was never one to interrupt but he knew this maroon car was going way too fast. About seven miles north of Wellington, Texas, the highway ran to the river but the bridge wasn’t due to be completed for months. There were barricades, but this driver never saw them. A cloud of fine panhandle dust and the unmistakable scream of a Ford V8 rose and fell. About ten seconds later came the sound of steel twisting and glass shattering. Launched from twenty-five feet up the embankment, the car landed on its side, halfway across the shallow river. The Pritchard family did not get to enjoy their ice cream.

Sam, Jack, and Lonnie yelled out to their wives for help and ran. It was a hundred or so yards to the Salt Fork of the Red River. As they got there it seemed darker by the second. Working by lamp, they could see the car was smoking; the doors were jammed. They went around front to the blown-out windshield and helped two men out. A woman was screaming somewhere inside. The men immediately went to the back, no concern for the woman, throwing sticks and boxes free of the wreck. Jack saw that the sticks were Browning Automatic Rifles and Tommy guns. Jack got the woman and wriggled her from the wreckage. She was the smallest woman he’d ever seen. Her leg was covered in battery acid that was burning her to the bone. The car caught fire as they got her free, and they all scrambled to put it out mid-river.

Fortunately, the woman passed out from the pain by the time they got her up the bank. Sam offered for them to come to the house. When they got into the light it dawned on the family how young they were. These were kids. One had just turned 17. Lonnie offered to go to town for a doctor. “No, we’re hot! If she dies, she’ll just have to die…” was the other’s response. The Pritchards were confused, but they’d been to town enough to hear of the Barrow Gang who had been terrorizing the country for a year. They could tell these weren’t tourists, and Jack swallowed the lump in his throat as he introduced himself to Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow and WD Jones. 

The next few hours were chaos. As Bonnie rested, Clyde and WD went to the back porch to figure out their next move. They were supposed to meet up with Buck and the rest of the gang in Sayre, Oklahoma but now they were going to be late. Meanwhile, Lonnie snuck away with the family Dodge and drove to town. He told the Sheriff and Deputy who dispatched an ambulance. Whether Lonnie failed to tell the two who they were dealing with, or they didn’t believe him is unclear but they went to Pritchard’s expecting to check on a car accident. There they found Bonnie, who quickly sprang to life and disarmed them as Clyde and WD appeared from the porch and fired a warning shot overhead. 

It was obviously time to leave. As Clyde was loading Bonnie and the two lawmen into the car WD thought he saw Lonnie’s wife of reaching for the door and fired his shotgun. She was hit in the hand with 5 buckshot pellets as he left for the car. On his way, WD shot out the tires to the remaining family car and they left in the Sheriff’s Chevrolet. They crossed the river as they should have in the first place, at a shallow crossing a quarter mile west, and headed for Oklahoma. 

According to the Sheriff, sometime later Bonnie’s pain became too great and she was moved to the back seat and laid across the laps of the lawmen. She wouldn’t see a doctor for a week; that would be in Missouri. Traveling as they did, her leg didn’t heal properly and she’d be carried or limp with a bent leg for the rest of her short life. She and Clyde were killed in Arcadia, LA, almost a year later.

After some debate among the outlaws, the Sheriff and Deputy were rewarded for their cooperation and were allowed to live. They were handcuffed and barb wired to a tree and managed to make their way back to Wellington the next day with the story of a lifetime. 

The car sat in the river for a time. It was stolen from a doctor in Madill, Oklahoma and his insurance paid him out. A local mechanic pulled the car from the river and he could be seen for years driving around Wellington in that maroon Ford, a standout in a sea of black cars.