The Daltons' Reconnaisance Mission

Another chapter in my latest book, Murder and Mayhem in Southeast Kansas, is about the Dalton gang's ill-fated attempt to rob two banks at once in Coffeyville on October 5, 1892. I've written about this incident previously on this blog; so I won't recount the details again. Suffice it to say that the double bank robbery attempt turned into a fiasco, and virtually the whole gang was wiped out, but not before they killed or mortally wounded four citizens.
One of the things that caught my interest as I was researching this incident this time around was a reference or two that I found in Coffeyville newspapers to visits that members of the Dalton gang paid to the town in the days leading up to the ill-fated robbery attempt. I have read in Robert Barr Smith's book about the Coffeyville raid, I believe, and perhaps elsewhere that one of the main reasons the Daltons' attempt to rob two banks at once turned out so badly for them is that they thought they knew the layout of the town because they had lived there a couple of years earlier but they had not been back recently to learn the changes that had been made. Specifically, a hitching rail near one of the banks had been taken up for road repairs, forcing the gang to tie their horses farther away from the bank than they had planned. This may well be true, but, if so, the Daltons' lack of intelligence wasn't because none of the gang had visited Coffeyville recently.
One night in late September, Bob Dalton called at the home of a Coffeyville druggist named Frank Benson, and the visitor had a six-shooter in his hand when Benson answered the door. Dalton asked Benson to go to his drugstore and get him some whiskey, but Benson told him the store was out of whiskey and referred him to some of the other druggists in town. Dalton politely apologized for disturbing Benson and retired without further ado. Or so the Coffeyville Weekly Journal reported. Benson said he knew for sure the intruder was Bob Dalton because he had been well acquainted with Bob when he'd lived at Coffeyville, as the Dalton boys had made Benson's drugstore one of their loafing places.
So, either the hitching rail had been only very recently taken up prior to the botched robbery attempt, or else Bob and his brothers did a mighty poor job of reconnoitering the place.