COLLECTING AMERICAN OUTLAWS

Wilbur Zink has preserved the Younger Gang's history in more ways than one.

- JANA BOMMERSBACH

Growing up in Missouri in the 1930s, Wilbur Zink loved listening to family legends as he sat at the kitchen table.

The one that most impressed him was the story of his grandfather, David Crowder, who was a teenager when the Pinkertons killed John Younger in 1874. A shopkeeper's son in Roscoe, Missouri, Crowder stood guard over the body. Guarding a dead man? Zink says that's not as strange as it sounds, considering what often happened to the bodies of the infamous: "The custom in those days was to cut off an ear and pickle it, or show off a body at a Wild West show."

Roscoe wasn't far from Zink's own home of Springfield, and that family tie inspired him to study what became his first book, The Roscoe Gun Battle. That research led him to seek out items owned by the Youngers and their partners in crime, Jesse and Frank James. Zink amassed thousands of items, which would ultimately inspire him to save the Younger homestead.

"The first thing I got was Jim Younger's violin," says Zink, from his Scottsdale, Arizona, home, where he and his wife have wintered for the last 28 years before returning to Springfield. As he notes, Jim ended up in prison, where he was visited by an old sweetheart who had gotten married and had a daughter. Jim gave the little girl his violin, the only thing he had to offer as a gift.