The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

And yet Jesse made some efforts at conventional work: he was a millwright, a machinist, a coal salesman; he plowed in the sun with three pistols hooked onto his belt; he swapped cattle at the livestock shows. He would start a job with good will and industry, but then he would walk away from it because he was belittled or maltreated or weary and bored. Each occupation became a day-or week-long deception, for he was twenty-one years old and had already settled into the one career that suited him.

During the five years between 1869 and 1874, the James-Younger gang robbed the Daviess County Savings Bank in Gallatin; stole six thousand dollars from the Ocobock Brothers’ Bank in Corydon, Iowa; six hundred dollars from the Deposit Bank in Columbia, Kentucky; four thousand dollars from a bank in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri; two thousand dollars from the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway near Council Bluffs, Iowa; twenty-two thousand dollars from the Iron Mountain Railroad at Gads Hill, Missouri; three thousand dollars from the Hot Springs stagecoach near Malvern, Arkansas. And so on. Jesse shot John Sheets in the head and heart and the banker drained off the chair; his clerk scurried into the street and the bandits fired twice, catching him fat in the arm. A cashier named R. A. C. Martin was told to open a safe and answered, “Never. I’ll die first.” “Then die it is,” said Cole and raised his dragoon revolver to Martin’s ear and fired. An iron rail was winched off its tie as a passenger train slowed on a blind curve and the locomotive tilted into the roadbed and then crashed to its side in weeds, crushing John Rafferty, the engineer, and scalding Dennis Foley, the stoker, so badly that he died within weeks. The six thieves were dressed in the white hoods and raiment of the Ku Klux Klan—for what reason, no one knows—and collected three thousand dollars in compensation for putting an end to two lives.

Stopping the increasingly common robberies became so paramount that the United States Secret Service and private detectives from Chicago and St. Louis joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency in stalking the James-Younger gang. Allan Pinkerton’s son William established headquarters in Kansas City and split his operatives between pursuit of the Youngers and the Jameses in the counties of Jackson and Clay; and yet, though many could recognize the gunslingers and their regular sanctuaries were known, investigators only came to misfortune when they got close to the gang.

John W. Whicher was assigned Dr. Samuels’s farm and, upon receiving a spy’s report that the James boys were present, walked there with a carpet bag and in poor man’s clothes on a cold night in March. He’d just crossed the wooden bridge over Clear Creek when he caught a slight noise, and then Jesse jerked the man’s chin back with his wrist and asked, “You looking for something?”

Arthur McCoy and Jim Anderson (Bloody Bill’s brother) scrabbled up from under the bridge with guns out and Whicher said, “I’m only looking for work. I was hoping to find a place on a farm. You happen to know of any?”

“Yep,” said Jesse. “I know just the right place for you. And Satan’s got it all prepared.”

Whicher was seen again at 3 a.m. near Owen’s Ferry, his mouth gagged and his legs tied astride a gray horse; and on March 11th his body was discovered in a cistern, still gagged and riddled with bullets. A note was pinned to his lapel that read: “This is the way we treat Chicago detectives; if you’ve got any more send them along.”

Only days later Captain Louis Lull and two associates were overtaken in the rain-soaked woods of St. Clair County by John and Jim Younger. They cocked shotguns and ordered the operatives to drop their pistols. They complied. But then Lull’s right hand glided down to a derringer and he shot it at John Younger, cutting into the jugular vein so that it surged red sleeves of blood out even as the dying boy got off a shot and killed Lull. One of the scouting party sprinted away through the woods but Jim Younger only gazed at his kid brother, who was tangled under his frightened horse. He then gazed at Edwin Daniels, the man who brought the operativ

es there, and calmly triggered his shotgun, catching the guide in the neck.

At Gallatin an overexcited black racehorse had torn from the rail before Jesse had mounted. He was dragged forty feet on a frozen dirt street, his greatcoat lumping up near his neck like a plow collar, before he could disentangle his boot and broken ankle from the stirrup. He hopped one-footed and climbed Frank’s arm and the two brothers galloped off on one horse as the filly sulked on a church lawn, her saddle rocked over to her flank, the left stirrup clinking on the flagstones when she browsed.

The filly was incontrovertible evidence linking the James brothers to the Missouri robberies, and yet they were again supported by Major John Newman Edwards, the grandiloquent author of Shelby and His Men and Noted Guerrillas, or The Warfare of the Border, in which Frank and Jesse James were gloriously mentioned. Edwards helped Jesse inscribe a letter to Governor McClurg denying involvement in the Gallatin crimes, claiming he had not murdered John Sheets, had not even been near Daviess County, that he had sold the filly a week beforehand and could furnish a receipt; however, he could not give up just yet and risk a vigilance committee that might lynch him.

Governor, when I can get a fair trial, I will surrender myself to the civil authorities of Missouri. But I will never surrender to be mobbed by a set of blood-thirsty poltroons. It is true that during the war I was a Confederate soldier and fought under the Black Flag, but since then I have lived a respectable citizen and obeyed the laws of the United States to the best of my knowledge.

Frank James smiled uncharacteristically when he read that and commented that he thought he was guilty of all those crimes but now he was having an argument in his mind about it.

If the James-Younger gang was beginning to be looked upon by the common people as champions of the poor, it was principally due to Jesse, who was the originator of their many public relations contrivances: the claims that Southerners and clerics were never robbed, the occasional donations to charity, the farewell hurrahs in honor of the Confederate dead. The James-Younger gang stole the treasures from each ticket holder in the Hot Springs Stagecoach except George Crump, of Memphis, who revealed he had been a soldier under the Stainless Banner. When they robbed the Iron Mountain Railroad at Gads Hill, they searched the passengers’ hands for calluses because they had purportedly forsworn harming workingmen or ladies in order to concentrate on “the money and valuables of the plug-hat gentlemen.” After ransacking the express car there, Jesse inserted an envelope into the conductor’s coat pocket and said in practiced words, “This contains an exact account of the robbery. We prefer this to be published in the newspapers rather than the grossly exaggerated accounts that usually appear after one of our jobs.”

The press release declared: “The most daring on record—the southbound train on the Iron Mountain Railroad was robbed here this evening by several heavily armed men and robbed of dollars.”

It rehashed their methods and indicated the direction of their flight and the colors of their horses, concluding, “There is a hell of an excitement in this part of the country.”

They rode west across Missouri, staying on farms overnight, one account saying they “conducted themselves as gentlemen, paying for everything they got,” and that fact alone seemed by then enough to certify that the criminals were the James-Younger gang; and yet when the St. Louis Dispatch printed its story implicating them in the robbery, Major Edwards sent a Western Union telegram to the city editor, saying: “Put nothing more in about Gads Hill. The report of yesterday was remarkable for two things—utter stupidity and total untruth.”

At the 1872 Kansas City Fair, Jesse and Frank and Cole brushed ahead of an idled line to the entrance gate, fastening red neckerchiefs over their noses. Cole and Frank extracted revolvers from beneath linen dusters and Jesse snatched the ticket seller’s tin cash box. He knelt in the dirt and pilfered over nine hundred dollars in greenbacks and coins as Cole and Frank rotated with irons and menacing looks. A thousand gawkers milled around, amazed by the convincingness of the actors and the skit as a ticket seller ran from his booth and wrestled Jesse for the cash box, beckoning for assistance. Cole knocked a woman aside and shot at the seller and missed but ruined the leg of a small girl. And then the three outlaws shoved through the crowd, unhitched their horses, and cantered off.

Days later Jesse showed himself at the Harlem boardinghouse, shaved and hair slicked and redolent of witch hazel. He was jovial and jittery and couldn’t sit still. He chewed mints. He was solicitous of his cousin, asked about Zee’s health, her moods, her pastimes. They snacked on sliced bananas and milk. And when she washed the dishes, he eased behind her, girdling her small waist with his hands, then massaging her back and shoulders. He moved her blond hair aside with his nose and kissed her neck. “Oh, that gives me goosebumps,” she said, and clacked a bowl in a bowl. His hands widened their transit over her ribs until his fingers grazed the sides of her breasts and withdrew and then insisted on more sensation of Zee with the next advance. Zee dried her hands and revolved and kissed Jesse on the mouth and they moaned in embrace for a minute. Jesse said, “If someone’s ear was to the door just now they’d think we were moving furniture.”

She smiled. “Oh, I cherish you so.”

He caressed her and asked, “Do you mind if I get liberal with you?” and she answered, “Yes,” at the word liberal, and “Yes,” at the end of the sentence.

“You do mind.”

“I’m unmarried,” she said, and then it registered that she was stopping a man who robbed and shot at people from fondling parts of her that she would otherwise pay scant attention to. Zee decided to relent when next he asked, but Jesse didn’t ask, he simply scratched his chestnut brown hair and smiled and looked for whatever exit that offered itself. He reached under his coat to the back of his trousers and hauled out a folded Kansas City Times that he flattened on the kitchen table. “If you don’t read another thing in your life, this is what you should last feast your eyes on.” He rapped his knuckles on a newspaper column and Zee bent over the table to see it, drawing a swing of hair away from her cheek.

It regarded the robbery at the Kansas City fairgrounds as “a deed so high-handed, so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators.”

Jesse straddled a chair. He blinked and darted and exercised his eyes. He followed a finger to the side of his head and back, and then to his nose, his chin.

The heels of Zee’s hands had numbed from her lean and hair had again fallen across her brow. She stopped reading and simply said, “The boarders will be coming down for supper in an hour and I’ve got to cook it by myself.”

“Can’t that man write though? He’s got more ee-magination than Georgia’s got cotton.”

Zee unsacked hard biscuits onto a plate. She cut tomatoes over a saucepan and juice ran down her wrists. Lard melted and slowly twirled in a skillet over a fire. Jesse grew morose as she ignored him. She saw him glaring at her once and then she saw him reading another newspaper that must have appeared from another pocket.

He read: “ ‘The Chivalry of Crime. There are men in Jackson, Cass, and Clay—a few there are left—who learned to dare when there was no such word as quarter in the dictionary of the Border. Men who have carried their lives in their hands so long that they do not know how to commit them over into the keeping of the laws and regulations that exist now, and these men sometimes rob. But it is always in the glare of day and in the teeth of the multitude. With them booty is but the second thought; the wild drama of the adventure first.’ ”

She pulled down a jar from the pantry and kept her back to Jesse as she dipped into the jar with a spoon. He continued: “ ‘These men are bad citizens but they are bad because they live out of their time. The nineteenth century with its Sybaritic civilization is not the social soil for men who might have sat with Arthur at the Round Table, ridden at tourney with Sir Launcelot or won the colors of Guinevere; men who might have shattered the casque of Brian de Boise Guilbert, shivered a lance with Ivanhoe or won the smile of the Hebrew maiden; and men who could have met Turpin and Duval and robbed them of their ill-gotten booty on Hounslow Heath.’ ”