Zee reached for but overturned a canister of black seasonings that spilled across the counter. Her creased dress as she tidied and the rucked wool stockings at her ankles were all that Jesse could see. He rocked forward in his chair as if his boots were stirruped. He said, “Just let me read on a little bit,” and he moved his finger along as he did: “ ‘It was as though three bandits had come to us from the storied Odenwald, with the halo of medieval chivalry upon their garments and shown us how the things were done that poets sing of. No where else in the United States or in the civilized world, probably, could this thing have been done. It was done here, not because the protectors of person and property were less efficient but because the bandits were more dashing and skillful; not because honest Missourians have less nerve but because freebooting Missourians have more.’ ”
She said in mute tones, “I don’t care what John Newman Edwards says.”
“How’s that?”
She wheeled with storm and sorrow in her face, her hands locked on her ears. “I don’t want to know!” she cried. She even stamped a shoe. And then she hustled out, her skirt inch-raised, and the swinging door clapped her departure.
Jesse limped over to the stove and clamped a potholder around the handle to move a skillet that was beginning to smoke.
A general mopines
s and depression began to plague Jesse, and Frank sought to dispel it with a trip to the Hite property near Adairville, Kentucky. However, it was there Jesse learned his sister, Susan Lavenia James, was planning to marry Allen H. Parmer, a man whom Jesse despised. The very idea of Susie’s being private with Parmer so plunged Jesse into despair that he chewed sixteen grains of morphine in a suicide attempt.
By the time a physician came, Jesse was sleepwalking and there seemed to be no hope that he’d recuperate; but Frank persuaded his younger brother to keep moving by whispering that the Yankees were coming or that Pappy was being strangled in the coffee bean tree. He gave Jesse two empty .44s so he could rage around the room, crying and carrying on until he collapsed with the morphine overdose and all they could do was pray for the repose of his soul. Just about sunrise Jesse abruptly woke up with a powerful appetite, as if he’d experienced only a peaceful sleep, and that evening he journeyed back to Kansas City where he prevailed upon Zee to marry him by convincing her of his complete repentance.
ON APRIL 24TH, 1874, Reverend William James, an uncle to both parties, joined Zee Mimms to Jesse James at the Kearney home of the bride’s married sister, who also served as the bridesmaid. Zee wore her mother’s white wedding gown though its train and veil had been browned by an attic trunk. They were shivareed in a one-room log cabin near Noel, and then journeyed to Galveston, Texas, accompanied by Frank, who would marry Annie Ralston two months later.
After a week in Galveston the couple was supposed to steam south to Vera Cruz, but Jesse had boated the Gulf of Mexico with his brother one afternoon and the blue water terrified him. The waves were big as the roofs of houses. He allowed a lead fishing weight to sink and it had gone so deep it stripped all the reel line from his spool. Who could prove it ever bottomed? Maybe it banged up against a China Sea junk at the other end of the world.
So they leisured at a coastal hotel and Zee peeled and sliced apples for her husband under a broad pink umbrella as a correspondent for the St. Louis Dispatch interviewed the famous Jesse James. The newsman was amiable and cautious and needed little more than social notes but it was nevertheless a catechism and the first of her husband’s characterizations she’d witnessed. His manners were decorous, his charm, while charlatan, was fetching, his sentences were dexterous, his thoughts glanced away from ensnarements like minnows. Zee pared a careful, red-skinned spiral from the fruit and listened with amazement as he braided and invented, and she wondered if she’d underestimated Jesse and scaled him too small, if she was so accustomed to him she hadn’t realized he was still as romantic and remarkable as the near-dead eighteen-year-old she’d nursed. She was ready, that season, to revise all her opinions of him. She had shrunk into a maiden who was deferential and daughterish, and it pleased Zee beyond good sense when Jesse placed his excellent hand atop hers.”
She saw that the correspondent had apparently asked the groom for a sentiment about his bride, because Jesse looked at her with amorous concentration and said, “We had been engaged for nine years, and through good and evil report, and notwithstanding the lies that have been told about me and the crimes laid at my door, her devotion to me has never wavered for a moment. You can say that both of us married for love, and that there cannot be any sort of doubt about our marriage being a happy one.”
It wasn’t at all happy for the first year. At summer’s end the couple returned to Missouri and concealed themselves in the sewing rooms and harness sheds of relatives until Jesse could get around to renting and cultivating a farm. Meanwhile she was rooting out a scandal that claimed it was the James-Younger gang that stopped two omnibuses on each side of the Missouri River one Sunday afternoon in August. Even though he was one of the victims, Professor J. L. Allen went so far as to blather, “I am exceedingly glad, as it looks I have to be robbed, that it is being done by first-class artists, by men of national reputation.”
And on December 8th, five men caused the Kansas Pacific Railroad to brake at the Muncie, Kansas, depot by stacking ties on the tracks. They uncoupled the Pullman coaches and towed the express and baggage cars ahead some two hundred yards before ransacking them of thirty thousand dollars. The express company immediately tendered a reward of one thousand dollars for each outlaw, dead or alive.
In early January Jesse shook Zee awake and read the verses in the Gospel of Matthew pertaining to the Holy Family’s flight from Herod into Egypt, saying he’d been getting premonitions and thought they ought to fly from Missouri. He was somehow so persuasive that Zee yielded to his proposition and by the next week they were renting a house in Nashville, Tennessee, where they would soon be joined by Frank and his new wife, Annie. (Annie Ralston had told her parents that she wanted to visit relatives in Kansas City and left home with a valise and trunk. Frank met her train and eloped with Annie to Omaha, whence she sent the note: “Dear Mother: I am married and going West.” Her parents had no idea who her husband was, or even that she’d been courted, and her father was understandably shocked when detectives surrounded his house and ordered the occupants out with their hands up.)
So the James boys were not in residence on the night that Allan Pinkerton’s detectives sloshed through snow to the Kearney farmhouse they called “Castle James.” In order to smoke the criminals outside, the Pinkerton operatives soaked a cotton wad in turpentine, tied it around a rock, and pitched it through windowglass into the kitchen, spritzing flames across the plank flooring. Dr. Samuels got up from his sleep and, when they called for the James boys to give themselves up, yelled out that his stepsons had disappeared, then poked the cotton wad into the fireplace as Zerelda spanked out the fire with a dishtowel. No sooner had the couple done that, however, than a soot-blackened railroad potflare smashed through another windowpane, and when Reuben Samuels swatted it onto the coals with a broom, the cauldron accidentally exploded.
Shrapnel tore through the stomach of Archie Peyton Samuels, the James’s nine-year-old stepbrother, and the boy died within hours. A maidservant who slept by the pantry had a slice taken from her cheek and swooned for loss of blood. And Mrs. Zerelda Samuels suffered such a mangling of her right hand that surgeons had to saw it off above the wrist.
The James brothers’ only public reaction to Archie’s death and the maiming of their mother came in an impassioned, misspelled letter from Jesse that appeared in the Nashville Banner in August. He listed once more the misrepresentations about his activities and then centered his fury on Allan Pinkerton, writing:
Providence saved the house from being burnt altho it was saturated with Turpentine & fiered with combustible materials and the shell did not do fatal work and they fled away to the special train that was waiting to carry them beyon the reach of outraged justice. This is the work of Pinkerton, the man that sed in his card that he just wished to set himself right in the eyes of the world. He may vindicate himself with some, but will never dare show his Scottish face again in Western Mo. and let me know he is here or he will meet the fate of his comrades, Capt. Lull & Whicher met & I would advise him to stay in New York but let him go where he may, his sins will find him out. He can cross the Atlantic but every wave and white cap he sees at sea will remind him of the innocent boy murdered and the one-armed mother robbed of her son (and Idol). Justice is slow but sure and there is a just God that will bring all to Justice. Pinkerton, I hope and pray our Heavenly Father may deliver you into my hands & I believe he will for his merciful and protecting arm has always been with me and Shielded me, and during all my persecution he has watched over me and protected me from workers of blood money who are trying to seek my life, and I have hope and faith in Him & believe he will ever protect me as long as I serve Him.
Jesse and Zee were then renting a cottage at 606 Boscobel Street under the aliases of J. D. and Josie Howard; Frank leased the Big Bottom farm as B. J. Woodson, and Annie added the first letter of his Christian name to become Fannie.
Zee gave birth to a son on New Year’s Eve, 1875, and they christened him Jesse Edwards, for his father a
nd the newspaper editor, but discretion caused them to call him Tim, and he was seven years old before he learned his actual name. Jesse would saunter downtown with his son hipped like a paunchy cat or bundled inside his overcoat so that the infant’s bewildered head poked between the lapels. He sat the baby in his homburg hat, he dangled him over rivers to give Zee a fright, he snuck him looks at his pinochle cards, hung a blue derringer over his crib, screwed a unlit cigar in the child’s mouth and practiced ventriloquism in taverns.
Zee choired at church, she conversed happily with her sister-in-law as they stewed and pickled vegetables or grated cucumbers and onions for catsup, she cooed to her child as he suckled; but alone outside her home she felt shadowed and stalked—footsteps stopped when she did, curtains dropped when she turned her head—and she became so leery and aloof that shopkeepers and neighbors assumed she was snobbish or persnickety or perhaps a little simple.
Her lone male friend was Dr. John Vertrees, whom Jesse hired to live with Zee and her son during the weeks of absence he attributed to his work as a wheat speculator. (The doctor assumed that was a lie manufactured to cover a secret addiction to cards and horse races, for Mr. Howard dressed like a boulevardier and wore a derringer in a hideaway shoulder harness and once presented to his wife an envelope of diamonds.)
Little is known about the James brothers’ activities on the road while they resided in Tennessee, except for the summer and autumn of 1876 in which the James-Younger gang committed two robberies, the second of them being the fiasco at Northfield, Minnesota, in September.
LESS THAN TWO MONTHS earlier they had robbed the Missouri Pacific Railroad of over fifteen thousand dollars near Otterville, Missouri. As the badmen looted the Adams and U.S. express companies, a minister conducted the timorous through canticles and evangelized for the repentance of sins, and a newspaper account later complimented the robbers who “were well versed in their business” and “remarkably cool and courageous throughout the whole affair.”
But then the St. Louis chief of police arrested a man who’d been bragging about the loot he’d gotten from the robbery, and after rough interrogation, Hobbs Kerry confessed that he was one member of a gang that was governed by Jesse James and included Frank James, Cole Younger, Bob Younger, Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts, and Bill Chadwell.
Jesse sent a letter (which was probably rewritten by Edwards) to the Kansas City Times, contending that “this so-called confession is a well-built pack of falsehoods from beginning to end. I never heard of Hobbs Kerry, Charles Pitts and Wm. Chadwell until Kerry’s arrest. I can prove my innocence by eight good and well-known men of Jackson County, and show conclusively that I was not at the train robbery.” He closed with another plea for a fair hearing and signed it “Respectfully, J. W. James.”
By the time the letter was published, on August 18th, Jesse and his brother and Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger were sitting on a railway coach headed four hundred miles north to an area in which the citizens would not be so cautious or on the lookout for thieves. Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts, and Bill Chadwell knitted into the group at depots in Missouri and the eight toured St. Paul’s gambling houses and sat through a Red Caps and Clippers baseball game before they bought thoroughbred horses and tack and rode the Minnesota River to scout Mankato and then Northfield.
Cole Younger coveted retirement in a foreign country before September stripped away but thought he needed more of a subsidy than a Swedish mill town could muster. Meanwhile Bill Chadwell, who’d lived in the state, boasted about the ease of larceny in placid Minnesota and indicated secluded routes and short cuts that could spirit the outlaws to Iowa like a whirlwind in the Book of Kings. And good authorities had told him that General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, the man called “The Scourge of New Orleans,” was an investor in the First National Bank of Northfield: they could revenge his confiscations and slaughter of Confederate soldiers. And that argument worked. Cole Younger later confessed that once they heard about Butler’s involvement in the institution, they “felt little compunction, under the circumstances, about raiding him or his.”