The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Bob Younger’s bay horse was the one killed by Manning, so he slunk over to some crates and boxes for cover. But Manning jogged around the Scriver Block to get to the other side of the outlaw and his gunshot made Bob Younger’s right sleeve sail as the ball crashed into the man’s elbow. Younger switched his revolver into his left hand and crouched around to get even with Manning, but Henry Wheeler looked down and with his third cartridge wrecked Bob Younger above the right knee.

Frank James reared his horse to twist it toward the Dampier House, but then felt a hurt in his thigh as if someone had driven an iron stake into the bone. He could feel his blood run down his shin into his boot, and he saw Jesse come out of the bank like a sleepwalker, easily climbing onto his grayish brown horse and cantering west on Division Street without giving anyone more than a few shots. And so Frank shouted, “They’ve got us beat!” and five shellacked horsemen raced toward the Cannon River bridge until Cole looked for his brother Bob and saw him scarecrowed in the street, broomsticked on his good left leg. Bob cried, “Don’t leave me! I’m shot!” and Cole pivoted around as many guns shot at him, reaching to Bob with pain as he said, “Get on behind me,” and gripping Bob by the cartridge belt to bring him up onto the croup of his horse. And then they sprinted out over the iron bridge, jouncing with agony in the gallop, their blood coasting back from their wounds.

TELEGRAMS THAT WARNED of the outlaws’ flight were by then being sent to each Minnesota sheriff’s office, but the James-Younger gang enjoyed the good luck of riding through Dundas, three miles west, as the telegraph operator was eating lunch. Shoppers and street people looked on in surprise as the spent and collapsed party in cattlemen’s dusters loped by on expensive racehorses that were dripping blood.

They stole a Morgan draft horse from a man’s wagon team and then got a saddle on loan from a farmer by saying they were deputies in pursuit of some horse thieves. They then strapped Bob Younger to the Morgan horse but within a mile the cinch snap

ped and Bob flopped off to the road. Jesse looked upon him like something peculiar in the road and pranced his racehorse impatiently as Cole picked up his unconscious brother and put Bob’s feet in his own saddle stirrups, riding with his arms around him as Bob rolled sloppily in their run.

When they ascertained that they were not being followed, the six washed and drank in the Cannon River and sat with exhaustion in the haven of shade trees. Charlie Pitts was unscathed so he watered and soothed the horses. Jim Younger sliced his linen coat into strips and tied the bandages over his mouth. Frank James numbed his injury with a tourniquet that he released a little with each minute. Cole Younger fabricated a sling for Bob’s arm and a binding for his leg, then wadded a bandana inside the shoulder of his coat and beamed his near-bald head with soaked leaves. They weren’t penitent over what they’d attempted; their sorrow reached to the limits of their bodies and no further, all their anguish was in their skin. Jesse came back from his reconnaissance and slid down the river bank, threshing weeds aside. Their predicament made him pitiless and when he looked at Bob Younger’s sleep, he spat. He said, “I don’t have a clue about where we are. Could be Delaware for all I know.”

“Could be Sherwood Forest,” said Frank, who in normal circumstances was never droll. And then he said, “Maybe we ought to go.”

Cole threw a stick. He and Jesse hadn’t been on good terms for more than two years—they were always vying for management of the gang and Cole regarded Jesse as too headlong in attitude—so he generally ignored what Jesse said, giving his ear only to Frank. Cole said, “Bob’s too sick.”

“Then let’s leave him,” said Jesse.

Cole glared up at the man and said, “I’ve still got my gun, Jess.”

And Frank angrily said to his brother, “Go gather the animals.”

Jesse ascended through the green weeds and grass, yelling back, “Give up that one man and you just might save five!”

By that time, the bodies of Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell were seated on a parlor bench in Northfield where their shirts were removed and their wrists crossed on their laps and photographs were taken. Their cameos later centered a souvenir card: the catch of death made them look bewildered and frazzled. Soon thereafter the cadavers of McClellan Miller and William Chadwell were sent to the University of Michigan medical school for classroom dissection, and for more than fifty years the skeleton of Clell Miller stood forlornly in Dr. Henry A. Wheeler’s consultation room.

The James-Younger gang meandered the woodlands of Rice, Waseca, and Blue Earth counties for a week, sometimes recrossing the same ravine four times in their windings, or clocking a village so that stores and hovels shied from at noon were confronted a second time at two. With Bill Chadwell gone, they were gloomily lost in green woods or limited by foreign creeks and rivers that were too deep to ford. Even as late as four nights after they’d run out of Northfield, the bedraggled gang was spied by boys who lived no more than fifteen miles away. At a small hotel near Shieldsville a posse of ten from Faribault was eating supper when the gang rode up to water their horses and became perplexed by the great variety of shotguns and rifles angled against the hotel’s porch railing. Jesse crept up to the porch and pressed against the screen, peering in. The posse then stopped talking or chewing or lifting their spoons and looked at Jesse with apprehension or stupidity, perceiving at once who he was; and they sheepishly permitted him to jump down and sprint away with his gang before they got up from their suppers.

The rains came and the gang was in swamplands with nearly one thousand manhunters looking for them. They gave up their horses and walked on foot at night, sleeping during the day under tents made from sopping blankets and shrubs. They couldn’t hunt wild game so they chewed grass and wild mushrooms, growing weaker as the nights grew increasingly cold. Jesse’s stamina was extraordinary, however, and he couldn’t stand the recurring pauses and delays. He complained that they were procrastinating and that it was like trying to make a getaway while pulling a hospital along. He considered the Youngers, and especially Bob, as impediments to ever getting back to Missouri, and once, in mean temper, put a gun against Bob Younger’s skull and was going to pull the trigger when Cole lunged at him, and only Frank and Charlie Pitts together were able to wrestle him off.

It was then that the James brothers split from the Youngers and Charlie Pitts. Days after they parted company, Jesse’s predictions came true, for Sheriff Glispin and his posse surrounded the four in the Younger gang. They were slogging through the mires of the Watonwan River near Madelia, and a gunfight ensued. Charlie Pitts was instantly killed with a Minie ball that crashed through his chest at the collar. Bob Younger was shot in the right lung but survived, as did his brothers, although Cole was stricken with eleven gunshot injuries and a blackened eye that gloved the entire right side of his face, and Jim fell with five wounds that included a cartridge ball that crannied beneath his brain and another that so shattered his jaw he could never again chew food.

The Youngers were medicated at the Flanders House in Madelia and were viewed in the Faribault jail by Pinkerton detectives and newsmen and crowds of the inquisitive, for whom Cole sorrowed about his sins and cited scripture and broadcast his love for mankind and the Baptist church, even cunningly leaked a tear or two so that resentments might be lessened. At the Younger brothers’ trial each man acknowledged his crimes and his guilty remorse so that instead of execution the judge sentenced them to the state penitentiary at Stillwater, Minnesota, there to remain for life.

The James brothers’ tracks were lost outside of Sioux Falls in the Dakota Territory, where it seems they rustled two blind horses from a farmer and, having long since become peeved with each other, gladly separated. The next information about either man was in a letter sent by some chagrined Pinkerton operatives who had relaxed from their hunt for the Jameses, in order to dine at the Whaley House in Fulton, Missouri, and had invited to their table a man who had charmed them with wicked stories and then left a note under their hotel room door, educating them about the fact that he was Jesse James. It was the sort of bravura performance that had become typical of Jesse James in society: he would later palaver with detective Yankee Bligh in Louisville and make the same admission about his identity via a postcard that read. “You have seen Jesse James. Now you can go ahead and die.”

MRS. ZEE JAMES conceived a second time in 1877, within a few weeks of Annie, and the two women exhausted entire mornings reporting their sensations and cravings, but the James brothers rarely saw each other and if they met didn’t speak. Frank thought Jesse had overtaxed his mind and saw good evidence for that judgment, for Jesse had silenced himself around Zee, he ate alone on the back porch, he followed his shoes as he walked; he ignored his wife’s condition until the last months, then made her hide from public view.

He was one to read auguries in the snarled intestines of chickens, or the blow of cat hair released to the wind, and the omens since he arrived in Nashville had forecast three years of bad luck that moated and dungeoned him. And he saw verification of his forebodings in all he tried to do. He had invested in commodities and lost so much he’d been forced into weekend work hauling rubble and trash. He had sold corn and seen the proceeds thieved by a rich landowner named Johnson who had no inkling who J. D. Howard was and paid insufficient attention to his menacing letters. He had traveled to Chicago in order to assassinate Allan Pinkerton but never found an occasion that did not seem devious and dishonorable. (He wanted a duel at sunrise with flintlock pistols. But instead he was offered potshots as Pinkerton exited from buildings or cabs, or nasty incidents in restaurants while he dined with operatives and their ladies—blood would spray the waiter’s coat, Pinkerton would tow the tablecloth as he sank, screams would shatter the glassware.) So Jesse went dejectedly home while sleuths and local constabularies continued the hunt for the Jameses in four states.

He had headaches that were fierce as icepicks behind his eyes. The cottage was wreathed by high bushes and lowering trees so it was as gloomy as twilight through the afternoon, and Jesse would sit alone in that eerie calm like broken furniture surrendered to a black lagoon. He’d purchased a contraption for peeling apples that he would dismantle and oil and reassemble, but his rifles dulled with smut, his horses ganted in their barn stalls, he wore the same clothes for weeks. He was like a man in a wheelchair, a man enfeebled with a stroke; his words were slurred, he noticed events seconds after they occurred, his neck seemed too frail for his head and his eyes sank to consider his brittle fingernails. Then he would awake and he would be transformed, his movements were raced and his mind was electric and his comments were snide and sarcastic, so that whenever he left for his livestock auctions and farm sales and derbies or wherever it was he went, Zee was relieved to see him go and welcomed Dr. Vertrees as one would a rescuer.

Twin sons were born to Zee in February 1878, and she named them Gould and Montgomery after the two doctors who’d delivered and cared for them until they succumbed to the crib deaths that were common among infants in that era. About then Annie gave birth to a boy who was christened Robert Franklin James and Zee had the minor consolation of nursing him when Annie’s milk was insufficient. But Jesse’s grief was huge. He thought of himself as the cause of their miseries and Zee would awake at night to see him sitting on the edge of the mattress, his blue nightshirt rucked and screwed about him, a white buttock windowed by the gather at his waist, his papa’s pencil-marked Holy Bible open in his hands.

He began to call himself Dave, a nickname from childhood that Zee never really got accustomed to, and he began gathering in the cottage some rough guests from Missouri: Tucker Bassham, a man called Whiskeyhead Ryan, a good-looking horse thief named Dick Liddil, an ex-Co

nfederate soldier named Jim Cummins, and Clell Miller’s brother Ed. Zee regarded them all unfavorably but gave Jesse no instructions about them for they seemed to gratify him in a way she could not, and she was pregnant again and wanted nothing more than an unchallenging life in Nashville, Tennessee.

She knew Frank James was getting along: his pedigreed hogs were awarded first prize for Poland Chinas at a county fair; when the crops were in he made cedar buckets for the Prewitt-Spurr Lumber Company; he was registered to vote and among his friends were the sheriff of Davidson County and a judge from the Eighth Circuit Court. But Jesse only raced horses—Roan Charger, Jim Malone, and one that especially pleased him, Skyrocket—and when she brought up the notion of a farm, Jesse agreed with her but thought it ought to be in the New Mexico Territory, and in July 1879 journeyed west to Santa Fe and the Las Vegas hot springs, staying there with a boyhood friend named Scott Moore so that Zee gave birth to their daughter, Mary, in a room at Frank and Annie’s house, and the child was a month old before her father ever saw her.

Annie partially convinced Zee that Jesse was a preposterous, irresponsible man, but America seemed spellbound by him. Correspondents sought to locate him, mysteries about the James brothers were considered in editorials, reports of their robberies seemed to be such a national addiction that nickel books were being published in order to offer more imaginative adventures. Insofar as it wasn’t them that the James gang robbed, the public seemed to wish Jesse a prolonged life and great prosperity. He was their champion and their example, the apple of their eyes; at times it even seemed to Zee that she wasn’t Jesse’s only wife, that America had married him too. And it seemed a joy to many of them when a reinvigorated James gang—without the man’s more prudential older brother—robbed the Chicago and Alton Railroad at Glendale, Missouri, in October 1879.

Some men with six-guns pushed the checker players at Joe Molt’s corner store fifty yards to the Glendale depot, where the station attendant ate the barrel of Jesse’s revolver until he agreed to whatever the outlaw commanded. Jesse then wrecked the telegraph apparatus with a crowbar (Tucker Bassham thought it was only a sewing machine) and the red flag was raised next to the railroad tracks in order to notify the engineer that passengers wanted on. After Dick Liddil climbed aboard the locomotive, Ed Miller sledged in the express car door, and currencies, bonds, and securities were swept into a meal sack and divvied six miles out of town, each in the company receiving $1,025, more than most of them could make in a year. The engineer told newspaper correspondents that the captain of the group had come up to him prior to riding off and had said, “I didn’t get your name, but mine is Jesse James.”

His pretext was that setting up a farm required a great deal of money, and he made an effort to persuade Frank to join him when again the James gang was plundering, but Frank was settled and intransigent and in the course of one of their increasingly common arguments Frank smashed a beer bottle against the Colt that Jesse had pulled in exasperation.

So Frank was again not with the James gang when, in November, they moved against the Empire City Bank. It appeared, however, that someone had spoken of their intentions, for the gang was forestalled by a preliminary reconnaissance that showed more than a dozen townsmen inside, each with more pistols and shotguns than he could possibly use. The gang therefore fragmented, with most of them returning to their chores as if they’d merely been on a club excursion, but Jesse and Whiskeyhead Ryan met again in September 1880 to rob the Mammoth Cave sightseers’ stage in Kentucky. Five men and Judge Rutherford Rountree and his daughter, Lizzie, were ordered out of the stagecoach at gunpoint and gave up $803 and jewelry, including a diamond ring that Jesse would later slip on his wife’s finger, and a gold watch that was a gift to the judge from the governor of Kentucky and was found two years later among the belongings of Mr. Thomas Howard of St. Joseph, Missouri. Ryan sipped from a pint bottle of whiskey during the presentation, and, as Jesse jumped onto his horse, complimented the passengers for their graciousness, drinking to their continued well-being. Judge Rountree would later recognize T. J. Hunt as one of the culprits and the poor man would be imprisoned for eighteen months before the judge’s mistake was repaired.

Jesse displayed the ring, the gold watch, and the money to Frank James, and then made a practice of sashaying by his older brother’s workplace in his gentleman’s clothes. The temptation of an easier income at last became too persuasive and Frank joined Jesse and Whiskeyhead Ryan when they stopped a government paymaster on the road to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in March 1881, splitting a five-thousand-dollar payroll three ways.