The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Many newspaper editorial pages on Tuesday carried columns applauding the assassination because it was cheap, expeditious, and successful, but the newspapers’ correspondents were at odds with that judgment, seeming only to record conversations with people who were sympathetic to the victim or skeptical that he’d really perpetrated all that the government said he did. In consequence, antagonism to the Fords was increasing. It was rumored that some Crackernecks intended to steal and enshrine the remains, that Bob would be lynched on the day that the body was interred, that Frank James was in the city with vengeance on his mind—this “mysterious stranger” was eventually revealed to be a German barkeeper who was known as Dutch Charlie. By afternoon the Fords had received at least two menacing letters, one of them crudely printed under the official seal of the Tennessee House of Representatives. It read: “To the Ford Brothers you have Killed Jessie James but you did not get his Pal so Jessie James shal be Avenged i will kill you both if i have to follow you to the end of the earth you cant escape my Vengeance.”

A reporter asked the Fords if they were at all cowed by the threat and Charley was again the one who answered, “No, sir, we fear no one. You tell this fellow from Tennessee to give us his name and we’ll meet him on even ground.”

Bob added, “Give me my guns and let me know who he is and I will meet him anywhere he will name in the United States.”

The writer was clearly impressed by the boys’ courage and resolution and said in summary, “If the worst comes, they will sell their lives as dearly as possible.”

Governor Crittenden came up from Jefferson City on the 4th and graciously shook hands at the polling places, urging people to vote the Democratic ticket. The Republicans swept the city elections except for a Democrat who was preferred as city marshal over Enos Craig.

Crittenden granted a good number of interviews, denying in each that he’d meant that Jesse James be killed. He was sure though that his actions would meet with the sanction of law-abiding citizens of Missouri and throughout the United States. “If not killed when he was,” the governor said, “he would have attacked the bank at Platte City, and in perpetrating the robbery would have killed in all probability some one or more of the officials in the ill-fated bank; then he would have gone to Kansas, returned and attacked the bank at Forrest City and killed one or more of its officials. Should not these things be considered? Must we overlook not only his past but anticipated robberies and murders in the future and grieve over his deprivation? I say no, a thousand times no. I have no excuses to make, no apologies to render to any living man for the part I played in this bloody drama; nor has Craig nor has Timberlake. The life of one honest law-abiding man however humble is worth more to society than a legion of Jesse Jameses. One is a blessing, the other a living, breathing, putrid curse.”

Crittenden’s secretary, Finis Farr, then substantiated the governor’s claim that no murder was intended by indicating the July proclamation that promised a reward only for the arrest and conviction of the man. Off the record, however, the secretary confided that studies showed real estate values in Missouri would increase by thirty-three percent once the desperado was gone, and noted that one man who was selling his farm had already raised the price by five hundred dollars.

Meanwhile the crowds at Seidenfaden’s grew and now were gaining admission to the cooling room only after contributing fifty cents. Another photograph was taken of the renowned American bandit constricted in a small walnut coffin, with his head canted to the left and with three sullen, scraggly men around him, and it was that shot that was most available in sundries stores and apothecaries, to be viewed in a stereoscope along with the Sphinx, the Taj Mahal, the Catacombs of Rome.

JAMES WILLIAM BUEL ARRIVED on Wednesday to cull information about the shooting for a reissue of his two books about the James brothers, The Border Outlaws and The Border Bandits; and Frank Triplett was in the city to sign a contract with Mrs. James and Mrs. Samuels and a St. Louis publisher, giving them fifty dollars as an advance against royalties. (The Life, Times, and Treacherous Death of Jesse James was written at the rate of sixty pages a day, and while not actually dictated by the two women, as was alleged, it was as congenial to the Jameses and as contemptuous and critical of Governor Crittenden and the Fords as any chronicle could be; yet it claimed that Frank and Jesse were criminals, and for that reason Zee repudiated the book in May, and Governor Crittenden unintentionally cooperated with the widow by suppressing it.)

Ex-Governor Brockmeyer visited both the cooling room and the jail cells and then communicated to a correspondent his glancing impressions of the slain man and his remover, saying Mr. James could have been distinguished in whichever course he undertook, that he was obviously a man born to control subordinates, and his general appearance showed a sagacity and power that but few men can ever possess. Of the Ford boy, there was a youth who could look green and uncouth except when cornered. That he was courageous, self-reliant, and prepared for any emergency, those, who looked into the depths of his cool blue eyes could not doubt for an instant. He could cope with anything, although his manner was quiet, self-centered, and of a retiring character; and it was possibly the corresponding singularities in the fugitive’s make-up that conceivably caused him to take young Ford into his confidence.

Mrs. Moses Miller, the mother of Clell and Ed Miller, also looked in on the cooling room, moving inchingly on two canes and shivering with palsy as she stood over the remains. Many reporters insisted on her opinion of the man more or less responsible for the deaths of her two sons, but she refused to speak a syllable and simply pressed a laced linen hankie to her eyes.

Meanwhile, an eight-year-old boy named Tom Jacobs was gallivanting through greening woods in countryside east of Richmond, calling for his mongrel dog. He followed its barking around scrub oak, box elder, and crab apple trees and saw it gambling miseries with a skunk, wagering to the right and left as the skunk showed its sharp white teeth and maneuvered in the scraggle and muck of a rain-changed creek. The boy saw that the skunk had been eating. He recognized a muddy wool blanket, menacing teeth, and a withered left hand with three missing fingers, and then ran with fright to his father.

Perry Jacobs was so convinced by the child’s horror that he rode straight to Richmond and collected Constable John C. Morris and Coroner Richard Bohanon, and they followed Tom Jacobs onto the Harbison acreage that was rented by the widow Bolton, finding the rotting cadaver of Robert Woodson Hite in a shawl of clay and apple tree leaves that slid from his chest in the rain. His eyes were plucked out, his mouth seemed to scream, and a bullet hole in the man’s right temple had been exaggerated by birds. The men wincingly carried Hite’s weight to a wagon and wound him in a rubber sheet, and then arrested Martha Bolton and Elias Capline Ford on the suspicion of murder.

Elias acknowledged that the cadaver was Wood Hite, but Martha claimed she’d only known the man as Grandfather Grimes; otherwise their statements about the December gunfight matched in attesting that it was Dick Liddil who’d committed the killing. They were released on their own recognizance since two brothers already in jail seemed a satisfactory guarantee that they wouldn’t “high-tail” it (the constable’s words). Wood Hite was deposited on the plaintiff’s table in a Richmond courtroom, pending a coroner’s inquest, and then Constable Morris, with unseemly haste, sent a message to Governor Crittenden that read: “I have the body of Wood Hite and am ready with evidence for identification. What shall I do with it? I claim the reward.”

The governor was so incensed by the constable’s greed that he considered charges against him, but guiltily decided that Morris’s reaction was partly of the governor’s own making, so that he merely sent the reply: “On account of the weather, rebury it. No reward offered for his dead body.”

The Ford brothers were remarkably unbothered by the revelation in Richmond. Perhaps their distractions and perturbations were already too plentiful for them to register the significance of the discovery, or perhaps they’d made a blithe assumption that the governor would pardon all previous crimes. At any rate they continued to comport themselves as if they’d done nothing terribly wrong, and Charley even acted hurt when he was informed that they would not be allowed to attend Jesse’s last rites on Thursday.

THE RAINS CONTINUED into the afternoon of April 5th, and surreys and rigs were mired in the slime of the streets, and yet more than four hundred mourners slogged after an express company wagon that carried a boxed iron casket to the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad depot. A covered hackney summoned Mrs. James and the two children at six, then Mrs. Samuels, a cousin named Luther James, and Sheriff Timberlake. Thomas Mimms, Henry Craig, and deputies, correspondents, and the city marshal came after them in carriages that were somberly festooned with black crepe ribbons and bows. Crowds lined the sidewalks and watched the cavalcade from beneath wet umbrellas and men stood lugubriously in the rain with their hats off, their hair washed slick against their skulls. A crackpot no one knew raised a purse pistol and shot at Mrs. Samuels, and Luther James and Henry Craig leaped out, tackling the manifestly intoxicated man in an alley. Craig punched him once in the stomach and once in the cheek and the man staggered away until he sprawled sloppily into a gutter. Craig regained the carriage and shook out his fingers and smiled when he was clapped on the back. “I needed the exercise,” he said. No charges were made against the crank.

Sheriff Timberlake and the deputies slid the boxed casket into a railway express car, then shut and locked the sliding door behind them, mindful of the irony in the situation. The remaining parties climbed onto a coach that included regular passengers who stared so rudely and pryingly at the veiled and weeping women that City Marshal Craig issued some minatory instructions and then sat with Mrs. Samuels’s left hand engaged in his right. They were old acqu

aintances from the Civil War when Enos Craig was the Buchanan County sheriff and oversaw Zerelda Samuels and her daughters in the county jail. They chatted about their gardens.

A special Hannibal train was scheduled to meet them at Cameron Junction but the crowds made them tarry so long in St. Joseph that they missed their connection and were forced to stay over in the town until a Rock Island train could be sent. Sheriff Timberlake and Marshal Craig vied over who would nightwatch the remains, for each mistrusted the other as a man capable of selling the corpse. An argument followed and Enos Craig reached for his gun, but realized the childishness of the fight when a station agent yelled from across the room, “Gentlemen, gentlemen! Don’t pull your pops in here!” Craig returned his revolver to its holster and then sourly walked the railroad tracks, snuffing Maccaboy tobacco.

Dick Liddil, Marshal Bill Wymer, Mrs. Katie Timberlake, and two other ladies had arrived in Kearney around noon on Wednesday and word went out that the funeral cortege would be coming soon, so that the railroad line between Cameron and the Samuels farm was fenced by the afflicted and curious even when the Rock Island freight train and single coach actually coasted by after midnight. Mary and Jesse Edwards James slept on the seats inside and Mrs. Samuels continued her inexhaustible commentaries on the caitiffs who’d slaughtered her son. Sheriff Timberlake lashed the container to the coach’s rear platform and sat on the box during the journey, sucking on a cold Calabash pipe, letting the wind comb his hair.

Once Kearney was attained, the casket was removed from the box and rested in the candle-lit lobby of the McCarthy House so that residents could look through the coffin glass at a man that many there had known only as a storybook legend. His skin was yellowing a little and the contusion over his left eye was orange but otherwise the man seemed more attractive than the Jesse they’d seen as a child. Mrs. Samuels came in from the sitting room at 3 a.m. accompanied by her mincing husband, and she again gave in to wild lamentations, screaming, “How can I stand it? How can I stand it? How can I stand it?” Zee James stood quietly at the foot of the casket, gently caressing the metallic rosewood with her light, gloved fingers. A silver name plate was affixed to the casket and German Gothic lettering had been used to inscribe the words “Jesse James.” Dr. Samuels recounted an uninteresting story about seeing his wife for the first time in that very hotel, and the New York Herald correspondent muttered a wisecrack to one of his colleagues. It was almost five in the morning when the writers at last went to sleep.

Sheriff Timberlake had arranged for the president of William Jewell College to officiate at the services on Holy Thursday, but after agreeing to that the Right Reverend W. R. Rothwell was reminded that a sophomore, George Wymore, had been slain by the James-Younger gang in the robbery of the Clay County Savings Bank, and Rothwell claimed an incipient malady, recommending in his stead Reverend J. M. P. Martin, pastor of the Mount Olivet Baptist Church.

Kearney was a main street town with only six hundred residents then, and yet five hundred people moved through the McCarthy House between sunrise and noon. Freight and passenger trains made unscheduled stops at the Kearney depot so that travelers and railroad crews could see the desperado, and sharecroppers were walking into town from shacks that were sometimes as far as sixteen miles away. Then it was two in the afternoon and the casket was screwed shut and carried out to the flatbed of a spring wagon. A procession of twenty teams and carriages followed the remains to a one-storey red-brick church that was already so filled that two hundred spectators were laughing and smoking on the lawn. The sky was cerulean blue, the temperature was sixty degrees, and a slight wind mowed over the grass.

Sheriff Timberlake was the supernumerary among the pallbearers and was mistaken for Frank James by many in attendance. The five others were Deputy Sheriff J. T. Reed, a boyhood friend of the outlaw’s, and J. D, Ford, the mayor of Liberty; then Charles Scott, James Henderson, and James Vaughn (who much later became mentally ill and claimed he was Jesse’s brother). The casket was situated on a short table in front of the plain altar and relatives and close acquaintances were seated beside it as the congregation sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

Reverend R. H. Jones read from the Book of Job: “Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not.”

Mrs. Samuels moaned, “O merciful Jesus!” at strategic intervals then and throughout the reading from Psalm 39: “Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Behold thou hast made my days as an hand-breadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.” Jones then offered a prayer for the bereft mother, wife, and children, asking the Lord to make their anguish a blessing to them by bringing them to wonderful knowledge of Himself.

The Mount Olivet congregation rose for the hymn, “Oh, Where Shall Rest Be Found?” and Reverend Jones retreated next to Timberlake as a stooped and sullen Reverend J. M. P. Martin sorely climbed to a raised wood pulpit that was slashed across with sunlight. He looked grimly at the casket through his spectacles and glanced apologetically at the family and assembly before dividing his Bible with his finger. He said, “We all understand that we cannot change the state of the dead. Again, it would be useless for me to bring any new information before the congregation respecting the life and character of the deceased.”

Some reporters were annoyed by the prim and politic tack the minister had taken, recognizing that there’d be no story in it, and they audibly sighed and sank deeper in the pews as Martin peered into his Good Book. “The text which I have chosen today is the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, forty-fourth verse: “Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of man cometh.’ ”

It was a sleepy, unimaginative, uninspired sermon that concentrated on the certainty of the grave, the need for repentance, the salvation of the righteous. Zee James no more than sniffed as Martin spoke, but Mrs. Samuels sobbed and swayed and rolled her eyes to the roof-beams, swoonily repining, then made the smaller Dr. Samuels crutch her flamboyant, chest-striking exit from the church at the conclusion of the service.