The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

And then Soapy went out and Bob went to the ceiling-high windows that looked over the street. He saw Soapy laughing with his bodyguards as he slogged through the snow; he saw shopkeepers greeting the man and giving way on the sidewalks. Bob slumped against the green wall and said without feeling, “Bang.”

THE GOVERNMENT OF CREEDE WAS, in fact, reorganized. Soapy’s gang strong-armed the commercial men, jerked pedestria

ns into alleys and put guns to their ears as one of Soapy’s lieutenants told how things had changed; they got to new arrivals to Creede as soon as they stepped off the train and injured more than one man by twisting a wrist until it snapped. Soapy appointed himself as president of a Gambler’s Trust and imposed membership in it on every saloonkeeper except Robert Ford. He manipulated people and preferences to such a degree that within weeks his good friends were made mayor, city councilmen, coroner, and justice of the peace, his brother-in-law, John Light, was made city marshal, and as a special insult to Bob, ex-policeman Edward O. Kelly was made deputy sheriff of Bachelor, a mining camp on the mountain of that name, just three miles away. Meanwhile, Soapy Smith opened the Orleans Club in the east canyon section called Jimtown, financing purchase of the gambling hall with the monthly percentages paid him for municipal operating expenses. And he did what he could to get Bob to resign his ownership of the Exchange Club: rocks with auguring messages tied to them crashed through the batwing doors at closings, glowering men in grizzly bear coats slouched outside the club with shotguns all day and followed Bob anywhere he went, and on April 3rd, 1892, the geography on which the club had been constructed was designated by the city government as the site of a forthcoming school and the gambling hall was ordered closed.

Bob ignored the ruling and gave not an inch to Smith’s commands and injunctions, and yet his bearing changed as his influence lessened, he was accused of cowardice and accommodation, of living up to his pusillanimous reputation, and he kept to his apartment all day or in a private room at night, getting drunk on his overnight whiskey as he pensively flipped over playing cards, looking at his destiny in every king and jack.

He complained to Dorothy that despising Robert Ford had become a peculiar kind of sport. He sometimes wondered in a self-pitying way whom people would peer upon, snipe at, sneer about, threaten, if Bob Ford weren’t around. Even as he circulated in his own saloon he knew that smiles disappeared when he passed by, that it was his overweening pride that the patrons whispered about, that it was quiet jeering that snagged their mouths like a fishhook, that there was always someone to spy on him and repeat his every word to Smith, to tally his sins and trespasses. And even Dorothy seemed unsympathetic, she seemed to perceive Bob as an impostor, as a boy of impulses but no principles, incapable and apprehensive and forever repeating the same mistakes.

Bob paged through his scrapbook from 1882 and grinned as he reread newspaper stories about the Ford brothers going East to perform on stage; then he glimpsed a correspondent’s report of the execution of Charles J. Guiteau, the man who shot President Garfield. He was a changed man, “meek as a child,” and on the night before his hanging Guiteau recited his own poem, “Simplicity, or Religious Baby Talk.” A scaffold was constructed in the jailyard and the public paid as much as three hundred dollars for the right to see the man strangle. A black sack was slipped over Guiteau’s head and a noose was snugged around his neck and he sang, “I am going to the Lordy; I am so glad,” until he dropped through the trapdoor and the rope jerked him rigid and he dangled in the air. The jailyard audience applauded.

On Holy Saturday night in April Bob Ford wagered a good deal of his savings on a prize fight between a professional named Johnson whom Soapy Smith had brought in and a Colorado boy whose magnificent strength could not compensate for his ignorance of boxing or of the newly inaugurated Marquis of Queensberry rules. He was one-eyed and practically unconscious by the seventh round, when he sloppily collapsed to the canvas and could not respond to the referee’s count. The professional was declared the victor and Soapy was clapping the man on the back in his corner when Bob irately jumped into the ring and swung a stocking that was weighted with coins at the fighter’s jawbone, instead breaking a bodyguard’s right arm before Bob could be dragged off.

Bob stayed awake that night and all Easter, grieving over his losses with Joe Palmer and four quarts of whiskey, at last going out to kill the prize fighter at eight o’clock Sunday night. But they could do no more than digress along the way: Bob made a shopkeeper jig by cocking his pistol and pounding in bullets around the man’s high-button shoes, spattering mud on his pants cuffs; he shot through a preacher’s dining room window and made a milk glass crash apart; the city’s pride were the arc lamps that illuminated Amethyst Street and prompted the saying “It’s day all day in the daytime and there is no night in Creede,” so Bob Ford rode underneath them on his horse and straightened his gun overhead, destroying all but sixteen. He encouraged his horse into the genteel lobby of the Central Theatre and there grandstanded with a long justification of his life, his reasons for thinking the prize fight was rigged, his high regard for his good friend’s boxing skills, his willingness to meet in a gunfight with anyone who thought he could match the man who shot Jesse James. By midnight all Bob’s cartridges were gone and he rode back to the Exchange Club yelling an old Kentucky brag: “Size me up and get goosebumps, boys. I’m the widowmaker and the slayer of jungles, the mean-eyed harbinger of desolation! I’ve ripped a catamount asunder and sprinkled his fragments in my stew; one screech from me makes vultures fly, one glance puts blisters on grizzly bears, devastation rides on my every breath! Where is that stately stag to stamp his hoof or rap his antlers to these proclamations! Where is the mangy lion what will lick the salt off my name!”

A COMMITTEE OF ONE HUNDRED was organized in Creede overnight and after long argument and a vote of fifty-three to forty-seven, they decided against lynching Bob Ford and Joe Palmer, choosing instead to urge them out of town. They pulled Bob from his sleep at six in the morning and reported the committee’s verdict and Bob pushed by them to drop the poisons of his stomach out an upstairs window. He then slipped to the floor, wiping his mouth on his sleeve as he looked up at a man in an astrakhan coat. “I’ll come back, you know. I always do. Getting rid of Bob Ford isn’t easy.”

“You’re a mighty big talker, ain’t ya.”

“I’ve got all your names on my list.”

The committee transported Bob to the railroad depot in a hackney and put him on a train to Colorado Springs, where Dorothy later shipped his possessions. Bob took a cheap hotel room there and permitted an interview in which he said, “I’m going back to Creede in a day or two with a gun in each hand,” but he sojourned in Colorado Springs for almost a fortnight.

He would go out in the morning sunlight and range over grasslands as Jesse might have, feeling the earth gain height until the green mountains abruptly jutted from it and changed their color to blue and gray in the distance. Or he would sit like a chair all day in the hotel lobby, gazing at the Regulator clock, reimagining the sitting room and the racehorse named Skyrocket and the gun that Jesse had given him, and everything would mingle with the stageshow and it would be Jesse who cocked his head to the right as Bob clicked back the hammer but it would be Charley with fright in his eyes, Zee who sagged from the chair to the floor, and then Bob himself who looked at the ceiling, blood pooling wide as a woman’s lap under his injury.

He was moving out of history with each year beyond 1882, and yet mentions of Robert Ford appeared periodically in the Colorado and Missouri newspapers, some displeased reports implying it was a pity the coward was still around even as one or two accounts every month contained the news that the slayer of Jesse James had his throat cut in an alley in Oklahoma or expired from consumption or pneumonia and was put in a paupers’ cemetery. No account that he’d read had the grace to remark on when or where he was born, who his kin were and how he was raised; they never remarked on the Moore School, Blue Cut, the grocery store, his agreement with the government; it seemed enough to say that Bob Ford was the man who shot Jesse James, as if his existence could be encompassed in that one act of perfidy. He recognized that he would never be forgiven, that he would not be granted eulogies nor great attention at his death, correspondents would not journey to Creede, his skull would not be surgically opened nor phrenologically measured, photographs of his body on ice would not be sold in sundries stores, people would not crowd the sidewalks in rain to see Bob Ford’s funeral cortege, biographies would not be written about him, children would not be named after him, no one would ever pay twenty-five cents to stand in the rooms he grew up in. He yearned for much less in Colorado than he had as a boy in Missouri, but he did yearn for this: that Robert Newton Ford might go down in history as more than a gunshot on April 3rd, 1882.

In such a mood, Bob mailed letters of penitence and supplication to commercial men in Creede, apologizing for his temporary insanity and asking permission to come back as a man of peace. And on April 27th he was sitting in the green chair of a Denver and Rio Grande passenger car as it coasted into Creede, but he was depressed to see upon looking out that the railroad depot was populated with competitors and opponents, even some of Soapy’s men twisting stockings with pennies packed in the toes. So he gripped his possessions and rushed back to the caboose, jumping down to the rock bed when the train jolted to a stop, and slipping through shops and down alleys to the office of the Morning Chronicle, where he composed, with the help of an editor, an article that was published the following day:

Bob Ford is again in Creede. Why the possibility of his return should have carried terror to the hearts of certain citizens is hardly possible to understand. Since he has been in Creede there has been no quieter man except on the unfortunate Sunday night two weeks ago. For his action upon that occasion he is extremely sorry, but after all, he only displayed then the Western idea of staying by one’s friends. This idea is one which Eastern people, as a general rule, cannot comprehend. It is true, nevertheless, that when a true Westerner starts out to stand by a man he does it thoroughly, even though it is simply a matter of getting drunk and shooting up the town. This is the cardinal idea which distinguishes the West from the East. Bob Ford has many interests in Creede, and if he chooses to stay here and watch his investments, he has as much right to do it as anyone else. A fighting chance is all anyone wants and Ford should at least be granted that.

Bob then appeared before the justice of the peace, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, and gladly paid a fifty-dollar fine, but the Committee of One Hundred (many of them Easterners) was persuaded by Soapy Smith that Bob was a pestilence to the community and ought to be expelled from Creede under penalty of death. The committee sent as its representative City Marshal Theodore Craig and Bob repli

ed only that it was a peculiar coincidence in his life that he was always being ordered around by a man with a star and the name of Craig. He said he’d had just about enough of that and wasn’t moving on again, and when the Committee of One Hundred came after Bob in the Exchange Club, they found gathered around him the many he’d given work to, the pretty waiter girls and gamblers and scary men like Jack Pugh and Broken Nose Creek, all of them aiming guns. “I’m staying,” Bob said. “You pass that along to Soapy.”

Craig said, “You give us no choice but to fight you.” And Bob said, “You can’t kill me; I’m already dead.” The committee gave in and Bob subsequently challenged the city government by keeping the gambling hall open and by going about Creede in his swank English suits and gentleman’s look, with only a derringer for a gun and that in his hip pocket. He knew the regular ill-regard of strangers and could feel great hate for him come into the gaming room each night. His history was pried into, his private life was made public, men stopped on the sidewalks to gape at him, reporters impeded his progress with impertinent and predictable questions. (On being introduced to one correspondent Bob said, “You’re going to talk me to death, I guess, and then go home and roast me like all the other goddamned papers do.”) He was compared to every reptile and animal, most of them predatory, and was persecuted by the catcalls of children and the loopy pronouncements of miners who were deep inside whiskey bottles. Spoiled vegetables were dumped on his doorstep, intoxicated Southern men sometimes pitched inside his saloon with pistols gripped in their hands, people ducked into shops to avoid him, he received so many menacing letters in the mail that he could read them without any reaction except curiosity and then smirk as he crumpled them up, a slaughtered cat was nailed to his closet door along with a note that read simply, “Get out of town.” The bogus signature belonged to an Ed O’Kelly and the words were written in chicken blood.

And yet he did not change his name, camouflage his identity, dodge the press, go off to a foreign country, or seek refuge in the wilderness. Instead he played the scapegrace and rogue, pretended that he was appreciated by many, professed that he knew just when and how he would die and did not feel imperiled.

ON THE NIGHT of June 5th, some persons unknown (perhaps inspired by Soapy Smith) spilled coal-oil around the Exchange Club and put a match to it. The fire grew like ivy over the wooden walls and gained entrance to the gambling room, peeling the wallcoverings up from the floor, exploding the glassware, and mangling iron until it got out again and joined itself to the wood around the club. It soon became a conflagration, eating not only Bob Ford’s place but every canvas, clapboard, and pinewood building in the gulch, ravaging much of Creede and creating such great heat that men gave up pitching their pails of Willow Creek water on the fire itself, instead cooling their panicky animals by splashing their steaming hides.

Bob managed to preserve only a few cases of liquor and his upright piano, and yet he persisted with the doggedness and incorrigibility that were typical of him throughout his life. He prospected the unincinerated sections of Willow Creek gully and purchased in Jimtown a big canvas tent shored up by scantlings, with a long wooden floor and a ceiling eighteen feet high, a onetime inn between a mining office called Leadville Headquarters and an eating cabin called The Cafe. Bob then salvaged a good length of his Eastlake bar and a mule team dragged it up Rio Grande Avenue and into the tent, the greater area of it being given to dancing, the one activity not available in the Orleans Club or the Gunnison Club and Exchange.

Bob called his fifth saloon the Omaha Club and the grand opening was on Tuesday, June 7th. He engaged two musicians to play violin along with the piano man and charged his eager and agog patrons one dollar to dance a five-minute mazourka, schottische, or waltz with pretty girls they’d only gaped at with longing in the past. An intermission followed each song, during which the girls were encouraged to get their partners up to the bar or go back with them to private tents, splitting the receipts of each enterprise with Bob. So many yearning men crowded into the Omaha Club by eight o’clock that a good deal of the dancing took place on the streets, and it looked so much as if Bob and his girls would be getting rich that Nellie Russell sought Mr. Ford out, saying she’d accept any job with him, even one as a prostitute.

They strolled together up Rio Grande Avenue and Bob made the usual interrogations, learning that Miss Russell grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri, and would have been a girl of ten when Bob was living there in the cottage. She said at night children would crouch by the sitting room windows of 1318 Lafayette in order to frighten themselves by seeing the ghost of Jesse James. She’d never seen it but a boyfriend said the apparition once spooked him, appearing near a looking-glass, like vapor from a teapot except for his scowling and piercing blue eyes. She said the place had been such an upsetting experience for the people who’d rented it over the past ten years that the cost had dropped from the fourteen dollars per month that Thomas Howard had paid to the bargain price of eight, and still no one would stay there. It was being sold for taxes when she left to come West.

Bob used that advantage to change the subject and ask why she’d come to Creede.

Nellie shrugged. “You go down any street in America and you’ll see signs about folks getting rich in Creede. And I guess I liked the sound of it; I mean the word Creede. Don’t you?”

Bob guffawed at her ignorance and said, “It isn’t even the man’s actual name! His real name was William Harvey! Only reason. N.C. came West was his girlfriend jilted him and married his older brother. Shouldn’t make it religious or anything.”

“Still. You get a good feeling from it.”

“You don’t always,” he said.

The canyon’s cliffs and buttes castled over them, deep black against a deep blue sky. The conflagration had gutted a good many lodgings in Creede and the uprooted had been transplanted into Jimtown, where they slept on the ground like island people, like serfs. Bob could see the lights of cooking fires and cigarettes in the foothills, and as they strolled along with their practical conversation, he could hear the happy uproar of the Omaha Club as the musicians played “Pop Goes the Weasel,” but under that he could pick out the hopeful talk of shopkeepers, prospectors, workers, and clerks who’d lost what few things they had.