Hard Way Out of Hell

by Johnny D. Boggs

  A small man, but with a big belly, black hair, thick mustache and beard, and dressed as sloppily as a town drunk. Plaid sack coat and striped britches, a bowler hat, green ascot with polka dots, a vest missing at least two buttons, and one pants leg tucked partly in a boot.

  “Hey!” Jesse yelled. “I got something to say.”

  “Shut up!” a man in a gray suit yelled.

  But Henry Clay Dean smiled and, pointing, called out: “I yield to the man on horseback!”

  “Well,” Jesse said, standing in the stirrups now, and bowing toward Corydon’s guest of honor, “you’ve been having your fun, whilst we’ve been having ours. You needn’t go into hysterics when I tell you that we’ve just been down to the bank and robbed it of every dollar in the till. If you’ll go there now, you’ll find the cashier tied up. So, if you want any of us, why, just come down and take us. Thank you for your attention.”

  “Get out of here, you lying dog!” yelled a farmer.

  Since everyone in town had been so obliging that day, we obliged him, spurring our horses and hightailing hard for the Missouri state line.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The $10,000 we split lasted a while. It even got Clell Miller a pretty good lawyer after his arrest by deputy marshals. I’m not sure Clell needed a lawyer, for we sent plenty of friends—former bushwhackers—who swore on the Good Book that Clell had been with them and nowhere near Corydon on June 3, 1871. Acquitted, Clell rode back to Missouri, and we had a few good laughs over several bottles of fine rye whiskey.

  The law also sent out notices for Jesse James—the boy never should have tried to show up Henry Clay Dean, because people could describe him to a T after that grandstanding—but Jesse got his wish. He wrote a letter to John Newman Edwards, and the Kansas City Times printed it.

  As to Frank and I robbing a bank in Iowa or anywhere else, it is as base a falsehood as ever was uttered from human lips. I can prove, by some of the best citizens in Missouri, my whereabouts on the third day of June, the day the bank was robbed, but it is useless for me to prove an alibi.

  Of course, a man has to eat, keep his horses fed, and his guns loaded. Twenty-five hundred bucks doesn’t last as long as you would think it might, not when you’re on the run, helping your starving kinfolk, and paying a lot of money to be forgotten. A little less than a year later, the James boys, Clell Miller, and I met again at the Rubicon, where Jesse talked us into returning to Kentucky to a visit a rich bank in Columbia. This time, we brought along my brother John.

  I didn’t care much for it, but John said, since he was already outlawed for killing a deputy sheriff in Texas, he might as well keep on that trail. If he didn’t go with us, he swore that he would go it alone. Being the damned fool that I was, I thought maybe, if I kept my eye on John, I could keep him from getting killed.

  * * * * *

  This is how we did things. Once we had a bank in mind—in this case, the Deposit Bank in Columbia, Kentucky—we rode into the area, but never together. Since I knew cattle and horses, I would usually pretend to be a livestock buyer and just chat up some folks. We stopped at farms, always polite, always courteous, and we tipped well. When it came time to do our business, we would ride into town. At least two of the boys went inside the bank, another stood at the door near the horses to make sure no legitimate customer went inside, while maybe two other boys stayed a distance from the bank, keeping watch. If something went wrong, those two men would cut loose, yell, scream, cuss, shoot, and make sure none of our “inside men” or “second squad” got hurt.

  This particular bank stood on the edge of the square. Jesse, Clell Miller, and John rode into town from the Burksville Pike, dismounted, and led their horses into the alley. Clell and Jesse went inside, while John busied himself by the front door tamping tobacco into a pipe bowl.

  At the square, Frank swung down off his sorrel, busied himself tightening his cinch. Folks figure that was some ploy, to keep citizens from suspicioning what strangers were up to, but it was more than that. No bank robber wanted to get caught, captured, and killed because of a loose cinch.

  “You think this is a good idea?” I asked. I remained in the saddle, scanning the windows of businesses, the rooftops, looking for any sign of an ambush or nosy Kentuckians.

  Frank brought his stirrup down from the saddle. “ ‘I have given Him my faith, and sworn my allegiance to Him; how, then, can I go back from this, and not be hanged as a traitor?’ ”

  The night before at a boarding house at Russell Springs, Frank had whiled away the hours reading Pilgrim’s Progress. It had been his father’s favorite book.

  I tried to think of some suitable retort, but I was not familiar with Mr. John Bunyan’s work. Besides, a gunshot boomed from inside the bank, and I cursed as I filled my hands with a pair of Navy Colts.

  Since we started the ball in Liberty, bank robberies had become fairly regular events across the West. Folks, not wanting to lose their money, were charging onto the streets. Reins in my teeth, I pulled triggers, controlling the fine thoroughbred with knees and thighs. Riding with Quantrill had taught us the need for mounts that would not flinch at gunfire, would not scare, but would run like hell when given rein. We damned sure never rode into town on green or skittish horses.

  “Time to skedaddle, gents!” Frank called out, spinning his horse, breaking panes of glass from the courthouse with well-aimed shots from his Remington.

  One thing I remember about that job in Columbia. Some old gent sat on a rocking chair on the other side of the street. He rocked back and forth, and leaned over, trying to get a good look at us, it appeared. Other folks ran this way or that, diving behind water troughs or cracker barrels, or darting into the open doors of businesses. Women screamed for the town marshal, but he never showed his head. While men pointed at us, none dared draw a revolver or shoulder a rifle. But this jasper? He just rocked. Turned out that he was blind. At least that’s what the Louisville Journal reported, but I know one thing for sure. As much noise as we were making with all of the shooting, that fellow must have been deaf, too.

  John had already mounted and was holding the reins to the horses for Jesse and Clell. Both men crashed through the door, with Clell firing two shots into the bank before leaping into his saddle. Jesse was the last to mount, for he held the wheat sack. Once his feet found the stirrups, he shouted: “Off the street, you damned fools! We’re Lowry’s gang! Lowry’s gang!” He shot twice, spurred the mare, and took off for Burksville. We followed.

  * * * * *

  “The Lowry gang?” Frank asked after we turned off the pike. We were following a logging trail and had begun to circle back toward Columbia—Frank and I had figured that no posse would expect us to do that. Coming to a creek, we stopped to let our horses drink, shed our homespun and duck, and put on our businessmen clothes.

  Jesse grinned. “Let the law go after the Lowry boys … instead of Jesse James.”

  “They’ll have to go to Hades to catch the Lowry gang, Dingus,” Clell said. “Last I heard about them … the last living one blowed his own head off with a shotgun.”

  “We’re a mite pale in color to be confused for them boys, too,” Frank said.

  I cursed, for I did not care about a bunch of freedmen who had caused a stir in North Carolina and, as far as I knew, had never set foot in Kentucky. Besides, as Clell Miller had just mentioned, they were all dead and buried. Something bad had happened inside the bank, for Brother John remained as pale as a freshly laundered sheet.

  I asked: “So what happened inside?”

  “Damned fool cashier wouldn’t open the vault,” Jesse answered, tossing the wheat sack to his brother.

  “Did he look like Major Cox, too?” I said.

  That knocked the smirk right off Jesse’s face.

  Clell Miller cleared his throat. “The fool went for a pistol. Dingus had no choice.”

  I let ou
t a heavy sigh, not able to look again at my younger brother. He had killed a lawman in Texas in self-defense, although we doubted any jury or judge would see things that way. Now he was an accessory to a murder committed during a bank robbery.

  “Damnation.” Frank looked up from the sack, and sprayed a sweet-gum tree with tobacco juice. “I don’t think there’s six hundred bucks in here.”

  * * * * *

  Which barely left enough to get us back home. So, yeah, Parson, I went with Frank and Jesse to the Kansas City Fair in September. It was a pretty good idea, as brazen as a shavetail Yankee lieutenant chasing glory, and I hand all the credit to Jesse.

  “We ride straight up to the ticket gates,” Jesse explained. “Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty thousand people.” He tapped the headline in the Times. “That’s how many will be there, according to this here newspaper. All buying tickets.”

  “Ten, fifteen, twenty thousand eyewitnesses,” Frank warned him.

  “Uhn-huh.” Jesse grinned. Damn, he could charm a fire-breathing Baptist out of his Bible when he smiled like that. “And they’ll think we’re just part of the show.”

  It netted us only $1,000 for, damn our luck, the cashiers had just emptied the tills and sent most of the loot to the bank right before we rode up to the ticket gates. As I held the reins to Jesse’s horse, and Frank held his Remington, Jesse went right up to the cashier.

  “What would you do if I told you I am Jesse James and I am robbing you?” he stated.

  The man looked up from the tin box, snarled, and said: “I’d tell you to go to hell.”

  “Funny”—Jesse placed a long-barreled Colt under the man’s nose—“because I am Jesse, I am robbing you, and if you don’t do as I say, you’ll be the one going to hell.”

  He snatched the box, pushed the cashier down, and ran to the bay mare, tossing the tin to me. Yet as Jesse tried to put a foot in the stirrup, the fool cashier came at him in a running dive, knocking Jesse to the ground. His horse, of course, did not bolt, even when Frank fired a shot at the cashier. The bullet whined off the gravel, the cashier screamed like a catamount, and then I saw a girl—nine, maybe ten years old—yell as she clutched her leg and fell. Her mother and father raced to her, shielding her body with their own. Frank swore, punched the sky with two more shots, and I aimed my Navy at the cashier, who had quit playing hero. Jesse leaped into the saddle.

  We rode out of the fairgrounds at a high lope, and did not stop until we had crossed the Rubicon.

  “The idea,” I said as I divided up our bounty, “is not to announce ourselves.”

  “I figured it was just like the Lowry gang in Kentucky,” Jesse explained, wadding up a stack of bills and stuffing them inside his coat pocket. “Someone points a finger at us, we can say what you just said. Lowry gang didn’t rob the bank in Columbia. Jesse James wasn’t anywhere near the Kansas City fairgrounds.”

  * * * * *

  The next time we met, Jesse showed us a copy of the Kansas City Times.

  “There is a dash of tiger blood in the veins of all men,” the prose began, “a latent disposition, even in the bosom that is a stranger to nerve and daring, to admire those qualities in other men.”

  I pushed my hat back and listened as Jesse read: “ ‘… But a feat of stupendous nerve and fearlessness that makes one’s hair rise to think of it with a condiment of crime to season it, become chivalric; poetic; superb.’ ”

  We had robbed a fair in broad daylight. We had wounded a little girl. Yet this newspaper account made us out to be Robin Hood or Lancelot, and not the “thieves and pickpockets and burglars and garroters in Kansas City.”

  “ ‘… What they did,’ ” Jesse continued to read, “ ‘we condemn. But the way they did it we cannot help admiring …’ ”

  He folded the newspaper, leaned back, and sipped rye. “What do you think?”

  Frank simply nodded, but I had to shake my head, whistling. “Well,” I conceded, “that John Newman Edwards can turn a phrase every once in a while.”

  “You like it?” Jesse couldn’t hide his excitement or astonishment that I was pleased.

  “I like it,” I said.

  But what Jesse wrote a short while later brought out the wrath of Thomas Coleman Younger.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It is generally talked about in Liberty, Clay County, that Mr. James Chiles, of Independence, said that it was me and Cole and John Younger that robbed the gate, for he saw us and talked to us on the road to Kansas City the day of September 26th. I know very well that Mr. Chiles did not say so, for he has not seen me for three months, and I will be under many obligations to him if he will drop a few lines to the public, and let it know that he never said such a thing.

  Jesse James

  Clay County

  * * * * *

  I balled up the Times and threw it at Jesse.

  “You damned fool. You mention my name. You mention John’s … when John was not anywhere near Kansas City when we robbed the fair. What the hell were you thinking?”

  Maybe there had been some rumors, some gossip tossed out in the back pews of churches or at the bars in saloons, but no one had ever put in print that Cole Younger, or John, had been riding with Frank and Jesse James. Hell, yeah, I was mad. Putting my name out there was one thing, but John had not been part of our deal at the fairgrounds.

  “Jim Chiles saw me and Buck,” Jesse explained. “Buck wanted to go see that gal he’s sweet on in Independence.”

  “Leave Annie out of this, Dingus,” Frank said.

  “Well, anyhow, we were riding with Clell Miller to meet up with you. Jim must have mistook Clell for John, and Buck for you.”

  I shook my head, took the bottle Frank offered me, and had a long pull, but liquor cured nothing.

  “I’m sure,” Frank said, “that this Jim Chiles will do as you wish … say we were not involved.”

  An eerie darkness clouded Jesse’s face. He could be a charmer when he wanted to be, but when one of those moods struck him, you saw death in his eyes.

  “Oh, yeah. Chiles will do exactly as I say. We’ve already had a little chat about his mouth.”

  Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

  Galatians 6:7.

  I had no one to blame for this, except myself. I had led my brother astray, and I had chosen to ride with Frank and Jesse. Oh, sure, I wrote a letter myself. Jesse had his pressman in John Newman Edwards, but I had some connections myself. My sister Martha Anne had moved back to Missouri, and her husband worked for the Pleasant Hill Review, so I met with him, gave him my own letter, which he published. Sure, I denied being there, which was a lie. I wrote that John was not there, which was the truth. But maybe the most truthful thing I put in the letter was this: “We were not on good terms at that time,” I said of Jesse and me, “nor have we been for several years.”

  Looking back, I should have kept my trap shut. All that did was keep the Younger boys in the news. Word got down to Texas, where Jim had returned, and landed a job—if you can believe this—with the Dallas Police Department. And when another peace officer was arrested for a robbery, he said Jim was with him. Hell, why should that man be any different? Half the crimes being committed in the country were now being laid at our door. The Youngers, like the James boys, had become ubiquitous.

  Facing an indictment, Jim fled Texas and met us at the Rubicon. This time, Bob came with him, as did John. Officially, we were now the James-Younger Gang.

  Others rode with us from time to time. Arthur McCoy, the old “Wild Irishman” who had ridden with Jo Shelby. Bushwhacking comrades Clell Miller, Jim Cummins, Ed Miller, Bill Ryan, Tom Webb, Charlie Pitts.

  Yes, Parson, I lost my way. The St. Genevieve Savings Bank in Missouri netted us $4,000 during the spring of 1873. Sure, I was there, and not, as I’ve always claimed, nursing some sic
k neighbor down Roscoe way. The sad part about this was the fun we began to have. Drinking, racing horses, gambling, consorting with lewd women. We laughed a lot, and it felt good to be with John, Jim, and Bob, or whoever rode with us. We were family. From time to time, by Jehovah, I didn’t even mind Jesse. It was his idea to rob that train in Iowa.

  * * * * *

  Well in his cups, the Wild Irishman, Arthur McCoy, tied a knot around the rail on the other side of a curve, dallied the rope over his saddle horn, and put the spurs to his roan, which strained and struggled while Clell Miller and Charlie Pitts pounded on the iron with a hammer and spike bar we had stolen from a handcar house near Adair.

  “What are we doing this for, Dingus?” Frank asked.

  Jesse pointed at McCoy. “That’s the way the boys did it in Kentucky during the war. Ain’t that right, McCoy?”

  “Right as rain,” McCoy said.

  Eventually, the rail came lose and tumbled down the incline. We left it there, mounted our horses, and rode up a bank to hide in some woods and wait for the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific to bring us a fortune in bullion. Long around seven o’clock that evening, we saw the black smoke from the engine, heard the wheels clicking, and watched the train round the curve.

  It was a hell of a thing to see. Sparks flew as the engineer hit the brakes, but he had no chance. The locomotive slammed off the rail and toppled over in the ditch, steam hissing, as the tender, express, and baggage cars followed, toppling down the embankment and landing on their sides. The three passenger cars somehow managed to stay on the rails, but the last one slammed into the middle car, crushing perhaps the back third, while the caboose popped loose and rolled backward maybe fifty rods.

  People were shrieking and moaning, and I thought for sure that the boiler would blow, but the brakeman must have shut off the valve. Anyway, we saw the brakeman first, bleeding, burned, and banged up considerably, but somehow dragging the engineer from the engine’s cab. Even from the woods, I knew, from the way the engineer’s head rolled about, that the man was dead as he ever would be.