The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel

by Ron Hansen

  She introduced Jesse to her girlfriends at parties but it seemed all he could do not to nod off over his tea; sometimes she lost him entirely to other rooms and attics where he could browse like an auction bidder. Whereas his own chums delighted him; he sent coded letters to aliases at tavern addresses and was jubilant when a note came back; even after his friends had taken leave he would savor their conversations, retell stories to Zee that were still vile and indelible in her mind, indicate the characteristics he found most attractive in the rowdies.

  Jesse introduced Cole and Jim and Bob Younger to her in Kearney and she sat through a meal and several foul cigars with the four before she excused herself to walk on the lawn in her sweater so she could hear silence and take in the dark like a sedative and become somehow less alive. Jim and Bob were fine—cordial and slender and irresistible—but Cole was a red-haired beef of a man with sideburns and a horseshoe mustache, even more boisterous and extroverted than Jesse, a twin to him in his facial features, and the two in combination were so electric and incandescent Zee felt slow and shut-in and scorched.

  And Cole was cruel; he fetched the viciousness in Jesse; he boasted with sayings like “I cooked his hash,” and frightened Zee with a Civil War tale about fifteen Jayhawkers he’d tied belly to back in a row in order to test an Enfield rifle at close range. Cole’s first shot bore into three men instead of the ten he intended and he had commanded, “Cut the dead men loose; the new Enfield shoots like a pop-gun!” He needed seven shots to slaughter all fifteen and said he reverted to the Army Springfield .45 from then on. Jesse listened with cold-blooded admiration, as if he’d had a rather intricate mathematics problem broken down on a blackboard; Zee brooded on how harrowed and deserted the last man killed must have been, hearing the rifle detonations and the moans of the Kansas soldiers, sustaining the lurch and added strain of cadavers on the ropes as execution moved toward him a body at a time.

  And she would remember later that Cole mentioned the robberies of the banks in St. Albans, Vermont, where Confederate soldiers in civilian clothes showed their grit by getting the money in broad daylight and walking right out into the street. She would remember that because of a St. Valentine’s Day newspaper account about two men in soldiers’ overcoats who’d robbed the Clay County Savings Bank in Liberty, Missouri, and ridden off with twelve accomplices into a screening snowstorm.

  Jesse came to the boardinghouse with divinity fudge and a red paper heart on which he’d doggereled about ardor, and as Jesse nudged a lizard’s fringe of flame from some embering logs, they talked about the crime, Jesse saying that it was really only just deserts for all Easterner-owned corporations like that. He asked, “How much loot does it say they got?”

  She read that the thieves filled a wheat sack with sixty thousand dollars in currencies, negotiable papers, bonds, and gold. She also noted that a boy who happened by was killed by one of the men and that he was a student at William Jewell College, where Jesse’s father had once been on the board of trustees. “George Wymore?” she said. Jesse was still a moment and then said, “I know his folks.” She asked, “You don’t think it was the Youngers, do you?” He flicked the oiled paper back from the divinity fudge and broke off a sliver before sitting down on the floor next to her. He said, “I only know Cole’s been poor and Frank’s been with him.” He glared at the fire for a minute, his good lung not yet strong enough for him to breathe without gasps, his skeleton so evident that he seemed a young man dying. He said, “I’ll bet it was accidental,” and then he changed the subject.

  Alexander Mitchell and Company, a banking house in Lexington, had two thousand dollars stolen from a cash drawer in October 1866. Five months later six bandits walked inside a firm in Savannah and demanded that Judge John McLain hand over the keys to his vault. He wouldn’t and an incensed man shot him in the arm (which in result was amputated), but the outlaws exited without McLain’s cash. And in May 1867, a rustler told his jail inmates in Richmond that the local bank would be robbed that afternoon. The rumor carried and the town square was monitored, deputies were readied, and the teller locked the two wide doors of the Hughes and Wasson Bank. Then twenty yipping, howling outlaws in slouch hats and linen dusters galloped onto the main street and fired at second-storey windows. A robber broke the clasp lock with a bullet and six men marched inside and the bank lost four thousand dollars. But citizens constructed a roadblock and resistance. Mayor John B. Shaw was killed while rushing the thieves, his revolver kicking with each wild shot. Several men in the gang had ridden over to the jail in order to release Felix Bradley, the rustler in confinement there, but a boy named Frank Griffin raised a cavalry rifle in the courthouse yard and fired on them. Someone aimed an answering shot at him and his forehead was staved in. His father was Berry Griffin, the jailor, who went insane when his son was killed and raced across the dirt street and tackled a robber’s boot and stirrup. The horse skittered and screamed. The robber looked at Griffin as if he were an inconvenience, and he lowered his revolver to the man’s head and fired, burning hair with the gunpowder spray. The man sank under the horse. With a section of his skull blown off and the robber fired a second time to make sure the jailor would remain dead. And then the gang rode out of Richmond without any casualties of their own, although Felix Bradley was soon lynched by an angry mob.

  Zee Mimms read that account as she’d read the accounts of the other robberies, and then she knelt with her arms crossed on the windowsill, her chin on her wrist, looking out beyond the pink blossoms of the yard’s cherry trees to the cinder alley that Jesse would trot along on another man’s horse. He would arrive with something expensive and inappropriate—a brass candelabrum, a garlic press, a wire dressmaker’s dummy—and if she broached the issue of the Richmond murders, he’d maintain he hadn’t yet heard the news and then look sick with sorrow and pity as she told him about the Hughes and Wasson Bank and Mayor Shaw and the Griffins; or he’d maintain the marauders were most likely driven to the crime by an unforgiving enemy that would never give ex-guerrillas a chance at more regular jobs. He would ignore her questions or laugh about them and he’d grow forbidding if she insisted he tell her where he’d been over the week, and yet when Jesse came—with a walnut metronome—Zee decided to find out what her fiancé did with his hours: Did he weed and water? Did he drink? Did he whore? Did he mumble-the-peg, fling sticks to dogs, whittle turtles from oakwood? Did he ride into peaceful towns and train his pistols on shopkeepers and college boys as outlaws ransacked the bank? She jested her inquiries so that she would not offend, but lies and evasions were what she received in answer, or Jesse cartooned his endeavors, saying, “I’ve just been sitting around the house practicing the alphabet.”

  She said, “You haven’t been doing anything bad, have you?”

  “ ’Course not.”

  “You haven’t been gallivanting around with the Youngers?”

  He glowered at her and said, “I guess that’s my own business, isn’t it.”

  Zee looked pained but practical. “I’m going to be your wife.”

  His eyes seemed hysterical and what strength he had seemed governed only with great difficulty. He struggled with a thought and then shrugged back into his riding coat. “I can’t remember when. I worked the farm last. I’m always changing horses and I’m gone for days at a time. I’ve got shotguns and six-guns in every room, I’ve got gifts to bring you and I’ve got greenbacks in my pocket and if you look in my closet you’ll see more fancy clothes than you will in all of Clay County. So you tell me what I do for a living. You figure something out and then you tell me if we oughta forget about getting married.”

  And Jesse was outside and climbing onto a stolen horse as Zee angrily shut the curtains. She folded up the newspaper and slid it under a cobbler’s door down the hall, she put a picture of Jesse at seventeen inside the top drawer of a jewelry box, she pushed the metronome’s pendulum and as it ticked in three-quarter time she gradually crouched by it with her crying eyes in her palms.

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nbsp; THE JAMES AND YOUNGER BROTHERS larked into Kentucky in March 1868, and at the same time a man calling himself a cattle dealer visited the Nimrod Long and Company Bank in Russellville, Kentucky, chatted about escrow accounts, and departed. Soon thereafter the cattle dealer returned with four other men who drew revolvers from under their coats and received over twelve thousand dollars, which was thrown into the same wheat sack that had been noted in the Missouri robberies. Shopkeepers located revolvers and fired on the robbers in their ride out but ten sentries who were stationed on the avenue covered their getaway.

  A Louisville detective named Yankee Bligh took on the Russellville case for a consortium of financiers and he identified Cole Younger and his confederates as the probable bank robbers. He was also concerned that two men named Frank and Jesse James had bloodied the bedsheets of a hotel in Chaplin, more than a hundred miles from the incident. A sallow man under a greatcoat had clutched his side as he slunk away from the open hotel room door and his grave older brother had informed the maid that the man’s Civil War injuries were still uncured. His wince when he moved, however, persuaded her that the wound was reopened in a scrap. And Jesse sealed the detective’s suspicions about the James brothers’ involvement when he mailed his fiancée a card that said a physician had instructed him to go to California or else lose his vitality.

  He went to the Paso Robles Hot Sulphur Springs resort owned by his uncle, Drury Woodson James. There he mended his lung and recovered from an ear infection by consuming lemons and oranges and castoreum in addition to a pound of fish every day. A photograph of him at the time showed a cadaverous man with sunken cheeks and eyes darkened with hollow, his left hand clutching a cane; he would never again be as sick as he was then: Jesse would later say it was a condition that was brought on by being away from Missouri and Zee. It took him four months to convalesce and then he vacationed in San Francisco on stolen cash that he doubled with casino roulette and monte. He lounged in steam baths, he stood at the prow of a ferry, he ate six-course meals in French restaurants, he sinned in fandango saloons where the “pretty waiter girls” wore ostrich-feather bonnets and red silk jackets but nothing whatever below that except shoes, and for a dollar would let Jesse contemplate what he had never spied outside of art museums. It all made him feel guilty and unmoored, and it wasn’t long before he was climbing aboard a train that would carry him back to Missouri and make him himself again.

  Zee was visiting her Aunt Zerelda at the Kearney farmhouse when Jesse arrived. His mother made an opera of his coming home and cooked a supper of pork and pies, complaining all the while of the illnesses and sleepless nights her boy’s going had brought her, and reporting on the many deputies and Pinkerton detectives who were skulking around the place. “Seems like I’m spending every minute making up alibis for you.” She proclaimed, as they were eating, that she’d attempted to get cash for some negotiable papers “the boys” had swiped from the Clay County Savings Bank but that a manager had snootily refused her. She asked if Jesse knew that it was Mr. Nimrod Long of Russellville who paid half the tuition for Jesse’s father to go to Georgetown College. She asked if Jesse wasn’t ashamed of himself. Through it all, Jesse miserably eyed Zee but saw that she was simpering at Zerelda as if she were speaking the lightest of gossip. And as the couple strolled down to Clear Creek to flip pebbles into the water and chat, Jesse saw that the woman he was pledged to had changed. Zee called herself a milkweed, a nuisance, a scold; she regretted her prying into his affairs, regretted giving him arguments when she knew that he needed allegiance and love. She wanted to accommodate him, to be a good wife to him, and nothing else really mattered to her. And that seemed to be true, for thenceforth Zee avoided all rumors and newspaper stories about the James-Younger gang, she shied from conversations about criminal acts and politics, she refused invitations into society, she never inquired again about the robberies or murders attributed to Jesse; instead, she’d accepted a simple, stay-at-home life for herself and was no more conscious of the James brothers’ crimes than she was of the Suez Canal or the mole on her back or the dust kittens under the sofa.

  And yet Jesse made some efforts at conventional work: he was a millwright, a machinist, a coal salesman; he plowed in the sun with three pistols hooked onto his belt; he swapped cattle at the livestock shows. He would start a job with good will and industry, but then he would walk away from it because he was belittled or maltreated or weary and bored. Each occupation became a day-or week-long deception, for he was twenty-one years old and had already settled into the one career that suited him.

  During the five years between 1869 and 1874, the James-Younger gang robbed the Daviess County Savings Bank in Gallatin; stole six thousand dollars from the Ocobock Brothers’ Bank in Corydon, Iowa; six hundred dollars from the Deposit Bank in Columbia, Kentucky; four thousand dollars from a bank in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri; two thousand dollars from the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway near Council Bluffs, Iowa; twenty-two thousand dollars from the Iron Mountain Railroad at Gads Hill, Missouri; three thousand dollars from the Hot Springs stagecoach near Malvern, Arkansas. And so on. Jesse shot John Sheets in the head and heart and the banker drained off the chair; his clerk scurried into the street and the bandits fired twice, catching him fat in the arm. A cashier named R. A. C. Martin was told to open a safe and answered, “Never. I’ll die first.” “Then die it is,” said Cole and raised his dragoon revolver to Martin’s ear and fired. An iron rail was winched off its tie as a passenger train slowed on a blind curve and the locomotive tilted into the roadbed and then crashed to its side in weeds, crushing John Rafferty, the engineer, and scalding Dennis Foley, the stoker, so badly that he died within weeks. The six thieves were dressed in the white hoods and raiment of the Ku Klux Klan—for what reason, no one knows—and collected three thousand dollars in compensation for putting an end to two lives.

  Stopping the increasingly common robberies became so paramount that the United States Secret Service and private detectives from Chicago and St. Louis joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency in stalking the James-Younger gang. Allan Pinkerton’s son William established headquarters in Kansas City and split his operatives between pursuit of the Youngers and the Jameses in the counties of Jackson and Clay; and yet, though many could recognize the gunslingers and their regular sanctuaries were known, investigators only came to misfortune when they got close to the gang.

  John W. Whicher was assigned Dr. Samuels’s farm and, upon receiving a spy’s report that the James boys were present, walked there with a carpet bag and in poor man’s clothes on a cold night in March. He’d just crossed the wooden bridge over Clear Creek when he caught a slight noise, and then Jesse jerked the man’s chin back with his wrist and asked, “You looking for something?”

  Arthur McCoy and Jim Anderson (Bloody Bill’s brother) scrabbled up from under the bridge with guns out and Whicher said, “I’m only looking for work. I was hoping to find a place on a farm. You happen to know of any?”

  “Yep,” said Jesse. “I know just the right place for you. And Satan’s got it all prepared.”

  Whicher was seen again at 3 a.m. near Owen’s Ferry, his mouth gagged and his legs tied astride a gray horse; and on March 11th his body was discovered in a cistern, still gagged and riddled with bullets. A note was pinned to his lapel that read: “This is the way we treat Chicago detectives; if you’ve got any more send them along.”

  Only days later Captain Louis Lull and two associates were overtaken in the rain-soaked woods of St. Clair County by John and Jim Younger. They cocked shotguns and ordered the operatives to drop their pistols. They complied. But then Lull’s right hand glided down to a derringer and he shot it at John Younger, cutting into the jugular vein so that it surged red sleeves of blood out even as the dying boy got off a shot and killed Lull. One of the scouting party sprinted away through the woods but Jim Younger only gazed at his kid brother, who was tangled under his frightened horse. He then gazed at Edwin Daniels, the man who brought the operativ
es there, and calmly triggered his shotgun, catching the guide in the neck.

  At Gallatin an overexcited black racehorse had torn from the rail before Jesse had mounted. He was dragged forty feet on a frozen dirt street, his greatcoat lumping up near his neck like a plow collar, before he could disentangle his boot and broken ankle from the stirrup. He hopped one-footed and climbed Frank’s arm and the two brothers galloped off on one horse as the filly sulked on a church lawn, her saddle rocked over to her flank, the left stirrup clinking on the flagstones when she browsed.

  The filly was incontrovertible evidence linking the James brothers to the Missouri robberies, and yet they were again supported by Major John Newman Edwards, the grandiloquent author of Shelby and His Men and Noted Guerrillas, or The Warfare of the Border, in which Frank and Jesse James were gloriously mentioned. Edwards helped Jesse inscribe a letter to Governor McClurg denying involvement in the Gallatin crimes, claiming he had not murdered John Sheets, had not even been near Daviess County, that he had sold the filly a week beforehand and could furnish a receipt; however, he could not give up just yet and risk a vigilance committee that might lynch him.

  Governor, when I can get a fair trial, I will surrender myself to the civil authorities of Missouri. But I will never surrender to be mobbed by a set of blood-thirsty poltroons. It is true that during the war I was a Confederate soldier and fought under the Black Flag, but since then I have lived a respectable citizen and obeyed the laws of the United States to the best of my knowledge.