by Ron Hansen
The girl said, “His wife’s in here.”
Zee was sitting on the wide bed and crying in her hands. Her calico dress was streaked with blood and was redly saturated in the middle and hem. A fat woman sat with a sweatered arm over the widow’s shoulders, and a girl of twelve was crouched with the children. Zee looked to John Leonard and realized he was recording whatever he saw. She pleaded, “Oh, please don’t put this in the paper,” and Leonard said, “I’m afraid that’s my job.”
The coroner came to the door and asked, “What’s your name, madame?”
“Mrs. Howard,” she said.
“Is the body that of your husband?”
She nodded.
The Gazette reporter turned to the sitting room to see Enos Craig and the two Fords come inside. The coroner asked Zee, “Do you know who killed him?” and Leonard could hear the widow answer, “Our two cousins, the Johnsons.”
City Marshal Craig stared at the strong, spiffily outfitted body on the floor and sidled over to Leonard. “Do you know who they say that man is?”
“Someone named Howard.”
Craig shook his head. “The boys claim it’s Jesse James.”
“Goon!”
The city marshal spied the widow in the sideroom and slipped off his broad white hat as he approached her. Enos Craig was a skinny and very stern man of fifty-three, with a crossed left eye and a vast gray mustache that he continually petted with a red handkerchief. He was not at all related to Henry Craig but was the younger brother of Brigadier General James Craig, a United States congressman, and he could exert in special circumstances the mellifluence that his brother made customary. He glared at the fat woman and the girl until they left the room, and then sat on the mattress with Zee. He remarked in an amenable, soothing voice, “Mrs. Howard? It is said that your name is not Howard but James and that you are the wife of the notorious Jesse James.”
Zee frowned at him. “I certainly can’t help what they say.”
“The boys who have killed your husband are here. It’s they who tell me your husband is Jesse James.”
She looked at him with consternation. “You don’t mean they’ve come back?”
Craig let the widow slump against his shoulder and weep rackingly as he stroked her fine blond hair. He crooned some comforting words and then said, “You know, it would be a lot more restful for your soul if you’d speak the truth. The public would think mighty highly of you; your children wouldn’t ever again want for anything.”
She nibbed her eyes with her sleeve, like a child. “I want to go see him.”
“How’s that?”
“I want to see my husband.”
“Just lean your weight on me,” Craig said, and the two walked into the sitting room.
Bob shrank back when he saw Zee and Charley moved to the screen door. She screamed, “You cowards! You snakes!” She surged at them but was restrained by the city marshal and, struggling, she cried, “How could you kill your friend?”
Charley slouched outside and Bob followed him, slapping the screen door shut. John Leonard scurried after them and went over to the sickly brother with the smudge of a mustache who was then squatting against the white picket fence, making a cigarette. Leonard asked, “You mean that really is Jesse James?”
“Isn’t that what we’ve been saying since we come?”
The crowd ogled them and a small boy ran down the street, shouting what he’d overheard about Jesse James to whomever he encountered. Bob strolled over, slapping his palm with a stick. He said, “Have someone twist off that gold ring on his finger. You’ll find a script with the name Jesse James inside.”
Leonard jotted that down and then asked Charley, “Why’d you kill him?”
Bob intervened, “Say: we wanted to rid the country of a vicious and bloodthirsty outlaw.”
Charley smiled in agreement and craned his neck to see the flight of the reporter’s scribbled shorthand. He said to Leonard, “You should mention the reward too.”
“You shot him for money?”
“Only ten thousand dollars!”
Leonard looked at Bob and saw that the young man was scowling. He said, “I’ll mention that you are young but gritty.”
Charley grinned. “We are all grit.” He licked a cigarette paper and said, “You never expected to see Jesse’s carcass in Saint Joe, did you? We always thought we’d create a sensation by putting him out of the way.”
Zee gave in to Craig’s gentle interrogation and admitted the truth. She wished she were in Death’s cold embrace; she wondered what would become of the children; she talked about Jesse’s love and kindliness and promised to speak further if the city marshal would guarantee no entrepreneur could get at the body and drag it all over the country.
Shortly after ten o’clock the body was carried to the Seidenfaden Undertaking Morgue in a black, glass-sided carriage that was followed by a procession of mourners, including Mrs. James. Snoops and onlookers swarmed around the cottage, viewing what they could through the windows, appraising the horses in the stables, swapping stories about the James gang, stealing whatever would slide up their sleeves, so that the cottage was soon closed, the sashes nailed shut, and a policeman stationed on the sidewalk to scare off looters.
Removed as evidence by Enos Craig were a gold ring with the name of the gunman inside, a one-dollar gold coin made into a scarf pin and cut with the initials J.W.J., a set of pink coral cufflinks, a Winchester rifle that Jesse called Old Faithful, a shotgun that was nicknamed Big Thunder, four revolvers (Pet, Baby, Daisy, and Beauty), an eighteen-karat-gold stem-winder watch stolen from John A. Burbank in the Hot Springs stage robbery in Arkansas, and a Waltham watch in a gold hunting case stolen from Judge R. H. Rountree when the Mammoth Cave sightseers’ stagecoach was robbed in 1880. Mrs. James was not relieved of a resized diamond ring that was owned by Rountree’s daughter, Lizzie.
An onlooker came over to the boy Tim and smiled as if they knew each other. “So you’re Jesse Edwards James.”
The boy frowned at the man.
“Do you know who Jesse James is?”
The boy shook his head.
“Do you know what your father’s name was?”
Young Jesse was mystified. “Daddy.”
The man laughed as hugely as he would have if Jesse James had joked with him and tried to get the gathering reporters to jot down the story along with his name, spelled out.
Jesse Edwards James and Mary were sent to stay with a woman named Mrs. Lurnal, and the manager of the World Hotel gave Mrs. James accommodations there. She displaced her grief by fretting a great deal about finances, so an auction of unnecessary household items was suggested. Zee’s uncle, Thomas Mimms, sent telegrams to Mrs. Samuels and the family; the girl she was to shop with for Easter clothes packed a suitcase. Alex Green informed Zee that she was an accessory-after-the-fact in the multiple crimes that her husband committed but consented to represent the widow for a retainer of five hundred dollars; then R. J. Haire ruined Green’s scheme by volunteering his services as an attorney in loving remembrance of a much-maligned and magnificent man.
POLICE COMMISSIONER Henry Craig received Bob Ford’s telegram at his law office in the Kansas City Times building, but made no effort to inform the newspaper staff of the assassination; he merely sent a return message to Bob that read: “Will come on the first train. Hurrah for you,” and then notified William H. Wallace, the Jackson County prosecuting attorney, of the extraordinary news. And since the wait for a regular run would have been many hours, Craig rushed north in the readied Hannibal and St. Joseph locomotive and coaches, stopping once, in Liberty, to collect Sheriff Timberlake and a stunned and saddened Dick Liddil.
Thomas Crittenden’s secretary saw Bob Ford’s communiqué only after perusing the morning’s correspondence, but he immediately telegraphed the St. Joseph authorities for particulars and made arrangements for the governor to go there as soon as Crittenden returned from a meeting in St. Louis. The governor groaned when he
was greeted with the news, and according to Finis C. Fair, the secretary, Crittenden said over and over again on their walk to the executive mansion that he regretted the Fords did not apprehend Jesse James alive.
At noon in St. Joseph, O. M. Spencer, the prosecuting attorney for Buchanan County, scheduled a coroner’s inquest for three o’clock that afternoon and visited the Fords in Enos Craig’s office in order to inform them that he didn’t actually believe their stories about acting in concert with the government and that he intended to prefer charges of murder against them. He said, “I don’t care if Mr. James was the most desperate culprit in the entire world; that fact wouldn’t justify you in killing the man except in self-defense or after demanding his surrender, and the law is very explicit on that point.”
Bob looked at the floor but Charley smirked at O. M. Spencer and asked Enos Craig when lunch would be served.
At Seidenfaden’s funeral parlor on Fourth and Messanie streets, the cadaver was made void and then swollen by a cavity injection that was the substitute, then, for embalmment. A starched white shirt was exchanged for the stained one, but the cravat and remaining clothes were the same that Jesse James wore when he walked to the cigar store that morning.
On his second day of work with the Alex Lozo studio, a man named James W. Graham got the chance to become renowned at twenty-six by gaining the city marshal’s permission to be the only photographer of Jesse Woodson James. He set a single-plate, eight-by-ten-inch studio camera on a box and, with William Seidenfaden and two men, carried the cadaver from the laboratory into the cooling room where those who’d expired were exhibited in a case of ice.
Correspondents from Kansas City, Independence, Richmond, and Kearney were already in the city and clustered behind the crimson cord and stanchions in the cooling room, writing their impressions and comparing the physical features on the remains with the two available photographs of Jesse at seventeen and twenty-seven.
Graham and the undertaker’s assistants strapped the body to a wide board with a rope that crossed under his right shoulder and again over his groin, then they tilted the man until he was nearly vertical and let the camera lens accept the scene for a minute. The man’s eyes were shut, the skin around them was slightly green, and the sockets themselves seemed so cavernous that photographic copies were later repainted with two blue eyes looking serenely at some vista in the middle distance. Likewise missing in the keepsake photographs was the mean contusion over his left eyebrow that would convince some reporters that it was the gunshot’s exit wound and others that it showed the incidence of Bob Ford’s smashing the stricken man with a timber. The body’s cheeks and chest and belly were somewhat inflated with preservatives, necessitating the removal of the man’s thirty-two-inch brown leather belt, and making his weight seem closer to one hundred eighty-five pounds than the one hundred sixty it was. His height was misjudged by four inches, being recorded as six feet or more by those who wrote about him.
Graham carried the photographic dry plate back to the Lozo studio for development and many in addition to the newspaper reporters followed him, awaiting prints that sold for two dollars apiece and were the models for the lithographed covers on a number of magazines.
The body of Jesse James was lowered onto a slab that was surrounded with crushed ice and Mrs. Zee James was escorted into the cooling room by Enos Craig. She was so overcome with anguish and sorrow that she swooned in the city marshal’s arms and then catatonically sat in a chair, disinclined either to cry or talk, unmindful of other visitors, merely staring at the slain thirty-four-year-old man until two in the afternoon.
Bob and Charley were in the midst of perfunctory interviews with reporters by then. Many noted that the Fords appeared to be proud of their accomplishment and contemptuous of the men who’d sought the James gang of late. Their comments were sneering, snide, argumentative, cocky, misleading. Charley preempted most of the conversations, exaggerating his role and responsibilities in order to insure the governor’s indulgence. Bob lied about being an employee of the Kansas City Detective Agency, about being twenty-one, about Jesse’s wearing four revolvers instead of two .45s, about never having joined the James gang, about shooting Jesse through the left temple, when the man turned around, rather than to the rear of his right ear. When they were asked whether they feared retribution from Frank James, Bob answered in a sentence that seemed rehearsed: “If Frank James seeks revenge, he must be quick of trigger with these two young men; and if we three meet anywhere, it will be Bob Ford who will kill Frank James if there’s anything in coolness and alertness.”
A policeman returned from the cottage with clean clothes for Charley, a gray tweed suit for Bob, and after they’d washed and changed, the Fords were issued shotguns for a short walk under rain-lashed umbrellas to the Buchanan County Courthouse.
The circuit courtroom was on the second floor and was already more jam-packed than an immigrant ship, with pallid women in the pews and children squeezed between the balusters of the bar and boys piggy-backed on their fathers’ shoulders. Sitting in the aisles and pushing down the alleys and shoving into every cranny were correspondents from all the closer towns, shopkeepers with aprons on under their sweaters, intimidatingly mustached businessmen in nearly synonymous suits and slickers, farmers with droopy hats and fierce-looking beards, everyone staring as six policemen and the Ford brothers strode to the reserved seats on the defendant’s side, their bootheels clobbering the oak wood flooring, their suit coats stuffed behind their pistol grips.
Mrs. Zee James was sitting with Marshal Enos Craig on the plaintiff’s side, wearing a black silk dress and dark brown veil; in the second row was Henry Craig with a yellow legal pad on his knee, his round spectacles far down his nose. He gave Bob just a glimmer of a smile and then found justification to make some sort of notation. Bob crouched forward and saw that Zee was crying, he saw the prosecuting attorney instructing Coroner Heddens at the clerk’s table, he looked around the room. People began making comments on his attractiveness, expressing surprise at his slightness and age, gossiping about his peccancy, sending him looks of scorn; but Bob governed his own emotions, reading his fingers as Coroner Heddens and a jury of six men came in from the judge’s antechambers and a bailiff announced the inquisition was in session.
Charles Wilson Ford was the first witness called to the stand. He testified that he was twenty-four years old and in residence on the Ray County farm of Mrs. Martha Ford Bolton when he first made the acquaintance of Jesse James in 1879. He said, “He was a sporting man and so was I. He gambled and drank a little, and so did I.” Charley claimed he’d never stolen anything with the James gang, but most of his further statements were true. His lisp was not much noticed. Rain fell straight as fishing line outside and gradually cooled the courtroom. Heddens asked if Bob came to St. Joseph to assist in robbing a bank and Charley apprised the coroner of their plans for a Platte City attempt. “Jesse said they were going to have a murder trial there this week, and while everybody would be at the courthouse, he would slip in and rob the bank, and if not he would come back to Forrest City and get that.”
The coroner stood near the plaintiff’s table with his hands in his pockets. He was unpracticed at cross-examination and all too aware of the many attorneys observing his performance. He lamely asked, “What was your idea in that?”
Charley continued as if the man’s inquiry were logical and incisive. “It was simply to get Bob here where one of us could kill Jesse if once he took his pistols off. To try and do this with his pistols on would be useless, as I knew that Jesse had often said he would not surrender to a hundred men, and if three men should step out in front of him and shoot him, he could kill them before he fell.”
O. M. Spencer was aghast when Dr. Heddens then released Charley without a more exacting interrogation but chose to let the matter rest until he could manage the questioning at the Ford brothers’ trial. Charley swaggered back to the wooden chair and slouched down in it so that all the eyes would be off him.
Bob said, “You did fine,” and Coroner Heddens called Robert Newton Ford to the stand.
People strained their necks and rose from their seats and jumped to see the shootist. He strode with confidence to the bailiff, calmly swore not to perjure, and then complacently revealed himself to the courtroom audience, smiling with arrogance and gladness. He was twenty years old but looked sixteen. His gray suit was new, he seemed exceptionally well groomed, his short brown hair was soft as a child’s. He was very slim but sinewy, with stark bones that seemed as slender and hard as the spindle struts on a chair. His facial features were refined, his complexion was flawless and without color (sunburn was then tantamount to dirt), and except for something cruel about his mouth Bob Ford might have been thought rather pretty.
The coroner commenced his easy catechism and Bob answered with a voice that was authoritarian and certain, even haranguing in its tone. He presented a comparatively accurate narrative of the preceding four months, misspeaking some dates and making the ten-thousand-dollar reward seem his only motive for the murder.
Heddens asked, “What have you been doing since you came here?”
“My brother and I go downtown sometimes at night and get the papers.”
“What did you tell Jesse you were with him for?”
“I told him I was going in with him.”
“Had you any plans to rob any bank?”
“He had spoken of several but made no particular selection.”
The coroner was a little confused about the variation from Charley’s statement about the Platte City Bank but went on. “Well, now will you give us the particulars of the killing and what time it occurred?”
“After breakfast, between eight and nine o’clock this morning, he, my brother, and myself were in the room. He pulled off his pistols and got up on a chair to dust off some picture frames and I drew my pistol and shot him.”
“How close were you to him?”