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

by Ron Hansen

  It was an age in which common wages were twelve cents an hour, so at fifty dollars a performance they could easily think themselves rich; they were from a territory that was so critically short of women that marriages were still arranged by correspondence, and yet the Fords were everywhere accompanied by pretty, teenaged dancing girls and singers who did not vigorously protect their chastity or reputation, and who thought that Charley and especially Bob were menacing, moody, ungovernable, and wickedly appealing. They were recognized on the seashore, in grand hotel lobbies, in Brooklyn, and were warily accommodated, wisely adjudged, gossiped about as if they were Vanderbilts; they could walk into shops and see the aproned sales clerks cringe, they could jeer at waiters and maids and hackney drivers who would make the ridicule seem jolly, they ate in elegant restaurants with giggling girls who were painted and powdered in the superior fashion of the arrogant rich but who made no efforts at genteel politeness or responsibility. A significant amount of their days was without requirements or planned activities, and yet the temptations were now greater and interestingly multiplied: Turkish tobaccos, Scotch whiskies, English gins, nights spent gambling on cards or fighting dogs, Sundays spent with expert prostitutes. On the afternoon that Bob read about the flamboyant surrender of Frank James to Governor Crittenden, he was sitting in an apothecary awaiting a prescription for a stomach complaint, and when he received the telegram that ordered him back to Missouri, he’d already missed a Thursday matinee on account of intoxication. So that when Bob and Charley arrived for the court trial in Plattsburg—a change of venue caused by extreme anti-Ford sentiments—they were written about rather chidingly, as corrupted representations of the evils of city living. They were dissipated, intemperate, petulant, and overindulged. Charley’s consumption and indigestion had only become more lacerating; his eye sockets were as deep and dark as fistholes in snow, his gums were strangely purple, he wore extravagant gold rings on every finger and a clove of garlic around his neck according to the guidance of a gypsy named Madame Africa. Bob was skinny, sallow, peevish, his complexion spoiled with so many pimples that some correspondents thought it was measles.

  He was beleaguered in Plattsburg, cornered in strange rooms, gracelessly stalked and surrounded on sidewalks, greedily nagged for opinions and hypotheses about Frank and Jesse, the James gang, Governor Crittenden, Wood Hite. Everything was exaggerated and magnified—if he was not religious then he was slavishly in league with Satan; if he slept little it was of course a consequence of nightmares; and it was generally agreed upon by all that Bob was plagued by apparitions, by incorporeal voices, by grim imaginings of his own grave and the stinging judgment of history—even the indignant silence that he gradually adopted was guessed to be charged with meaning.

  By October of 1883, Bob Ford could be identified correctly by more citizens than could the accidental president of the United States (Chester Alan Arthur); he was reported to be as renowned at twenty as Jesse was after fourteen years of grand larceny, and though it was by then a presumption on his part, it was unanticipated by others that a poised but unscrupulous young man could be thought dapper and tempting to women: the courtroom was as packed during his second-degree murder trial in Plattsburg as was the Mount Olivet Baptist Church when the corpse of Jesse Woodson James was prayed over and dispatched to his Maker, and as the correspondents noted the crowds inside and on the courthouse steps, they were surprised by the presence of otherwise sophisticated ladies, reading in this a proof of the young man’s beguiling powers.

  Bob was represented by Colonel C. F. Garner and the case against him was put by the prosecuting attorney for Ray County. An agreement was reached with the James-Samuels clan that if they neglected to respond to subpoenas requiring them to testify, Bob would repay the indulgence when and if Frank James came to trial, so the cross-examinations at Plattsburg were far less spectacular than many who visited the town might have hoped. Colonel Gamer opened the case for the defense by introducing an affidavit sworn to by James Andrew Liddil (who was then in an Alabama jail and in no jeopardy) stating, according to Garner, that Dick and Wood “suddenly became involved in a personal difficulty but that few words passed between them until both drew revolvers and commenced firing at each other…the firing being rapid and continuous, occupying a few seconds of time; that Liddil received a flesh wound in the leg, and Wood Hite was fatally shot, dying instantly; that Hite brought on the fight, was the aggressor, made the attack, and was firing at Liddil when he was shot and killed by a bullet from a pistol fired by Liddil, and that Robert Ford, my client, knew nothing of the difficulty until the firing commenced.”

  The expected group of deponents were called to the stand: Constable Morris, who recovered Wood’s body, Dr. Mosby, who examined it, Henry H. Craig, residents of Richmond who could remember nothing derogatory ever having been said about Robert Ford’s character, and especially Mrs. Martha Ford Bolton, whose aplomb and placid deposition of even recklessly obvious lies very nearly stupefied the appalled prosecution.

  It was a raucous and unruly trial interrupted by snipes from the spectators, by laughter at provocative or funny comments from the witnesses, and by applause at particularly rousing passages in the attorneys’ summary arguments. Bob ignored the exchanges to a great extent, seeming to be engrossed only in the cartoons he scribbled on a yellow pad or in smuggling silly notes to girls who flagrantly admired him. He even appropriated a piece of Henry Craig’s office stationery and scrawled out a misspelled and mispunctuated letter.

  President Dear sir as have forgoton your name & addess as President of the Wabash St. Louis + Pacific R.R. will you please grant Myself and Family a monthly pass over your Road from KC to Richmond the distance of 45 miles

  I Remain yours truly

  Bob. Ford

  Slayer of Jesse James

  ON OCTOBER 26TH, after forty hours of deliberation, the jury arrived at a verdict and deputies spent the morning combing the county in order to bring back the defendant. Sheriff Algiers found him on the railroad tracks, walking a rail like a tightrope, his arms kiting out and his body hooking left or right for his precarious balance. Bob glanced at the road and grasped why the sheriff was there. He jumped to the cinders and as he swaggered to the sheriff’s buggy said, “The judge can hang me if he wants. I’m not scared of dying.” And when Bob walked into the courtroom it was with carelessness and insouciance; sitting next to Colonel Garner he seemed a worker called in from the cornfields for coffee and apple pie.

  The jury foreman gave a folded note to the court clerk and Judge Dunn acknowledged that the court clerk could read it. “ ‘We, the jury,’ ” the clerk announced, “ ‘find the defendant, Robert Ford, not guilty of charges as indicated in the indictment.’ ”

  Colonel Garner gleefully shook Bob’s hand and then the hands of the Ford family, and the large crowd exited as if from a play that was not entirely satisfying. Bob crossed over to the jury box, grinning a little crazily and saying, “You did the courageous thing.” One man wiped his palm on his pants leg after Bob Ford clasped it.

  Practically as soon as the Plattsburg trial was over, the Ford brothers traveled east again in order to bring back to the stage How I Killed Jesse James. The repertory company went south to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington City, and the Ford origins in Virginia, then was rerouted north again with a Christmas in New England.

  Charley was increasingly superstitious, increasingly subject to the advice of gypsies and tarot card readers and poor women who lived in the slums and who promised to cure his miseries with green teas, pipe smoke, poultices, hypnosis, even jolts of electricity cranked into his jittering wrists with a magnet generator. And yet his coughing continued, his fatigue grew greater, his stomach fought all his body’s cravings, he was convinced that tapeworms were eating his organs and once hung upside down over a goblet of syrup and milk, his mouth gapingly open, tears sliding into his dangling hair as he prayed the parasites would grope out of his esophagus into more acceptable food.

&nb
sp; Charley was initially delighted with the East and with the progress he’d made from his poor beginnings. He would slog through an ankle-deep ocean at Atlantic City with his suit coat gathered over his right arm, his shoes clamped together in that hand as the other shaded his eyes from sunlight so that he could see more unmistakably the pretty women in their thigh-length bathing dresses and knee-length bloomers, their sturdy white calves exposed. They would step into the sheeting water higher up on the sand and a larger wave would curdle foam over their feet and they’d squeal, and Charley would grin magnificently, looking around for Bob so he could share his enjoyment. A young girl might venture out and dip into the ocean, bravely swimming toward Europe as Charley’s aghast eyes followed her every stroke. And when she came out, the frills of her bathing dress would be sagging low and the black cloth would be clinging to her body, making everything significant and generating such excitement in Charley that he’d run to get Bob and show him the sight.

  “She was a beauty, was she?” Bob said once.

  “She didn’t have one more bump than necessary. And you could tell she liked you noticing too.” Charley sniggered a little and added, “I would’ve stayed put till the tide came in but I was afraid I was starting to bulge.”

  By the time they were living in Brooklyn, though, Charley was getting no great pleasure in hungering for women and was going out of his way to avoid meeting them. If Bob brought along one of his dancing girls on their evenings out in Manhattan, Charley managed to speak only when protocol demanded it or when he had something ugly to say, smiled without good humor when Bob nudgingly joked, and glimpsed the girl leeringly on the sly. He whispered to one girl, “I know exactly who you’re working for. You won’t get your hooks in me.”

  Charley was becoming an onlooker, a playgoer, judging but not joining, given to long days alone in his room, where he read strange pamphlets and testimonies and circled his bed with garlic and black candles. He called Bob’s girlfriends Jezebels and temptresses, begetters of greed and jealousy, and warned Bob that his “wrong-living life will carry you into the perpetual burning.” He compared all females unfavorably to Mrs. Zee James, whom he spoke of as certain priests might the Madonna, and composed long, soul-describing letters to her, begging her forgiveness, none of which he mailed. He said once, “I’m going to look for somebody like Zee. All my spots will disappear.” And on another occasion Charley disapproved of something by pointing out that a soothsayer named Perfecta had put him onto just such a scheme.

  Bob said, “You’re spending too much time with gypsies.”

  “You mark my words, Bob. They’ll pluck out your eyes. They’ve got your name written in goat’s blood.”

  Hence Bob grew more estranged from his brother. He was appalled by Charley’s peculiarities, his progressively worsening illnesses, his mixture of puritanism, piety, black magic, and gullibility. He squandered no money but possessed no savings and it seemed probable to Bob that Charley was giving his earnings away, having been counseled by some crystal-ball gazer—who was no doubt the beneficiary—that this was the only means of assuaging his guilt. And guilt was pumping like poisoned blood through the chambers of Charley’s heart; he’d confessed that many times he’d lain on a mattress, calling for sleep, but was instead visited by gruesome imaginings of a coffin and of the subjugation of earth on his chest, and more than once he’d bolted upright at night to see a grisly form fly out through the window. Perhaps in consequence, there was something changed in Charley’s stage portrayal of Jesse: his limp now seemed practiced, his high voice was spookily similar to the man’s, his newly suggested dialogue was analogous to a script that Jesse might have originated, he said he was “getting to know him” with the unopposable conviction of a man who’d just been in colloquy with a spirit made flesh. It was a gradual transmogrification, but it was no less frightening to Bob. Too many gunshots on the stage and too many resignations to Bob’s betrayal were separating the Ford brothers as Charley accepted the obligation of personifying Jesse James. He was given to private yearnings, wistfulness about the past, all of the commonplaces of death like weeping and glamorized memory, and he began to look at his younger brother with spite and antagonism, as if he suspected that in some future performance he might present himself to a live cartridge in Robert Ford’s gun.

  So Bob avoided Charley insofar as that was possible, and sought only to repair his evil reputation. Ironically, it was in New York that Bob first heard the song written by a Missouri sharecropper whose name was Billy Gashade. Bob was sitting in a Bowery saloon, a green bottle of whiskey on the crate to his right, a shot glass in his fingers, when a man with a banjo announced he was going to sing “The Ballad of Jesse James.”

  He began: “Jesse James was a lad who killed many a man. He robbed the Glendale train. He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor, he’d a hand and a heart and a brain.” The man strolled the room, coming so near Bob that Bob pulled back his crossed legs as the man sang the chorus in a higher pitch. “Oh, Jesse had a wife to mourn for his life, three children, they were brave; but that dirty little coward that shot Mister Howard has laid Jesse James in his grave.”

  A stevedore put a nickel in the singer’s palm; he tipped his head in appreciation and continued: “It was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward. I wonder how he does feel? For he ate of Jesse’s bread and he slept in Jesse’s bed, then he laid Jesse James in his grave.”

  The man with the banjo, whose name seemed to be Elijah, sang the chorus again and Bob worked at registering no change in attitude or expression. He was so drunk by then that his head jerked when he shifted it and one arm hung slack by his side, but his mind was stubbornly unasleep and could make out that there was an incorrect stanza about robbing a Chicago bank and another about the shot coming on a Saturday night and one about Jesse being born in the county of Shea. The singer concluded: “This song it was made by Billy Gashade as soon as the news did arrive. He said there wasn’t a man with the law in his hand could take Jesse James when alive.”

  Bob capped the green bottle with his shot glass and stood, gripping the bottle neck. His chair tipped over and he staggered a little with intoxication, gaining balance as he moved by sliding a hand against the saloon wall. “Two chilrun,” he said. “Munnay mornin, na Sa-urday nigh. Cowny of Clay. You said Shea.” He gave the bottle and shot glass to the saloonkeep and tilted slightly to the right as he took a boxer’s stance versus the singer. “You gonna fight me, see who the coward is?”

  Elijah glared at him with repugnance but said without anguish, “I ain’t gonna fight you, boy. You get on outta here.”

  “Huh?”

  A man at the rail yelled, “Sleep it off!” and slapped Bob forcefully on the back, sending him walking a step or two before he regained himself. “Any you wanna fight me? Huh? Who’s gonna be?” He fell off his legs somehow and sat down on peanut shells, looking flabbergasted. He crawled up to his feet and swayed without words for a moment, his fists raised only gingerly at his sides, and his eyes glinting with tears.

  The saloonkeeper said, “Get on home now, son. Go on! Get yourself outta my place!”

  Bob guided himself through the door and got lost in the night and awoke at sunrise on Houston Street, a dog licking his mouth.

  SOON EVERY SALOON’S piano man could sing the song and stock companies were incorporating it into their romances, and because the simple chorus came up no less than eight times in the course of the ballad, even the stupid or dipsomaniacal could recall that it was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward, who laid poor Jesse James in his grave.

  Charley seemed to agree with the allegations of cowardice but Bob always challenged them, punching more than two street buskers, insisting on gunfights or meetings in alleys, stopping the stageshow at any gibe and asking the man if he wanted to investigate Robert Ford’s courage in some mutually agreed upon way.

  On New Year’s Eve in the Horticultural Building in Boston, a rough who’d argued with Charley that afternoon (calling him
a barbarian), came to the Fords’ evening show and guyed them throughout the act, yelling so many insults that Bob eventually sprang from the stage, jolting the wind from the man, swinging punches at his skull, maybe socking him a dozen times before others yanked him off. And then Bob smashed into them as well, his fists striking blood from the lips and noses of gentlemen who tried to discourage his rage, as Charley pitched into a second group, misapplying his pistols until a policeman finally appeared, fetching a lump from Charley’s head with a single swipe of his billyclub.

  Only sixteen from an original audience of over three hundred had stayed in the Horticultural Building; the rest had stampeded outside, some even crashing through windowglass as if the place were on fire. Five men were lying on the floor, cupping their mouths or noses, their starched shirt fronts crinkled and spotted red. The policeman said as he shackled Bob, “You may be the Ford brothers or the James brothers, but you cahn’t drink blood in Boston.”

  Articles about the fight appeared in many newspapers. Over the next week, inspiring the St. Joseph Gazette to comment: “Since one of them acquired notoriety by shooting another assassin in the back, the pestiferous pair has traveled the country under the apparent assumption that they were protégés of the state of Missouri. These fellows ought to be locked up in the interest of public morals or put under bonds to keep the peace by holding their tongues.”

  George Bunnell coincidentally came to a like opinion that the slayers of Jesse James had lost their stage appeal and he called in their repertory company, claiming the competition for shows like theirs was already too plentiful. J. J. McCloskey’s Jesse James, the Bandit King was still in New York; Charles W. Chase brought his Mammoth James Boys’ Combination to the West, playing Mosby’s Grand Opera House in Richmond in May 1883; another company stayed for a two-night engagement at Tootle’s Opera House in St. Joseph; and a show called The Missouri Outlaws was being reviewed by P. T. Barnum. And yet the Fords continued on the road with their own company, The Great Western Novelty Troupe, presenting seven thespians and a composition called Jesse James throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, upstate New York, and New Jersey.