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

by Ron Hansen

  The playwright was a glamorous actor from Buffalo who gave himself the title role and rearranged American history to gain an enlarged arena for his gifts. The makeshift story commenced with an archetypal robbery with many killings, jumped rapidly to the cottage in St. Joseph where the swag was apportioned to the gang, the greatest amount going to Jesse. Angered by that, Bob shot the outlaw after supper on a Saturday night, but only now, on this stage in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Newark, New Jersey, did gallant and gritty Robert Ford see that he’d slain an impostor, for striding from the wings was the genuine Jesse James, and following a vainglorious dialogue, the two desperadoes met in a gunfight and Bob again vanquished the lion. Bob was then congratulated on his courage and accuracy with a gun and the tragedy was strangely forgotten as Bob began a shooting exhibition, firing many blank cartridges at apples that were jerked from Charley’s mouth with strings.

  Charley called the road shows “a regular picnic” and claimed weekly receipts of nine hundred dollars, but they actually made only a fraction of that, and as they journeyed west they played to apathetic or antagonistic crowds. On September 26th, 1883, Jesse James played Louisville, Kentucky, and the management of The Great Western Novelty Troupe was agreeably surprised upon learning the Buckingham Theatre was completely sold out and that sitting rights to the aisles and galleries cost as much as regular box seats might. Only when the curtain was raised did Bob recognize that the great crowd was there to hiss and jeer at his every sentence and fling garbage onto the stage, and when he uneasily raised his gun at Jesse the audience rioted, according to Bob’s recollection, surging to the footlights, calling him a cur and a murderer, children scrabbling onto the stage to destroy the set and sneer at Bob in the sing-song of playgrounds.

  And when Bob returned to his hotel that night he was given an unsigned letter that conveyed an account of Judas that was never accepted into the gospels. It said the disciple lived on after his attempt to hang himself, providing an example of impiety in this world. He grew huge and grotesque, his face became like a goatskin swollen with wine, his eyes could not be perceived even by an examining physician, to such a depth had they retreated from the sunlight, and his penis grew large, gruesome, a cause for loathing, yellow pus and worms coming out of it along with such a stink that he could stay in no village for long before he was chased away. After much pain and many punishments, Judas died in the place he belonged and, according to the account, the region still permitted no approach, so great was the stench that progressed from the apostate’s body to the ground.

  EXCEPT FOR A MONTH as sideshow attractions with P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth, the Ford brothers stopped performing in 1883 and their company dispersed into other productions as Bob and Charley sought more private lives, though that was problematical, even impossible, for many of those who’d once been in the presence of Jesse James.

  Bob was going on twenty-two when he went back to Kansas City to gamble for a living. He was dapper, glamorous, physically strong, comparatively rich, and psychologically injured. By his own approximation, Bob had by then assassinated Jesse over eight hundred times, and each repetition was much like the principal occasion: he suspected no one in history had ever so often or so publicly recapitulated an act of betrayal, and he imagined that no degree of grief or penitence could change the country’s ill-regard for him.

  He thought he might have committed suicide in the cottage on April 3rd, gripped the smoking gun barrel in his teeth and triggered his skull into fragments, painting his red regrets on spattered wallpaper he gruesomely staggered against, but even that might have been judged just one more act of cowardice. He thought he might have begged no clemency from the governor and been hanged on May 19th, but even with his own strangling descent to the grave, Bob guessed he would not be any more forgiven than Judas was long ago. So Bob played the renegade and rogue, stooping to no repentance, struggling with no phantoms, expecting no compassion, accepting no responsibilities, no pressures, no contempt. He was smug and disagreeable, arrogant and dangerous, as aggressive as a gun.

  He thought, at his angriest, about visiting Mrs. William Westfall in Plattsburg, the McMillans in Wilton, Iowa, the Wymore family in Clay County, Mrs. Berry Griffin in Richmond, Mrs. John Sheets in Gallatin, perhaps even Mrs. Joseph Heywood in Northfield, Minnesota. He would go to their homes and give his name as Robert Ford, “the man who killed Jesse James.” He imagined they would be grateful to him. They would graciously invite him in and urge him to accept extravagant gifts in exchange for his having made their grief a little lighter. But in actuality Bob made only one irregular journey and that one was to Kearney, Missouri, under the cover of night when even dogs were asleep. He crept up to a nine-foot-high marble grave monument beneath a huge coffee bean tree and glided his fingers over an inscription reading:

  In Loving Remembrance

  JESSE W. JAMES

  Died April 3, 1882

  Aged 34 Years, 6 Months, 28 Days

  Murdered By a Traitor and Coward

  Whose Name Is Not Worthy to

  Appear Here.

  BOB JOURNEYED into Kansas and the Indian Territories in 1885, gambling with cowboys in saloons, sleeping on ground that still remembered the sun, riding west without maps. A rattlesnake once snapped at his spur and then slithered gracefully away. Bob crept after it with a machete, chopping off the snake’s head and giving the body to a gunnysack until he could cook the meat that night. Hours later when Bob stripped off the gunnysack, the snake slashed out and socked Bob’s neck, striking hard as a strong man’s fist, only then spilling onto the sand, its spirit spent and at peace.

  7

  MAY 1884–JUNE 1892

  Some may think different but all the men I know who’ve killed anybody would give all they’re worth to get away from their reputation.

  BOB FORD

  in the Creede Candle, 1892

  CHARLEY FORD WAS ALL that his countrymen wanted an assassin of Jesse James to be: agitated, frightened, groveling, his melancholy unmanageable, his sicknesses so actual and so imagined that days would pass when he could do no more than nap under smothering coats and catch spiders with his glances. He had married in May 1883, a Miss O’Hara from St. Louis, but by April 1884, her peevishness and disappointment with her pale, phthisic, and ghost-ridden groom had separated the two and Charley was staying with his parents in order to cure his consumption with some good country air. Though he was only twenty-six years old, he was given to the fatigue and fragility of the aged; he weighed just ninety-eight pounds, he complained of the cold, the outcries of children, the plots against him by Martha and Bob, the purloining that kept him impoverished. He would shrink into a rocking chair on the roadside porch in May, his skeleton covered with woolens and shawls, his skull made idiotically jolly with a purple and gold stocking cap. He had by then developed secondary infections to his alimentary tract and in order to calm the searing pain in his lungs and organs, Charley ate ten or twelve grains of morphine per day, with the result that a stupid and sprightly playfulness could give way to deep sleep and then sleepless depression in which he wept and whispered plainsongs of remorse to Jesse.

  But on May 6th, 1884, Charley was merry enough to go hunting with Tom Jacobs, the boy who’d chanced upon the body of Robert Woodson Hite two years earlier. Quail were startled from the weeds of the Jacobs farm, their wings chattering in flight like the sound of riffled pages, but Charley would only gape at the sky as the birds disappeared, as if sight were as tardy as description and their presence had not yet pierced his eyes. He lingered over ordinary things—a gnarled finger of Dutch elm root emerging from the earth, the spade marks of a plowhorse’s shoes in a muddy cornfield, a clearing peppered with the pawprints of rabbits, a crow that sliced down near his ear. Tom lost the sickly man in the woods and after a prolonged absence saw Charley again with his shotgun hinged open over his arm, slouching back toward home, his clubfoot jerking his walk. Tom cried out if anything was wrong, but Charley gave no answer.r />
  He angled the shotgun against a staircase and gave his mother a smile as he climbed to the upstairs room where he slept. He hung his heavy chinchilla coat on a closet nail and snagged his slouch hat over it. Though there were scraps of paper and pencils in the room, he composed no apology or goodbye. He removed a .45 caliber Colt revolver from a frayed holster looped over the bedpost and reclined on a duck feather mattress, crossing his calf-high boots at the ankles, fingercombing his dark brown hair. He twinged as he pressed the gunsight against his chest, then quelled his heart with a single shot, the gun sliding to the floor as the singe mark on his shirt lightly smoked.

  The suicide was reported in a great many newspapers and the private ceremony that the Fords preferred was changed by circumstance to a large public gathering. No government official paid his respects, but Henry Craig and Sheriff Timberlake attended, as did Dick Liddil, whose release from jail had just been arranged.

  Bob was plagued by questions from people seeking the reasons why Charley killed himself, some appraising the victim’s kid brother as he spoke, trying to anticipate if Bob would make his escape from shame and reproach by employing the same procedure. Bob responded to the pressures imprudently, by pushing away from the reception crowd and going into the woods with his gun and shooting the shagbark off a tree.

  And yet he stayed on the Ray County farm for another year, playing cards with his sister and Dick, making Ida his audience for acts of prestidigitation, puttering around the house, mowing hay, corn-husking with his brother Wilbur, slaughtering pigs and chickens. But by the summer of 1885, the scrutiny of passersby and the contempt of the Richmond community were all too persistent, and Bob journeyed west in order to make a new reputation.

  Elias Ford sold the grocery store and purchased a farm near Blue Springs that he worked on with Wilbur in the plain and simple way of ordinary people. Martha gave up the Harbison place soon after Bob departed and moved over to Excelsior Springs to be with her twin sister, Amanda. Dick Liddil was still Martha’s paramour but the spell was beginning to wear off for her. His appearance was no longer exemplary, his skewed right eye was going blind and was sometimes red as a radish, and he whispered, when alone with her, that Jesse had put a hex on them, that everything they attempted from then on was predestined to fail. So Martha separated from him in the late eighties and accepted a marriage proposal from a man whose occupation and personality were unimpressive but sustaining. Except for Bob, the Fords were alike in that: they completed their lifetimes peacefully and disappeared from history.

  JOHN SAMUELS, who’d lingered on the brink of death for more than four months in 1882, got better as soon as his stepbrother Jesse was sent to the grave, and he gave the world an undistinguished life until his dying at seventy-one, in 1932.

  Dr. Reuben Samuels grew progressively more affected by the mental injuries he’d suffered when strangled in the coffee bean tree during the Civil War. By 1900 the man was so violent that he was finally confined in a straitjacket and conveyed to the state asylum, where he spent the last eight years of his life in a condition of childishness and rage.

  His wife, Zerelda, remained on the Kearney farm, which she subdivided among her surviving children until it was little more than a two-storey house, slave quarters, ramshackle barn, and garden. Her greatest source of income began to be the twenty-five-cent tours of the grounds and rooms, in which she perorated against the government and the courts, and gave gasconades about her slaughtered sons, Archie and Jesse, gladly showing her amputated right wrist or the combination steel knife and fork she’d made so that she could eat left-handed.

  She was an inveigler. She would cozen many of her guests, invite them into her confidence, make them feel especially privileged, at last agreeing to sell them a stone from the grave or, at much greater cost, a worn shoe from one of the James boys’ steeds (these she bought from a village blacksmith in wheelbarrow loads; the stones were shoveled from Clear Creek and spread on the grave once a week). If they asked to take a photograph of Zerelda in her black rocking chair in the yard, she would appeal to them to mail back a copy as a sweet remembrance, and these snapshots she’d sell to new visitors as soon as she received them. She petitioned for and accepted a free pass from the Burlington Railroad in atonement for its crimes against her family, and then spent each trip lumbering down the aisles, steadying herself on the seats as she chronicled her life for the passengers and castigated the Burlington company.

  She remained a strong and overwhelming woman even as she crossed into the twentieth century. She outlived three husbands and four of the eight children she bore and she showed no signs of sickness when she retired to a Pullman sleeper in 1911 and there died of a stroke at the age of eighty-seven.

  On the Monday after Easter in 1882, Zerelda Mimms James auctioned off most of the contents of the cottage on Lafayette Street. A common coal scuttle that was once warmed by the great man’s hand garnered twice its cost, the coffee mill that Mary played with on April 3rd brought the widow two dollars, Mary’s highchair, seventy-five cents, the chair Jesse stood on and the feather duster he fiddled with went for five dollars each. Two horses and saddles in the stables were confiscated as stolen goods, slivers of the floorboards were ripped up as mementoes, painted wood siding was being stripped off the cottage when the police came to restore order.

  And yet Zee was penniless and she would remain that way in spite of many generous efforts to bring her to solvency. Someone enterprising signed Zee onto a speaking circuit but she was unwilling to exaggerate and actually too shy for public address, so an orator was paid to retell the legend with extravagant histrionics as the crying widow looked on. The preview rehearsals were atrocious, however; Zee kept shaking her head at the man’s preposterous hyperbole and she couldn’t be heard when she responded to questions from the audience. The program was judiciously canceled and she accepted work as a cook for a while, but she suffered a miscarriage in July, recuperated slowly, and soon depended upon a subscription of several hundred dollars that was raised for her by Major John Newman Edwards.

  Zee moved back to Kansas City in 1882 and worked there as a cleaning woman and seamstress in a manner that many construed as penitent. She joined Mrs. Samuels in suing J. H. Chambers, publishers, for royalties from The Life, Times, and Treacherous Death of Jesse James, a book they’d earlier denied collaborating on. A jury awarded them $942 and the article about that was the last news about Zee; she thenceforth retired from the public eye, shunning reporters, seeking retreat, staying with one of her five sisters and brothers for months at a time and then regretfully moving on.

  She felt crippled, forsaken, marooned. She saw no other men, she mixed with other women solely at church socials, her only company was her children, most of her clothing was black. She thought of Jesse as her vitality, her vigor, her crucial ingredient; once he was gone she was a prey to fatigue and sickness and instability until she gratefully accepted death in 1900 at the age of fifty-five.

  Her daughter, Mary, grew into an intelligent and pretty but rather inconspicuous woman who married Henry Barr, an affluent farmer much older than she was, and gave birth to three boys on property across the road from her father’s birthplace. Her hair changed from ash blond to chestnut brown as she aged and it delighted her that she resembled Jesse at least in coloring, but she called no particular attention to her heritage and many who knew her when she passed away in 1935 were surprised by her maiden name.

  Her brother took great advantage of the name Jesse Edwards James. He was a sprinter in high school and, in the summer, an office boy in the real estate investment company run by Governor Crittenden’s son. He played semi-professional baseball, ran a cigar stand in the courthouse, received a college scholarship from Thomas Crittenden, and became an attorney-at-law in Kansas City and Los Angeles. He was once accused of robbing the Missouri Pacific Railroad at Leeds in 1898, and Finis C. Farr, the governor’s private secretary in 1882, acted as counsel for the defense without fee. Mrs. Zerelda Samuels gave h
er grandson an alibi by claiming he’d been sitting on the porch with her when the robbery occurred, just as Jesse James, Sr., seemed always to be when earlier crimes were committed. The jury acquitted the man but the judge was rumored to have said, “Jesse, I find you not guilty, but don’t do it again.”

  When Jesse was twenty-four he wrote the memoir Jesse James, My Father; in 1921 he financed and acted in the movie Under the Black Flag, and some years later was a highly paid technical advisor to Paramount Pictures when they produced their counterfeit Jesse James, starring Tyrone Power. Jesse Edwards James died in California in 1951. Of his four daughters, one was an escrow officer for the Bank of America, another worked in the Federal Reserve, and a third sold Liberty Bonds.

  IN MAY 1882, the Missouri state legislature was asked to vote on a resolution “to commend the vigilance and success of the civil officers of Clay and Jackson counties and the citizens of western Missouri for their efforts in bringing the [James gang] to justice.” Spittoons were thrown at the sponsor of the resolution and he was upbraided with such outrage and ridicule that the session was soon adjourned.

  It is not very startling then to see that Timberlake, Craig, Wallace, and Crittenden were politically ruined by their involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Jesse James. James R. Timberlake could read the signs clearly enough that he sought the county collector’s job rather than reelection as sheriff, and yet he was roundly defeated and moved to New Mexico to work as a cattleman. Governor Crittenden called him back as deputy United States marshal but he retired from office soon after his wife died and returned to his Liberty livery stables. He started taking morphine to cure insomnia, and he succumbed to an accidental overdose of the narcotic in 1891.