by Ron Hansen
Henry H. Craig ran for Kansas City marshal in 1882, but received only a small percentage of the vote. He never again gained even a party’s nomination but he did acquire some prominence in the private practice of law and it was partially because of the sponsorship of Henry Craig that the junior Jesse James could study for the legal profession.
William H. Wallace stayed on as prosecuting attorney for another year but couldn’t resist attempts at a higher office. He lost races for Congress in 1884, the United States Senate in 1901, Congress again in 1906, and governor in 1908 before he gave up and applied himself to the cause of prohibition.
Thomas T. Crittenden once realistically assumed that he would be reelected governor, then join his uncle in the United States Senate or join his childhood friend John Harlan on the United States Supreme Court, so he was shocked and stung when the Democratic Party withheld even its nomination for governor from him, preferring the former Confederate general John S. Marmaduke. Senator George Vest came to his aid by suggesting Crittenden as a foreign ambassador but President Grover Cleveland rejected the motion on the grounds that Europeans would recognize the ex-governor as the man who “had bargained with the Fords for the killing of Jesse James.” Cleveland instead made him consul general to Mexico City, and, after a change of presidential administration, a friend whom Governor Crittenden appointed as a judge repaid the favor by making Crittenden referee of the Kansas City Bankruptcy Court, which he manfully accepted as a great honor and responsibility. He suffered a stroke at a Kansas City baseball game and died in the stands in 1909.
In the late eighties Dick Liddil joined Bob Ford in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and acted as his partner in a Bridge Street saloon, but he really wasn’t much help. He was hopeless with arithmetic, lackadaisical with cleaning up, and in his despair would strip off his apron and stroll out of the place, preferring the companionship of horses that ate apples off his palm in the livery stable next door. J. W Lynch made the attractive proposal that Dick sample a thoroughbred named St. John and a string of other racehorses on the Eastern and Southern circuits and the partners split up. Dick would never again see Bob or Martha, nor would he admit any past association with the James gang. He competed at Saratoga, Pimlico, and Churchill Downs and produced so well that he came to own a good many racehorses himself, and he was grooming one in Cincinnati, Ohio, when he grew oddly weary and went to sleep on the straw floor of a stall, and there James Andrew Liddil died of natural causes, at age forty-one, in 1893.
Of the Younger brothers, only two survived the nineteenth century. John had been killed by Pinkerton detectives in 1874. Bob yielded to consumption in the Stillwater prison infirmary in 1889, his last words to Cole being “Don’t weep for me.” A significant segment of Jim’s ruined jaw was surgically removed after the gang was arrested near Madelia and his only nourishment for twenty-five years was whatever could be sipped from a spoon. Cole lost most of his hair and added forty pounds in prison. Mostly as a relief from routine, he and Jim volunteered as subjects for phrenological studies that concluded Cole was a loyal and steadfast but unforgiving man who could have made an excellent general; and that Jim had considerable artistic and literary talent but no faculty for getting money.
The two were released from Stillwater in 1901 and took jobs selling cemetery monuments for the P. N. Peterson Granite Company. Jim sought to wed a writer named Alice Miller but was forbidden a marriage license because the Minnesota attorney general ruled that a man still under a life sentence must be considered legally dead. Soon thereafter his fiancée changed her mind about Jim and in 1902 he committed suicide in the Reardon Hotel in St. Paul, leaving an anguished letter in which he said he was “a square fellow, a socialist, and decidedly in favor of Woman Rights.”
The governor attested to his sorrow and remorse for the tragedy by granting a full pardon to Thomas Coleman Younger, and with mingled gloom and gladness Cole returned to Lee’s Summit, Missouri.
ALEXANDER FRANKLIN JAMES was in Baltimore with his wife and child when he read the news about the assassination of Jesse James. He had spurned his younger brother for being peculiar and temperamental, but once he perceived that he’d never see Jesse again, Frank was wrought up, perplexed, despondent. The East seemed a foreign country to him, and whichever city he visited seemed an uninhabited island without Jesse alive. He was suddenly lonely, nostalgic, morose; he might have yearned for suicide were it not for Annie and Rob.
He was inaccurately sighted in St. Joseph, Kansas City, and Kearney in April and May 1882, but in fact stayed on the coast through spring and summer, writing letters of overture and negotiation to the journalist John Newman Edwards, who routed them in turn to Governor Thomas Crittenden.
Frank assumed the alias of B. F. Winfrey and moved west in autumn, meeting with the governor on October 5th, 1882, at five in the afternoon. Crittenden had jubilantly invited state officials and approving reporters to his Jefferson City office in order to share in the opening of a “Christmas box,” a surprise which they presumed referred more to Major John Newman Edwards than to the grave, august stranger who was with him. But then Edwards gestured to the stranger and grandly introduced Mr. Frank James and the man strode forward, removing a revolver and Union Army cartridge belt, and presented them to the governor, saying, “I want to hand over to you that which no living man except myself has been permitted to touch since 1861, and to say that I am your prisoner.”
One day later, Frank James gave an interview to the St. Louis Republican in which he said: “If I were governor charged with upholding the laws of a great state cursed by such a band of outlaws who terrorized the state, I would take desperate measures to meet such desperate men. They would have to go as in this case they have gone. Such is the fate of all such bands. But what must be the suffering of such a pitiful creature as Bob Ford? For a few paltry dollars he has, while on the verge of manhood, brought upon himself a blighting curse that will never leave him in all the years to come.”
The government accorded privileges to Frank James; he was given parties, genteel receptions, magnificent presents and accommodations, an opulent coach on the train that carried him to Jackson County; to some it seemed the state of Missouri surrendered to Frank James rather than the other way around. People learned of his journey north and swarmed to the railroad stations along the way, at which Frank needed only to show himself and shyly wave to receive a wild ovation.
Prosecuting attorney Wallace couldn’t construct a convincing case against Frank in Independence, so the outlaw was sent to Gallatin to stand trial for the murder of John Sheets in 1869, and for the murders of Conductor William Westfall and Frank McMillan in the Winston train robbery of 1881. Edwards was able to recruit seven aspiring politicians as counsels for the defense, including a former lieutenant governor and a former congressman who was a commissioner of the Supreme Court of Missouri. Since the courtroom was too small to accommodate the crowds, the trial was moved to the Gallatin Opera House, where the sheriff sold tickets of admission.
The prosecution’s case depended upon the confessions of Clarence Hite, Whiskeyhead Ryan, and Dick Liddil; but Hite died of consumption before he could take the stand, Ryan was already in jail on a robbery sentence and had nothing to gain by angering Frank James or his confederates, and although Dick was precise and persuasive in both his testimony and demeanor, the accusations of a convict, horse thief, profligate, and roustabout were not given much credence.
Frank James, however, evinced dignity, intelligence, rectitude, and sobriety. He represented every quality that gentlemen then were eager to possess. He could speak passable German and French; he could recite one thousand lines of Shakespeare; he was not suspiciously attractive; he had fought for the right side in the Civil War.
A jury that was already partial to James when first impaneled moved to acquit the defendant and the courtroom erupted into prolonged applause.
Frank wasn’t free for more than a year when he was arraigned in Alabama for the robbery of a paymaster at Mus
cle Shoals, and again the verdict was not guilty, but right after the announcement a sheriff arrested the man for the robbery of the Missouri Pacific Railroad at Otterville in 1876. The charge was dismissed in February 1885 because the principal witness died two days before the case went to trial.
So it was that in spite of more than circumstantial evidence linking Frank James to a great many crimes, the man never served a day in the penitentiary.
What he did was act as a race starter at county fairs, increasing attendance with each appearance; he worked in a shoe store in Nevada, Missouri, and in the Mittenthal Clothing Company in Dallas, Texas, until monotony or annoyance with the overawed customers goaded Frank into leaving. He curried and cared for the racehorses of a rich man in New Jersey until his generous paychecks seemed too much like philanthropy. Then for seventy dollars a month, he accepted tickets at the Standard Theatre in St. Louis, refusing all invitations to see the saucy burlesque show inside.
He was mentioned as the new sergeant-at-arms for the Missouri legislature in 1901, a post that he anticipated would be a reprieve and an open display of his reformation, but the Democrats who recommended Frank foresaw his presence in the assembly as a political handicap, and the offer was retracted. So it was with regret and resentment that Frank capitulated to some of the many propositions from stock companies and performed, with chagrin and great nervousness, secondary roles in the plays Across the Desert and The Fatal Scar.
He was a survivor and it made him feel slightly guilty. It seemed to Frank that grace had come upon him without merit, that he’d been pardoned without justification or purpose. He once visited the scene of the 1864 Centralia massacre with a Missouri Herald reporter and strolled the Pleasant Grove cemetery looking for names he recognized. He gardened around an ill-kept grave and said, “The marvel to me is that I am not sleeping in a place like this. What have I been spared for when so many of my comrades were taken?” He straightened and roughed the earth from his hands, quoting from the Gospel according to Matthew: “ ‘Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.’ ”
When Cole Younger came back to Missouri in 1903, the two sick, aging men became reacquainted. Cole was pious, penitent, overweight, aching from the twenty-six gunshots he’d subjected his body to. Frank was sour and skinny and gray-haired, a chain-smoker and teetotaler with a minor heart condition. A Chicago circus management company signed the two to appear together in a Wild West show called Hell on the Border, in which Cole mixed with the audience and signed autographs and waved a white hat when his celebrated name was announced. Frank sat grumpily in a stagecoach that was robbed by city boys playing the James-Younger gang and then rode on an ornate spangled saddle and Arabian horse in the grand finale alongside Sioux Indians and ex-cavalry men and bronc riders and girls who did rope tricks.
Frank considered it crooked, silly, and unmanly and he moved on within months, settling once again on the Kearney farm. His son, Rob, was by then an auditor for the Wabash Railway in St. Louis; his wife, Anne, provided Mrs. Samuels with company and went into angry seclusion whenever gawkers stopped by. Frank raised cattle, rode in a buggy pulled by a plow horse named Dan, shot at paper targets in the woods, and taciturnly walked from room to room with tourists who now paid fifty cents to see Reverend James’s diploma from Georgetown College, a sampler stitched by Zerelda Cole at St. Catherine’s Academy, the Holy Bible that Jesse read, one of the guns he shot. If asked about Jesse, Frank would recite from Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
Alexander Franklin James died of a heart attack on February 18th, 1915, at the age of seventy-two. As he grew older he’d become plagued by visions of scientists making judgments about the configurations and weight of his brain, so Annie granted his wish that his body be cremated and the ashes stored until they could be interred with her own, which they were, in 1944, when she died at age ninety-one.
Thomas Coleman Younger died, unmarried, at age seventy-two, and was survived by one daughter, Pearl, a prostitute whose mother was Myra Belle Starr. After leaving the Wild West show, Cole returned to his birthplace in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, and continued making public appearances, speaking at churches, tent meetings, and ice cream socials on the evils of whiskey, What Life Has Taught Me, or simply Crime Does Not Pay.
ROBERT NEWTON FORD meandered southwest to the Las Vegas hot springs in the late eighties, having recollected that Jesse once thought about going straight in that region. He was a professional gambler then and owned a plug horse, the clothes he’d rolled into a green tarpaulin, and the shaggy chinchilla coat that had belonged to Charley, with eight hundred dollars in poker winnings sewn into the coat’s sagging skirts. He registered in the Old Adobe Hotel, then made a sightseer of himself for a week, playing cards for pennies, gathering information about the town and Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, going to the hot springs to cogitate and get clean.
On a sashay along Bridge Street one evening, he saw a stooped man gum to a saloon window a sign saying the place was being sold and the owner going back East. Bob spent the night on a stool there, counting the sales that were rung up, figuring out what he’d change, and the next morning negotiated an outright purchase of the inventory and a year’s lease of the property, putting down a fifty-dollar deposit. He then sent a telegram to Dick Liddil in Richmond, and a month later, when Dick jumped off the train, Bob was happily at the depot, looking groomed and genial in a crisp white shirt and buttoned gray vest, a long white apron concealing his legs and angling off his gun. He grinned at Dick and said, “Say hello to prosperity,” and hung an arm over Dick’s shoulders as Jesse might have as he guided him on a ramble through the Mexican vegetable and poultry market and then across Old Town’s plaza with its gazebo and gardens to a street of orange-colored clay.
Bob Ford’s saloon was advantageously located in Las Vegas, on the major east-west thoroughfare over the Gallinas River, and it might have gathered commercial men of San Miguel County as well as those going west forty miles to Santa Fe, but gossip about the proprietors was circulated, The Daily Optic even reminded its readers of their inglorious careers, and though a few shepherds and miners straggled in to gawk at the renegades of the James gang, a large contingent, under the outraged influence of Scott Moore (Jesse’s boyhood friend), boycotted the place in fury over the assassination.
Bob paid boys to pass out fliers to people crossing the bridge and even went into the street himself in order to prevail upon pedestrians to appease themselves inside. He ordered an upright piano shipped over from Albuquerque, gave away boiled eggs and sweet pickles and crackling pig skins painted with red chili sauce; he persuaded the governor’s son, Miguel Antonio Otero—who was just about his age and grew up in Missouri—to give a Saturday night party there; he even sought singers and dancing girls through advertisements in Colorado newspapers; and yet the saloon was bypassed, signs were ripped down, gentlemen crossed to the southside sidewalk in order to get to the plaza.
Bob was spending capital accumulated over five years on weekly expenses and saw poverty approaching with each payment to a supplier, so when Dick presented Bob with Lynch’s proposal that Dick run St. John and some other racehorses on the Eastern and Southern circuits, Bob gave up and without pain cooperated in pushing the animals into a Santa Fe freight car and in packing the inventory into a Studebaker wagon. Dick went East and got lucky again; Bob went north to Walsenburg, Colorado, and began another sorry saloon, bringing in a meager number of customers with sideshow bragging about himself: the man who killed Jesse James. He moved on again, going forty-five miles further north to Pueblo, where he earned some recognition as a wily professional gambler and then managed to get together the capital for a “pretty waiter saloon” in a section of town called the Mesa. He invested all his savings in gambling equipment that was shipped south from Denver and spent many hours in the countryside or at the railroad depot meeting sixteen-to twenty-one-year-old girls who looked poor o
r put upon or in flight from mail-order marriages and jobs in the cantaloupe fields: He promised them an eight-by-four room, three meals a day, and clean white dresses that were cut so short they showed their white bloomers and thigh-length black stockings. He guaranteed them protection and pleasant society, quietly giving them the option of prostitution without really requiring it—they were only expected to speak gladly with the patrons and persuade them to purchase liquor and beer at outrageously increased prices.
The gambling and the pretty waiter girls in Bob’s third saloon made all the difference. Bob flourished in Pueblo as he hadn’t since his years as an actor with George Bunnell. And his life in Pueblo was by then in great part a performance; his personality was compressed to that peculiar emptiness of a man whose public appearance is only a collection of gestures and posturings, of practiced words and affectation. He was a peacock, a swain, a swaggerer: one account of Bob accused him of “running off at the mouth” and of playing gunfighter around the Mesa, another reported his belligerence and umbrage, and yet another account mentioned his jumpiness and unhappiness and a panicky desperation that could make him seem possessed. His mean and cowardly reputation preceded him, of course, but there were plenty of other stories that could explain, at least, his uneasiness and suspicion. It was at this time, for example, that a man who owned a barbershop ingratiated himself and cringed around Bob for a month or so before letting on to a companion that he planned to avenge Mr. Jesse James by killing Robert Ford. The companion whispered the news to Bob, who approached the barber in his shop, jostled him out into the yard, and supplied him with a pistol. “Go ahead,” Bob yelled. “Draw your gun and let her fly!” Instead the man got down on his knees and begged to stay alive. Bob chopped his pistol into the barber’s nose, crushing cartilage and bone, and as the man gushed blood over his mouth, chin, and belly, Bob dragged him over to his saloon, where the barber was compelled to beg again for pardon in the presence of Bob’s pitiless cronies.