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

by Ron Hansen

  On another occasion Bob happened into the Bucket of Blood saloon in Pueblo and sipped whiskey at the bar in order to oversee the gambling operations and compare their gross income with his own. A boy with a guitar was singing anything suggested and it wasn’t long before a man in the audience sought to anger Bob Ford by calling for Billy Gashade’s song. The boy began “The Ballad of Jesse James” and according to an eyewitness named Norval Jennings every gaze attached to the dirty little coward in their midst. As the song went on it seemed Bob would not react to its jeering, but he gradually grew indignant enough to swing around on his high stool and sweep the right side of his coat over his gun, scowling at the singer as the boy ignorantly continued. According to Jennings, Bob then jerked up his Colt and shot at the guitar with miraculous accuracy, cutting through the catgut strings and stinging the boy’s playing fingers as the tightened strings sprang free. The boy yowled and gathered his right hand to his chest and Bob swaggered out through gunsmoke, inviting disgust with a grin.

  He was regarded as arrogant, dangerous, pigheaded, savage, with no redeeming qualities beyond a capacity for liquor and a scary gift in handling guns. Yarns were relayed around town in which Robert Ford was gallant or magnanimous—yarns about his giving Christmas suppers to the indigent, about his slipping fifty dollars into the pocket of a Mexican with a poor family, about his chasing off a gang of toughs on a sidewalk merely by menacing them with his cane—but anything congratulatory was judged to be bogus by those who thought they knew him and the accounts were forgotten in favor of disparaging tales that seemed more fitting.

  He brought much of their antagonism on himself: he way argumentative, garrulous, haughty, intoxicated more than often, petty about anything that involved money, perturbed only by injuries to his property and reputation, and pestered by an everlasting fear of assassination. In his private life, however, he was agreeable, forgiving, even loving, a gentleman of means and intelligence who was plagued by a guilt that he could not acknowledge.

  He had given work to a nightwalker named Dorothy Evans and gradually became beguiled by her. She was a plump, pretty, cattleman’s daughter, pale as a cameo, with the sort of overripe body that always seems four months pregnant. Her long brown hair was braided into figure eights and pinned up over her ears in the English country-girl style. Grim experience was in her eyes, many years of pouting shaped her lips, but everything else about her expression seemed to evince an appealing cupidity, as if she could accept anything as long as it was pleasing. She was canny, practical, sympathetic, purposeful, with a ready tally of the profit and loss she made on each hour she passed with her employer; and Bob was willing to pay for her attention, her pity, her open displays of high feeling and respect.

  Dorothy had initially appeared at his saloon in response to a newspaper advertisement that read:

  GOOD STEPPERS, make yourselves some money.

  FUN GALORE! FINE CLOTHING!

  The wages of sin are not death, but wealth,

  fame, and the chance of a proper marriage.

  It was July and Bob was pulling ice in a child’s red wagon because he couldn’t afford the five-penny delivery charge when he came upon a young woman in a long green gown of dainty frills and ruffles. She wore gem-buttoned gray gloves and a Georgia sunhat and she angled a parasol over her right shoulder, rolling it slightly in a way that suggested pleasure at the sight of a man pulling a child’s red wagon. She said, “I was expecting somebody old and ugly.”

  Bob said, “Pueblo has a supply of them: just who in particular?”

  “You are Bob Ford?”

  “And proud of it too.” He figured she was a big-city journalist like Nellie Bly and there to get yet another story about Robert Ford’s disgrace and ignominy.

  But she said, “I sing and play the piano. I’ve come to see you about that position for a good stepper.”

  “Oh golly.” He’d been getting his fingers into yellow gloves in order to carry the ice inside but now he yanked them off and with chagrin jerked a swinging door open for her and invited her out of the sunlight and high temperature.

  She said her name was Miss Evans and that she was brought up in an orphanage run by the Sisters of Mercy. Her only skirt was a flour sack until the age of fourteen when she’d married a mining engineer in Denver. Pneumonia had taken him from her, however, and desperation had pushed her into the life of a courtesan.

  “You mean you’re a prostitute,” Bob said. Her gloves were together on the oak saloon table. His finger jiggled one of the gems and he recognized that it was only colored glass. He said, “You don’t have to sugar things with me.”

  Miss Evans said, “I’m not ashamed of it; I just like the word.”

  “I’ve got some call for it, if you’re willing.”

  “Could be,” she said, and then forgot her pert good taste. She pulled a gold case from her purse and Bob lighted her cigarette. A man who worked for Bob barged inside the saloon, swinging ice between his legs with iron tongs. He saw the cigarette in her fingers and stopped long enough to pepper the floorboards with waterspots and make a happy face at Bob, then lunged back into the storeroom.

  Bob asked, “You know who I am?”

  She nodded a little too eagerly, like a girl slightly in love with her teacher. “Bob Ford.”

  He recrossed his legs and gazed at the flooring. “The man who shot Jesse James.”

  “I’ve seen your picture.”

  He glanced at her with suspicion. “So you were lying.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said you were expecting somebody old and ugly, when you knew, just what I looked like.”

  She wasn’t sheepish, she didn’t look into her lap or pout or pretend to be embarrassed. She said, “I was making conversation,” and was especially pretty with him.

  “How much of that is true, about the orphanage and the Sisters of Mercy and the mining engineer?”

  She blew cigarette smoke and said, “Hardly any.”

  He glared at her with a cocked eyebrow that betrayed how engaging he thought she was. “Do you have a given name or do you just generally make something up?”

  “Dorothy,” she said.

  “You can sing though, can’t you?”

  She got up and glided over to the upright piano, putting her cigarette in a tin cup there. She sang “Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage” and “Home, Sweet Home” and Bob gave her a job at higher pay than the other girls’.

  She garnered attention in Pueblo with gaudy clothes and brazen, unblushing displays of her body; she sang serenades on street corners as riders lingered their horses, teamsters looked on from their wagon seats, and young clerks forgot their shops to gaze with delight and longing; her picture was on a poster that read; “Prizes like this may be captured nightly at Bob Ford’s Saloon.” She brought in enough new customers to greatly augment Bob’s earnings, but she could have justified her wages with only her generous attentions to Bob. She was deeply interested in Bob’s overpublicized life with Jesse and listened almost rapaciously, sitting absolutely still as he spoke, showing no expression beyond that of rapt absorption, her mind seeming to accept his words as a mouth does water.

  It was only with Dorothy Evans that Bob spoke revealingly or plainly, and it was with her that he spoke of things he didn’t know he knew. He told her about playing poker with Thomas Howard in the dining room of the cottage. Jesse would flap his bottom lip with his thumb and smack his fist on the table with every card he played. He’d folded on one or two winning hands and never caught on to Charley’s bluffs. He rubbed his teeth with a finger, Bob said, he nibbled his mustache, he purified his blood at night with sulphate of magnesia in a glass of apple cider. Bob told Dorothy that he had no real memory of the shooting and its aftermath: he could remember lifting the gun that Jesse had given him and then it was Good Friday and he was reading about the funeral proceedings as if they’d happened a long time ago. He explained that he’d kept the yellowed newspaper clippings from April 1882 and
repeatedly pored over them, each time feeling aped, impersonated, cruelly maligned by the Robert Ford that the correspondents chose to put into print. He’d acted lightning-struck and stupefied, mechanical and childish. He was ashamed of his persiflage, his boasting, his pretensions of courage and ruthlessness; he was sorry about his cold-bloodedness, his dispassion, his inability to express what he now believed was the case: that he truly regretted killing Jesse, that he missed the man as much as anybody and wished his murder hadn’t been necessary.

  “Was it?” Dorothy asked.

  Bob looked at her without comment.

  “How I mean it is: why was it you killed him?” There was a gentle tinkling to her voice that Bob had grown accustomed to in actresses.

  Bob said, “He was going to kill me.”

  “So you were scared and that’s the only reason?”

  He sipped from a German stein of beer. “And the reward money,” he said.

  “Do you want me to change the subject?”

  Bob reset the stein and glanced at her in a calculating way. He asked, “Do you know what I expected? Applause. I thought Jesse James was a Satan and a tyrant who was causing all this misery, and that I’d be the greatest man in America if I shot him. I thought they would congratulate me and I’d get my name in books. I was only twenty years old then. I couldn’t see how it would look to people. I’ve been surprised by what’s happened.”

  IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME that a cowpuncher and prospector named Nicholas Creede began producing great amounts of silver ore from the Holy Moses and Amethyst mines in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. A tent town in the gulch of Willow Creek was given the man’s name and a spur of the Denver and Rio Grande narrow-gauge railroad was rapidly developed to join the camp to Wagon Wheel Gap in the east, and only deep snows in the high canyon passes prevented many thousands of miners from swarming over the mountains. They waited impatiently for the spring thaw in Pueblo, bringing good profits to the saloons and hotels and boardinghouses where they slept three or four to a room. Bob Ford was not exempt and put in with him in the Phoenix Hotel was a man named Edward O. Kelly, making a very unhappy pairing.

  Kelly was from Harrisonville, Missouri, just twenty miles south of Cole Younger’s farm in Lee’s Summit, and he gave even friends the improper opinion that his sister was married to one of the Younger boys. He was a child of a physician who’d given him a good education and he was employed as a policeman in Pueblo, but by 1890 the man had the mean, scrawny, unintelligent look of the regularly intoxicated. He forgot to shave or change his clothes, his shirts and coat were much too big for him, his green eyes showed no glint of humor, he had only repugnance for women, and he thought Bob Ford was a disgrace to the good name of Missouri.

  They generally said nothing when in the room together, they glanced everywhere but at each other, they even hung up a flagged string in order to split the room area and separate possessions. And then one day Bob was rummaging through his belongings in search of a four-hundred-dollar diamond ring that he was going to present to Dorothy as a sign of their common-law marriage. Bob saw Kelly sniggering and saying words to himself and he jumped to the wrong conclusion, charging Kelly with stealing the ring.

  Kelly glared at Bob for a second or two and then groped for his six-gun, raising the .45 at Bob when a janitor ran in from the hotel corridor and beleaguered him, grappling his strong arms over Kelly’s and jolting the slight man against the room’s wall. Kelly looked between his feet and jerked the gun’s trigger, obliterating the man’s big toe and then going down with him as the janitor fell in agony. Kelly wriggled away to a corner and glared at the janitor as the man rolled with his pain. Bob was sitting in a chair like a passenger, looking aghast at the damage he’d caused, and Kelly said to him, “You’ve always got an angel, don’t ya. Some fool’s always rushing in to save your sorry hide.”

  The police came and Kelly gave up his gun to a pal, and in the course of the explanations that followed, Bob Ford slipped out of the room as if he could disappear.

  He stayed away from Kelly after that and moved into the storeroom of his saloon, sleeping on a cot with Dorothy there, letting vagrants and spongers and hungry young men sleep on the gambling tables and bar for fifty cents a night.

  Everyone, it seemed then, was going to Creede; grubstaked strangers from as far away as Indiana were loitering around the railroad yards in order to gather the latest exaggerations from the King Solomon Mining District, or they grouped around the big fires in the cold, goading the sting from their fingers. Bob joined the rings of men around the fires or in the congested hotel lobbies, chatting with gandydancers who’d put in the railroad spur and with the rugged mountain men who’d strung the telegraph lines. According to them there was no government in Creede, no taxes, no lodgings, not many stores, no fancy women in sight; the only saloons were cold canvas tents rigged over log walls and the whiskey was cut with plugs of tobacco.

  So Bob bought green sawmill lumber and got the many stragglers around Pueblo to raise and carpenter a grand dance hall on ground that was swept free of snow. He bought extravagant furniture and draperies and oil paintings of naked goddesses and with a practiced eye appraised how everything looked in the place. When the building was complete, he ordered a crew to cautiously take it apart and pile it on a railroad flat car, and by the time Wagon Wheel Gap was opened in April and the Denver and Rio Grande was operating in the high country again, Bob was moving on with his common-law wife and his pretty waiter girls to the city where he could begin a new life.

  He became a man of property and exemplary reputation. He squandered a magnificent sum of money and made his Exchange Club a palace. The rough boards on the outside of the gambling hall and bagnio disguised eight gaming tables of green felt and sculpted mahogany, an intricately scrolled and filigreed Eastlake bar of forty-foot length, a long brass rail four inches off the floor, brass spittoons at each junction, brass fittings on each cabinet and door, and glassware exactly like that used in the Teller House in Central City. Overhead lighting came from crystal chandeliers, muslin cloth of dark green concealed the pinewood walls, and everywhere were copied paintings of Aphrodite and the apple, Leda and the swan, the rape of the Sabine women, Venus at her toilette, Venus and Cupid, even La Primavera.

  Downstairs were eight pretty waiter girls, many croupiers in crisp white shirts and yellow ties, and two or three mixologists with gartered sleeves and great waxed mustaches. Upstairs Dorothy oversaw the expensive activities of prostitutes with made-up names like Topsy, Lulu Slain, the Mormon Queen, and Slanting Annie. Everything was meant to be as high-class and congenial as an Eastern gentlemen’s club, without gunplay or fights or conniving; corporation presidents and their mine managers visited after supper, a glee club of Yale graduates sang around the piano, prospectors galumphed around the place bragging about their claims, assayers, grocers, and storekeepers made their evening elapse over newspapers there, and earnings changed hands at an average of nine hundred dollars per hour, sixteen hours per day, six days a week—meaning, of course, that Bob Ford’s gambling hall could garner more in one year than the James gang could in thirteen.

  Creede itself was nothing like the Exchange Club. It grew in a gully between two great mountains, so that the sun only gave it eight hours’ light in a day and the snow run-off guttered along the single main street from April to July, obliging pack animals and pedestrians to slog through stocking-high muck and manure. The altitude was eight thousand eight hundred forty feet, so it was infrequently anything but cold (twenty degrees below zero in March was not uncommon) and the only water for months at a time came from pails of snow cooked over a fire—many negligent or already overworked men were consequently filthy, infested with body lice, and so foul-smelling that the Cyprians kept perfumed hankies to their noses as they gave up their pleasures.

  A great variety of humanity was coming to Creede: cowhands, cardsharps, shopkeepers, tramps, mining engineers, crew managers, speculators in precious metals, fore
igners from every country in Europe, Mexicans, Ute Indians, common laborers, cattle rustlers, circuit riders, petty thieves, physicians who had no license to practice, one or two lawyers who’d been disbarred, and a good many men whose lives were money. They were coming at the rate of three hundred per day, with the railway passengers sitting two to a chair or squeezing so tightly together in the aisles that a man could lift both feet and not fall. The Denver and Rio Grande recovered the cost of its railroad construction to Creede in just four months and lodgings were so scarce in the camp that each night they rented out ten Pullman cars on a sidetrack. Shanties might give refuge to eight or nine men, as many as sixty cots were jammed into one hotel dining room, the poor taught themselves to sleep upright supported by ropes that were strung across storage rooms, some people limped around Creede on crutches, having lost their feet to the cold.

  And though it was against all odds and expectations, the man who governed all of them, the grand authority in Creede, was the slayer of Jesse James, Robert Newton Ford. Bob made the judgments and regulations, oversaw the punishment of criminals, the paltry disputes of commercial men, the controversies between saloonkeepers and their patrons; he arranged many civil matters, approved sketches of construction, appointed the sheriffs and tax collectors, paid the yearly salary of the justice of the peace. If he was not appreciated or very often praised, he was nonetheless complied with as a man of power and strong opinion who could not be crossed without peril. He gave permissions, exceptions, dispensations; he gained prerogative, reputation, prestige, satisfaction.