For more than two weeks after the Hot Springs stage robbery, Jesse guided his horse steadily north.50 The names of the four men who rode beside him, according to press accounts, were Frank James, Arthur McCoy—the Confederate cavalryman mentioned in “A Terrible Quintet”—Cole Younger, and one of Cole’s brothers.51 By January 27, they had reached Missouri’s southern border. They continued north, following the Iron Mountain Railroad through the southeastern section of the state. On January 30, they stopped to eat in Mill Spring, then they continued on, passing through Piedmont, six miles farther north.
That night, they asked for shelter at the home of the widow Gilbreath, three miles north of Piedmont. Three of them set down double-barreled shotguns, she noticed, and when they took off their overcoats, she saw that each of the five carried a pair of large revolvers.52 They had maps, a compass, and a spare horse; they also came with a fair knowledge of the countryside and the Iron Mountain’s schedule.53
At perhaps three in the afternoon the next day, they trotted their horses into the hamlet of Gads Hill, just north of where they had spent the night. Founded by George W. Creath just three years earlier, this cluster of two or three houses, a general store, an abandoned sawmill, and a bare railroad platform depended on the Iron Mountain Railroad for its existence. Creath had named his village, deep in rugged, heavily wooded wilderness, after the rural retreat of Charles Dickens. But at least one of the gunmen knew it as the place where Prince Hal robbed Falstaff after Falstaff had robbed the pilgrims, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. Robbing the robbers—as they saw it—would be their work that day.54
Jesse and his comrades visited the town merchant, McMillan, and secured his rifle and perhaps $800 of his money (though the flinty store owner slipped $450 more into the lining of his coat). Then they ushered him through the cold winter air to the railroad platform, where they also brought the handful of men, women, and children who lived in the nearby houses. There was no shelter for them by the tracks, as trains rarely bothered to stop at this remote flag station. But the James brothers and their crew knew a little about railroad procedures. As their prisoners shivered around an open fire, they scrounged up a red signal flag, used to warn of danger ahead. They planned to wave down the Number 7 train, the express from St. Louis to Little Rock, due in at 4:06 p.m. It would probably carry a large shipment of cash, for this was the time of year when money was sent south in great quantities to pay for cotton purchases. Long before the appointed hour, they were ready, red flag in hand, shotguns cradled in their arms, pistols loaded, and a sheet of paper prepared for this occasion.55
Four o’clock came and went as they waited in the January chill. Finally, about an hour late, the Number 7 steamed into view. One of the gunmen waved the red flag. The great iron mass of the engine slowed, then clanked through the switch that the bandits had thrown and onto the siding adjacent to the platform. Immediately after the last car passed, one of the bandits threw the switch again, trapping the train.
As the locomotive eased up to the platform, conductor C. A. Alford went to investigate the red flag. “I jumped off the train, thinking that the track was torn up,” he reported a few days later. “A man advanced and caught me by the collar and stuck a pistol in my face.” For a moment, Alford was utterly confused as he looked at the small crowd huddled around an open fire, and the men with guns. The fellow who held him wore a mask of white cloth that completely covered his head, with holes cut out for his eyes and nose. “I was a little surprised,” the conductor reported, “and understood his object only when he shouted, on thrusting his pistol in my face: ‘Stand still or I’ll blow the top of your head off.’ ” Then he turned toward the train and bellowed, “If a shot is fired out of the car I will kill the conductor.”56
The gunmen proceeded quickly and efficiently, following the model they had developed in Iowa the year before. One man stood guard over the prisoners while two walked outside of the train, one on each side. When one of the passengers poked his head out a window, the nearest bandit swung his shotgun toward his skull and warned, “Take your heads in, and not move out of the car!”57 The last two outlaws collected the engineer and the fireman and put them with the conductor and the other prisoners. Then they stepped up into the baggage car.
Inside, Adams Express messenger William N. Wilson waited nervously by the safe, revolver in hand. As soon as a masked face appeared in the doorway he aimed his weapon—then froze. A second bandit had also appeared, shotgun directed squarely at Wilson’s chest. “Give me your pistol you son of a bitch,” the bandit snarled. The express messenger quickly complied, handing over the safe key as well. The robbers unlocked the iron box and rummaged through its contents. They found a package containing some $1,080. They tore open another marked “watch,” but when they saw it was silver, not gold, they tossed it on the floor. “You’ve got more money than all that comes to!” one of them snapped at Wilson. “Shell out or I’ll blow your brains out!” There was no more, however. They ripped open registered mail packages containing various sums of money, and even broke into the conductor’s satchel.
They seemed to relax as they rifled the mail. When they were finished, the lead bandit—most likely Jesse—opened the messenger’s waybill registration book and scribbled, “Robbed at Gads Hill.” He cheerfully added that he had signed such a book before.58 Then they prodded Wilson and the baggage master to where the other prisoners stood, and went back to rob the passengers.
The work went quickly. There were only two passenger cars—one smoker, one ladies’ car—and a Pullman sleeper, carrying just twelve men, five women, and eight children in all. As they passed through, brandishing their revolvers, they ordered the men to show them their hands. “They stated that they did not want to rob workingmen or ladies,” the St. Louis Republican reported, “but the money and valuables of the plug-hat gentlemen were what they sought.”
The two bandits became positively buoyant as they strolled down the aisle, collecting hundreds of dollars in cash and jewelry. One of them playfully exchanged hats with a passenger, while the other recited Shakespeare. When one man introduced himself as a minister, they returned his money and asked him to pray for them. They demanded to know if anyone was named “Pinkerton.” Finally they picked out a man, declared that he was a detective, ordered him into a sleeper-car compartment, and ordered him to strip. Every employee of the famous Pinkerton’s detective agency, they said, had a secret mark on his body. Satisfied—or simply amused—they soon let the humiliated passenger go.59
Once all the passengers had been looted, the gunmen rejoined the group of prisoners on the platform. They finished their work by taking fifty dollars from conductor Alford, along with his gold watch, which prompted an impulsive outburst from the baggage master. “For God’s sake, you won’t take it,” he protested, “for it is a present.” The outlaws promptly returned it, and told the railroad men that they were free to go. “When we got ready to start,” Alford reported, “the robbers shook hands with the engineer, Wm. Wetton, and told him whenever he saw a red flag he ought to stop. They then strolled off to their horses, tied up about a hundred yards distant, and rode out of sight before we got under way.”60
As the train chugged off, the crew discovered the bandits’ final touch: they had left behind a prepared press release, with instructions that it be telegraphed to the St. Louis Dispatch. “The most daring robbery on record,” it began. “The south bound train on the Iron Mountain railroad was robbed here this morning by five heavily armed men, and robbed of_______dollars.” The rest of the brief release described the crime with great accuracy, showing that everything had indeed gone according to plan. “The robbers arrived at the station a few minutes before the arrival of the train, and arrested the agent, put him under guard, and then threw the train on the switch.… There is a hell of excitement in this part of the country.”61
Jesse and his comrades escaped west into the forest, carrying at least $2,000. They rode two abreast, each pair almost one hundred ya
rds apart, with the fifth man leading the spare horse in the rear—a formation that would keep them from being trapped together in an ambush. The next night, February 1, they stayed with a widow named Cook on the Current River, where they cleaned and reloaded their arms. They left early the next morning. From there they continued west across southern Missouri. “All along the route they are reported to have conducted themselves as gentlemen, paying for everything they got,” the St. Louis Republican announced. “They had a map and compass to direct their route, avoiding roads and keeping to the hills as much as possible.” A large posse followed behind, gradually disintegrating as its members tired of the fruitless chase.62
As the outlaws disappeared into the woods, John Edwards went to work. In a St. Louis Dispatch editorial titled “Gads Hill,” he rounded out the circle of argument begun with “A Terrible Quintet,” or even “The Chivalry of Crime,” more than a year earlier.63 The bandits, he wrote, were the inevitable result of a deeper evil in the United States, an evil that had led to an epidemic of crime. “We believe that the war had a great deal to do with this disease solely because the war made the Radical party a triumphant one. Radicalism has no principle.… Everything that was venerable and sacred in the country, it has taught the people to despise. As far as it could it has defamed and derided the constitution. It has declared, because of its uses and manipulations of them, that the courts were marketable things.… States have been treated as conquered provinces, abject criminals protected in the exercise of outrageous powers.”
But in Missouri, he wrote, the iron hand of Radicalism had raised its own destroyer, a kind of criminal who was entirely admirable. “Is it hard to discriminate between the men of Gads Hill, and the men of the iron clad oath and registration law? Is the line difficult to draw between Rodman* on the one hand, and these daring highwaymen on the other? No, indeed.” Here Edwards began the central thrust of his argument: The evils of Radical rule had not yet ended. “But is the curse lifted from Missouri with the passing away of the old regime? It were well if it could or would be so. It were well if no knowledge had ever been had of … tyranny and oppression, of a disfranchisement that offered a premium to rascality, and of such a destruction of the old order of things as taught to the rising generation only those lessons that have borne fruit at Ste. Genevieve, at Gads Hill, up in Iowa, and at various other places where desperate men have struck and been successful.”
Now at full stride, the crusty Confederate wrapped up all the outlaws’ disparate messages and symbolism into one comprehensive condemnation of the Republican order. Before the Civil War, he wrote, banditry would have been crime, pure and simple, and would have been snuffed out.
By and by, however, when the militia came, and when men were shot down in their houses or in their fields, it was because of their disloyalty.… And when rich and prosperous counties were made beggars in a night … because ten per cent of their population voted debts upon them impossible to pay, it was no longer called robbery.… The trees thus planted are bearing wholesome and legitimate fruit. Since 1862, the government has been robbing, so has its officers of high and low degree, so has every administration in every Southern State, so did the administration of Missouri, so have the national banks, the tariff, the custom house, the Indian agents, the railroads, the cabinet officers, Grant himself.… To stop it—to break up private as well as official robbery of all kinds—it is only necessary to break up the Radical party. For this Augean stable there must be another Euphrates.
By the time this editorial appeared, on February 10, 1874, Edwards’s personal ties to the outlaws were well known; already a rumor circulated that he had been given a gold watch from their plunder.64 It would be too much to say that he was considered their mouthpiece, for that was too passive a role for the opinionated and increasingly influential editor. Perhaps “official interpreter” would have been the best way to describe him. Few doubted that Edwards’s essay cast the bandits as they wished to be seen, as Confederate avengers against an imagined Radical monolith—the invisible empire that extended its corrupt tyranny into every crevice of life. He depicted them as men of the old order who boldly stood against the abominations of Union victory and Radical rule. In this highly political—and secessionist—view, they appeared as part of the great wave of “Redeemers” working to overthrow Reconstruction with their own invisible empire, a systematic application of violence and intimidation.
Edwards and his twenty-six-year-old friend Jesse James had many reasons to put the banditry in this light: a desire to shift the Democratic Party in an explicitly Confederate direction; outrage at the social and political revolution of Reconstruction; and a simple hunger for glory. But neither of them could have predicted how successful their efforts would be in the year that followed. Help was on the way from an unexpected source, a new enemy who would make all of Edwards’s arguments about the Radical empire tangible and real, and tear apart the Democratic Party in the process. The bushwhackers were going back to war.
* Emphasis added.
* Gold and silver remained legal tender, and could be taken in refined bullion form to a U.S. mint, where it would be turned into coin (though the federal government stopped minting silver in 1873). Large shipments of bullion were regularly made from the West to New York, where it was sold for greenbacks in the gold market. The Rock Island shipped 8,138,879 pounds of bullion east in the year ending March 31, 1874; Annual Report to the President, Directors, and Stockholders of the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad Company, April 1, 1874 (New York: Clarence Levey & Co., 1874), 25; Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 255–60.
* The Regular Army had six black regiments after 1866 (reduced to four in 1869), while Northern men made up more than 90 percent of the postwar officer corps. See T. J. Stiles, “Buffalo Soldiers,” Smithsonian 29, no. 9 (December 1998): 82–94; Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 411–13.
* Francis Rodman had invalidated several elections as Republican secretary of state in 1866 and 1868.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Allies and Enemies
WILLIAM B. DINSMORE’S business was nothing if not predictable. A colorless former bookkeeper, he had joined the Adams Express Company shortly after its founding, in 1840. Through hard work and shrewd management, he had risen to the presidency of this, the country’s largest express corporation. He competed with other express firms, such as the United States or the American; he cooperated with railroads, which he paid handsomely to carry his messengers, packages, and safes; and he dealt with clients and colleagues who were much like himself, gray men in gaslit offices in the narrow streets of lower Manhattan. But in 1874 Dinsmore’s world went into convulsions, causing him the most unexpected problems.1
The first signs of trouble came in 1872, when the steadily chugging economy began to hiccup and cough. The Treasury Department’s contractionist monetary policies and the deflationary structure of the national bank system had begun to slow things down even as the first hints appeared that the railways had overexpanded. Europe lost its voracious appetite for American railroad bonds, which starved the aggressive corporations of their primary source of financing. Then, in September 1873, the unthinkable happened: the firm of Jay Cooke—the financial wizard who had helped keep the Union fiscally healthy during the Civil War—found itself unable to finance the Northern Pacific, and went bankrupt. The result was a panic of titanic proportions.2
“I now entered the most anxious period of my business life,” recalled Andrew Carnegie, soon to be the largest steel manufacturer in the country. Carnegie could hardly help panicking in the Panic of 1873. “All was going well when one morning … a telegram came announcing the failure of Jay Cooke & Co. Almost every hour brought news of some fresh disaster. House after house failed. The question every morning was
which would go next. Every failure depleted the resources of other concerns. Loss after loss ensued, until a total paralysis of business set in.… It was impossible to borrow money, even upon the best collaterals.… I could scarcely control myself.”3
Banks failed; mills closed; prices plunged as the already diminishing stock of money shrank further. Prices for farm products fell so low it was hardly worth the freight charges to send them to market. And the full burden of every sector’s losses fell on the railway corporations. “While it has been a season of great general depression of business,” declared the Railroad Gazette at the end of 1874, “railroad business has suffered especially—more perhaps than any other great industry except iron.” The editors likened the impact of the Panic to a war.4
With freight traffic, government aid, and foreign investment all evaporating, the railway corporations began to look for new sources of income, and the express business seemed just the thing. As handlers of priority deliveries, Dinsmore’s industry was cushioned against the full impact of the depression. It also operated with a high profit margin, since it lacked the enormous overhead sustained by the railroads. In 1875, with the economy still plunging downward, the Adams Express Company enjoyed a stock capitalization of $12 million, even though it could boast of only a small fraction of the physical assets of the average railway. That same year, Harper’s magazine estimated that the express business had created fifty millionaires (at a time when the president of the United States earned the astronomical salary of $20,000 a year). These lucrative companies depended on the railroads for their survival, making them vulnerable to the owners of the tracks and rolling stock. Jay Gould, for example, canceled Union Pacific’s contract with Wells, Fargo & Co. and instituted his own express service. Other lines looked to follow his example.5
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