T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  On the afternoon of the appointed day, Jesse, Frank, and one of the Younger brothers rode into the thick belt of timber that lined much of the northern shore of the Missouri. The road from the railroad depot ran westward alongside the trees. The outlaws stationed themselves inside the woods just where the path turned south, before continuing across a bare sandbar to the ferry dock. At about six o’clock, they heard the rattle of harness, wheels, and hoofbeats as the stage approached. They spurred their horses into the open. Frank James, it appears, cut off the team of horses; Jesse and the representative of the Younger clan galloped up and thrust the muzzles of their revolvers through the windows.

  “Damn it,” one of them said, “he isn’t here.” Jennings, it turned out, had come home a day early. Making the best of it, the bandits ordered the male passengers and the driver, eight men in all, out onto the road as Jesse dismounted and handed his reins to Frank. The victims waited in a line, hands held high, as Jesse went through their pockets. The brothers’ companion, however, noticed a few Sunday strollers walking nearby; he rode his horse over to them and ordered them to join the prisoners outside the stage.

  “I know you,” one of the pedestrians replied, “in spite of that dirty old veil over your face.” She was a young woman from Lexington named Mattie Hamlett, and she had known the James and Younger brothers during the war. Her keen eye for faces, however, was not matched by a memory for names: she referred to the man in front of her as “Will Younger,” but there was no brother by that name.57 When she walked over to the omnibus, she recognized the sharp blue eyes and upturned nose—albeit masked—of the young James boy who had come into Lexington at the end of the war, badly wounded, but she called him Frank instead of Jesse.58

  “Why, Frank James,” she said, putting a hand on Jesse’s arm, “I’m astonished to see you have come down to such small work. I thought you never did anything except on a big scale.” He warmly shook hands with her, and made no effort to correct her mistaken identification. “Well, I am a little ashamed of it myself,” he cheerfully replied. “It’s the first time we’ve ever stooped to such small game. But you needn’t call names quite so loud here.” As he pulled money and watches from the men’s pockets, Hamlett interceded on behalf of some of the victims. Jesse handed back the driver’s gold watch at her request, but kept the chain. “No,” she huffed, “give back the chain too; I won’t have part, if I can’t get all.” He reluctantly complied.

  From Lexington, perched high on a bluff across the river, the robbery could be seen in every detail. Word spread through the streets, and a large crowd gathered to watch the unfolding drama. It did not take long. As the outlaw rifled the passengers’ pockets and bags, he pulled the largest sum from William Brown, a prosperous black man, who carried fifty-two dollars and a revolver. When Jesse arrived in front of J. L. Allen, an educator from Kentucky who had come to Lexington to set up a private school for boys, he admired the man’s fine coat and vest—a sharp contrast to his own worn-out linen duster. Take them off, he ordered. “Don’t take that man’s clothes,” Hamlett objected, to no effect. But at her request, he passed over a woman who remained in the coach, and the three bandits took their leave. There is no point in chasing us, Jesse said as he mounted. We’re riding the finest horses in Missouri, and will be seventy-five miles away by morning. “Good-bye, Miss Mattie,” he shouted as they rode away, “you’ll never see us again.”59

  The omnibus robbery—taking place in front of hundreds of witnesses—caught the thoroughly embarrassed Governor Woodson on the campaign trail. In a speech in the town of Wellington, he could only sputter that he had not ordered the James boys arrested because he lacked the proper affidavits. The editors of the Radical Lexington Register sarcastically offered to send him a copy of their newspaper.60

  In Jefferson City, Lieutenant Governor Charles P. Johnson hoped to staunch the political bleeding by capturing the famous bandits. Acting in Governor Woodson’s absence, he sent a letter on September 1 to C. C. Rainwater, vice president of the St. Louis police board, urgently requesting help. (As noted earlier, the St. Louis police remained under the governor’s control.) Two days later, Officer Flourney Yancey walked into Johnson’s office, bearing a letter of introduction. “He is an excellent officer,” Rainwater wrote, “an experienced soldier, and a brave and determined man.” As the St. Louis Globe observed, he “was an expert scout during the war”—a background that would prove useful in the coming days.61

  Johnson immediately sent Yancey to Lexington to meet with Thomas H. Bayliss and other citizens, who were to provide him with details of the omnibus robbery, and gave him authorization to requisition support from local authorities. He also sent orders to St. Louis chief of police L. Harrigan to prepare a half-dozen men to aid Yancey. And then he waited. After a week, he began to telegraph inquiries to Harrigan and Bayliss. “I have not heard from Yancy [sic] except through you,” Harrigan replied on September 11. “I don’t know anything about him,” Bayliss telegraphed on the same day. “Went down the Pacific road when he left here.”62

  Johnson need not have worried: Yancey had found the outlaws’ trail. From Lexington he traced them through Lafayette County, some eighteen miles south of Waverly. A U.S. deputy marshal reported that on September 6, the bandits ran into the Lexington brass band on the road, “but the members of the band being well armed presented a bold front, and were allowed to pass on unmolested.” From there they circled back north and crossed the Missouri River. Yancey rode alone, asking discreet questions along the way, and learned that the two James brothers and Jim Younger were about twenty hours ahead of him. Near the railroad depot of Norborne in Carroll County, the bandits spent a night at a house belonging to the Pool clan, then trotted west, moving through the rugged Crooked River country north of Richmond on their way back to Zerelda’s farm.63

  Their old home proved to be no safe haven. As Yancey trailed them, Sheriff Patton relentlessly hunted them in Clay County, riding his prize racehorse, Dixie. “She [Dixie] has had a pretty hard time now for some time, running after the James boys and Jim Cummins,” Bettie Patton wrote on September 4, 1874. (Cummins, a fellow veteran of Bill Anderson’s band, was a friend of the outlaw brothers.) “George has nearly worn himself and horse both out.”64

  Yancey, meanwhile, lost the bandits’ trail. He crossed back and forth over the Missouri River until he finally learned that Frank James had gone into Jackson County, and that Jesse and Jim Younger were headed east. He immediately telegraphed the Ray County sheriff, asking him to pull a posse together for service the next day. Then he rode toward Richmond, spending the night at a farmhouse near the boundary of Clay and Ray Counties.

  The next morning, Jesse and Jim Younger prepared for their coming encounter with the St. Louis detective. They had been informed by the brother of one of their old bushwhacker comrades that Yancey had been spotted following them. They continued on their ride east through Ray County, but more carefully now, keeping an eye on their trail.

  Just east of the village of Fredericksburg, not far from where Bill Anderson had fallen ten years before, they spotted a suspicious fellow following perhaps three hundred yards behind. They continued to a place where the road dipped down and rose up sharply, then stationed themselves some forty yards past this blind spot. The man soon appeared, his horse cantering up out of the dip in the lane. He had a pistol slung on his hip.

  “Halt!” Jesse shouted, and he and Younger opened fire. But Yancey kept his nerve, drew his revolver, and shot Jesse, sending him crashing to the dirt. Jesse got to his feet and remounted as Yancey and Younger continued to shoot, pulled his other revolver, and began to fire again. Seconds later, the brief, intense skirmish suddenly ended. Yancey’s horse, already dancing skittishly from the noise, went wild as the firing intensified and galloped away uncontrollably, carrying Yancey with it. “The fright of his horse,” the St. Louis Globe reported, “probably saved his life.”65

  • • •

  AS JESSE RETREATED with Younger
to the shelter of a friend’s farm, he confronted a more serious problem than the slight injury he had suffered. For long months, he and John Edwards had pursued the carefully crafted strategy of glorifying Jesse, glorifying his deeds, but protesting his innocence on any specific count. They had successfully created a fog of cognitive dissonance, allowing old Confederates to salute the outlaws’ bravado and defiance and still see them as persecuted men. The Lexington stage robbery, however, had worked Peter Donan, editor of the Lexington Caucasian, into such a fit of enthusiasm that he had abandoned the program entirely and praised the James brothers by name.

  “In all the history of medieval knight-errantry and modern brigandage, there is nothing that equals the wild romance of the past few years’ career of Arthur McCoy, Frank and Jesse James, and the Younger brothers,” Donan’s story began. He went on to salute their war record under Quantrill and Anderson. “But even this weird, flashing record, combining the endurance and fleetness of the Bedouin Arab, with the savagery of the Cossack and the gallantry of true knighthood,” he continued, “has been eclipsed by their exploits of later years. They have become pet institutions of Missouri. Their fame has become national, aye, world-wide.… These four or five men have absolutely defied the whole power of Missouri.” After continuing in this vein for some time, the story led into the details of the robbery itself with the exclamation, “Lexington has just had the honor of one of their Robin-Hood-like, rattling visits.” Donan went on to hail the three robbers by name. “The whole proceeding was conducted in the coollest and most gentlemanly manner possible,” he wrote in conclusion. “Prof. Allen doubtless expresses the sentiments of the victims when he tells us that he is exceedingly glad, as he had to be robbed, that it was done by first class artists, by men of national reputation.”66

  Perhaps Donan wanted to stick his thumb in the eye of Unionists who relentlessly attacked the former guerrillas during the political campaign; perhaps he had tired of following the awkward strategy of praise-and-deny; perhaps he simply got carried away. Whatever the reason, Donan invalidated Jesse’s alibi that he and his new wife had moved to Mexico. Fortunately for the Clay County outlaws, they had a cunning and determined ally to help control the damage: their mother.

  No sooner had Zerelda read the Kansas City Times’s reprint of the Caucasian’s story than she mailed a letter to Mattie Hamlett, demanding a retraction. The missive arrived in Lexington the next day, and it left Hamlett badly shaken. “After a hasty consideration of its contents,” she wrote back, “I have the privilege of replying as follows.” Yes, she had identified the bandits, she admitted. “It was repeated, on my authority, that the James brothers were the perpetrators of the deed. After a mature reflection on the subject, I am prepared to doubt the accuracy of my recognition sufficiently to warrant me in refusing to make formal affidavit to the fact.” She joined a growing list of witnesses who retracted statements after hearing from Jesse or his family. Zerelda forwarded a copy of the letter to the Kansas City Times. The James brothers were now famous enough for the New York Times to reprint it as well. Meanwhile, an anonymous note arrived at the St. Louis Republican, mocking the press for conjuring up the imaginary “Will” Younger, testifying to Jesse’s absence in Mexico, and claiming that Frank was laid up with an old war wound.67

  After Jesse returned home from his gunfight with Yancey, his mother acted once more to seal the breach in the public relations wall. With Dave Pool and Edwards as intermediaries, she made an appointment for an interview with Donan at the Lexington Caucasian’s offices. When she arrived in town with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Sarah, “all Lexington was buzzing with the news,” Donan reported.

  At three in the afternoon, Pool escorted her to the Caucasian’s offices and introduced her to the highly impressed editor. “Mrs. Samuel is a tall, dignified lady,” he wrote, “graceful in carriage and gesture; calm and quiet in demeanor; with a ripple of fire now and then breaking through the placid surface; and of far more than ordinary intelligence and culture.”

  Zerelda repeated the well-established tale of how her boys had been persecuted in war and peace. She described how Jesse had been “seized in the field where he was at work” by Union militiamen, “a rope put around his neck, and instant death threatened,” on the day that his stepfather was hanged. “When they went home after the surrender,” she said, “they were driven to the brush by Fletcher’s loyalists.” Over and over she repeated, “No mother ever had better sons; more affectionate, obedient, and dutiful.” On the subject of their innocence, she began to flare. “Say what the world may, my sons are gentlemen!” she exclaimed. “But I wish you, sir, to know, that they are not in this country, haven’t been for months, and may never be again.” Dave Pool interrupted to say that he had received letters sent from Mexico by the boys, and editor Donan noted that Edwards had also assured him of their current exile in Mexico.68

  Zerelda’s interview, among other things, gave the Democratic Party political cover. At a major rally in Jefferson City, journalist Joseph Pulitzer took the stage to defend the record of Democratic rule over the last two years, particularly in regard to the banditry problem. “The Youngers and Jameses,” he declared, “have not been arrested simply because they had long since fled the State.”69

  As the St. Louis Republican had predicted, however, the James-Younger gang proved to be the opposition’s most potent weapon. By now, the Liberal Republican Party had collapsed, leaving the old Radical organization intact, though badly weakened. In an attempt to duplicate the Democrats’ “possum policy” of 1870, the Republicans endorsed the new People’s Party, a Granger-based set of populists who were concerned primarily with the depression, an expansion in the money supply, and control of the railroad corporations. This farmers’ party hardly saw the bandits as Robin Hoods. “We want lawlessness put down in the state of Missouri,” declared gubernatorial candidate William Gentry in his convention address. “How can we expect, with this staring us in the face, to get people from other states to come and bring their capital among us?”70

  On September 24, 1874, Senator Carl Schurz picked up the theme in a major address in St. Louis. As an original Liberal Republican, the German immigrant had linked arms with the Democrats in 1870. After seeing his party disappear beneath his feet, however, he now sternly criticized his old allies. “I have been accused of having called Missouri the ‘robber state,’ ” he declared. “I have to pronounce that utterly false.” But the outlaw problem was real, he said. His fellow senators often came to him with newspaper stories of Gads Hill and other raids and asked, “Have you no laws and no government in Missouri?” The bandits, Schurz argued, were tolerated by the Democrats. “Has every party in the state pronounced itself emphatically for a relentless suppression of these outrages and a vigorous enforcement of the laws? … The Democratic party in state convention forgot all about it.” Even worse, he complained, many Democrats actively supported the outlaws. Taking direct aim at Edwards and the St. Louis Dispatch, he observed that “a leading organ of that party [declares the bandits] … rather a nice and desirable set of fellows, [and] almost the whole Democratic press lustily chimes in.” Please, he begged old secessionists, “Sink the Confederate in the citizen.” Wartime hatreds and the toleration of banditry, he claimed—in a persistent Republican refrain—were stifling immigration and driving away investors.71

  Schurz was on to something. The James and Younger brothers may indeed have helped clog the inflow of settlers and capital, which fell off sharply after 1872, and they were happy to have done it.72 In Missouri, the quintessential border state, old Confederates had initially welcomed the immigration and railroad expansion of the immediate postwar years. But as the revolt against Reconstruction gained steam, as the depression that began in 1873 fed agrarian populism, some former rebels came to see them as the poisoned fruit of Radical rule, factors that threatened to transform Missouri into a Northern state.

  The James-Younger gang had emerged out of the chaos of the Confederate defe
at, out of a general defiance of authorities they did not recognize. As they became more political under Edwards’s influence, however, they added deeper meaning to past crimes. The railroads, for example, recruited immigrants from the North and Europe; banks lent money to new settlers. By robbing them, by creating a general sense of insecurity, Jesse and his companions could see themselves as taking direct action to preserve Missouri’s Southern character.

  “I know people called Missouri the state of bushwhackers and outlaws,” Frank James later said. “They said it was the home of the James boys, and life and property were not safe. So the Republican emigrants went through Missouri without stopping.… The result is that Missouri is Democratic, her people have been forced to depend on her own resources.”73 Of course, it is impossible to establish that they had this in mind in planning any specific robbery. But as the Republicans expressed outrage in 1874, they congratulated themselves on their achievement.

  For a time, it looked as if the People’s Party might split off enough Union Democrats to carry the election. At the end of September a fracas erupted over statements by James O. Broadhead, an old ally of Frank Blair. “Rebelism” saturated the party, he complained, infuriating ex-Confederates; the war waged on Radicals “is a war also upon Union men.”74 The Democrats struck back—as the New York Times observed—by telling farmers that all their problems were “the fruits of Republican policy. Railroads are oppressive because of Republican ascendency. Monopolies are oppressive because Republicans foster them.” Every question was tied to race and Reconstruction. Money, for example, was a key Granger issue: most farmers favored preserving and expanding a paper currency, but eastern financial figures had pushed Congress toward restricting the volume of greenbacks to more closely match the supply of gold. (A target date of 1879 had been set to make the paper notes redeemable at Treasury offices for gold coin.) Even this, the Democrats argued, should be seen in terms of the evils of Reconstruction. “The Republicans of the East look hopefully to a threatened war of the races,” asserted the Kansas City Times, “as a means of withdrawing the thoughts of their Western brethren from dangerous leanings on the currency question.”75