To further his efforts, Pinkerton sent letters to Postmaster General Marshall Jewell and Chief Special Agent Patrick H. Woodward, head of the office of mail depredations, asking for a contact in the Kearney post office. Even this delved into the deep division between Unionists and secessionists in Clay County. The man recommended to Pinkerton was the Kearney postmaster, Anthony Harsel. A native of Clay, and a former slaveowner, Harsel had led one of the first EMM companies in the county; his wartime experiences (secessionists torched his house, among other things) had radicalized him, with a capital R. He became a leader of the local Republican Party, supervisor of voter registration, and later the first justice of the peace in Kearney township (organized in 1872). Even after the Democrats’ sweeping return to power in Missouri, Harsel remained a political force. Local postmasters were influential figures in post–Civil War America; the president himself used appointments to the post to reward political followers. The old Radical Unionist eagerly joined Pinkerton’s crusade. “Harsel the postmaster has appointed a deputy [to help watch the James brothers],” Pinkerton reported to Woodward, “and has himself gone into the country.” Whether Harsel also opened mail addressed to the Samuel farm remains unknown.23
The cooperation of the post office did not mean, as the press later suggested, that Pinkerton operated on the federal payroll. He approached the department as a supplicant asking a favor. A review of the letters sent from the offices of both the chief special agent and the postmaster general reveals no official correspondence with Pinkerton; indeed, no case file exists for any of the James brothers’ robberies. The aid Jewell and Woodward offered was strictly off the record.24
After the Muncie train robbery in December, Pinkerton prepared for the final strike. “I am expecting every day to bring this thing to a climax,” he wrote to Woodward on December 15. “At least two or three parties are there, but they are well armed, and have all the advantages men could ask. We must be cautious, and make our movements secure, and then I hope every tick of the wire will tell us we have got our men.”25
With evidence mounting that the James brothers were at home, Hardwicke hastened ahead with the preparations. Sheriff Patton—tipped off by his informer—was surprised to learn that the quiet, bookish lawyer had emerged as “the prime mover of the whole affair, and the getter-up of the plan of operations.”26 Hardwicke met secretly with L. W. Towne, the general superintendent of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, to arrange for a special train to carry Pinkerton’s raiding party. He established a stockpile of guns, so the detectives would not have to carry weapons with them en route. And he recruited one or more guides to lead them to Zerelda’s farmhouse. On Christmas Day, Hardwicke was able to send Pinkerton a critical telegram containing his final ideas on how the capture should be carried out.
“I have given it serious thought,” Pinkerton replied, “have had Robert with me all the time, and we both accord you great credit in taking care of everything you had to do.” He was referring to Robert J. Linden, a senior agent designated to lead the Missouri operation. “Now for the battle,” he continued. “It makes us feel like laughing at the great preparations we are making to tackle 2 or 3 men. Still, they have many friends. We may set them down as legion.”
Pinkerton then ticked through the remaining work to be done. First, he was going to arrange with the Burlington Railroad to pass through his men and the ammunition, just as the Hannibal and St. Joseph had agreed to do. Second, Linden would visit the U.S. arsenal at Rock Island, Illinois, carrying with him a letter of introduction from General Sheridan, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, and he would carry away a special device. Third, Pinkerton asked Hardwicke to have Addie Askew, Daniel’s wife, prepare food for the detectives; there would be seven men, he noted, including Linden. “It could be left somewhere for Jack [Ladd] to pick it up,” he added, “but great care must be taken to excite no suspicion and leave no clue behind.” Fourth, a surgeon would accompany the party, at least as far as the Cameron junction in Clinton County. Fifth, Hardwicke’s guide had to pick out the shortest route from the railroad tracks to the Samuel farm, for “the men are not woodsmen.” Ladd would lead them back. Hardwicke was to hold the special train after the raid until Linden was certain that everyone had returned safely. And Pinkerton was most concerned that they “know positively” when the James brothers were at home. “It won’t do for us to take chances,” he observed.
He had one final comment. “Above all else destroy the house, wipe it from the face of the earth,” he wrote. “How the logs will burn.… Burn the house down.” Nothing could have better demonstrated how personal the matter had become.27
At five o’clock in the afternoon on January 25, 1875, the Pinkerton agency learned—probably through a telegram from Hardwicke—that the James brothers were at their mother’s home. In short order Linden had his men ready to go, almost certainly waiting at a depot on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad. The railroad provided them with a light train, consisting of a locomotive and a caboose. The Pinkerton men loaded it with a large quantity of weapons and equipment—including that special device from the Rock Island arsenal—and then set out down the line. At 7:30 p.m., they arrived just outside of Kearney. Hardwicke’s guide or one of the Pinkertons on the scene flagged down the train, helped them unload their supplies, then led them through the woods. What they did for the next four hours is uncertain; most likely they waited in the woods, eating the food Addie Askew had prepared for them, then went to a nearby road to collect the horses that had been tied up for them.28
“After getting things ready we advanced on the house,” Allan Pinkerton explained to Woodward on January 27. Always prone to self-aggrandizement, he wrote as if he had been present; he was not, though he had personal knowledge of what transpired. “Not a word was spoken, and about half past twelve midnight, we commenced firing the building.” The raiding party—perhaps eight or nine men in all—divided up. Most remained mounted and stood guard near the barn and the icehouse; two or three walked up to the farmhouse, pulled loose the weatherboarding that encased the structure, and inserted “hollow tubes, shaped like a roman candle, and filled with combustible and inflammable material,” as a reporter described them. “These were put between the siding and log walls, and then ignited.”
Having started the fire on the outside, the detectives now produced the special device from the Rock Island arsenal: an iron ball, seven and a half inches in diameter, filled with an inflammable liquid that drained slowly out through a small hole onto a cotton covering. They set it on fire and tried to throw it inside. “But judge our dismay,” Pinkerton wrote, “when we found every window fastened on the inside with wooden boards, although so concealed by a curtain that they could not be seen from the outside.… Such is the manner in which the house is kept. It is a perfect citadel, however my men were equal to the occasion, and soon battered in the windows, then flung the fire balls into the house.”29
IN THE CHRISTMAS cold of 1874, Jesse James kept close to home. He and Frank moved in and around Independence, where they were spotted dining with friends and attending church services.30 Midway through the month, Jesse sent his wife back to his mother’s farm—perhaps, as the press surmised, because the newly pregnant Zee was not feeling well.31 On January 16, she stepped off the train from Kansas City onto the Kearney platform, where Reuben Samuel met her with his wagon and drove her home. Jesse followed a week later. On January 23, he was spotted on his well-known horse in Ray County.32
The little Samuel house bustled with activity on the night of January 25. As usual, the black residents of the farm—fifty-four-year-old Charlotte, eighteen-year-old Ambrose, and six-year-old Perry—busied themselves with chores and dinner preparations. Though called “servants,” they were living out a practical continuation of slavery, into which Charlotte and Ambrose had been born; even little Perry would be given no options for another life. Meanwhile, Zerelda was preparing thirteen-year-old John and ten-year-old Fannie to go to a pa
rty given by a nearby family. (Her oldest daughter by Reuben now lived in Sherman, Texas, where she attended the high school taught by Susan James Parmer.) As they went out the door, they told eight-year-old Archie that he couldn’t come with them. “Archie came to me in the evening after they had gone,” Zerelda said two days later, “and looking into my face, said, ‘Ma, I am so hungry, and brother and sister have gone to a party. They wouldn’t let me go.… You’ll go to Kearney tomorrow, won’t you and buy me something?’ I dressed him up in his new suit, as he asked me to do, and he sat upon my knee. I thought he never looked so beautiful and confiding.”33
Even with the older children gone, the family dinner table was more crowded than usual. Informed sources insisted that Jesse, Frank, and Clell Miller spent that evening in Zerelda’s house. A neighbor’s farmhand spotted William Fox—known to be a lookout for the James brothers—leading three horses out into a pasture after nightfall. As Fox tied up the animals, the watching laborer recognized one of them as Jesse’s famous mare. After darkness fell, Jesse and his companions took their leave, sneaked through the woods to their horses, and rode away.34
With the boys gone, the Samuel household settled in for the night. The home consisted of three rooms: a parlor at the east end, a family room in the middle, and the kitchen on the west side.35 After the children returned from the party, Zerelda and Reuben made their beds in the family room. Charlotte, Ambrose, and little Perry retired to the kitchen, bolting the door to the adjoining room before crawling under quilts on the floor. After a busy day, silence descended on the farm.
About half past midnight, Ambrose jolted awake. “I heard noise at the northwest corner of the kitchen, and men talking,” he said the next evening. “I then raised up in my bed and saw a light glimmering through a crack in the panel of the door. I then got up … looking toward the north window, and saw two men, either one or the other or both with a light in their hands; they then raised a ball or something that was red and threw it at the window, which knocked me down. It then fell on the floor, and an oily substance ran out over the floor.”
In the family room, the hubbub startled Reuben out of a heavy sleep. “Hearing the noise, as though something was falling on the floor, I supposed that the house was falling in from the fire on the negroes,” he recalled. “I ran to the door; it being fastened, I went [outside] around to the west end of the house and saw the west end of the kitchen on fire.”
As Reuben tore off the flaming weatherboarding, Zerelda also awoke and went to investigate. Finding the kitchen door “barred on the inside by the negroes as usual,” she stepped out into the cold night air “and went on round to the north door and went into the kitchen, and on entering I saw something like a bowl on fire in the middle of the floor. I tried to kick it over. Then Reuben took hold of the shovel and threw the said bowl into the fireplace.” Seeing that one of the quilts in the kitchen had caught fire, she seized it and went to throw it outside. “I then opened the south door leading onto the porch and went out on the porch, and then immediately turned round [after tossing the quilt aside] and went back into the kitchen and there was some time that I do not know what transpired.”36
At that moment, the Samuel family and its attendants were clustered around the large, open fireplace where the strange object burned. Standing closest to it were Reuben, Ambrose, John, Zerelda, and little Archie. They did not know—nor would they ever find out—that this was the special device provided to Pinkerton agent Robert Linden by the Rock Island arsenal. It was certainly meant to light up the interior of the house, so the inhabitants could be seen through the windows; it was probably meant to help set the building on fire as well; but it was definitely not intended to do what it did next. When Reuben rolled it into the hearth, it nestled in a roaring fire, far hotter than the flickering of the cotton wick that covered the device. The inflammable material inside superheated. Then the sphere exploded.37
The erupting liquid inside shattered the casing, sending heavy chunks of cast iron blasting in every direction. Reuben staggered back when a small piece struck him on the side of the head, and Ambrose fell through the front door when another scrap hit his skull. A larger fragment smashed Zerelda’s right arm just above the wrist. One last piece tore through Archie’s third rib on his left side and seared through his bowels. The two men regained their feet and carried the wounded boy outside. They returned to help Zerelda, who was moaning that she had been shot. “The first thing that came to my recollection as I gradually grew to myself,” she said several hours later, “my arm was hanging loose by my side, it being my right arm, it being broken just above my wrist.”38
After Reuben got his injured wife into bed, he went outside and bellowed into the night sky for help. Then he heard noises in the woods just beyond the icehouse and other outbuildings—the noisy tramp of horses moving rapidly through the underbrush, followed by a quick patter of gunfire. Unfortunately, the neighbors heard gunfire as well; at least one man who responded to Reuben’s call turned around and went home when he heard the shots. Not everyone, however, was deterred. The first person to reach the Samuel house was the family’s closest neighbor—Daniel Askew.
With the help of Askew and other fresh arrivals, messages went to nearby doctors; in short order, Dr. James V. Scruggs arrived from Kearney, followed by Dr. William G. Yates from the same town, Dr. Sheets from the village of Greenville, and Dr. Allen from Liberty. As the physicians clustered around Zerelda and her son, someone stole Scruggs’s horse from the yard; it turned up about three miles away, thoroughly exhausted, having been ridden at a gallop the entire way. “Everybody has their own opinion about it,” wrote Scruggs’s daughter. “Pa’s is, he [the horse] carried a messenger somewhere.” William Fox was soon charged with stealing the animal.39
From the first moments after the blast, it was clear that Archie would not live until morning. As the wounded Zerelda waited for medical attention, Reuben brought the dying boy to her side for a last moment together, then carried him to another bed. “After a while Dr. Sheets came in and told me he couldn’t live much longer,” Zerelda stated the next day. “I said to him, ‘Oh God, receive the soul of my child.’ Archie heard me and replied, ‘Tell my mama I’m better.’ They were the last words he spoke.” Zerelda, an iron-willed woman who had withstood the death of two husbands, militia raids, military prison, and exile, now quivered with emotion. “I had often thought of what might happen to Jesse and Frank, and was prepared to hear most anything; but I never expected to see this. I never thought I should live to see my pet child stricken down at my side,” she said. “I used to be a woman of fortitude and resolution; it is all gone now. I could stand anything but this.”40
There is no reason to doubt that she spoke honestly, but by the next nightfall she had already begun to recover her inner strength. In the early hours of January 26, Dr. Allen severed her shattered limb. “The Dr. says he don’t think he ever saw a human being with more nerve in all his life than Mrs. Samuel has—he’d amputated her right arm just below the elbow,” wrote Bettie Patton to her brother. Zerelda endured the excruciating operation in her own home—without anesthesia, needless to say—and remained alert enough to take part in the coroner’s inquest that convened in her house that evening. Justice of the Peace Joel T. Albright gathered a jury of five men, including Zerelda’s brother, Jesse R. Cole, and Daniel Askew. “Mrs. Samuels sat by the bedside,” wrote a reporter who attended the proceedings, “a portly, dignified woman suffering intense pain, however.” She and Reuben gave their testimony, then signed their names to their statements. Ambrose spoke as well; but he had been allowed no education other than that of the fields, so he could only scrawl an X—“his mark.”41
The next day, the family worked on the damaged house, tended the wounded Zerelda, and prepared Archie’s body for burial; a reporter saw the dead boy the next day, “dressed in a suit of Confederate gray.” On Thursday they had more visitors: a posse led by Sheriff John S. Groom. A forty-six-year-old native of Clay Coun
ty, Groom had served under O. P. Moss during the Mexican War, then fought for the Confederacy. He had barely survived the Civil War. Shot through the shoulder at the battle of Lone Jack, he had recuperated for a time before raising a new company, which he led straight into a Union ambush outside of Liberty. He had hid in the brush for nine days as his scattered men were hunted down, then he fled Missouri for the duration of the war. With the coming of peace he had established a store in the new village of Kearney, where he had maintained quiet but uneasy relations with his fellow rebel Jesse James, facing his wrath after the murder of John W. Sheets on one hand, and providing him with an alibi on the other. In the Democratic primary of 1874, he had defeated Sheriff Patton. Now he had the responsibility for catching the James brothers. “I am mighty glad I was not sheriff” when the Samuel farm was attacked, Patton wrote a few weeks later.42
Embarrassed into action by the Pinkertons’ involvement, Groom gathered forty-six men after the raid. He sent half on a sweep through the countryside, and half he led to the famous farmhouse. There he divided his men into three parties—two to guard the outside, lest anyone try to flee, and the other, led by Liberty township constable W. J. Courtney and James-fighting-veteran Oscar Thomason, to search the house itself. They had heard rumors of subterranean passages leading out of the building, but they found nothing except numerous gun ports cut into the walls. They arrested four young men: William Fox; Edward Samuel, Reuben’s nephew; Ed Miller, brother of Clell; and George James, cousin to Jesse and Frank. Before the prisoners departed with the posse, Zerelda called them over to her sickbed. “They’re just taking you down there to pump you,” she told them. “Keep your mouths shut, and don’t tell anything you don’t know.”
T. J. Stiles Page 38