T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  The disaster at the Samuel farm, he hinted, had shaken the agency deeply. “I have just received a telegram from Robert J. [Linden],” Pinkerton wrote. “He has taken some money, is badly scared, and says he will borrow himself, as he won’t be seen for a long time.” Pinkerton himself was the primary suspect for a grand jury in Clay County that was investigating the raid. He voiced nonchalance. “The evidence is plain and clear where I was all the time,” he wrote. He had many witnesses to offer him an alibi, including Governor John L. Beveridge of Illinois, who may have promised to refuse requests for extradition of the detectives. “I rather think,” Pinkerton added, “it would be troublesome for them to get any of the men from Illinois.”60

  Pinkerton may have been distressed, but it was Hardwicke and Askew who remained on the battlefield, isolated and vulnerable. In Liberty, a grand jury interrogated both men, along with Askew’s wife, Adeline. Other witnesses included Reuben and Zerelda—helped by Zee Mimms James, who was “constant in her attention on the old lady,” according to the press—former governor Woodson, and officials of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad. Hardwicke’s work for the detectives came to light, as did the role of Askew’s farm as the base for agent Jack Ladd. In the end, the jury indicted Ladd, along with Pinkerton, Robert J. King (apparently Linden’s pseudonym), and five unnamed men. Hardwicke and Askew were not charged.61

  The law was one thing; the James brothers were another. Their impending retribution shadowed the county during February and March.62 Many Unionist farmers received threats from the brothers or their sympathizers. “I wish to say that my brother-in-law resides about two miles from the James’ place,” wrote Daniel Geary to Governor Hardin, “and has been repeatedly warned by these desperadoes or their friends to leave the county. He has paid no attention to these threats, but since the attack on the house of the mother of these boys all Northern men especially, as well as those who have … denounced the acts of these bandits, will live in constant fear of assassination.”63 In an interview with the Kansas City Times, Susie James Parmer spelled out her family’s suspicions of Hardwicke and Askew; Hardwicke was particularly terrified, she noted gleefully, and had written a note to Zerelda begging to see her. “I believe that every man engaged in it will be punished,” Parmer stated, “if not in this world certainly in the next.”64

  Askew was made of sterner stuff, and continued to live on his farm. He never even bothered to purchase a firearm—not that it would have done him any good in the end.65 Shortly before eight o’clock in the evening on April 12, Askew left his house to draw a pail of water from the well in the rear of his property. He picked his way through deep darkness, the moon shrouded in clouds. As he returned, lugging a full bucket in one hand, a figure stepped out from behind a woodpile. The two apparently spoke quietly for five to ten minutes.

  Inside the house, Addie Askew heard the dull bark of a revolver echo three times. “[I] came to the front door,” she told a coroner’s jury, “which being difficult to open I went around and called my husband; [I] received no answer.” What she did not tell the jury was what she did next. Assuming the worst, she immediately ordered her children to hide, then gathered up all the letters from Allan Pinkerton and threw them in the fire. As far as she knew, the gunman could be coming for her next; her life might depend on destroying the incriminating evidence. With the correspondence in ashes, she ran outside. “I do not think it was over two minutes between the hearing of the shots and my arrival to where my husband lay,” she reported. “[I] looked closely, but could not tell how he was shot, but thought from feeling that his face was mashed in.” Three bullets had punctured his head: one had pierced his face below the eye, another had torn off a portion of his skull, and a third had gone through his brain.

  Just a few minutes after the shooting, neighbor Henry Sears heard someone shouting “Hallo!” repeatedly in his front yard. He opened the door and peered out into the darkness. “Hello yourself!” he answered. As he strained his eyes, he made out one man on horseback, and had the vague impression there might be more. The mounted figure spoke. “We have killed Dan Askew tonight, and if any one wishes to know who did it say that detectives did it,” he declared. “Tell his friends to go and bury the damned son of a bitch tomorrow. Will you do it?” Sears only stared back, dumbfounded. The next morning, he and a friend named Charles D. Poe searched the ground. They found the tracks of a single horse, which matched those found at the Askew farm. The tracks showed that the killer had ridden to another farm that night—that of another man rumored to have aided the Pinkerton agents—only to turn away for some unknown reason.66

  Survivors of the Civil War would have recognized the technique used in the murder: Catch a Unionist farmer out in his yard, gun him down, then boast of it to a neighbor—as Fletch Taylor’s bushwhacker crew had done to Alvis Dagley in 1864. The similarity of method appeared to be no coincidence. At the time of the shooting, a party of three men had been spotted at or near the Samuel farm; they departed on the morning of April 14, two of them riding to Richmond and the third taking the Blue Mills ferry to Jackson County. This last man, the press reported, “was recognized by his fine mare.” It was Jesse James, almost certainly the man who shot Askew.67

  “The victim has been suspected of harboring the detectives who recently visited the Samuels’ house, in fact, has been accused of so doing,” wrote Van Horn in the Kansas City Journal of Commerce. “He denied it, and there was no proof to show that he had done so. He was a Radical, however, and for this was selected as a victim upon whom the vengeful wrath of the James boys should be wreaked.… To kill a Radical is no crime in the eyes of certain Democrats.… A family has been robbed of a father and husband, and the friends of the Jameses are in ecstacy.” Van Horn was quite right. A few weeks after the murder, Zerelda predictably denied that her boys had had anything to do with it, but she spilled no tears for Askew. “He had made enemies during the war,” she observed darkly.68

  That was the echo that sounded again and again in the days after the killing: the war, the war, the war. Even Allan Pinkerton finally understood the historical resentments that had ground up his men in Clay County. “Daniel Askew, when he learned to know me, opened his door widely for shielding my men, who concealed there nearly 3 months,” he wrote to Governor Beveridge on April 16, 1875. “Askew was a Union soldier during the late war.… There came also those accursed rebels … viz. the Jameses, Cole Younger, Major Edwards, Genl. Shelby, and most others, in whose track followed robbery, rapine, and murder and there it is at the present time.” The same day, he sent a letter to a contact near the Samuel farm—Dr. J. C. Bernard of Haynesville, Clinton County—asking him to give his best to Askew’s widow. “I would like to speak to his wife, but I cannot,” Pinkerton wrote. “A reign of terror prevails all through Clay County at the present time.”69

  “The citizens,” wrote Sheriff Groom to Governor Hardin, “are as greatly terror stricken as at any time during the war.… There are many good men here who expect to meet and share the same fate. There is no doubt about the threats against them by the James brothers and their associates.”70 Even the Kansas City Times noted the fear in Clay County. “One of the farmers whose life has been threatened was in Liberty yesterday for the purpose of purchasing arms with which to defend himself,” the paper reported on April 18. “He is one of ten or twelve, and he proposes to fight.” The next day, Groom sent another letter, this one to Adjutant General Bingham. He pleaded for a supply of breech-loading, ten-gauge shotguns, “the style of arms these murderers carry,” saying he would provide the men. “I tell you General the people are terror stricken,” he reiterated. Even L. W. Towne, the superintendent of the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad who had cooperated in the raid, handed in his resignation and moved to safer parts.71

  On May 11, Pinkerton finally sent a note to Addie Askew herself. “I have not seen you,” he wrote, “but yet I cannot help calling you a friend, and one of those dear friends whom one can never have but once in this li
fe.… I thank you, and wish only that I was able to see you.”

  They were some of the last words that he would ever write related to the outlaws. As he had declared immediately after the disastrous raid, he resolved to give up the hunt, to abandon the vendetta. Addie Askew now passed through the process of estate inventories and probate auctions that Zerelda James had once endured; Samuel Hardwicke fled to St. Paul, Minnesota, in fear for his life; and Pinkerton silently accepted that Jesse James had won.72

  * The low number of black Missourians, combined with the deep division of the white population, kept the politics of wartime allegiance in the state from taking on the primarily racial character seen in the old Confederacy.

  *Christopher R. Adamson notes that convict leasing spread throughout the post-Redemption South, with white prisoners generally exempt, making it “a functional replacement for slavery.” See “Punishment After Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 1865–1890,” in The South: Part 1, ed. Eric H. Monkkonen (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992), 3–17.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ambition

  IN THE WEEKS following the raid on the Samuel farm, all of the outlaw’s enemies suffered defeat and disarray. “I am of the opinion,” wrote the Daviess County prosecutor, “that all the sheriffs in that section (except Groom of Clay) are afraid of Jesse James.” Governor Hardin tried to keep the hunt going, but fear and confusion prevailed. He discovered, for example, that the Iron Mountain Railroad—widely thought to be a prime mover behind the Pinkerton activities—had not concerned itself in the slightest in the chase for the Gads Hill bandits. On February 27, 1875, the governor had written to corporation president Thomas Allen to ask for his aid in extraditing William McDaniel, should he be acquitted in his trial in Kansas for the Muncie robbery. Allen did not bother to reply until May 19; when he did, he promised help, but vaguely added that “we have always supposed” that the James-Younger group had not been involved in the Gads Hill raid.1

  Stymied by the railroad, the governor found an eager ally in Wells Fargo, which had been robbed at Muncie. In late March 1875, the firm’s superintendent in Kansas City, E. M. Cooper, received information that Clell Miller was hiding in Carroll County. Cooper dispatched four men to take him—“which resulted, as usual, in failure,” he wrote to Hardin on April 5. The Wells Fargo agents went to the sheriff with their requisition—an extradition order—from the governor of Kansas. The officer accompanied them to the farm of Sharpe Whitsett, Miller’s uncle. As the four men waited outside, the sheriff went into the house to talk to the bandit—and was taken hostage. Miller kept a cocked revolver on the hapless official until he himself mounted his horse; then he shouted “Good-bye, gentlemen,” and escaped.2

  Inevitably, the press attributed the bungled arrest to the Pinkerton agency, unaware that it had abandoned the hunt for the Missouri outlaws. And soon Wells Fargo had to drop the matter as well. In the summer of 1875, Jay Gould took control of the Kansas Pacific and replaced the express company with his own service (which he had begun earlier on the Union Pacific). That left Wells Fargo cut off from any connection with the East. Cooper’s position became superfluous, and he abandoned his hunt for the James gang.3

  The governor had one last ally, who proved to be the most persistent of all: Sheriff Groom of Clay County. At the beginning of May, Groom obtained the shotguns he had requested from the adjutant general, hauling fifty of them from Kansas City. “He had been secretly but busily engaged in organizing a posse [of] 150 men to hunt the James boys,” reported the Liberty Tribune. He also organized a watch on the Missouri River ferries; through the middle of July, if not even later, he kept four men on duty twenty-four hours a day, paying them with state funds. But the James brothers were already safely across.4

  At 7:30 p.m. on May 13, four men robbed an isolated store/post office in Henry County, about twelve miles north of Clinton. The bandits “were well-dressed, genteel-looking men, and mounted on splendid horses,” according to the press. “We suppose them to be the Younger or James Boys from the way they proceeded,” reported two of the victims, Mrs. D. A. Lambert, wife of the merchant, and Miss Bessie H. Sharp. “They were professional hands at the business.… [They stole] every cent we had in the world.”

  Lambert and Sharp may have been right about the bandits’ identities. For one thing, two of the Younger brothers had been spotted nearby two days earlier; for another, the raid was carried out with quiet precision, leaving a blacksmith only fifty yards away unaware of the entire affair. Most telling of all, the robbers fiercely interrogated a Yankee teacher whom they suspected of being a detective, relenting only when he produced his “school certificate.” They raided the small store in the belief that the owner had thousands of dollars in gold, but had to content themselves with far less.

  Even if the James and Younger brothers were not involved, the incident revealed once again Missouri’s sense of helplessness. Lambert and Sharp took it upon themselves to write to Governor Hardin, they explained, because the men “all say it is no use to write anything about it, as they have been committing just such depredations for some time in this State, but we thought if the men would not appeal to you we would. We do not fancy being ordered around under the muzzle of a revolver and threatened with death if we offer the least resistance.”5

  All this amused Jesse James immensely. On May 24, just eleven days after the Henry County robbery, he wrote a letter to an unnamed individual, identified by the press seven years later as “an official who was at that time earnestly engaged in hunting the outlaws”—probably Groom. The outlaw masked his whereabouts by mailing the letter to his cousin and sister-in-law Nannie Mimms McBride in Kansas City, who forwarded it on May 26 in a new envelope.

  “My Dear Friend,” he wrote, “Your welcome letter of date the 21st reached Mrs. ——yesterday morning, and was forwarded to me immediately.… You say you was greatly surprised, you supposed I was in Texas or Mexico. I am generally where people least expect me to be. You asked me if I was innocent why I did not give myself up,” he continued. “Don’t you know that I have been lied on and persecuted so long that the public prejudice is so great against me that it would take one hundred thousand dollars to defend me.… And besides that a requisition would be found for me from Iowa and how long do you suppose I would be spared from a MOB in that radical State.”

  The note—which the Journal of Commerce believed was genuine—bears all the marks of Jesse’s writing: the cocky self-assurance, the sense of persecution, the belief that Radicals would never let him live in peace. The political tone was reinforced by a further reference to a newspaper editor, whose name was deleted by the press when the letter was later published, “the dirty dog [who] is writing all those lying newspaper reports about Clay County and the James boys. He fears us and he is telling all the lies he can to get me killed but he will get his just due in time.” This was almost certainly the Journal’s editor, Robert T. Van Horn. The newspaper may have possessed the letter because it was given to him as a helpful warning.

  But there was a surprise buried in the missive. Jesse claimed that the Muncie and Henry County robbers were Clell Miller, Tom McDaniel (brother of the incarcerated William), Jack Keen, and Sol Reed—all known to be followers of the James and Younger brothers.6 The outlaw heartily encouraged his correspondent to capture them. Perhaps he imagined that they would never be apprehended, or that they would keep their mouths shut if they were (as William McDaniel did). No matter what he thought, the passage betrayed a callous disregard for the welfare of his fellows. Cole Younger had complained of this tendency in an 1874 letter to the Pleasant Hill Review. “My name would never have been used in connection with” the Kansas City fair robbery, he had written, “had not Jesse W. James, for some cause best known to himself, published in the Kansas City Times a letter stating that John, myself, and he were accused of the robbery. Where he got his authority, I don’t know, but one thing I do know, he had none from me.”7

  Younger had tried to stretch the point
to argue that he and Jesse “were not on good terms”—a claim he clearly crafted for public consumption.

  But intimates of the bandits would later agree that there was something increasingly reckless, something dangerously unpredictable, about Jesse. One official who hunted these men later asserted that Cole “was the only one of the whole number who could control Jesse James, and I am convinced that those who knew both men well told me the truth when they had said that in a number of instances Cole Younger at his own peril prevented Jesse James from taking life.”8

  For Jesse, a few issues were resolved beginning in the summer of 1875. On the night of June 29, William McDaniel was shot to death by a farmer, having escaped from his Kansas jail. He died without ever speaking a word about his fellow robbers at Muncie. In Clay County, Jesse’s mother had developed a serious infection in her amputated arm, but the infection healed. And Jesse and Zee moved. At some point following the Pinkerton raid, in part to protect Zerelda from further attacks, they settled in a small house at 606 Boscobel Street in Edgefield, Tennessee (across the Cumberland River from Nashville), just forty miles south of his uncle George Hite’s farm near Adairville, Kentucky. They passed themselves off as Josie and John Davis Howard. He claimed to be a wheat speculator, and often disappeared for weeks at a time.

  In his role as J. D. Howard, Jesse often asked John Vertrees, the son of a neighboring physician, to stay at his house when he was away. The young man observed many strange things when he was at the Howard home. Zee—Josie—once showed him thousands of dollars in diamonds, claiming that her uncle in Illinois “had bought them for a mere song at an auction sale.” Whenever Jesse returned, Vertrees recalled, he handed his wife “rolls of money and other valuables.” Perhaps he was carrying out robberies that went unreported, or fetching money he had hidden earlier. But, as a Nashville newspaper later reported, “Mrs. James was always well provided with money, very frequently having as much as $1,500 in her possession.”