T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  FOR THE THREE men inside the bank, Cole’s anguished voice punctuated an emerging awareness of their own failure. Pitts jumped over the counter, followed by the man who had guarded Wilcox and Bunker. The last outlaw, the leader, paused on his way out. Wilcox watched as he turned toward Heywood, who had risen unsteadily to his feet and now groped toward his desk. In all likelihood, the man who glared at the dazed banker, who extended a pistol toward his head, was the same outlaw who had shot John Sheets at Gallatin and R. A. C. Martin at Columbia—who had composed the famous letter to the Kansas City Times after the Kansas City fair robbery. “A man who is a d—–d enough fool to refuse to open a safe or a vault when he is covered with a pistol ought to die,” he had written. “If he gives the alarm, or resists, or refuses to unlock, he gets killed.” In all likelihood, the gunman was Jesse James.

  It was all over. Their biggest, most carefully planned operation was ending in disaster. As the others raced out the door, this last man held a revolver to the head of the quiet bookkeeper who had destroyed his plans. He squeezed the trigger and killed Joseph Heywood. The gunman leaped over the counter and disappeared out the door. In the vault he left behind, the safe sat unmolested—and unlocked.87

  Out on the street, the bandits scrambled into their saddles through the acrid clouds of gunsmoke. The storm of bullets continued, one of them catching Jim Younger in the shoulder. “For God’s sake don’t leave me boys,” Bob wailed behind them, staggering along with a shattered arm. “I’m shot.” Cole swung around and reached down with a meaty hand, hauling his little brother up onto his own horse. Digging in their spurs, they set off at hard gallop, heading south.88

  Within two weeks, Pitts would be dead, the Youngers captured, and the James brothers clinging to freedom on the most desperate ride of their lives.

  IN NORTHFIELD, the citizens slowly emerged from their hiding places, some still gripping rifles and shotguns. They bent down to examine the corpses in the street; they filed into the bank to find the bloody remains of Heywood; and John Ames ran to the telegraph office to wire an alert that would spark a statewide manhunt.89 They had won, but at a bitter cost. And in the days and years to come, they would wonder why this band of Missourians had come here, hundreds of miles from their hunting grounds, to rob a modest bank in a modest town. It was a question they could never properly answer for themselves. The next morning, the one man who could put that question in its proper context was at the bank, standing where Jesse James had so recently stood, counting the money with the other shareholders. Adelbert Ames soon discovered that the robbers had taken virtually nothing. As the manhunt progressed, however, the bank would deplete its capital by a quarter as it paid rewards and supported Heywood’s widow. The foiled robbery would cost Ames personally almost a thousand dollars.

  But it wasn’t the money that came to Ames’s mind, as he pondered the events of September 7. “The time yesterday,” he wrote, “reminded me of an election in Mississippi.” The context seemed to him inescapable, even if it escaped the Minnesotans around him. “Is it not strange,” he wrote to Blanche in his next letter, “that Mississippi should come to visit me? The killing of Republicans by a set of Mississippi K.K. [Ku Klux Klansmen] produces a similar state of sensation as the murdering of a number of men by Missouri cut-throats who are after plunder.”90

  Ames had hit upon precisely the right comparison, the one the bandits themselves had intended. Instead, an obstinate bookkeeper had saved Ames’s money, a sharpshooting young doctor had saved his life, and the Northfield robbery would be forever remembered not as a bold blow against a leading Radical, but as the day Jesse James reached beyond his grasp.91

  * Direct elections of senators would not occur until the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, in 1916.

  * The author is not related to William Stiles.

  * Cole later claimed that Bob was one of the three who entered the bank, and emerged before the others to join the street fight. No witnesses inside or outside of the bank testified to anyone exiting separately, however. Bob was clearly identified outside the bank during the affair, which only took a few minutes; he could not have been in both places.

  PART FOUR

  Fate

  1876–1882

  They continued the war after the war ended; such, at first, was their declared purpose, and, in a measure, so executed. But as time passed on the war, even to them, was a thing of the past, but having imbued their natures in crime, they … became the outlaws they now are.

  —Kansas City Times

  July 27, 1881

  We called him outlaw, and he was; but fate made him so.

  —John N. Edwards,

  Sedalia Democrat

  April 13, 1882

  Anybody that knows anything about Jesse, knows that whenever he’s captured, a black box will suit him better than chains.

  —Bettie Scruggs Patton

  January 29, 1875

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Resurrection

  IN 1879, as John Davis Howard wandered his rented farm near Box Station in Humphreys County, Tennessee, where he lived with his wife, Mary, and his young son, Tim, and looked back over the previous thirty-odd months, they seemed packed with meaningful events. In the election of 1878, for example, the Greenback Party had made a surprisingly strong showing, with its calls for strict control of corporations and a larger money supply to cope with the depression. More than a million people had cast their ballots for Greenback candidates, sending fourteen congressmen to Washington. Before that, in the summer of 1877, there had been a stunning wave of national strikes, beginning on July 16 and ending on July 29. For thirteen days, railroad employees and other workers had shut the country down in protest against repeated wage cuts. In the end, President Rutherford B. Hayes had sent troops into the major cities to put the strike down by force.

  Hayes’s presidency itself was the result of another great event: the election of 1876. Democrat Samuel Tilden had apparently won, but the Republicans had cried foul, claiming that black voters had been suppressed in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. Indeed, threats and outright force had prevented African Americans from going to the polls throughout the South; if they had been able to vote freely, there is little question that Hayes would have won easily. After months of angry disputes, investigations, and secret negotiations, Southern Democrats had agreed to allow Hayes to take office. They had made a number of demands (including federal support for the Texas Pacific Railroad and other infrastructure in Dixie), but had set two absolute conditions: the appointment of a Democrat as postmaster general—the most important dispenser of patronage in Washington—and an end to federal intervention in Southern elections—that is, an end to federal protection for African Americans. In the Compromise of 1877—sealed, ironically, at a hotel owned by a black man named James Wormley—Reconstruction had finally met its tragic end.1

  So it had been an eventful period, even for a typical farmer, though Howard’s neighbors knew that he was not exactly typical. He could be boastful and flashy, such as the time he bragged that he would corner the corn market by buying the county’s entire harvest. He could also be resentful and sullen, as he was with merchant W. K. Jackson, who broke the corner. He could be combative, as he was in dealing with a lawsuit brought against him by one Steve Johnson in early 1878. And he could suffer hardship like anyone—in February 1878 his wife had given birth to twins, only to see them die soon afterward.

  He also seemed to be, in the parlance of the times, a sporting man. A patron of the racetrack, he loved fine horses. He kept a particulary remarkable animal saddled at all times, claiming that constant exercise kept it in shape. His more respectable “brother-in-law,” B. J. Woodson, shared his passion for horses and often accompanied him to the track. Howard also frequented the faro “banks”—or parlors—in and around Nashville, and he would sometimes return home with thick rolls of cash, explaining that he had been trading livestock. He was just as likely to return penni
less, however; at one point or another, it seemed that he owed money to most of the county, and he even swindled a local farmer out of $900 in cattle when he was particularly short of cash.

  Given the often-conflicting stories he told about himself, the revolvers he always carried, and his guarded air, he “was generally regarded as a desperado,” in Jackson’s words. Once, for example, he was playing cards in Nashville, and began to suspect that the dealer was using a stacked deck. Silently he drew his revolver, placed it in his lap, and said, “Nothing like that goes.”2

  Restless, suspicious, and edgy, Howard appeared to be half farmer, half hustler—in any case, not a man given to reflection. But the people of Humphreys County didn’t know that he was the famous outlaw Jesse James, or that “B. J. Woodson” was Frank James. They had no reason to think that this was a man who was accustomed to commanding headlines, to seeing his own writings splashed across the front pages, to being the topic of legislative debates and statewide elections. As drawn out as the last three years had been for everyone, they must have been torturous for the newly pacified James, struggling to lead a new life in Tennessee. For him, the autumn of 1876 would have been another epoch. No one he now nodded to at the post office or bantered with about horses could have grasped what he had been through in those harrowing days. By all rights, he should not have survived them, and as he scraped by on cards, corn, and horse racing, he may have felt that he had outlived his allotted time.

  IT HAD ALL changed in fewer than fifteen minutes. At 2 p.m. on September 7, 1876, the James and Younger brothers had been an invincible force, slayers of detectives and heroes of Confederates; by quarter past two, they had become fugitives, wounded and wanted men who galloped south from Northfield as fast as their horses could run. Cole Younger, wincing from the bullet that had torn his hip, carried with him his badly injured brother Bob. Jim Younger reeled in the saddle from a shoulder wound. Charlie Pitts and the Jameses had escaped unharmed, but they left behind the corpses of Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell, the Minnesotan who could have guided them on their escape.3

  Before the riders had gone very far, they stopped to bandage Bob’s bleeding arm. Then they galloped on, stopping just past the village of Dundas to pour a bucket of water over the wound and rewrap it. They halted a farmer on the road and took a draft horse from his wagon for Bob to ride; one of the other Youngers led the horse, as Bob cradled his arm in his lap, blood dripping from the fingertips.4

  Back in Northfield, Henry Wheeler leaped into a saddle to lead the chase. He and the small party he led soon returned, however, their less-than-prime horses having given out after a few minutes of hard riding. But in towns across the southern half of the state, telegraphs clicked out the news of the robbery, thanks to John Ames’s hasty report. Parties of police from Minneapolis and St. Paul quickly gathered at the train stations for the journey south, and posses formed in villages all around the outlaws. “The past two days have been those of unusual excitement,” wrote John E. Risedorph of Le Sueur, Minnesota, on September 9, “although the cause of the excitement was many miles away.… The whole country are on their track and report says have them surrounded.” As A. W. Henkle wrote several days later, “most every man who was not a coward” joined in the manhunt.5

  The six men they were after knew the search would begin immediately. Riding three abreast, they spurred their horses into exhaustion as they galloped southwest. Two hours after the robbery, they entered the village of Shieldsville, where they found a wagonload of guns; the owners, members of a posse, were inside a saloon drinking beer. They debated breaking the weapons, but decided to ride on. Then their troubles began to multiply. A party from Faribault caught sight of them and opened a long-range fire-fight, but no one was injured. Bob’s horse stumbled and fell. They took another from a passing farmer, but it, too, was a draft animal, unused to saddle and spurs, and they let it go after failing to bring it under control. Exhausted, they turned into a stretch of woods for the night.6

  The next day, they pushed south across a bend in the Cannon River, fending off a handful of guards. They found two boys named Rosenhall plowing a field nearby. They took their animals and forced one of the brothers to guide them. After riding for a while into some woods, they ordered the boy to remain and continued on to another campsite. That night a storm struck. The six outlaws had rubber coats, but they were soon cold and wet to the bone, and increasingly hungry. The next morning they abandoned their horses and moved west through the brush on foot, slowly and cautiously, eating corn and potatoes they took from the fields. They often caught sight of their pursuers through the trees, and could even hear their voices. But the old bushwhackers put their vast experience to work: they waded through streams to mask their trail, or hopped from rock to rock, or walked directly in each other’s footsteps. Hampered by wounds and the increasingly systematic pursuit, they made slow progress. And all the while it rained, day after day, turning the ground into mud, saturating their clothes, and filling their boots with water.7

  Early on the morning of September 13, the six men reached the outskirts of Mankato, at the southern bend of the Minnesota River. They were hiking across a field belonging to farmer Henry Shaubert when they encountered one of his hired hands, a fellow named Dunning. Immediately they drew their pistols, ordering him to keep still as they tied his arms. As he marched with them, the bandits heatedly debated his fate. “Let’s shoot the son of a bitch,” one of them argued, “then he will be sure not to tell.” The others demurred, and simply forced him to take a solemn vow to not tell anyone of this encounter. And they had one other exchange with their prisoner. “The Captain, he is so called by the gang,” Dunning told reporters, “said if the cashier had opened the vault he would not have shot him, and said the next time they thought the cashier would open up.” Only Jesse would ever be called “our captain” by fellow gang members.8

  They released Dunning as promised, but they placed little faith in his vow. They immediately doubled back, circled to the south, then went into a stretch of dense timber near Mankato as search parties crisscrossed the area. To the west, their hunters formed a picket line “in regular army style,” according to the Minneapolis Tribune, with small groups moving along the railroads with handcars and deploying at evenly spaced intervals. Faced with this tightening net, the robbers decided to do the last thing anyone expected: that night, near midnight, they walked straight through Mankato itself, stopping to steal a cabbage, some melons, and a couple of chickens along the way. After clearing the western edge of town, they confronted one last obstacle: the Blue Earth River, which blocked their westward march. In pitch darkness, rain still pouring down, the six bandits scuttled across a railroad trestle bridge on hands and knees, slipping past unwary guards on the other side.9

  In the woods on the western bank of the Blue Earth, the six weary, sodden men made camp. Under the cover of hanging raincoats, they made a fire to roast their chickens, and looked forward to their first meal in days. But yet another party of pursuers forced them to flee, leaving the food and some of their coats behind.

  On September 14, 1876, Jesse and Frank James discussed their situation with Pitts and the Youngers as they crouched in the brush, listening for their hunters. For a week now they had been creeping west, moving mostly on foot, in the midst of a constant downpour. Their horses were gone, the Youngers were wounded, and they were all, as Bob Younger put it, “fearfully hungry.” They suffered from exposure as well, especially now that some had lost their coats. The temperature had dropped markedly; as one of their pursuers wrote, “I never suffered more from cold than I did that night.” It was time, the James brothers said, to split up. Their old comrades could only nod their heads. Pitts elected to remain with the Youngers as Frank and Jesse departed in the midnight darkness, “with the knowledge and consent of the others,” as Cole explained a few days later.10

  Jesse and Frank clearly grasped how desperate their position was. In the days to come, they would ruthlessly drive their own suffe
ring bodies as they pushed relentlessly toward the Dakota Territory. Immediately after they left the others, they stole a horse from a nearby barn. They rode together on the same animal through the wet night, trying to slip though the picket line that guarded the passages between a chain of lakes to the west. They bent forward, closely hugging the horse as they walked it slowly down a sandy road that ran through the forested shore of Lake Crystal. Suddenly a shotgun erupted. The spray of pellets caught Frank in the right foot and Jesse in the right knee, struck one of them in the side, and blew off one of their hats. With cool aplomb they slipped to the ground and crept away as their frightened horse galloped off, decoying their pursuers down the lane.11

  Now wounded for the first time, they continued on foot. Perhaps two hours later, at three o’clock in the morning, they approached a barn to look for horses. One of the brothers stepped inside its open door and saw a man standing guard with a musket. The outlaw jumped forward, swept the rifle out of the man’s hand, and smashed the butt of a revolver against his head. As the man fell senseless to the floor, the brothers saw a pair of large gray horses behind him. They found no saddles in the barn, however, so they each stuffed a pair of grain bags with hay and tied them together with a rope to make a set of improvised stirrups; then they bridled the horses, mounted, and set out for the western horizon.12