T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Finally they began to make rapid progress. They covered another twenty miles by seven o’clock in the morning, when they stopped at a farmhouse to buy a loaf of bread and a new hat. As they kicked their horses ahead, the morning sun lit the vast, rippling, almost treeless plain of southwestern Minnesota. With little cover to hide in, speed was their only protection. At dusk they stopped at the home of a German immigrant, who agreed to put them up for the night. After they came inside, the man’s wife helped dress Jesse’s wounded knee. They were injured when their wagon broke down, they explained—accounting for their lack of saddles as well as their wounds. They pored over a map, asking detailed questions about the roads. Then they went to sleep in their clothes, their first night of rest in at least two days.

  The next morning, September 16, they set out at seven o’clock, changing direction sharply once they were out of their hosts’ sight. At two in the afternoon, they forded the Des Moines River and asked for lunch at a house belonging to a man named Swan. Rather than waste any time, they had the farmer bring them bread, milk, and meat as they sat on their horses. As they ate, they peppered Swan with polite questions about the distances to various railroads. Then they turned southwest and rode all afternoon, all through the night, into the early hours of the next day.

  At half past seven on Sunday morning, Jesse and Frank reined in on the western bank of the Rock River and got their breakfast at a nearby house. They radiated physical agony as they shuffled into the kitchen, barely able to lift their feet. They had spent the last twenty-four hours on horseback, in the same clothes they had worn for ten days through pounding rain. In addition to exhaustion and muscle pain, they must have suffered from chafed and peeling skin inside their thighs. Their wounds affected them as well. Though they refused to unbutton their raincoats—reaching up under them to get money to pay for their meal—one of them was obviously injured in the right side, his garment being torn there, and he could barely sit up to eat. But the iron will they had inherited from their mother drove them on. They returned to their horses once more, though they had to climb a fence slowly in order to mount.13

  As the brothers pushed themselves ahead, they benefited from the timidity of their pursuers. When the Rock County sheriff caught sight of them some two hundred yards away, he decided not to risk a confrontation. That evening, close to sunset, the brothers finally reached the Dakota Territory. Shortly after crossing the line, they stopped at a barn and swapped their horses for a black pair, only to find that one had a blind eye and the other was entirely sightless. Ten miles on they switched again, stealing two gray geldings, then trotted through Sioux Falls in the predawn hours of September 18. Just south of town they overtook the stage to Yankton. They asked the driver where he was going, then turned and rode northwest. As they expected, the driver went back and warned the townspeople, who organized a posse that gave chase in that direction, as the brothers resumed their ride south.14

  “In every way,” one of the James brothers’ pursuers remarked, “they were masters of the situation. Their bravery at Mankato, Lake Crystal, and at Seymour’s farm [where they stole the first pair of gray horses], and their endurance on horseback for days and nights, wounded and almost starving, and without sleep, are without parallel in the history of crime.” But they were not out of danger yet, even here in the Dakota Territory, some two hundred miles from Northfield. That night they went to sleep at a farm near the Iowa border. At six the next morning they bolted awake as a posse approached. Sprinting for their horses, they mounted and galloped toward the Sioux River, then splashed through its waters into Iowa, riding up a bluff on the far side. At the top they stopped and fired several rounds, hitting one of their foes’ horses. The hunters jumped out of their saddles to take cover. When they looked up to return fire, the James brothers had already escaped into a stretch of timber.15

  Jesse and Frank now rode straight toward Sioux City, where the Missouri River bent south and flowed toward home. Late in the afternoon of September 20, they saw a lone horseman ride up to them. His name was Dr. Mosher, he explained, and he needed directions to the home of a patient near James Station. The brothers chatted with him briefly, bringing up the subject of the Northfield robbery. Had he heard of it? Were the robbers thought to be close by? As Mosher replied, they drew their pistols. “We are two of the Northfield boys,” they told him. “You are the man we want. You’ve been following us, and we have a description of you.” Then they patted down the startled doctor before finally accepting his stuttered denial.

  A friend of Mosher’s explained what happened next. “He was made to undress and change clothing with the larger of the two men, and the doctor put his legs into a pair of pants six inches too long.” The dirty, worn-out trousers had a large hole near the right knee; clearly Jesse, who was distinctly bigger than Frank, had been the worst hit in that shotgun blast on the night they left the Youngers. “The rubber coat torn by the charge of shot at Lake Crystal was exchanged for the new one the doctor wore,” Mosher’s friend added. They also took his horse, leaving him with one of their exhausted mounts. The doctor noticed that “they seemed to be pretty well worn down, especially the wounded man.”16

  Worn down—but free. After forcing Mosher to rebandage Jesse’s wounded knee, the brothers let the doctor go, then rode south into the darkness.17 Their trail was never found again. Ruthless, relentless, and utterly iron-willed, they had outrun, outfought, and outsmarted perhaps a thousand pursuers, crossing hundreds of miles of hostile territory. And they had survived.

  Their comrades could not say the same. The next day, September 21, the three Younger brothers and Charlie Pitts were discovered near Madelia, Minnesota. They had remained on foot, and were moving slowly west when they approached a farmhouse belonging to Ole Sorbel. “We were very imprudent this morning in going to the house for food,” Bob Younger explained later that day, “but we were so fearfully hungry.” Sorbel’s teenage son Oscar mounted a horse and galloped eight miles to Vaught’s Hotel in Madelia, where he breathlessly described the men to Sheriff James Glispin of Watonwan County. Glispin immediately organized a large party that cornered the bandits in five acres of brush along the Watonwan River. A vicious firefight ensued, with several members of the posse very narrowly escaping serious injury.

  A few minutes into the battle, Bob shouted, “I give up; the rest of the boys are all shot to pieces!” Glispin and his men moved in and found Pitts dead and all the Youngers badly wounded—Bob in the right side, Cole in the face, and Jim in the right thigh and upper jaw. The sheriff transported the brothers back to Faribault, the seat of Rice County, where people poured in to see them. After only the briefest resistance, the bandits freely admitted their identities. But they refused to name the two men who had escaped—until a reporter played a small—perhaps inadvertent—trick on them. The James boys had been caught, he said; one was dead, the other dying. “This seemed to affect them,” the journalist wrote. Cole asked who had been killed, the larger or smaller one? “Mind, I don’t say they are the James brothers,” he added. Then he asked if they had said anything about himself and his brothers. No, the reporter replied. Cole nodded. “Good boys to the last.”18

  “They … tell many affecting incidents in their cases,” John E. Risedorph noted cynically in his diary. “When they speak of their sister they break into tears.” But after a few days of their weepy storytelling for the crowds that visited the jail, even Risedorph, a Union veteran and die-hard Republican, began to feel some sympathy. “One has to pity the bandits,” he wrote three days later, “when we look back and imagine only a few short years ago they were promising children growing up under the care of a loving mother and intelligent, cultured father.”19

  One visitor refused to soften. He understood what sort of men the outlaws were, having dealt with their kind in Mississippi. When Adelbert Ames stood outside the bars of the Rice County jail, he pointedly interrogated Cole about his role in the robbery. You’re the man who shot the Swede, he said. You were the
best horseman in the group. “One rider is as good as another,” Younger replied warily. What about the killing of Heywood? Ames asked; that was a cowardly act. The bandit waved him off, saying piously that they never had intended to kill anyone. Ames scoffed. You certainly tried to kill Manning, he said (as he well knew, having stood behind Manning during the fight). Younger grew angry. It is “no use to talk to illiterate people,” he fumed. “They could not appreciate a sublime life!”20

  The three Youngers were soon sentenced to spend the rest of their sublime lives in prison. On December 11, they pleaded guilty to robbery and being accessories to murder, thereby evading the hangman’s noose, and were admitted to the Minnesota penitentiary at Stillwater. Meanwhile, long before that day in court, the authorities confirmed the identities of the three dead bandits with the help of St. Louis police chief James McDonough, who took the train to Minnesota on September 22, carrying Hobbs Kerry’s detailed description. And in Northfield, the townspeople heard from Bill Chadwell’s father, Elias Stiles, who was living in Grand Forks, Dakota Territory. “I thought he was in Texas,” he said of his dead son. “I suppose he got in with a lot of them damned pirates.”21

  Only two of those “damned pirates” remained free. But where had they gone?

  JAMES MCDONOUGH was an obstinate man. In January 1873, for example, he had made dozens of important enemies—including Stilson Hutchins, the state legislator and founder of the St. Louis Dispatch—by accusing commissioner Julius Hunicke of corruption. But McDonough had remained undeterred: once he reached a conclusion, he rarely gave way.22

  It was a trait that would haunt him in the summer of 1876, as he assumed responsibility for the hunt after Frank and Jesse James. On August 18, after the capture of Kerry, Governor Hardin ordered McDonough to organize another special force under the terms of the outlawry act signed by Governor Woodson. Funding for the elite unit began to flow on August 24. Within five days, the police chief had dispatched a squad of nine men to the state’s western border.

  By that time, the outlaws were already well on their way to their epic battle in Minnesota, but McDonough convinced himself that they were hiding out with a mysterious Cal Carter near Dennison, Texas. Even after the Northfield robbery made the headlines, he refused to believe that the famous bandits had carried it out. All throughout the James brothers’ desperate ride for home, he had his men—led by Morgan Boland, who had arrested Kerry—prowling through Texas and the Indian Territory. Not until he saw the bandits who had died in Minnesota did his men rush into Clay County and take up positions along the railroads in northwestern Missouri. By then the James brothers had already found refuge.23

  Despite this grave mistake, McDonough kept Boland and his men in the field, searching for signs of the wounded fugitives. At the end of September, they heard reports that Frank and Jesse had not gone directly to their mother’s farm, but had circled through the Indian Territory into southern Missouri, and then to the homes of sympathizers in Jackson County. About the same time, Annie Ralston James appeared on her father’s farm, suggesting that the brothers had indeed returned to their old haunts. On October 13, Boland led a raid on the home of a Dr. Noland, near Independence. He hauled away a man with a suspicious wound to the knee, whom he believed to be Frank James.

  McDonough soon learned that it was yet another error. “I must frankly admit that my faith in associating him with the Northfield robbery remained unshaken until yesterday, when a competent surgeon pronounced the wound of long standing,” he wrote to the governor on October 19. But this arrest of an innocent man “reflects no discredit on the State, or the Police Department,” he said. “I may add that a few of our citizens here of the old Confederate element seem to differ with me, and are disposed to characterize the affair as an outrage, &c., &c., … and may prejudice the public to an injurious extent.” The special anti-bandit police unit was soon disbanded, however, never to be resurrected again. It was the last of a succession of detectives and ad hoc squads funded under the outlawry act. Their only success had been the capture of Kerry, an outsider and raw recruit.24

  “The old Confederate element,” meanwhile, was indeed enraged, and not only in St. Louis. “Jackson county is angry, and well it might be,” wrote the Kansas City Times. “The old folks are mad and the boys are brightening up their shooting irons for work; and when Jackson county boys settle down to business, they mean it. There is no foolishness about this thing this time as the Chicago and St. Louis policemen will find out the next time they venture to invade Jackson county and kidnap and carry away, without due process of law, peaceable and innocent citizens of this county.”25

  Across town, Robert Van Horn heaved a heavy editorial sigh in the Republican Kansas City Journal of Commerce. “Never have we felt so humiliated as we do to-day, to find the spirit of opposition to authority so rampant as it is,” he wrote in response to the Times. Two days later, he once again bemoaned the Civil War allegiances that turned the James brothers into heroes. “Now, there is not a man of average intelligence in this county who does not know that these outlaws have been harbored and befriended, and are so to-day, by men who harbored and befriended them during the war, and by nobody else, and for no other reason.”26

  Even as Van Horn typeset his words for publication, Zerelda Samuel lacerated him in the Kansas City Times. “Her idea of the devil is ‘Old Van Horn,’ ” a reporter wrote after an impromptu interview. She turned every question into an attack on Van Horn. “The old villain is pursuing me and mine to the death,” she said. “Go you and ask him. He appears to know more about Frank and Jesse than I do.”27

  A week later, she squelched her anger to give a cultivated performance in another interview with the Times. She was moving to Texas to escape her troubles, she announced. “I hope I shall at last find peace and rest in the new home I hope to find,” she said, wiping away a few tears. “I am very old now, and not the woman I was thirteen years ago, when trouble came upon me and mine with the war. My husband was hung by the Federals, and Jesse, then only a boy of 15 years old, was whipped by the same gang until speechless because he could not tell where his brother Frank was.” She wailed about her poverty and her burdens—including Charlotte, whom she called an “old darkey.… She will never leave us; she is too old to do for herself, and will not take her freedom.” She also listed Perry, referring to him as “a little negro child adopted by me,” and an old paralyzed black man “belonging to the family.” And this in an attempt to win sympathy.28

  How familiar it all seemed: the personal involvement of the governor; the bumbling raid by detectives; the outrage of Confederate Democrats and the tut-tutting of Republicans; Zerelda’s calculated appeals for sympathy; and, of course, the invulnerability of the James brothers themselves. Probably no one realized how rapidly it would all disappear.

  The political landscape was undergoing a drastic change, eroding the partisan conflicts that Jesse had addressed so directly. One element would remain the same, of course: the Republicans still lambasted the Democrats. “The popular sentiment of the ruling party in our State is in favor of the brigands,” wrote the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. “We assert that the Youngers and the James boys have been upheld in their robberies and in their bloodshed by the low state of Democratic opinion in Missouri.”29 Within the Democratic Party, however, the chasm between the Confederate and Unionist factions began to narrow. Thanks in part to the battles over the outlaws, which had rallied and united the old rebels, the Confederates now wielded virtually equal power within the party. Though the Democrats nominated a string of Unionists for governor through the 1870s, they chose two die-hard rebels for the U.S. Senate: in 1875, Francis Marion Cockrell, a brigadier general in the Southern army, followed four years later by George Graham Vest, who had represented Missouri in the Confederate congress.30

  Jesse and his comrades had symbolized secessionist resentments, but when the dust settled after the election of 1876, there was nothing left to resent. The nation had repudiated Reconstructi
on, along with all the egalitarian ideals of the Radical Republicans. Missouri had tossed aside the constitution of 1865, and the leaders of the rebellion now held power as legislators on Capitol Hill and in Jefferson City. A new Confederate consciousness had emerged within Missouri, reshaping the memory of the war from a struggle between neighbors—the great majority of them Unionists—into an uprising by the people against rampaging Kansans bent on destroying the state. The change was sealed by the publication, in 1877, of John Edwards’s Noted Guerrillas, a romantic history of Missouri’s war.

  In a very real sense, the Civil War had been refought in the years since Appomattox—and the Confederates had won. In the heat of victory, the politics of wartime allegiance evaporated, leaving gritty economic issues. The main problem for Democrats in Missouri would not be the Republicans, or even internal struggles, but the rising appeal of the Greenback Party. Senator Cockrell, for example, would jump onto the populist platform by championing bimetallism—the idea that the government should expand the money supply by minting silver as well as gold. (Silver had been essentially demonetized in 1873.) And state railroad commissioner John Sappington Marmaduke, a major general in the rebel army, gained widespread popularity by pushing for strict regulation of railway corporations.31

  One factor, however, remained constant: the James brothers’ invulnerability. It would be demonstrated yet again in the immediate aftermath of the disputed election, as Sheriff Groom carried on the hunt after the St. Louis police returned home. On November 22, 1876, Groom learned that the boys had returned to see their mother, who had come back after her monthlong visit to Texas. He quickly gathered four men and armed them with shotguns, then rode to the outskirts of the Samuel farm. There the posse dismounted and crept through the darkness on a cold, rainy evening. The sheriff waved his men into hiding places around the main building—knowing, perhaps, that the James brothers often slept in the woods, rather than risk spending a night in the house.32