T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  As Groom and his men peered through the darkness, they heard someone tramping through the mud and dripping leaves. It was one of the James brothers. The sheriff shouted a command to halt. The outlaw immediately drew his revolver and fired in the air. Groom and a nearby colleague each squeezed off a shotgun blast, then ducked behind a tree for cover. A bullet splintered the trunk that protected the sheriff as the bandit returned fire. Then the fugitive turned and sprinted through the brush to his brother and their waiting horses. “Come on, you cowardly sons of bitches,” the brothers yelled, then they galloped off through the woods.33

  Groom searched frantically for the outlaws in the days following the brief exchange of gunfire. He also telegraphed the sheriff of Ray County and asked him to post a guard on the Missouri River across from Sibley, where the old bushwhackers liked to cross. Nothing came of it. The James brothers had, once again, simply vanished.34

  THAT WAS ALMOST three years before. To the man who passed himself off as J. D. Howard in Tennessee in 1879, it must have seemed like far longer. Almost everything he knew had come to an end. His cause had ebbed away, and all his old comrades had been killed or captured or had taken peaceful paths. Only he and Frank remained, and they, too, had set out in a new direction. In 1877, Jesse had moved his family to Humphreys County; in August, by Frank’s account, he and Annie had settled nearby, eventually renting a farm on Hyde’s Ferry Hill near White’s Creek, close to Nashville. Their careers as bandits were over.

  The brothers remained close. Dr. W. A. Hamilton, who treated Jesse on March 17, 1879, later noted that “both Howard and Woodson had a strong love for horses, had plenty of money, and seemed to be very liberal in spending it.” Frank, for example, entered two of his horses in races at the state fair and elsewhere. “Howard and Woodson frequently appeared at the various faro banks in Nashville and always together,” Hamilton added. “Woodson rarely ever had anything to say, while Howard spoke occasionally, and even then only when a question was asked. Howard at all times seemed to have control of Woodson.”35

  And yet, their lives had increasingly diverged as their crimes receded into the past. Perhaps it was due to Frank’s age, or to his new son, Robert Franklin (who was born on February 6, 1878), or perhaps he had simply discovered the pleasures of a legitimate life. Whatever it was, it had sprouted and blossomed in Tennessee. “I worked regularly every day on the farm, seldom failing to put in my full ten hours per day in the field,” Frank said later. “At the end of the year I engaged to team for one year on Jeff Hyde’s place, for the Indiana Lumber Company, and I carried out my agreement to the letter, driving a four-mule team every day, taking my meals in the woods with the darkies, and never doing less than a full hand’s work.” His neighbors would agree. He had undergone a noticeable change soon after his arrival, they observed. He had stopped cursing, had taken to the Methodist church, and often shared his love of Shakespeare with friends, including the clerk of the county court, Charles H. Eastman, who lived across the road. And he made a point of befriending Nashville policemen, including Detective Fletcher W. Horn.36

  All had changed, changed utterly—and Frank was glad of it. For Jesse, on the other hand, a terrible boredom was born. In his restless card playing, track going, and grain speculating, he seemed unable to adapt to the exchange of steady labor for a steady income. He wanted more, faster, and for less. Nor was there any thrill in driving a mule team or wrestling with a plow. His early immersion in the business of killing had wrought permanent changes in his personality.37 At age sixteen, he had gone almost directly from the schoolhouse to murdering his neighbors, and had risked his life in every year that followed, until shortly before his thirtieth birthday. By contrast, Frank had already passed through adolescence when the war swept over him, and was far more capable of finding his footing again once the waters receded.

  In early 1879, Jesse moved his family into Frank’s house on Hyde’s Ferry Hill, perhaps for the safety of his wife and child as he began to wander again. According to one highly questionable report, he visited Las Vegas, New Mexico, in July 1879, where he made friends with Henry Antrim, alias Billy Bonney, alias Billy the Kid. More likely he was at home when Zee gave birth to a baby girl, Mary, on July 17.38 But he did not remain home for long.

  In August or September of 1879, Jesse made his way to the Lafayette County home of Jo Shelby, his friend and patron. Using Shelby’s farm as a base, he visited relatives and sympathizers, speaking to a number of young men who seemed well suited to his purposes. He knew them from years past or his recent travels. They included his cousin Wood Hite; Ed Miller—Clell’s younger brother—who had been arrested at the Samuel farm the night of the Pinkerton raid; Bill Ryan, an Irish-born ruffian who lived in Jackson County; and Tucker Bassham, a Jackson boy whom Ryan had contacted in April. None was a former guerrilla.

  Rounding out the squad was James Andrew Liddil, better known as “Dick,” a Jackson County farmhand who had met Jesse in 1872 or ’73, before serving almost four years in prison for horse theft. His recruitment was probably typical of the others. One day in September 1879 an old bushwhacker named Ben Morrow ran into Liddil and told him that Jesse James wanted to see him. “About 2 o’clock in the afternoon I went to Ben’s, and I found Jesse in the yard getting some water out of a barrel,” he recalled. “We had a little chat and went out to where his horse was tied in the woods. He said he was broke and wanted to make a raise, and he wanted me to help him. I agreed.” Liddil went to a Kansas City pawnshop and purchased a pair of Smith & Wesson revolvers. Jesse continued to organize his squad, moving between the farms of such sympathizers and former guerrillas as Jim Hulse and Thomas Eddington. It was widely reported that he visited the Kansas City fair as well.39

  Shortly after six in the evening of October 8, 1879, Jesse and his five followers rode to a schoolhouse near Glendale, an isolated stop on the Chicago and Alton Railroad just east of Independence, Missouri. Jesse kept his newer recruits ignorant of the others’ identities, calling his cousin Wood Hite “Bob” or “Father Grimes,” the unschooled Bassham, “Arkansas,” and Dick Liddil, “Underwood.” Bassham had no weapons, so the others lent him a pistol and a shotgun. Jesse himself carried a pair of Colt’s .45 caliber revolvers. They guided their horses through the heavily timbered countryside to Glendale itself. The hamlet was virtually identical to the scene of so many of Jesse’s previous train raids: a house or two, a single store/post office—run by Joe Matts, “an old settler,” according to the Kansas City Journal—and a two-story depot, where telegraph operator John McIntyre lived with his mother. All except Jesse and Hite pulled on masks. Then they split into two groups, Bassham, Ryan, and Liddil going to the store, Jesse, Miller, and Hite taking the depot.

  The operation began smoothly. The first squad quickly rounded up Matts and a dozen or so Glendale residents, then marched them over to the depot, where they were told to “sit down, act clever, and keep still.” As Matts shuffled to a seat, he recognized the leader of the bandits as a tall fellow with light whiskers who had stopped several times at his store over the previous week. Jesse, meanwhile, briskly carried out his self-assigned task. First he hauled McIntyre and his mother, along with F. B. Bridges, the railroad’s traveling auditor, down from their dinner table on the second floor. Then he, Miller, and Hite went through their pockets. As the other bandits arrived with their prisoners, Jesse demanded that McIntyre put out a red light to stop the train. I don’t have a red light, the man responded. “At this,” Bridges reported, “he attempted to telegraph a word of warning, but was pulled back, and several of the gang who were then in the office began tearing the telegraph instruments from the table.” The ignorant Bassham, thinking it was a sewing machine, tried to stop Jesse from wrecking it, much to Liddil’s disgust.

  Now furious, Jesse told McIntyre to put out a green light instead—a signal to halt for passengers or new orders. “But the train will stop if I do that,” McIntyre protested. Jesse cocked one of his revolvers and shoved the barrel into Mc
Intyre’s mouth. “That is just what we want,” he said, “and the sooner you obey my orders the better. I will give you a minute to lower the light.” McIntyre quickly provided the sought-after lantern. While this was going on, one of the bandits cheerfully told Bridges “that the robbers knew there was $380,000 in bullion on the train; that they had watched it all the way from Denver and were going to have it.” A large shipment of gold and silver was indeed coming from Leadville, Colorado. Unlike the previous time Jesse had stopped a train full of bullion—on the Rock Island, in Iowa—this one would be passing through his home territory; the heavy precious metal could easily be hidden nearby for later retrieval.

  Having secured the depot and all the residents of the village, the robbery proceeded with little incident. At eight o’clock, the eastbound train duly slowed to a halt at the station. Liddil covered the engineer and fireman as Jesse and Miller went to the express car. Inside, United States Express messenger William R. Grimes locked the doors, stuffed the contents of the safe into his satchel, and tried to escape out the back. Miller seized a coal hammer and smashed open the forward door. Jesse rushed in and swung the butt of his revolver down on Grimes’s head. He seized the money, but found no bullion; after coming off the Kansas Pacific at Kansas City, the shipment had rolled onto another line. Their work done, the bandits mounted and galloped away, howling as they went.40

  In every detail, the Glendale raid echoed Jesse’s previous train robberies, right down to the fruitless pursuit by Jackson County marshal James Liggett, as the bandits dispersed through the rugged “Six-Mile country,” where Confederate guerrillas had once roamed. The Chicago and Alton and the U.S. Express offered the usual rewards, even though, as always, the railway itself had suffered no losses. These rewards came to $1,000 per man from the railroad, up to a total of $15,000, and $250 per man from the express company, or $25,000 for the entire gang. And Jesse clearly intended to grab the headlines, just as he had back at the peak of his career. Before he mounted his horse and rode off into the night, he handed the telegraph operator a press release he had composed for the Kansas City Journal.

  But times had changed, making this strike a whisper compared with the great chorus of raids silenced some three years earlier. The loot, for example: Grimes told Jesse and Ed Miller that the safe contained tens of thousands of dollars, bringing them a fleeting moment of joy. They soon discovered that only $6,000 of it was in cash; the rest was in checks and financial instruments that were worthless to them.41 What foiled them was the growing integration of the nation’s financial structure. The spread of checking to country banks and the emergence of the express companies as financial intermediaries were gradually making the economy less dependent on cross-country shipments of cash, and less vulnerable to robberies.42

  Even the land itself turned away from Missouri’s increasingly archaic outlaw. Of the three counties where most of Jesse James’s supporters lived, Jackson had always been perhaps the most important, home to the largest number of former Quantrill and Anderson bushwhackers. But the rapid expansion of Kansas City was turning this former stronghold of slave-labor agriculture into an urban and industrial center. In 1865, Kansas City had been home to 3,500 people; in 1870, it had grown to more than 32,000; and in 1880, the census takers would count 55,785 residents, making it the thirtieth largest city in the country. The metropolis voraciously consumed neighboring farmland, adding thirteen new subdivisions in 1879, to be followed by twenty-seven more in 1880.43 In a very tangible, physical sense, there was less and less space for the outlaw to operate safely.

  Most important, the meaning was gone. Jesse hungered for publicity as much as he ever had, but his purpose had disappeared. His press release, for example, offered none of the potent symbolism of his former pronouncements, back when he had worked hand in hand with John Edwards to advance the politics of the Lost Cause. “To the Kansas City Journal,” he began, addressing the city’s Republican newspaper. “We are the boys that are hard to handle and will make it hot for the party that ever tries to take us.” He signed it, “James Brothers, Jim Connors, Underwood, Jackson, Flinn, Jack Bishop.” On the other side he wrote the cryptic message, “Adams Express Co. has no charter, therefore cannot convict guilty men,” with the signatures, “Cal Worner, Frank Jackson.”44 So much bravado, so much defiance—yet hollow, unfocused, and empty for all that.

  Jesse was grasping at the past. It was a fact easily missed in the furor over the Glendale robbery, but he himself dropped hints of his sense of lost purpose and diminished stature. The week of the Kansas City fair, he had sought out John C. Moore, the cofounder, with John Edwards, of the Kansas City Times and now editor of the Independence Democrat. He had come back to Missouri “for the purpose of killing detective Pinkerton,” Jesse told Moore, “who, he understood, was to be in attendance upon the Kansas City Exposition.” Recalling the raid on his mother’s farm, Jesse “swore to kill him before he (James) went under.” He mentioned sadly that he had sent a note to John Edwards, now editor of the Sedalia Democrat, asking to meet him, but had heard nothing back. “Jesse,” Moore wrote, “seemed to feel much aggrieved thereat.”45 Perhaps Edwards thought it was the safest course for both of them. But his silence was telling. All their battles had been fought and won. The great political partnership between the gunman and the journalist and power broker had come to an end.

  There would be one more news story about Jesse in 1879, a tale that was part farce, part prophecy. In early November, the one-eyed former bushwhacker and bandit George Shepherd—the man arrested by D. T. Bligh in Chaplin, Kentucky, after the Russellville robbery in 1868—announced that he had killed Jesse James. Marshal Liggett soon confirmed the story, admitting that he had recruited Shepherd to infiltrate the gang. The claim, then, had credibility. Edwards caught the first train for Short Creek, site of the reputed slaying, and even Zerelda—having “broken visibly” in recent years, according to the press—seemed worried. But she refused to answer any “military questions,” and declared that it “had better be a two-eyed man” who would dare ride up to Jesse and shoot him.46

  When the corpse failed to reveal itself to searchers at the designated killing ground, the public began to question the story. The doubts were best summarized by Robert Pinkerton. “No one should know more about Jesse James than I do, for our men have chased him from one end of the country to the other,” he said. “His gang killed two of our detectives, who tracked them down, and I consider Jesse James the worst man, without any exception, in America. He is utterly devoid of fear, and has no more compunction about cold-blooded murder than he has about eating his breakfast. I don’t believe that Shepherd would dare to shoot at him.”47

  The dead man was alive and well, of course, having returned to Tennessee. “Jesse was down at Nashville at the time,” Frank recalled, “and my wife read him a telegraphic account of it from the newspapers the morning after it occurred. We laughed a good deal over it but never learned what it all meant.”48 In fact, Shepherd’s fraudulent claim marked a turning point. The former guerrillas had always been loyal to each other. Only Hobbs Kerry had ever turned on his comrades, but he had not belonged to the bushwhacker fraternity. For Shepherd even to pretend to betray Jesse was an omen.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Assassins

  JESSE JAMES DID NOT behave as if he were afraid of death. Like an addict unable to restrain himself, he indulged as never before in the vices of his brigand life. He gambled so frequently and so recklessly that even the quiet Zee, who had stood so much over the years, began to complain. In the spring of 1880, he returned to Missouri to cavort with his followers and hangers-on, including Jim Cummins, an old guerrilla comrade. Ed Miller introduced him to two young brothers who lived in Ray County, Bob and Charley Ford, whom he quickly befriended (especially Charley, the older of the two). Thanks to this emerging circle of friendships, the center of Jesse’s social life shifted to the home of the Fords’ sister, a youthful widow named Martha Bolton, who lived in Ray just east of R
ichmond. She was an attractive woman, and Dick Liddil in particular became fond of her. Bolton’s home soon emerged as the regular rendezvous for the outlaws and their associates. Jesse visited his mother, then took Liddil with him back to Tennessee.1

  In Nashville, the outlaw and his disciple caroused while Frank continued to put in long days hauling logs with his mule team. Frank would soon claim that he had been thinking of abandoning crime “ever since [Joseph] McClurg was governor”—that is, since the murder of John W. Sheets. Perhaps. But he was certainly devoting himself to a legitimate existence now. These years “of quiet, upright life,” Frank said, were “the happiest I have spent since my boyhood, notwithstanding the hard labor attending them. My old life grew more detestable the further I got away from it.”2

  Jesse, on the other hand, could not endure the world that Frank so cherished. For three years he had fitfully tried to live at peace. Then, at Glendale, he had turned back for good. Empty as it now was, it was still the only life he had ever known, and the only one he had ever wanted. In a sense, it truly was his fate.

  Starting in August 1880, he plunged into a succession of robberies unprecedented in their rapidity. After just two weeks at home, he and Liddil went to George Hite’s farm in Kentucky to collect Ryan for a new operation: Jesse planned to stop the tourist stagecoach at Mammoth Cave. A rainstorm induced him to put it off for a few days, however, and Liddil went to Tennessee. Perhaps ten days later, Jesse and Ryan returned to Nashville with a load of cash and valuables. On September 3, they explained, they had held up a coach full of passengers outside the cave. They laughed about the incident, describing how they had forced a black preacher to drink whiskey. Jesse sorted through the plunder and pulled out a fine diamond ring, which he had resized for Zee’s finger. Then he took his small crew back out again, this time to rob a store belonging to John Dovey in the mining town of Mercer, Kentucky. On October 15, they raided the establishment—just missing a delivery of the miners’ payroll that was to have been lodged in Dovey’s safe.3