The James family would tell this story for years with the same anger they recounted the murderous Pinkerton raid on their farm in 1875.
“After that day,” Frank said, “Jesse was out for blood.”
Jesse James, teenage guerrilla fighter, 1864.
(Library of Congress)
Jesse did not actually join the bushwhackers until June 1864, a full year later. In only a few months’ time, though, the sixteen-year-old saw plenty of blood, both the enemy’s and his own. His first wound was self-inflicted: while practicing with one of his revolvers—every respectable bushwhacker carried no less than four—he shot off the tip of the middle finger on his left hand. Jesse had to hide this in later years because it was a sure way of identifying him. One account says this was how Jesse got the nickname his close associates would call him for the rest of his life. With blood squirting from the stump of his finger, Jesse cried, “O, ding it! ding it! How it hurts!” The boys started calling Jesse James “Dingus.”
Another more serious wound would come in August 1864 when Jesse was trying to steal a saddle from the farm of an old German Unionist living in Ray County. The German, who had a bit more gumption than smarts, poked a rifle out of his doorway and took a potshot at Jesse, after which the old farmer fled his house and darted into a cornfield. The lead slug tore into the right side of Jesse’s chest, passing through his lung. It was a close call but, after a few weeks, Jesse was back in the saddle alongside Frank.
Jesse kept company with the worst, most-feared of the bushwhackers: Bloody Bill Anderson, Arch Clement, Dave Pool. It was a hell of a life for a teenager, but Jesse took to it well; indeed, there was little choice if one wished to survive such embattled times. Fittingly, his bushwhacker career would end violently, with more of his own blood spilled. In May 1865, with Frank off in Kentucky, Jesse and several bushwhackers ran into a Federal patrol in Lafayette County, Missouri. Lead started flying back and forth immediately. A pistol ball punctured Jesse’s side, entering the same lung that had been wounded previously, and in nearly the exact same place. But this hit was more dangerous than the first; every time he breathed, “air and blood matter” passed from the hole in his chest. One week later, as Jesse lay in a hotel bed in Lexington, Missouri, convalescing, he formally surrendered and swore an allegiance to the United States. It would take months for him to fully recover.
But he would never recover from the war.
We were outlaws the moment the South lost,” Frank James recalled. “Why, we had as much chance of settling down, tilling our farms and being decent as a tallow dog chasin’ an asbestos cat through hell.”
Frank may have been overstating but not by much. The fighting may have ended, but the war’s horrors in Missouri were still fresh in people’s minds. Bitterness and personal grudges still smoldered. Former bushwhackers, isolated on their farms and no longer protected by their comrades, became easy pickings for anyone bent on revenge. After returning to Missouri from California, Cole Younger came face-to-face with what he described as “so-called vigilant committees.”
“They were hunting out Confederates,” Cole asserted, “accusing them falsely of crime and adopting any excuse to take their lives. Neither I nor my brother Jim could remain at home. . . . Everywhere we went armed, everywhere we were on the lookout for enemies.”
And former Confederates were “outlawed” politically as well. A new Missouri constitution instituted the infamous “Ironclad Oath,” which said that before you could hold public office or even vote, you had to swear you hadn’t fought for the South, nor ever “given aid, comfort, countenance, or support to persons engaged in any such hostility.” Any past or present sympathy with the South was enough to put you in political exile. This meant the bushwhackers and their families and supporters had no voice or place in postwar Missouri. Still, a few found other means to make themselves heard.
On the afternoon of February 13, 1866, ten or twelve men rode into Liberty, Missouri, and robbed the Clay County Savings Association of nearly $60,000 in U.S. bonds and gold, most of which belonged to the Unionists (now the Radical Republicans) who controlled the state and local government. This was the first daylight bank robbery in American history, and it was pulled off by the kind of men who had experience conducting daylight raids on unsuspecting towns. As the Liberty Tribune reported, most everyone believed that the robbers were “a gang of old bushwhacking desperadoes.”
And it was fairly easy to guess who’d done the job—it was Clay County, after all. But producing hard evidence was another matter. Solid identification was always the tricky part. This continued to be difficult in the bank raids, train robberies, and assorted holdups that followed the Liberty heist. The first robbery in which Jesse James can, with absolute certainty, be named as a participant was three years later, at the holdup of the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri. In this robbery, Jesse murdered the cashier, John W. Sheets, whom he mistook for Samuel P. Cox, the commander of the Federals who had killed Bloody Bill Anderson. While no eyewitnesses could positively identify the two robbers at the time, they did recognize the fine mare the bandits were forced to abandon in their escape. The champion racehorse named Kate belonged to Jesse James.
With each brazen holdup that followed, from Kentucky to Iowa to West Virginia, suspicion centered more and more on the Jameses and Youngers. Still, the boys never failed to elude the posses and the detectives. Jesse invariably wrote a letter to the newspapers claiming he was miles away from the outrage in question, a claim that could be corroborated, he said, “by some of the best men in Missouri.” If he and Frank could be guaranteed a fair trial and protection from mobs—one of Jesse and Frank’s favorite lines—they were more than willing to turn themselves in and face all charges.
This was all fired up by the popular newspaper editor and former Confederate John Newman Edwards, a champion of the Jameses and Youngers. “They are outlaws, but they are not criminals,” he wrote. He praised them and embellished their daring exploits while railing against the law enforcement and detectives who hunted them. Countless Missourians joined Edwards in sympathizing with the bandits, especially after the Pinkerton raid. This even led to an amnesty bill for the brothers being introduced in the state legislature in March 1875—and it almost passed.
Then came the sensational capture and confession of Hobbs Kerry following the 1876 Rocky Cut robbery. He named the Jameses and Youngers, though no one was surprised by this. Still, it was an important confirmation by an actual gang member. Kerry also identified other gang members, including Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts, and Bill Chadwell. These men were not the prizes the Jameses and Youngers were, but two of them had even enjoyed a degree of anonymity. That was over now.
Clell Miller grew up in a prosperous slave-owning family in Clay County, not far from the James farm. At five feet, eight inches tall, he was the shortest of the outlaws. His hair, cut short, was light and curly, and he had modest sideburns. Clell had joined Bloody Bill Anderson’s guerrilla band at the tender age of fourteen, but his introduction to bushwhacker life was short-lived; in his first fight, a disastrous skirmish in Ray County on October 27, 1864, Bloody Bill was shot dead. As Miller rushed to the corpse, a bullet knocked him from his saddle.
Wounded but alive, Miller was recognized by the Federal commander, Colonel Cox, who was an old friend of Clell’s father. This coincidence saved Clell’s life because one of Cox’s men had already decided to execute the boy. Clell spun a tale for the colonel about how he had been “kidnapped” by Anderson’s men, but Cox knew better, and the boy remained a prisoner of war. Later, Miller’s father lied for the boy, as did several neighbors, who vouched for him as a loyal citizen. Clell was eventually released from a St. Louis prison, by which time the war had ended—at least officially.
Clell, who sometimes used the alias Jim Hines, was not a drinking man, but he certainly liked to have a good time. He deeply admired Jesse and would follow him anywhere.
On June 3, 1871, he joined J
esse, Frank, and Cole and robbed the Ocobock Brothers Bank in Corydon, Iowa. The boys rode out of town that day with $6,000, but the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was hot on their trail. Clell was captured a year later by a Pinkerton operative who whisked him off to Iowa, to be put on trial. A host of friends and relatives made the trek north to testify on Clell’s behalf, some swearing that they had been with him in Missouri on the day of the heist. These alibis got Clell acquitted, and the court even paid $150 to cover the costs of his witnesses.
As the bank and train robberies continued, Clell became a favorite suspect, along with his pals the Jameses and Youngers. On December 8, 1874, during a train robbery a few miles west of Kansas City, Miller helped empty out $27,000 from a Wells, Fargo & Company safe. On a still night four months later, a local sheriff and several Wells Fargo men surrounded Miller in a house near Carrollton, Missouri. The outlaw asked the sheriff to come into the house unarmed for a parley. The sheriff agreed, thinking to himself this little talk would end with Clell’s surrender. But the young bandit had something else in mind. He grabbed the officer by the throat, pushed a Navy Colt to the terrified man’s head, and threatened to blow his brains out if he did not cooperate. The sheriff cooperated.
Clell then jumped on the back of a horse, politely shouted, “Goodbye, gentlemen,” and galloped away. The stunned Wells Fargo men got off a few shots but missed their target in the darkness. Clell could be heard laughing in the distance. The Carrollton Journal’s comment on the affair was succinct and to the point: “Missouri outlaws are not to be trifled with.”
Charlie Pitts, whose real name was Samuel Wells, had grown up near Lee’s Summit in Jackson County, Missouri. The Wells family were neighbors and good friends of the Younger family. Charlie and his mother had discovered the body of Henry Younger after he was murdered by Missouri State Militia soldiers. Charlie, fourteen years old, raced to notify the closest Federal command post while his mother remained to watch over the body. Two months later, Charlie’s own father, a civilian, was shot and killed while cheering for the Confederates at the Battle of White Oak Creek.
Charlie and a brother joined the guerrillas (virtually nothing is known of their early bushwhacking days). After the war, Charlie married and moved to Kansas, where he worked as a wagon teamster for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. For a year or more before Rocky Cut, he and Bill Chadwell were frequently seen in the coal, lead, and zinc mining towns of southeastern Kansas and southwestern Missouri, where there was plenty of action and money.
Strongly built, Pitts stood nearly five feet, ten inches tall. He had noticeably short, thick feet (he wore a size 6 boot, quite petite for his body size), and his hands were small and fat, though calloused from hard work. His impressively broad forehead was topped by thick, black hair, and he had a short beard and dark mustache. His knowledge of horses was so respected that, when looking to rob a bank or train, the gang had him take care of their entire stock.
In the summer of 1875, Charlie became smitten by a Mrs. Lillie Beemer, a Cherokee, Kansas, woman described by a newspaper reporter as a “sprightly young grass widow who has a history.” And Mrs. Beemer, too, seemed taken with Charlie—or at least with the money he always seemed to have. Even though he was already married with a family, Charlie continued to pursue Lillie, and they became engaged.
Wanting to impress Lillie, Charlie began making thinly veiled references to his daring robber exploits. Lillie later said Charlie gave her so many details about an April 19 robbery of a Baxter Springs, Kansas, bank she became convinced he was one of the two bandits. She didn’t need any more proof after Rocky Cut, when he handed her a package containing nearly $2,000 in greenbacks and asked her to hold it for him while he was away. Lillie used part of the money to buy a wedding dress. But during Charlie’s absence, Lillie began to have second thoughts about marrying the outlaw.
He returned to Cherokee on July 29 anxious to get married that very night, but the widow refused. The wedding was off, she told him, placing the money back in his hands. Charlie became enraged, and Lillie trembled as he threatened to shoot her down on sight if she married another man. Charlie “carried two large revolvers,” the widow recalled, “and appeared very nervous and restless.”
Charlie apparently rebounded quickly because he reportedly married another gal just three days after the breakup, which may explain why Lillie was so forthcoming with information when the detectives came to question her. In addition to Lillie, the detectives tracked down two of Pitts’s brothers. One broke down under questioning, confessing that Charlie had admitted using part of his Rocky Cut share to purchase mules, harnesses, a brand-new Studebaker freight wagon, and a spring wagon. The widow Beemer also remembered Charlie saying he’d bought a fine team of mules in Missouri. This property was promptly attached and auctioned for the benefit of the Adams Express Company.
With the law closing in, Charlie could not return to his Kansas haunts—especially not after Lillie Beemer gave the authorities a recent photograph of the outlaw. Perhaps worst of all, though, was that Charlie’s dalliances were published in the region’s biggest newspapers. This provided some very interesting reading for his wife, Jennie Wells, as well as her friends and family.
William “Bill” Chadwell fled Kansas with Pitts. Standing six feet, four inches tall and clean shaven, Chadwell was such a robust man that he naturally attracted attention. Born twenty-three years earlier in Greene County, Illinois, he had been named for his father, a farmer. But the senior Chadwell died when Bill was a small boy, and in the 1860s the family migrated to southeastern Kansas. Bill was not a particularly bright teenager, but friends and neighbors thought he was hardworking and inoffensive. He did have a troubling flaw, though, according to a woman who boarded Chadwell for several months in 1871 while he worked on her husband’s farm: the young man could be “easily influenced by the society in which he was thrown.”
The society Chadwell entered a short time later, Missouri’s tin and lead mines, was rough, and only then did he become known as a “desperate character.” One incident from 1874 even made him a local legend. Chadwell and a fellow miner were having a rousing good time around a campfire when his intoxicated pal inexplicably picked up a small keg of blasting powder and tossed it into the flames. Quick as a flash, Chadwell knocked his friend senseless, coolly reaching into the fire for the smoldering keg and heaving it into a ditch. Folks would tell that story for a long time to come.
By 1876, Chadwell’s best buddy was Charlie Pitts. On April 19 of that year, he and Pitts strode into the bank in Baxter Springs, Kansas, and shoved their pistols into the face of the cashier. They walked out with an easy $3,000. Rocky Cut would be another good haul for the pair less than three months later, but, like the other gang members, Chadwell had given Hobbs Kerry a little too much of his personal information. Lawmen easily traced Chadwell to Cherokee County, and, according to one newspaper account, had him surrounded in a cornfield. Incredibly, the outlaw escaped his pursuers.
A later report described how the posses made a surprise appearance at the home of Chadwell’s father-in-law, “old man Robinson,” just south of Fort Scott, Kansas. They found Chadwell’s and Pitts’s wives, but the robbers had ridden away days earlier. One thing was sure: if Chadwell tried to come home anytime soon, the detectives would be all over him.
Most of the time, the James-Younger gang acted like a bunch of good ol’ boys. They liked to have their fun, and they got along relatively well. But there could also be tension and arguments and, most notably, a jostling for leadership. Cole Younger and Frank James, close in age, were good friends, but Cole and Jesse simply tolerated each other. Jesse’s strong personality and sizable ego—not to mention that he was younger—grated on Cole, who had a considerable ego of his own. Cole later said that Frank “would bear acquaintance,” while Jesse “was inclined to be quarrelsome.” In later years, Cole loved to tell the story—over and over—of how he and Jesse nearly “shot it out” once, only to have Frank and others interv
ene.
Jesse and Frank were as different as night and day. Frank, slightly taller than his brother, was also considerably slimmer, almost effeminate looking, with a small neck and a long, narrow face flanked by rather large ears. One journalist described him as “spare but sinewy.” He inherited his distinctive hawklike nose from his mother, who nicknamed her boy “Buck”—a name his friends and gang members called him. Usually quiet and serious, Frank wasn’t interested in being well known. He had two great pleasures. One was reading, and he often spouted lines from Shakespeare and the Bible. The other was tobacco, which he chewed constantly.
A newspaper reporter claimed that Frank never touched liquor, but a former gang member said the outlaw was one of the few in the band who “would get dead drunk.” Frank was “a bad man in a fight,” commented future gang members Bob and Charley Ford, and “he was a great deal more cunning than Jesse.”
Jesse, more handsome than Frank, had an oval face and a slightly turned-up, or “pug,” nose. Easily the most striking thing about his appearance was his stunning blue eyes, which seemed to move constantly—almost nervously. Strong and sturdily built, he sat a saddle like no one else, riding so erect “that he almost leaned backward.”
Jesse was “light-hearted, reckless, devil-may-care,” wrote John Newman Edwards, and he “laughs at everything.” “He had a keen sense of humor,” recalled Charley Ford, “and delighted to humbug people with whom he came in contact.” One of Jesse’s pleasures was striking up a conversation with a stranger and then, ever so deftly, changing the subject to the James gang and seeing what the person happened to think about the outlaws.
Shot All to Hell Page 4