The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  The answer to this pointed query was not to be forthcoming—at least not for the moment—since no sooner had it escaped Henry’s lips than the coach lurched violently and, with a piercing screech of iron wheels on iron rails, ground shuddering to a halt. There was a loud hiss of steam outside, then a portentous silence.

  Somewhere up ahead, the nervous nickering of horses broke the stillness of the hot night air. Peering out the window of the coach to see if any station was apparent, all Henry would have been able to discern would have been the stark rock walls of a construction cut, void of any sign of human habitation or commerce. His fertile imagination might have leaped to wild Indians, herds of bison, or flash floods.

  His fellow passengers, however, being far better acquainted with the hazards of the route, were quicker to comprehend the true nature of their plight.

  “Train robbers!” shouted one of the Chicago drummers.

  Contrary to the tenets of American mythology, the art of the train robbery was not invented by the James Gang; that dubious distinction is more properly accorded to the Reno brothers of Seymour, Indiana, who first struck an Adams Express car in 1867. Yet just as it was J. S. Bach who codified and extended the conventions of European music without having created them de novo, so it was the James Gang who perfected the techniques of robbing trains and with whom the classic methodology, even as early as 1876, was already most strongly identified in the popular imagination.

  Furthermore, the so-called James Gang was only a loosely organized and ever-shifting cadre of personnel, a larcenous pickup ensemble of which the nucleus was the James brothers themselves—Frank and Jesse—and the Younger brothers—Cole, Jim, and Bob. On July 6, 1876, these core brotherhoods, minus Jim Younger and augmented by Clell Miller, Sam Wells (alias Charlie Pitts), and William Stiles (alias Bill Chadwell), along with a neophyte outlaw named Hobbs Kerry, had assembled near California, Missouri, and ridden west in two groups toward the town of Otterville in what is now Cooper County. The following afternoon, as the Number 4 Express was chugging out of Kansas City, the members of this odious octet had converged a couple of miles east of a forbidding gash in the railroad bed known locally as Rocky Cut, where a bridge was being constructed across the Lamine River. Because of this excavation, trains passing through the cut were obliged to slow to a crawl. A lone watchman was stationed at the construction site, his main job being to cross over and inspect the structure before and after the passage of each train.

  As the sun was setting behind the bridge, Bob Younger, Sam Wells, and Clell Miller burst out of the woods and accosted the hapless watchman at gunpoint. “You ain’t going to hurt me,” he whimpered as they blindfolded him. “What would we want to hurt you for?” replied one of his assailants. “We want that money, that’s all we care for.”

  While the other members of the gang took up positions along the banks of the cut, Bill Stiles and the rookie bandit Hobbs Kerry stayed behind and piled a barricade of railroad ties across the tracks.

  It was shortly after ten in the evening when the Number 4 Express finally approached the cut. The blindfolded watchman was shoved across the rails to flag it down with his lantern. According to one witness, “the engine climbed up on the ties, rising fully ten inches off the track and then stopped and of its own weight settled back on the track.” Stiles and Kerry quickly scurried to the rear of the train to pile additional ties on the tracks behind the caboose, effectively eliminating the possibility that the engineer might make an escape by throwing the train into reverse.

  Owing to the summer heat, the side door of the express car had been left open. Three of the bandits quickly boarded while two others climbed onto the engine, whooping and firing their revolvers into the air.

  The commotion was precipitating a mad scramble inside the coaches: The terrified travelers hurried to divest themselves of potential booty, the men sliding greenbacks and gold eagles into their shoes or under their reclining seats, stuffing their pocket watches and jewelry into their baggage on the overhead mesh racks or dropping them into the watercooler, the stove, even the mouths of the brass spittoons. The women—those of whom who had not fainted outright—shrieked or sat paralyzed in their seats. From up the line in the express car came muffled shouts and bangings, then a volley of sharp pistol reports. “The passengers,” the baggage master, Peter Conkling, later recalled, “had every reason to believe a massacre was in progress.”

  Almost immediately, the door of Henry’s car swung open to reveal a pair of masked gunmen. Both bandits were armed with big Colt Navy revolvers; the shorter of the pair also cradled a Winchester carbine across his chest.

  “Okay, we’re comin’ in and goin’ through you all,” announced the taller of the duo, “so be quick, damn you, and hold up your hands!” His strong voice boomed through a mask of diaphanous white muslin, apparently fashioned from a lady’s handkerchief or undergarment. Next to the dirty bandanna of blue calico carelessly knotted over the bridge of his partner’s nose, this delicate swatch gave the speaker a strangely refined air. In his left hand he toted a two-bushel wheat sack, which he held aloft as he strode into the car.

  “Now, I wouldn’t advise any of you to hold back on your donations,” he warned. “We’ll have your money anyway, and if you get smart, we’ll have your life as well.” The bandit punctuated this harsh caveat by sending a staccato triplet of pistol blasts ringing into the stamped tin ceiling of the coach. (In fact, despite these well-rehearsed theatrics of terror, the gang seldom made off with any significant loot from the riders of the trains they attacked. Such tactics were employed less as a way of increasing the haul from the holdup than of ensuring that the passengers, who of course outnumbered the outlaws, would remain cowed and distracted while the real work of the heist went on up in the express car.)

  In the long annals of the James Gang’s larcenous exploits, the train robbery at Rocky Cut is best remembered for the unprecedented behavior of one of the passengers, the Reverend J. S. Holmes of Bedford, New York: “To comfort the frightened passengers and crewmen, huddled under the guns of the guards,” wrote Jesse James’s biographer William A. Settle, Jr., “a minister who had been on board the train prayed loudly that the lives of all might be spared. In the thought that his prayers might go unanswered, he exhorted those about to be killed to repent of their sins while there was yet time. Following the prayer, the passengers mustered enough spirit to sing religious songs, an accompaniment to robbery odd enough to unnerve most bandits.”

  The outlaw pair, however, appeared not in the least unnerved by this impromptu display of Christian fervor. With the nonchalance of conductors taking tickets, they advanced along the aisle, relieving passengers of pocket watches, cash, rings, and brooches, all of which they crammed unceremoniously into the waiting grain sack.

  Elena Phoenix kept her eyes fixed on the lean figure of the leader as he made his way toward her through the acrid stench of gunpowder hanging in the air. Only when he was standing directly over her did she drop her gaze from his angular face. Without a word, the bandit reached down and began to unfasten the clasp of her double chain of amber beads. His touch at the nape of her neck lingered as he gently brushed aside the fine golden wisps of hair above her collar with the muzzle of his pistol. At this criminal caress, Elena lifted her soft sea-green eyes to the hard steel-blue orbs of her assailant.

  “Fear,” wrote William James in his Principles of Psychology, “has bodily expressions of an extremely energetic kind, and stands, beside lust and anger, as one of the three most exciting emotions to which our nature is susceptible.” Just which of these exciting emotions Elena was experiencing—or what puissant admixture of all three—is impossible to determine from our historical distance. Henry James, observing from the edge of his seat, saw her lips part and her bosom heave with what at the time he took to be a dry gasp of terror, but what he later surmised might have been the sign of some more succulent response. He was conscious of something like an electrical discharge in the air between Elena
Phoenix and the outlaw, a palpable frisson to which he could not help but respond with a sympathetic shiver.

  The gunman, as if sensing—and resenting—Henry’s vicarious participation in this charged moment, spun quickly on his heel and thrust his revolver directly into the writer’s face. “All right, mister! Fork out!” barked the bandit.

  Henry James, who had doubtless never imagined himself the victim of any crime more violent than plagiarism, obediently dug out his pocket watch and struggled to unfasten its gold chain from his waistcoat, but the outlaw impatiently ripped it away, along with a ragged swatch of the vest’s patterned silk lining.

  To Henry’s surprise, as he later recounted to his brother William, he found that he was not afraid, at least not in the pulse-pounding, sweat-dripping fashion of the dime novels. Rather, staring up into the barrel of the bandit’s cocked six-shooter, he experienced only an overwhelming desire to be in Paris. It was the same “irresistible longing” he had felt often enough in recent weeks, but seldom with the intensity it carried now. He could almost smell the floral perfume of the Luxembourg Gardens wafting across his table and mingling with the aroma of fresh-baked croissants in the Odéon bistrot where he had so often taken his petit déjeuner on his most recent tour of the continent.

  The cold steel of the bandit’s revolver against his right temple prodded the writer abruptly back to the less civilized side of the Atlantic. Henry hastily deposited his wallet and gold tiepin into the open sack. Yet the masked desperado still seemed unsatisfied. “I’ll take the book, too,” he said, motioning with his pistol toward the handsome leatherette portfolio perched on Henry’s lap.

  Henry always considered his written impressions to be “property,” and it would be difficult to overstate the importance of his notebooks to him. “If one is to undertake to tell tales and report with truth on the human scene,” he wrote in later life, “it could but be because notes had been from the cradle the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy…to take them was as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognize, to remember.” However nonchalantly he might have parted with his pocket watch or billfold, Henry James was not about to willingly chuck the accumulated literary capital of his entire western journey into a grimy grain sack. He demurred with a tight shake of his head.

  “Seems to me you may have missed the gist of my little sermon back there,” the robber hissed. Through clenched teeth, he added, “Now either you hand over that item pronto, or I’m going to blow your damn balls out your asshole.”

  This graphic threat, underlined by the presentation of the Colt’s barrel at the appropriate anatomical altitude to make good upon it, was sufficient to loosen Henry’s grip on his precious portfolio—and very nearly on his precious consciousness as well.

  “I thank you very kindly, friend,” the bandit drawled with a deep bow, holding his prize aloft. Then, to Henry’s unfeigned horror, rather than depositing it into the wheat sack and moving on, the outlaw began flipping through the notebook with surprisingly delicate fingers, stopping at the page on which Henry had most recently been scribbling. “‘The softer facet of her being,” the outlaw intoned, “is accentuated by a fashionable mauve frock, which blossoms with fantastic frills and flounces and from which a daring flash of lemon-yellow petticoat peeps fetchingly at the ankle….’”

  Neither the reader nor anyone within earshot of his leering, lip-smacking recitation had any difficulty identifying the subject of these observations. Elena Phoenix stiffened in her seat, staring straight ahead and coloring strongly at this public enumeration of her charms.

  The author of the portrait colored no less strongly. Henry squirmed in his seat and massaged his forehead with his palm. This train robbery, so promising at the outset as a thrilling vignette of Western history on the hoof, now seemed to be turning into a major literary embarrassment. “That isn’t meant to be read,” he protested. “Those are merely notes.”

  The bandit ignored the author’s complaint. “Sounds to me,” he went on, closing the book and addressing himself to the blushing Elena Phoenix, “like you’ve got yourself a real admirer here.”

  Elena kept her eyes forward, her chin high. “I don’t believe Mr. Jones appreciates my views, and I’m not certain I appreciate his.”

  “Ah, but I appreciate your views just fine,” said the bandit, chuckling. “Front, side, and back!” All of this was very much a public performance, another jaunty bit of terrorist theater carefully calculated to burnish the outlaw’s growing legend.

  Elena, who was not unaccustomed to inspiring such attempts at roguish repartee, merely sighed and muttered, “Well, I’m afraid I’ve seen quite enough of you.”

  The outlaw stepped to Elena’s side and placed the notebook gently on her lap.

  “I just don’t believe that’s true,” he said, raising his hand to his cheek. “Doesn’t every Christian woman, deep down, long to gaze upon the very face of evil, to behold the marks of sin and degradation upon the human visage, to confront the naked countenance of hell?”

  With a dramatic flourish, he ripped off his sheer muslin mask.

  Elena Phoenix, the very portrait of arch composure in her recent conversational contretemps with Henry James, could now, staring up at the handsome features so familiar from every post office rogues’ gallery and train depot wall west of the Mississippi, find for vocal expression only a shrill schoolgirl squeal: “Jesse James!”

  If the young woman’s composure cracked in registering the presence of the notorious bandit, that of Henry James positively crumbled. The author, who was to become one of the masters of the nineteenth-century ghost story, looked as if he had just seen one. “My God!” he blurted. “It’s Robbie!”

  At this ejaculation, the outlaw turned and faced the writer again, squinting hard to penetrate the glossy brown-black beard that obscured Henry’s facial features nearly as effectively as the muslin mask had concealed his own. His mouth worked dumbly, twisting into an expression that on any countenance less formidable than that of the most dreaded desperado in the country might have been taken as the grin of a halfwit. The silly smirk seemed to take on a life of its own, spreading slowly into a smile as wide as all the West.

  “Holy shit!” hollered Jesse James. “It’s Harry!”

  Chapter Two

  The young woman who introduced herself to Henry James as Elena Phoenix was born Elena Brownlee Hite on August 28, 1853, in Hartford, Connecticut, the only child of Asa Billings Hite and his wife, Amelia. As a young man, Asa Hite had enjoyed remarkable success in Hartford’s burgeoning insurance industry, first as a salesman for the Aetna, then as a manager at Connecticut Mutual Life. He had married well and made the most of it by becoming an early investor in the Hartford & New Haven Railroad, which had opened its books in 1835. By the 1850s, when Elena was born, Asa Hite had already amassed a considerable fortune, most of it in railroad stocks and bonds. Elena grew up in the fashionable Lord’s Hill district of that prosperous New England city (a prominent neighbor was Junius Morgan, father of the fabled financier J. P. Morgan). She attended Miss Draper’s Seminary and later the Hartford Female Seminary, founded by Catharine Beecher, the older sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame.

  It might be tempting to credit Elena’s subsequent fierce advocacy of female emancipation to this early immersion in feminist ideology, but it is important to note that Catharine Beecher, though considered progressive by many in her day, actually represented the conservative wing of the women’s movement. Her educational agenda, rather than being geared toward preparing women to achieve social, political, and economic equality with men, was based on the assertion that managing a home, raising a family, and teaching—the only occupations Miss Beecher deemed appropriate for women—were every bit as important and challenging as running a business or a nation. (In 1871 Beecher signed a petition against female suffrage, arguing that women gaining the right to vote would only cause “the humble labors of the family and school to be still mor
e undervalued and shunned.”)

  Despite its emphasis on “domestic economy,” Miss Beecher’s curriculum was surprisingly rigorous: Elena studied algebra, chemistry, ancient and modern history, rhetoric, French, Greek, and Latin, along with draftsmanship, written expression, and physical education, which consisted of calisthenics, archery, and “light chest weights”—all designed to improve “the grace and carriage” of the young seminariennes.

  Academically, Elena proved a superior student, though one of her teachers reported that she could be “headstrong,” and another described her as being occasionally “sullen.” Her fellow students apparently found her somewhat standoffish—one even called her “haughty”—though from Elena’s viewpoint, this was merely a misconstruction of her natural reserve, even shyness, at that awkward age. For whatever reason, she did not make any close friends at Miss Beecher’s seminary (or, if she did, those adolescent bonds unraveled abruptly and permanently in the wake of her subsequent transgressions).

  At home, even in her teens, Elena was virtually the mistress of the household. Amelia Hite, never a robust woman, had nearly died in giving birth to her daughter, leaving her a semi-invalid and effectively terminating conjugal relations with her husband. (Elena once described her mother, who, in addition to her other infirmities, was most likely addicted to laudanum, as “a living ghost haunting her own house.”) Consequently, Elena received considerably more hands-on training in domestic economy than even Miss Beecher would have prescribed for one of such tender years. In an era when young women were often little more than “ornaments in their fathers’ parlors, waiting,” in the apt phrase of Brown University professor Nancy Hoffman, Elena became something of a surrogate spouse to her father, taking on—along with much of the responsibility for running the household and overseeing her mother’s care—many of the social obligations and prerogatives of a Victorian wife. Asa Hite, when not traveling on “railroad business,” as he did widely and frequently, was bent on entertaining the upper crust of Hartford society and came to depend upon Elena to help arrange the lavish dinner parties through which he hoped to secure a place among the city’s better-established families.