Thus impressively armed and mounted, the gang ultimately set its larcenous sights on the town of Northfield, about fifty miles south of Minneapolis, which Frank and Jesse, posing as land buyers, went down to reconnoiter. The municipality, with a population of about two thousand, had been founded in 1855 on the banks of the Cannon River, across which a dam had been constructed to power the Ames Mill’s production of prizewinning flour ground from the grain grown in the fertile fields of the surrounding region. Though relatively small, Northfield already boasted two institutions of higher learning: Carleton College (founded in 1866) and St. Olaf College (founded in 1874). More to the point, Jesse and Frank discovered that the town was policed by only a single elderly lawman, that it had no gun shops—just a couple of hardware stores carrying a limited selection of firearms—and that its major financial institution, the First National Bank of Northfield, would be flush with funds generated by the recent harvest.
For the former Confederate guerrillas who made up the majority of the gang, Bill Stiles provided an additional incentive to target the Northfield bank: He informed his companions that one of the town’s leading citizens was Adelbert Ames, whose family owned the eponymous mill that drove the local economy. While a brigadier general in the Union army, Ames had commanded the division that brought down Fort Fisher in Wilmington, North Carolina, the last Confederate seaport to fall. After the war, he had served as governor of Mississippi, where he was known as “Grant’s bayonet governor” and where he had acquired a reputation among die-hard secessionists as a carpetbagger who had plundered the state during Reconstruction. Ames had been impeached when the Democrats came to power, but he had been exonerated of all charges and had eventually retreated to Northfield, where his family, Stiles reported, not only owned the profitable flour mill but also held a substantial interest in the bank. (Adelbert’s brother John was on the board of directors, and his father, Jesse, was a vice president.) To further sweeten the deal, Stiles revealed that Adelbert Ames’s father-in-law was none other than Benjamin F. Butler, who, according to Jesse’s biographer T. J. Stiles (no relation, he claims, to the bandit), had been universally regarded as one of the worst generals in the Union army. As the federal overseer of New Orleans during the war, Butler had earned the nickname “Beast” for his harsh and corrupt administration of that vanquished city. (He was also known as “Silver Spoons,” reflecting the popular calumny that, given half a chance, he would swipe his own grandmother’s flatware.) General Butler, it was widely rumored, had made a killing in kickbacks from a cotton-smuggling operation and had deposited a juicy chunk of his ill-gotten fortune in his son-in-law’s Northfield bank. “Butler’s treatment of the Southerners during the war,” Cole Younger later wrote, “was not such as to commend him to our regard, and we felt little compunction, under the circumstances, about raiding him or his.”
On Wednesday, September 6, the gang arrived in the vicinity of Northfield, traveling in two groups. Frank, Jesse, Charlie Pitts, and Bob Younger took lodgings at the farm of C. C. Stetson on the Faribault Road five miles outside of town. The others, including Henry, upon whom Cole Younger insisted on keeping a watchful eye, stayed at the Cushman Hotel in nearby Millersburgh, where, according to Marley Brant, “it was later reported that one of the men claimed he was ill and stayed in his room during dinner.”
It was on that evening that the outlaws plotted out the next day’s escapade, and if Henry had previously been skeptical of Frank’s boastful conceit of armed robbery being a form of art, he came to appreciate the degree of care and cunning that went into the realization of such a work. It was not simply a matter of riding up to the nearest bank and storming in with six-guns blazing, any more than writing a novel involved sitting down one day with pen and paper and starting to scribble from the top of page one. In both endeavors there had to be inspiration, outlines, rough drafts, false starts, an openness to improvisation, and a thorough conversance with the conventions of the genre. Given all that could go wrong, success in either enterprise could never be guaranteed. What Henry later wrote of the novelist’s métier, he might now have conceded, could well apply to those who aspired to pull off a bank holdup: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
Up in the Adirondacks, life in the shanty that summer had been proving—at least at the outset—every bit as rustic and convivial as William James could have desired. The climate of the mountain retreat, both meteorological and social, proved ideal for “tramping and camping,” and he delighted in the company of his medical buddies. James Putnam and Henry Bowditch were among the select group of William’s oldest and closest friends—it also included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—with whom he relished gossiping “on generalities” though, given the professional proclivities of the Adirondack Doctors, the generalities toward which their chat tended to gravitate were those centering on psychology and neurology.
Despite the fact that they were all more or less contemporaries, the other Adirondack Doctors struck William as far more comfortably settled in their professional and personal lives than he could ever imagine himself being: Henry Bowditch had married a couple of years earlier, and both he and James Putnam were already firmly established in their medical and academic careers. Bowditch, whom William always admired as “honest” and “worthy,” had pursued three years of postgraduate study with the renowned physiologist Karl Ludwig in Leipzig and had returned to the Harvard Medical School to become its first full-time faculty member, charged by President Eliot with revamping the curriculum to emphasize hard science. (Bowditch subsequently became dean of the school and the first president of the American Physiological Society.)
James Putnam, after earning his Harvard M.D., had gone on to Europe for further training, working with Karl von Rokitansky and Theodor Meynert in Vienna, and with the eminent neurologist John Hughlings Jackson in London. The focus of Putnam’s studies was clinical neurology and psychiatry. (He was especially intrigued by the enigma of neurasthenia, which the celebrated French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot once called “the American disease.”) Upon returning to Boston, Putnam, too, had taken up teaching at the Harvard Medical School while serving as “Head of Electrics” at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he pioneered the use of electrotherapy—mild galvanic stimulation—as a cutting-edge modality in the treatment of nervous disorders. By 1876, having established the hospital’s first outpatient clinic for the mentally ill, he had taken the title “Physician to Out-Patients with Diseases of the Nervous System.” Later, he was to become a founding member and president of the American Neurological Society and an early proponent of Freud’s theories in the United States. William, with only a single year of college teaching under his belt, had been doing experimental work back in Boston with both of these rising stars of American medicine. Bowditch ran a laboratory on North Grove Street near the Massachusetts General Hospital, to which James was a frequent visitor and in which he vastly enjoyed “paddling around.” With Putnam, he had been carrying out neurological experiments in a makeshift home lab, sometimes using animals—they had published a paper on “Cortical Stimulation in the Dog”—and sometimes themselves as subjects. William looked to his more experienced colleagues for suggestions and support for his plan to launch a laboratory of experimental psychology at Harvard, and by the end of the summer, he was confident that they would stand solidly behind him in his campaign to get his pet project approved, funded, and equipped. That aspect of his estival agenda, at least, appeared to be a done deal.
It was in the romantic realm that things were proving dicier, for if Jesse James was possessed of an irrepressible need to be known, William lived under the sway of a no less powerful longing to be recognized, though not necessarily in the sense of becoming a household name. The recognition that William craved was the less public—though perhaps rarer—distinction of being fully acknowledged and embraced by another human soul. “James yearned
for someone to perceive and love the authentic, the dark, self that lay somewhere in the deep recesses of his being,” wrote his biographer Linda Simon. In a passage about the human need for God in his essay “The Meaning of Truth,” William spelled out the essence of this special thirst for “recognition”:
The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a godless universe, I thought of what I called an “automatic sweetheart,” meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her. Would any one regard her as a full equivalent? Certainly not, and why? Because, framed as we are, our egoism craves above all things inward sympathy and recognition, love and admiration. The outward treatment is valued mainly as an expression…of the accompanying consciousness believed in. Pragmatically, then, belief in the automatic sweetheart would not work….
In Alice Gibbens, William was discovering that summer a real flesh-and-blood sweetheart with whom he was experiencing, much to his astonishment, the wholly unaccustomed sense of being precisely where—physically, spiritually, and socially—he would most want to be. He delighted in his easy intercourse with Alice as they passed blissful afternoons picnicking on the gentle wooded banks of the east branch of the Au Sable, hopscotching over the boulders of lovely little Johns Brook, and hiking the high trails of Mount Marcy, Haystack, and the daunting Gothics. “As a walker,” Putnam once recalled, James “was among the foremost. He had the peculiarity, in climbing, of raising himself largely with the foot that was lowermost, instead of planting the other and drawing himself up by it, as is so common. This is a slight thing, but it was an element counting for elasticity and grace.” Alice matched William stride for graceful stride.
In the evenings they often joined their friends around a crackling campfire to sing such old Stephen Foster favorites as “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and “Beautiful Dreamer,” to which Alice lent her charming soprano in haunting high harmonies that echoed through the pure mountain air. With the flickering light of the piney blaze illuminating their faces, they lay side by side under the huge starlit dome of the Adirondack sky to gaze up at the same Perseid meteor shower that had provided the heavenly sparks for Jesse and Elena’s lovemaking out in Missouri.
As their summer idyll was drawing to a close, William made a daring declaration: “To state abruptly the whole matter,” he told Alice, “I am in love, und zwar [forgive me] with Yourself.”
Such a bold pronouncement—one that he had never made to any woman—was for William James nothing less than a giant step down the path toward the fulfillment of his father’s matrimonial prophecy. But in the nervous Newtonian mechanics of William’s mind, all thinking tended to produce equal and opposite rethinking. Having laid his amatory cards so audaciously upon the table, the psychologist found himself besieged by a nattering swarm of characteristic second thoughts. “To a certain extent,” he wrote to Alice at summer’s end, “I will suppose you feel a sympathy with me, but I can furnish you with undreamed arguments against accepting any offer I might make.” Among these counterarguments would have been his fragile health, his questionable ability to support a family, his dark moods, his sexual inexperience, and, of course, the dread “family taint.” Though he desperately desired to be both known and loved, William feared that the more any woman truly knew him, the less she might truly love him—a line of squirrel-cage thinking that inevitably brought him around to the even more demoralizing conclusion that the very fact that he so often obsessed over his unlovableness was, in itself, grounds for her not to love him.
Increasingly, a corrosive anxiety came to eat away at William’s simple alpine pleasures, and not just on the romantic front; he also fretted that any day he might pick up a newspaper to read that his brothers—including his “in-many-respects twin” Henry—had been arrested or worse. Despite his deep yearning for an open soul-to-soul relationship with Alice Gibbens, he was reluctant to share these preoccupations with his potential bride, entailing, as such confidences inevitably would have, the unsavory revelation that some of her prospective in-laws were outlaws.
On the morning of September 7, the two bandit parties met up outside of the tiny village of Dundas and headed for Northfield as a unit. They must have made an impressive spectacle, cantering toward the town on their magnificent mounts, their white linen dusters flapping snappily in the morning breeze. Despite a bad night at the mercy of his blocked bowels and the fact that he was virtually a hostage, for the first time in his life, Henry was experiencing, however reluctantly and unexpectedly, the masculine thrill of riding into battle with comrades-in-arms—a delayed taste of what it might have been like to have been the solider (and the man) he had never become. “Henry James’s early stories,” wrote psychiatrist Howard M. Feinstein, “can be read as the creation of a young artist who had become painfully aware of himself as a female consciousness masquerading in the body of a man.” (This was what Leon Edel referred to as the author’s “literary transvestism,” a stance that informed not only James’s writings but his entire existence.) As a boy, Henry had once begged to tag along with William and his chums on some bit of childish mischief, only to have his older brother dismissively remark, “I play with boys who curse and swear.” The author had never forgotten the sting of that schoolyard snub; but henceforth, in the unlikely event that the appropriate occasion should ever present itself, he would now be able to retort: “Well, I play with boys who rob and kill!”
On this occasion the robbing and killing began at about one P.M. when, as planned, Jesse, Frank, and Bob Younger crossed the iron bridge into the center of town, hitched their horses in front of the bank, and strolled across the street to Jeft’s restaurant. After a hearty repast of ham and eggs, the trio moseyed back across Division Street to Lee & Hitchcock’s dry-goods store, located in a large building known as the Scriver Block, which also housed the bank. The outlaws bided their time sitting on some packing crates piled in front of the shop. At two P.M. sharp, they rose from the wooden boxes and sauntered nonchalantly around the corner into the bank. Taking this as their signal to deploy, Cole Younger and Clell Miller left their post at the near end of the bridge and rode slowly into town.
On his way up Division Street, Cole observed that there were far too many people out and about for his taste, including, to his surprise, Adelbert Ames, whom the outlaw recognized strolling with his father and brother. “Look, it’s the governor himself,” Cole remarked to Miller as they trotted by.
Ames overheard this comment and eyed the pair warily. “Those men are Southerners,” he alerted his companions. “Nobody up here calls me governor.”
Arriving at the front of the bank, Clell Miller noticed that his colleagues inside had left the door ajar—the first of the afternoon’s many missteps. While Cole dismounted and made a show of casually fiddling with the girth of his saddle, Miller got off his horse and strolled over to the door to ease it shut. At that moment J. S. Allen, a local hardware dealer who had become suspicious of the tough-looking strangers on their fine-looking horses, walked up to the door and tried to enter the building. Miller grabbed the merchant by the arm to block his way, but Allen had already gotten a glimpse through the window and had immediately discerned what was going on inside. He tore free of Miller’s grasp and took off down Division Street, shouting, “Get your guns, boys! They’re robbing the bank!”
Clell fired a warning shot over the fleeing hardwareman’s head. Across the street, a young medical student named Henry Wheeler, who was lounging outside his father’s pharmacy, saw what was taking place at the entrance to the bank. He, too, began yelling, “Robbery! Robbery!” Then he ducked into the drugstore to get a gun.
Inside the bank, Frank, Jesse, and Bob Younger had good reason to believe, at least at the outset, that everything would go according to plan. There were no customers in the establishment and only three employees on duty: the t
eller Alonzo Bunker, the clerk Frank Wilcox, and the bookkeeper Joseph L. Heywood. The door of the vault behind the counter was wide open, and a massive iron safe sat clearly visible against its back wall. The outlaws approached the counter, drew their guns, and ordered the employees to drop to their knees with their hands in the air. “We’re going to rob this bank,” barked Jesse. “Don’t any of you holler. We’ve got forty men outside.”
The robbers scrambled over the counter and demanded to know which of the workers was the cashier. Each of them replied in the negative, including Heywood, who, strictly speaking, was telling the truth in that the regular cashier, George M. Phillips, was in Philadelphia visiting the Centennial Exposition and had designated the bookkeeper to act in his stead during his absence. Jesse, however, observing that Heywood was the oldest, best dressed, and most well spoken of the group, leveled his pistol at the bookkeeper’s head. “You are the cashier,” he insisted. “Now open the safe, you goddamned son of a bitch!”
But Joseph L. Heywood was not one to be easily intimidated. The thirty-nine-year-old bookkeeper was a veteran of the Illinois 127th Infantry and the treasurer of Carleton College, of which he was also a trustee. Just a week earlier, he had told the president of the college that in the event of a bank robbery, he would under no circumstances hand over the institution’s assets. Indeed, even the most rabidly partisan of Jesse’s biographers have felt compelled to acknowledge the bookkeeper’s extraordinary calm and courage in the face of the gang’s coercions. Looking straight into the muzzle of Jesse’s revolver, Heywood quietly informed the outlaw that he was unable to comply.
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