The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel

by Ron Hansen

  Frank James smiled uncharacteristically when he read that and commented that he thought he was guilty of all those crimes but now he was having an argument in his mind about it.

  If the James-Younger gang was beginning to be looked upon by the common people as champions of the poor, it was principally due to Jesse, who was the originator of their many public relations contrivances: the claims that Southerners and clerics were never robbed, the occasional donations to charity, the farewell hurrahs in honor of the Confederate dead. The James-Younger gang stole the treasures from each ticket holder in the Hot Springs Stagecoach except George Crump, of Memphis, who revealed he had been a soldier under the Stainless Banner. When they robbed the Iron Mountain Railroad at Gads Hill, they searched the passengers’ hands for calluses because they had purportedly forsworn harming workingmen or ladies in order to concentrate on “the money and valuables of the plug-hat gentlemen.” After ransacking the express car there, Jesse inserted an envelope into the conductor’s coat pocket and said in practiced words, “This contains an exact account of the robbery. We prefer this to be published in the newspapers rather than the grossly exaggerated accounts that usually appear after one of our jobs.”

  The press release declared: “The most daring on record—the southbound train on the Iron Mountain Railroad was robbed here this evening by several heavily armed men and robbed of dollars.”

  It rehashed their methods and indicated the direction of their flight and the colors of their horses, concluding, “There is a hell of an excitement in this part of the country.”

  They rode west across Missouri, staying on farms overnight, one account saying they “conducted themselves as gentlemen, paying for everything they got,” and that fact alone seemed by then enough to certify that the criminals were the James-Younger gang; and yet when the St. Louis Dispatch printed its story implicating them in the robbery, Major Edwards sent a Western Union telegram to the city editor, saying: “Put nothing more in about Gads Hill. The report of yesterday was remarkable for two things—utter stupidity and total untruth.”

  At the 1872 Kansas City Fair, Jesse and Frank and Cole brushed ahead of an idled line to the entrance gate, fastening red neckerchiefs over their noses. Cole and Frank extracted revolvers from beneath linen dusters and Jesse snatched the ticket seller’s tin cash box. He knelt in the dirt and pilfered over nine hundred dollars in greenbacks and coins as Cole and Frank rotated with irons and menacing looks. A thousand gawkers milled around, amazed by the convincingness of the actors and the skit as a ticket seller ran from his booth and wrestled Jesse for the cash box, beckoning for assistance. Cole knocked a woman aside and shot at the seller and missed but ruined the leg of a small girl. And then the three outlaws shoved through the crowd, unhitched their horses, and cantered off.

  Days later Jesse showed himself at the Harlem boardinghouse, shaved and hair slicked and redolent of witch hazel. He was jovial and jittery and couldn’t sit still. He chewed mints. He was solicitous of his cousin, asked about Zee’s health, her moods, her pastimes. They snacked on sliced bananas and milk. And when she washed the dishes, he eased behind her, girdling her small waist with his hands, then massaging her back and shoulders. He moved her blond hair aside with his nose and kissed her neck. “Oh, that gives me goosebumps,” she said, and clacked a bowl in a bowl. His hands widened their transit over her ribs until his fingers grazed the sides of her breasts and withdrew and then insisted on more sensation of Zee with the next advance. Zee dried her hands and revolved and kissed Jesse on the mouth and they moaned in embrace for a minute. Jesse said, “If someone’s ear was to the door just now they’d think we were moving furniture.”

  She smiled. “Oh, I cherish you so.”

  He caressed her and asked, “Do you mind if I get liberal with you?” and she answered, “Yes,” at the word liberal, and “Yes,” at the end of the sentence.

  “You do mind.”

  “I’m unmarried,” she said, and then it registered that she was stopping a man who robbed and shot at people from fondling parts of her that she would otherwise pay scant attention to. Zee decided to relent when next he asked, but Jesse didn’t ask, he simply scratched his chestnut brown hair and smiled and looked for whatever exit that offered itself. He reached under his coat to the back of his trousers and hauled out a folded Kansas City Times that he flattened on the kitchen table. “If you don’t read another thing in your life, this is what you should last feast your eyes on.” He rapped his knuckles on a newspaper column and Zee bent over the table to see it, drawing a swing of hair away from her cheek.

  It regarded the robbery at the Kansas City fairgrounds as “a deed so high-handed, so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators.”

  Jesse straddled a chair. He blinked and darted and exercised his eyes. He followed a finger to the side of his head and back, and then to his nose, his chin.

  The heels of Zee’s hands had numbed from her lean and hair had again fallen across her brow. She stopped reading and simply said, “The boarders will be coming down for supper in an hour and I’ve got to cook it by myself.”

  “Can’t that man write though? He’s got more ee-magination than Georgia’s got cotton.”

  Zee unsacked hard biscuits onto a plate. She cut tomatoes over a saucepan and juice ran down her wrists. Lard melted and slowly twirled in a skillet over a fire. Jesse grew morose as she ignored him. She saw him glaring at her once and then she saw him reading another newspaper that must have appeared from another pocket.

  He read: “ ‘The Chivalry of Crime. There are men in Jackson, Cass, and Clay—a few there are left—who learned to dare when there was no such word as quarter in the dictionary of the Border. Men who have carried their lives in their hands so long that they do not know how to commit them over into the keeping of the laws and regulations that exist now, and these men sometimes rob. But it is always in the glare of day and in the teeth of the multitude. With them booty is but the second thought; the wild drama of the adventure first.’ ”

  She pulled down a jar from the pantry and kept her back to Jesse as she dipped into the jar with a spoon. He continued: “ ‘These men are bad citizens but they are bad because they live out of their time. The nineteenth century with its Sybaritic civilization is not the social soil for men who might have sat with Arthur at the Round Table, ridden at tourney with Sir Launcelot or won the colors of Guinevere; men who might have shattered the casque of Brian de Boise Guilbert, shivered a lance with Ivanhoe or won the smile of the Hebrew maiden; and men who could have met Turpin and Duval and robbed them of their ill-gotten booty on Hounslow Heath.’ ”

  Zee reached for but overturned a canister of black seasonings that spilled across the counter. Her creased dress as she tidied and the rucked wool stockings at her ankles were all that Jesse could see. He rocked forward in his chair as if his boots were stirruped. He said, “Just let me read on a little bit,” and he moved his finger along as he did: “ ‘It was as though three bandits had come to us from the storied Odenwald, with the halo of medieval chivalry upon their garments and shown us how the things were done that poets sing of. No where else in the United States or in the civilized world, probably, could this thing have been done. It was done here, not because the protectors of person and property were less efficient but because the bandits were more dashing and skillful; not because honest Missourians have less nerve but because freebooting Missourians have more.’ ”

  She said in mute tones, “I don’t care what John Newman Edwards says.”

  “How’s that?”

  She wheeled with storm and sorrow in her face, her hands locked on her ears. “I don’t want to know!” she cried. She even stamped a shoe. And then she hustled out, her skirt inch-raised, and the swinging door clapped her departure.

  Jesse limped over to the stove and clamped a potholder around the handle to move a skillet that was beginning to smoke.

  A general mopines
s and depression began to plague Jesse, and Frank sought to dispel it with a trip to the Hite property near Adairville, Kentucky. However, it was there Jesse learned his sister, Susan Lavenia James, was planning to marry Allen H. Parmer, a man whom Jesse despised. The very idea of Susie’s being private with Parmer so plunged Jesse into despair that he chewed sixteen grains of morphine in a suicide attempt.

  By the time a physician came, Jesse was sleepwalking and there seemed to be no hope that he’d recuperate; but Frank persuaded his younger brother to keep moving by whispering that the Yankees were coming or that Pappy was being strangled in the coffee bean tree. He gave Jesse two empty .44s so he could rage around the room, crying and carrying on until he collapsed with the morphine overdose and all they could do was pray for the repose of his soul. Just about sunrise Jesse abruptly woke up with a powerful appetite, as if he’d experienced only a peaceful sleep, and that evening he journeyed back to Kansas City where he prevailed upon Zee to marry him by convincing her of his complete repentance.

  ON APRIL 24TH, 1874, Reverend William James, an uncle to both parties, joined Zee Mimms to Jesse James at the Kearney home of the bride’s married sister, who also served as the bridesmaid. Zee wore her mother’s white wedding gown though its train and veil had been browned by an attic trunk. They were shivareed in a one-room log cabin near Noel, and then journeyed to Galveston, Texas, accompanied by Frank, who would marry Annie Ralston two months later.

  After a week in Galveston the couple was supposed to steam south to Vera Cruz, but Jesse had boated the Gulf of Mexico with his brother one afternoon and the blue water terrified him. The waves were big as the roofs of houses. He allowed a lead fishing weight to sink and it had gone so deep it stripped all the reel line from his spool. Who could prove it ever bottomed? Maybe it banged up against a China Sea junk at the other end of the world.

  So they leisured at a coastal hotel and Zee peeled and sliced apples for her husband under a broad pink umbrella as a correspondent for the St. Louis Dispatch interviewed the famous Jesse James. The newsman was amiable and cautious and needed little more than social notes but it was nevertheless a catechism and the first of her husband’s characterizations she’d witnessed. His manners were decorous, his charm, while charlatan, was fetching, his sentences were dexterous, his thoughts glanced away from ensnarements like minnows. Zee pared a careful, red-skinned spiral from the fruit and listened with amazement as he braided and invented, and she wondered if she’d underestimated Jesse and scaled him too small, if she was so accustomed to him she hadn’t realized he was still as romantic and remarkable as the near-dead eighteen-year-old she’d nursed. She was ready, that season, to revise all her opinions of him. She had shrunk into a maiden who was deferential and daughterish, and it pleased Zee beyond good sense when Jesse placed his excellent hand atop hers.”

  She saw that the correspondent had apparently asked the groom for a sentiment about his bride, because Jesse looked at her with amorous concentration and said, “We had been engaged for nine years, and through good and evil report, and notwithstanding the lies that have been told about me and the crimes laid at my door, her devotion to me has never wavered for a moment. You can say that both of us married for love, and that there cannot be any sort of doubt about our marriage being a happy one.”

  It wasn’t at all happy for the first year. At summer’s end the couple returned to Missouri and concealed themselves in the sewing rooms and harness sheds of relatives until Jesse could get around to renting and cultivating a farm. Meanwhile she was rooting out a scandal that claimed it was the James-Younger gang that stopped two omnibuses on each side of the Missouri River one Sunday afternoon in August. Even though he was one of the victims, Professor J. L. Allen went so far as to blather, “I am exceedingly glad, as it looks I have to be robbed, that it is being done by first-class artists, by men of national reputation.”

  And on December 8th, five men caused the Kansas Pacific Railroad to brake at the Muncie, Kansas, depot by stacking ties on the tracks. They uncoupled the Pullman coaches and towed the express and baggage cars ahead some two hundred yards before ransacking them of thirty thousand dollars. The express company immediately tendered a reward of one thousand dollars for each outlaw, dead or alive.

  In early January Jesse shook Zee awake and read the verses in the Gospel of Matthew pertaining to the Holy Family’s flight from Herod into Egypt, saying he’d been getting premonitions and thought they ought to fly from Missouri. He was somehow so persuasive that Zee yielded to his proposition and by the next week they were renting a house in Nashville, Tennessee, where they would soon be joined by Frank and his new wife, Annie. (Annie Ralston had told her parents that she wanted to visit relatives in Kansas City and left home with a valise and trunk. Frank met her train and eloped with Annie to Omaha, whence she sent the note: “Dear Mother: I am married and going West.” Her parents had no idea who her husband was, or even that she’d been courted, and her father was understandably shocked when detectives surrounded his house and ordered the occupants out with their hands up.)

  So the James boys were not in residence on the night that Allan Pinkerton’s detectives sloshed through snow to the Kearney farmhouse they called “Castle James.” In order to smoke the criminals outside, the Pinkerton operatives soaked a cotton wad in turpentine, tied it around a rock, and pitched it through windowglass into the kitchen, spritzing flames across the plank flooring. Dr. Samuels got up from his sleep and, when they called for the James boys to give themselves up, yelled out that his stepsons had disappeared, then poked the cotton wad into the fireplace as Zerelda spanked out the fire with a dishtowel. No sooner had the couple done that, however, than a soot-blackened railroad potflare smashed through another windowpane, and when Reuben Samuels swatted it onto the coals with a broom, the cauldron accidentally exploded.

  Shrapnel tore through the stomach of Archie Peyton Samuels, the James’s nine-year-old stepbrother, and the boy died within hours. A maidservant who slept by the pantry had a slice taken from her cheek and swooned for loss of blood. And Mrs. Zerelda Samuels suffered such a mangling of her right hand that surgeons had to saw it off above the wrist.

  The James brothers’ only public reaction to Archie’s death and the maiming of their mother came in an impassioned, misspelled letter from Jesse that appeared in the Nashville Banner in August. He listed once more the misrepresentations about his activities and then centered his fury on Allan Pinkerton, writing:

  Providence saved the house from being burnt altho it was saturated with Turpentine & fiered with combustible materials and the shell did not do fatal work and they fled away to the special train that was waiting to carry them beyon the reach of outraged justice. This is the work of Pinkerton, the man that sed in his card that he just wished to set himself right in the eyes of the world. He may vindicate himself with some, but will never dare show his Scottish face again in Western Mo. and let me know he is here or he will meet the fate of his comrades, Capt. Lull & Whicher met & I would advise him to stay in New York but let him go where he may, his sins will find him out. He can cross the Atlantic but every wave and white cap he sees at sea will remind him of the innocent boy murdered and the one-armed mother robbed of her son (and Idol). Justice is slow but sure and there is a just God that will bring all to Justice. Pinkerton, I hope and pray our Heavenly Father may deliver you into my hands & I believe he will for his merciful and protecting arm has always been with me and Shielded me, and during all my persecution he has watched over me and protected me from workers of blood money who are trying to seek my life, and I have hope and faith in Him & believe he will ever protect me as long as I serve Him.

  Jesse and Zee were then renting a cottage at 606 Boscobel Street under the aliases of J. D. and Josie Howard; Frank leased the Big Bottom farm as B. J. Woodson, and Annie added the first letter of his Christian name to become Fannie.

  Zee gave birth to a son on New Year’s Eve, 1875, and they christened him Jesse Edwards, for his father a
nd the newspaper editor, but discretion caused them to call him Tim, and he was seven years old before he learned his actual name. Jesse would saunter downtown with his son hipped like a paunchy cat or bundled inside his overcoat so that the infant’s bewildered head poked between the lapels. He sat the baby in his homburg hat, he dangled him over rivers to give Zee a fright, he snuck him looks at his pinochle cards, hung a blue derringer over his crib, screwed a unlit cigar in the child’s mouth and practiced ventriloquism in taverns.

  Zee choired at church, she conversed happily with her sister-in-law as they stewed and pickled vegetables or grated cucumbers and onions for catsup, she cooed to her child as he suckled; but alone outside her home she felt shadowed and stalked—footsteps stopped when she did, curtains dropped when she turned her head—and she became so leery and aloof that shopkeepers and neighbors assumed she was snobbish or persnickety or perhaps a little simple.

  Her lone male friend was Dr. John Vertrees, whom Jesse hired to live with Zee and her son during the weeks of absence he attributed to his work as a wheat speculator. (The doctor assumed that was a lie manufactured to cover a secret addiction to cards and horse races, for Mr. Howard dressed like a boulevardier and wore a derringer in a hideaway shoulder harness and once presented to his wife an envelope of diamonds.)

  Little is known about the James brothers’ activities on the road while they resided in Tennessee, except for the summer and autumn of 1876 in which the James-Younger gang committed two robberies, the second of them being the fiasco at Northfield, Minnesota, in September.

  LESS THAN TWO MONTHS earlier they had robbed the Missouri Pacific Railroad of over fifteen thousand dollars near Otterville, Missouri. As the badmen looted the Adams and U.S. express companies, a minister conducted the timorous through canticles and evangelized for the repentance of sins, and a newspaper account later complimented the robbers who “were well versed in their business” and “remarkably cool and courageous throughout the whole affair.”