Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies

by David Fisher

  That ten-thousand-dollar reward stirred up a lot of interest. Jesse was no longer that larger-than-life character whose name alone evoked terror. Realizing that there were now few people he could trust, Jesse settled with his family in St. Joseph, Missouri, living there under the name of Thomas Howard.

  To keep his gang close, Jesse let Charley and his younger brother Bob Ford stay with him. The rest of his gang was scattered nearby: His cousin Wood Hite was staying with another gang member, Dick Liddil, at the home of Charley Ford’s sister Martha Bolton. Apparently Martha was a lovely woman, as both Hite and Liddil were said to be smitten with her. There were even some reports that Jesse also had cast his eyes in her direction. But something happened in that house in early December. There already was some bad blood between Hite and Liddil about the split on the Blue Cut job, but the tension erupted one morning and they took to shooting at each other. Both men were wounded, but probably not seriously. Then Martha and Bob Ford came upon the scene, and the twenty-one-year-old Bob Ford shot Hite once in the head, settling the dispute. Jesse James’s cousin was buried in a shallow grave on the property. Liddil and Ford knew they had a serious problem: No one wanted to hazard a guess at what actions Jesse might take when he learned his cousin had been killed.

  Robert Ford was twenty years old when he shot unarmed Jesse James in the back of the head. He later reenacted the deed onstage in the play How I Killed Jesse James—but most people condemned his cowardly action and the play failed.

  In death, Jesse James’s celebrity grew. Only Buffalo Bill appeared as a hero in more dime novels, in addition to numerous “true accounts” and even touring stage shows.

  Charley and Bob Ford were looking for a way out of this mess, and in January they found it. They met secretly with Governor Crittenden and the Clay County sheriff and were not at all surprised to discover they shared some goals, the foremost of which was to rid Missouri, and perhaps the world, of Jesse James. In addition to the ten-thousand-dollar reward, the Ford brothers wanted a blanket pardon for all their crimes, including the murder they were about to commit, as well as a pardon for Liddil. The governor apparently was amenable, although the extent of that amenability would later be debated. Several days later, Liddil surrendered to the sheriff, although no announcement was made to the press so as not to alert Jesse.

  Sometime in March 1882, Jesse began planning his next stickup, finally deciding to rob the bank in Platte City, Missouri. To pull it off, though, he told Charley Ford, he needed some other people. Ford suggested his brother Bob. Preparations were stepped up in late March. The robbery was planned for the first week in April.

  At breakfast on the morning of April 3, Jesse was surprised to find an article in the local newspaper reporting that Liddil had surrendered. Word had leaked out. Oddly, he didn’t ask the Ford brothers if they knew anything about this, a natural question, and the fact that he didn’t ask made them very nervous. Instead, he cursed Liddil as a traitor and declared that he deserved to hang. After breakfast, Jesse had some chores to do. It was a warm day, so he took off his coat. Jesse always wore his guns, but he also wore a coat so no one would wonder why a peaceful man named Tom Howard was carrying two six-shooters. When he took off his coat, he also took off his gun belt and laid his guns on the bed. This was very unusual for him, as he was never to be found without his guns at arms’ length. It was the opportunity the Fords had been waiting for. As they were talking, Jesse suddenly noticed that a picture hanging on the wall was askew and did something completely out of character. He stood on a chair, turned his back to the Fords, and started straightening the picture, or dusting it.

  Bob Ford shot him dead. Both Ford brothers had pulled their weapons; there were reports that Charley fired too and missed. But Bob Ford’s one shot hit Jesse James under his right ear, and he fell. He was thirty-four years old when he died.

  Bob Ford sent wires to the governor and the sheriff, claiming the reward, then both brothers surrendered to the local marshal. As word spread that Thomas Howard was actually the feared killer Jesse James, the people of St. Joseph rushed to the house to catch a glimpse of his body, stunned to discover that the most wanted man in the country had been living comfortably among them.

  The assassination of Jesse James made national headlines. The popular Police Gazette immediately published this fanciful illustration (above left). The photo of the outlaw in death became a national sensation, and crowds flocked to see the house in St. Joseph where he was murdered.

  This softcover edition from Chicago’s Stein Publishing House was typical of the numerous books rushed into print after James’s murder.

  The Fords were arrested. Two weeks later, within hours, both men were indicted for the murder of Jesse James, pleaded guilty, were sentenced to hang, were pardoned by Governor Crittenden, and walked out of the prison free men. Rather than the ten-thousand-dollar reward, they ended up with about six hundred, as the governor divided the money among many deserving parties—himself included. And, rather than being acclaimed for finally bringing Jesse James to eternal justice, the Fords were scorned as cowards for shooting him in the back.

  Within a month of Jesse’s death, the newspaperman John Edwards began corresponding with the governor to arrange Frank James’s surrender. For the next three years, Frank fought charges accusing him of committing numerous crimes in several states. He was tried on only two of the murder-robberies and was acquitted. Many respectable men testified to his good character. In February 1885, he was cleared of all charges. For him, the Civil War and all the battles that followed finally were over.

  Charley and Bob Ford toured in a theater production entitled The Brother’s Vow; or, the Bandit’s Revenge, in which they reenacted the murder of Jesse James. Initially it was quite successful, but over time audiences lost interest, and it closed, leaving them almost broke. In 1884, Charley Ford, addicted to morphine and suffering from tuberculosis, and distraught at being considered a coward, committed suicide. Bob Ford held several jobs, earning some money posing for photographs with rubes in dime museums, billed as “the man who killed Jesse James.” By 1892, he was running a tent saloon in Creede, Colorado. A man named Ed O’Kelley shot and killed him there after an argument.

  Frank James held several jobs, even touring with Cole Younger for a bit in a theatrical production called The Great Cole Younger and Frank James Historical Wild West Show. Frank James died of a heart attack in 1915.

  The legend of Jesse James has been told in almost every American cultural medium—but two often-asked questions have never been satisfactorily answered. One: Was Jesse James a hero of the Old South, fighting against the evils of Reconstruction and the carpetbaggers’ intent to profit from the destruction of war, or was he an outlaw who took advantage of the political situation? When he raged, “Just let a party of men commit a bold robbery, and the cry is hang them, but [President] Grant and his party can steal millions, and it is all right,” was he simply an actor playing a role created for him by John Edwards, or did he really mean it? The answer, most probably, is a bit of both. He started out with a set of skills perfected in the war; then he clearly embraced and enjoyed playing the noble character fighting for Southern dignity, and perhaps at times he truly meant it. But even after that was no longer relevant, he continued robbing and killing. He knew no other way.

  The second and equally intriguing question is, Why would he take off his guns and turn his back on two men he did not know especially well and probably didn’t trust? He never went anywhere without his guns. Historians have offered a variety of explanations, describing the act as everything from foolhardy to courageous. Bob Ford once said he thought it was a trick: that Jesse wanted to make it appear that he trusted them so that he might later take action against them. Others have suggested that perhaps Jesse was tired and careless and willing to let fate play its hand. As he himself once wrote, “Justice is slow but sure, and there is a just God that will bring all to justice.”

  DOC HOLLIDAY

 
Desperate Measures

  Although it reads like an advertisement for a movie, this is a true story: The gunslinger Doc Holliday spent most of his life preparing to die, until he finally found a reason to live—and it almost killed him.

  Without a doubt, John Henry Holliday was the meanest, toughest, and probably the most violent dentist in American history; although, truth be told, he definitely could fill a cavity. His close friend Wyatt Earp described him as “a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit … the most skillful gambler, and the nerviest, fastest, deadliest man with a six gun I ever saw.”

  Unlike the other famous gunslingers of the Old West, John Holliday was a wealthy, well-educated man. His father, Henry Holliday, was a soldier, druggist, and planter who had fought the Indians in 1838, the Mexicans in 1846, and the Union army in 1861, rising to the rank of major before being forced by illness to resign his commission. His mother, Alice, was a classic Southern belle. His cousin, Mattie Holliday, who lived to be one hundred, served as the model for the character Melanie in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. John Henry was born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1852, but a decade later, the family, fleeing General Sherman’s March to the Sea, moved to Valdosta, Georgia, where Henry Holliday eventually was elected mayor. When John Henry was fifteen years old, his mother died of tuberculosis, the same disease that would later kill his adopted brother and shape the course of his own life.

  Nothing about his childhood suggested that he would one day wind up in the most famous gunfight in American history, the showdown at the O.K. Corral. John Henry received a classical education, studying grammar, mathematics, French, Latin, and ancient Greek. When it came time for him to pick a career, dentistry seemed an appropriate path to follow; his cousin had founded Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery. He graduated from there in 1872, after writing a thesis on diseases of the teeth, and joined a practice in Atlanta. Under normal circumstances, he would have gone on to have a fine life: He would have married a genteel woman and started a family; at night, he would sit by the parlor fire in his comfortable Georgia home; and he would die in old age, surrounded by loved ones.

  Instead, he started coughing.

  In 1873, when he was only twenty-two years old, John Holliday was diagnosed with tuberculosis, at that time a fatal disease. The cause wasn’t known, and there was no cure. He consulted the best doctors in Atlanta, and their opinion was unanimous: The only treatment was to move to a drier climate, which was believed to prolong life. As it turned out, he might well have had another reason to leave Georgia: It’s possible that he had shot his first victim.

  According to the story, written years later by lawman-turned-journalist Bat Masterson, John Henry and some friends came upon a group of black teenagers enjoying a popular swimming hole on the Withlacoochee River. Supposedly the two groups got into an argument, and Holliday produced a double-barreled shotgun. He shot and killed two of them and wounded several others, although his family insisted the story wasn’t true and he had simply fired over their heads to scare them away.

  Legends are born of reality, which is exaggerated and embellished until it shines brightly. Although the actual facts of that day are hazy, the meaning is clear: Even at a young age, there was a dark and dangerous side to John Henry Holliday.

  Whatever the reason, Holliday moved to Dallas and opened a dental practice. His skills were obvious: At the Dallas County Fair, he won several awards, including “best set of teeth in gold.” Dallas was a booming cow town, the railroad making it a hub for shipping grain, cotton, and buffalo hides. It might have been a smart place for a skilled dentist to set up shop, but not too many people there were willing to risk their lives visiting a dentist infected with consumption. As he soon discovered, though, there was another trade at which he excelled: John Holliday was a gambling man. As Masterson wrote, “Gambling was not only the principal and best-paying industry of the town at the time, but it was also reckoned among its most respectable.”

  The cards loved him. He possessed two traits that were essential for any gambler: intelligence and a poker face. If there was a single benefit to living with a death sentence, this was it: Nothing seemed to really make a difference to him. Win or lose, he was going to be dead in a few years. That knowledge made it easy for him to hide his emotions and draw the next card—or, when necessary, draw his gun.

  When money and alcohol are put on the same table, tempers can get mighty thin. The first time a gambling man backed down in the Old West, he might just as well keep moving, because people would learn about it and wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage. In 1875, Holliday was arrested after trading wild shots with saloon keeper Charles Austin. He was acquitted but, supposedly, a few days later, got into another gunfight and this time killed “a prominent citizen.” There is at least some evidence that this incident was just a story Holliday concocted to impress people. Apparently it worked, because by the time he settled in Jacksboro, Texas, in 1876, he was said to be carrying two guns and a knife and had become known as “the Deadly Dentist”! Allegedly he had to hightail it out of Jacksboro after killing a black soldier from nearby Fort Richardson—with the army, the Texas Rangers, the US marshal, the local sheriff, and a posse of citizens in hot pursuit, trying to collect the reward placed on his head. There actually may be some truth to that one, as there is a record of a Private Jacob Smith being shot around that time by an “unknown assailant.”

  Gamblers are always chasing the next big pot, and Holliday moved often, usually carrying with him some tale of violence for which there was little evidence. Supposedly, for example, while dealing faro in Denver under the alias Tom Mackey in 1875, he slashed the throat of a bully named Buddy Ryan. He also is credited with three killings in Cheyenne. It is possible; Masterson was blunt in his assessment, pointing out, “Holliday had a mean disposition and an ungovernable temper, and under the influence of liquor was a most dangerous man.” True or not, these stories served a purpose: Holliday had figured out pretty quickly that a reputation for being good with a gun would often make people hesitate before drawing on you.

  While on the trail, John Henry hadn’t forgotten his dental training, and when he found himself staying in one place for more than a short spell, he’d hang out his shingle, which gave him the nickname by which he would eventually gain renown, “Doc” Holliday.

  A gambler’s place of work is the saloon, and nobody ever claimed that Doc Holliday didn’t enjoy a drink or two or several more. Why not—one thing he knew for sure was that it wasn’t the whiskey that was going to kill him. He was what we’d now call a functioning alcoholic, with a hair-trigger temper. In a barroom fight in Breckenridge, Texas, he beat a gambler named Henry Kahn with his walking stick. Kahn returned later that day and shot Holliday. His wounds were so serious that the Dallas Weekly Herald quite prematurely reported his death. Upon his recovery, he settled in the rowdy town of Fort Griffin, where only a few years earlier a band of Kiowas had attacked a wagon train and killed seven men. But for Doc Holliday, that’s where the tall tales ended and his life as an American western legend took root.

  While working as a card dealer at the pugilist John Shanssey’s saloon in 1877, he met a truly formidable woman named Mary Katherine Horony, a curvaceous twenty-six-year-old dance-hall girl and sometime prostitute better known as “Big Nose Kate,” who would be his primary female companion for the rest of his life. The Hungarian-born, well-bred, and well-educated Kate was a fine match for him: She didn’t seem to give two hoots about very much, either, especially what people thought of her. She was tough, stubborn, and hot tempered and often told people that she belonged to no man, nor to any madam—she worked as a prostitute because she liked both the benefits and the freedom. And, ironically, she had already been married once—to a dentist, who had died.

  This portrait of thirty-one-year-old Doc Holliday was taken only months after the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.

  Soon after Holliday and Kate got together, she had an opportunity to show how m
uch she cared for him: She got to break him out of prison. In one version of the story, Doc had been playing poker with a gambler named Ed Bailey, who insisted on sifting through the discards in violation of the rules of Western Poker. Doc finally had had enough and claimed the pot. Bailey pulled his revolver, but before he could fire, Holliday whipped out his knife and gutted him. In another version, Doc was actually arrested for “illegal gambling.” Whatever the reason for his arrest, he was put under guard in a locked hotel room because the town didn’t have a jail. In the first version, a lynch mob was forming, and Kate was forced to take action to save his life. In both stories, she set fire to an old shed behind the hotel. When the fire threatened to engulf the town, everyone rushed to fight it. With their attention diverted, Kate broke Doc out of the hotel. Some say she pulled two six-shooters on the jailer and forced him to open the door. Guns or no, she got him out, and they took off for Dodge City.

  John Shanssey also introduced Doc Holliday to deputy US marshal Wyatt Earp. Shanssey and Earp had met several years earlier, when the future lawman had refereed one of the future saloon man’s bouts. This time, Earp had come to “the Flats,” as the town near Fort Griffin was called, hunting a train robber named “Dirty Dave” Rudabaugh. Perhaps at Shanssey’s request, Doc told Earp what he knew: While playing cards with Rudabaugh a few days earlier, he’d heard the man say something about going back to Dodge City. Earp sent that information by telegraph to Dodge City’s assistant deputy, Bat Masterson, who eventually made the arrest. But that encounter marked the beginning of the most important relationship of Doc Holliday’s life.