T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Starting in the twentieth century, the Federal Reserve system would enormously simplify the large-scale movement of money across the country. The twelve branches of the nation’s central bank would hold the reserve accounts of most financial institutions, which would make the settling of accounts between them mostly a matter of bookkeeping. In the 1870s, however, banks depended heavily on cash. With clearinghouses restricted to a few large cities, a primary way to make payments and adjust balances between banks was to ship bundles of currency across the landscape.11 All year long, physical stocks of money moved toward New York, to return in the fall to the spawning grounds in the countryside. And it all went by rail.

  The railroad corporations themselves did not handle shipments of cash; that was left to the express companies, which signed exclusive contracts with the various railways. The United States and Adams Express companies dominated the northeast, the Southern—a wartime spinoff of the Adams—controlled Dixie, and Wells, Fargo & Co. and American Express nearly monopolized business in the West. From offices in countless cities and towns, they moved packages of all kinds—from currency to corpses—via wagon, steamboat, and rail. On the trains, the express material went into the baggage car under the watchful eye of a messenger who traveled alone with the goods. “Do you know what it means to be a messenger?” groaned one of them. “It is to be the whole company—on wheels!” He would track packages, heft them between trains and stations, record deliveries, and update waybills, while riding alone “in a rumble, tumble-down old car,” as another messenger wrote, where “mail, baggage, express matter, dirty oil cans, train boxes and trash of all sorts were mixed up together.” There he sat, because there sat the cash and valuables, tucked in an iron safe.12

  By striking the railroads, the Missouri bandits would slice into the monetary pulse of the country. But there was symbolism to consider as well. In 1872, many Missourians had grown indignant at how railways had been financed. Ironically, the anger was the indirect result of the Radicals’ efforts to distance the state government from the railroad corporations. The state had shelled out $31,735,840 to build several trunk lines, starting in the 1850s, but all but one of them were bankrupt and incomplete in 1865. In disgust, the Radicals had sold the government’s stake immediately after the war, and had written a ban on further state aid into the 1865 constitution.

  Counties, towns, and townships leaped into the funding gap, firmly believing that government subsidies for railroads were essential; private investors lacked both the money and the will to build more lines. Meanwhile, a general belief prevailed that railway links would raise land prices, attract immigrants, and give farmers access to distant, lucrative markets. And to a large extent this idea proved to be correct: the areas where tracks were laid grew the fastest in the decade after the war, in terms of population and land value. Aided by a newly invigorated general incorporation law, more than forty local railroad companies were formed in Missouri between 1866 and 1873, backed by $17,199,950 in local government bonds, as country folk looked forward to high-speed connections to the great railroad network that wrapped the country together.13

  For many, the trains never came. Corruption, incompetence, and overoptimism about the potential profits left some lines half-finished, others entirely unbuilt. More than $2 million was paid to companies that never laid a single rail. Local taxes rose relentlessly; after less than a decade, Missouri’s local-government per capita debt amounted to three times that of its seven neighboring states. In August 1871, Ray County stopped paying the interest on its railroad bonds; a dozen other counties soon did the same.14

  In April 1872, the railroad-bond resistance movement took a dark turn. In Cass County, a ring consisting of county officials and the construction company hired to build the St. Louis & Santa Fe Railroad plotted to issue $229,000 worth of railway bonds that had been authorized in 1860 but never marketed. In a sweetheart deal, the county court changed the subscription from the original beneficiary, the Missouri Pacific, to the St. Louis & Santa Fe and issued them on March 1, 1871. The infuriated public brought pressure to bear, and the county court judges soon found themselves under indictment. After being released on bail, two of them tried to escape to Kansas City by rail; a large, well-organized group of vigilantes stopped their train at the village of Gunn City. The mob shot them (and an innocent friend) to death, and left them beside the tracks.15

  The fury continued. On April 21, 1873, the U.S. District Court in Jefferson City began hearings in a lawsuit brought by outside investors against thirteen Missouri counties and five towns that had stopped paying interest on their bonds. But angry bondholders were the least of the state’s railroad worries. The local lines built after the war put Missourians face-to-face with the most powerful forces in the nation’s economy: the great railway corporations, which absorbed many of the local companies. The mighty Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, for example, leased the Missouri Pacific, the Osage Valley and Southern Kansas, the Lexington and St. Louis, the Missouri River Railroad, and several others. Control of these short lines gave the big corporations a monopoly on the business of rural communities, and they used it mercilessly, keeping local rates high to subsidize their competition on trunk lines for long-distance through traffic. Even local lines that remained independent were at the mercy of the giants for outlets to the national railway network.16

  The power of the great railroads—the first large-scale corporations to emerge in the United States—stunned Americans of all backgrounds and opinions. “Modern society has created a class of artificial beings who bid fair soon to be the masters of their creator,” wrote Charles Francis Adams, Jr., in 1869. “It is but a very few years since the existence of a corporation controlling a few millions of dollars was regarded as a subject of grave apprehension, and now this country already contains single organizations which wield a power represented by hundreds of millions.”17 The Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad earned more than $7 million in 1873. That figure equaled 1 percent of all the nation’s currency and exceeded the total amount of national banknotes circulating in either Missouri or Iowa.18 And the Rock Island could not compare to the greatest of the great: the Central Pacific, which sat astride California; the Union Pacific, which controlled the transcontinental route; or the Pennsylvania and the New York Central, which dominated the East. Their might was represented in an apocryphal story told later about railroad tycoon Edward H. Harriman. On one occasion he arrived at the court of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary, only to be told that the monarch was running late. Harriman smiled. “I, of all people,” he replied, “know the problems of empire.”19

  This power was no abstraction to Missouri farmers. They suffered directly from a conspiracy among the four companies that controlled traffic between the Union Pacific’s terminal at Omaha and the cities of Chicago and St. Louis. In 1870, the Rock Island, Council Bluffs, Burlington, and Hannibal and St. Joseph lines organized the Iowa Pool to prevent competition among themselves. They shared roughly half of their revenue and manipulated rates to control the flow of traffic. They saw to it that the route from Omaha to St. Louis, for example, would be as expensive as the longer passage to Chicago. The details of the pool remained a secret, but the public felt its effects. “Foreign capital comes in,” stormed John Edwards in an angry editorial, “resulting in [railroad] consolidation, the establishment of through or trunk lines, with through rates of freight and discriminations against the very cities whose means have contributed to build them.”20

  Over the course of 1873, the Kansas City Times heralded a new sign of popular resistance: the emergence of the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange. “At the present time the farmers and producing classes are very greatly oppressed,” Edwards wrote on February 19, 1873, “and it is but meet and proper that they should unite and as a body endeavor to bring about a state of affairs more favorable to themselves.” New lodges popped up everywhere in rural Missouri, totaling 1,732 within a year of Edwards’s editorial—and they
spoke out. On July 16, 1873, the Central Council of the Cass County Grange passed a series of resolutions attacking the railroads. “We hold,” the Grangers declared, “that a State cannot create a corporation that it cannot thereafter control.”21

  “There are things done for money and for revenge,” Edwards had written in his “Chivalry of Crime” editorial, “of which the daring of the act is the picture and the crime is the frame it may be set in.” As the summer of 1873 began, Jesse James and his comrades could not help but see that the railroads offered more money, and sweeter revenge, than any target they had hit since Archie Clement’s death. All that remained was the daring.

  • • •

  THE CAPTAINS OF industry had made it easier to rob the captains of industry. As Jesse and Frank James, Cole Younger, and three colleagues prepared for their next raid, technological advancement spared them the time-consuming process of loading pistols and the need to carry a half-dozen revolvers at a time. The all-in-one metal cartridge, containing percussion cap, gunpowder, and lead ball in a single round, had become standard in most firearms (such as the new model .45 caliber Colt’s Peacemaker). With reloading made easy, the crew now needed only two pistols each. They also carried long guns: shotguns or lever-action repeating rifles, such as the older Henry or the Winchester introduced that year.22 But certain necessities remained: securing good horses, mapping the route, reconnoitering the target.

  On Monday, July 21, 1873, the bandits trotted up to their destination, an isolated stretch of the Rock Island Railroad between Council Bluffs and Des Moines, deep in Iowa. The location suited their purpose: the track curved sharply here, which would force an engineer to slow down; it sat only two hundred yards from a bridge, in a shallow cut—a dug-out depression—which would allow them to easily control the occupants from the banks above; and it was far from any house or settlement, the nearest being the Adair signal station, some four miles away. It was there that they had begun their work, breaking into a handcar house to steal a crowbar and a hammer. They bent over the tracks, using the tools to pry out a pair of spikes on the northern side. Then they ran a rope through the holes in the rail and hid themselves some fifty feet away. And waited. Waiting was an art they had each learned in the Sni and Fishing River bottoms, and practiced many times in the years since. No technology would ever eliminate the tedium of their work.23

  At about 8:30 in the evening they heard the chug of the steam engine in the distance, as the five o’clock express train from Omaha approached the Turkey Creek bridge just to the west. The locomotive dragged a coal-filled tender behind it, along with two baggage cars, a smoking car, two more passenger cars, the ladies’ car, and, finally, two Pullman sleepers. In that second baggage car, the bandits expected to find the weekly transcontinental express shipment, sent east each Monday night.

  They watched the train slow sharply as it approached the curve, its speed slackening to just twenty miles an hour. As it drew close, they yanked on the cord, displacing the rail. Immediately the axles groaned as the engine went into reverse and the air brakes clamped tight. With the train screeching toward the fatal break in the track, the Missourians opened fire, spattering the locomotive with bullets. Then the locomotive slipped off the rails and toppled over. In a roaring crash, the tender upended, spilling its load of coal; the first baggage car jackknifed, crashing onto its side; the next baggage car and the smoking car popped off the rails. Out of the wreck the fireman appeared, dragging the inert form of the engineer.

  The six bandits darted forward to their assigned places. Two stood guard outside, one walking along each bank, shooting and cursing. “Get out of sight, damn you,” they bellowed at every face that appeared in a door or window, “or we will shoot you.”24 Two others jumped inside to keep an eye on the passengers, and the last two stepped up into the second baggage car.

  Eyewitness accounts are rarely completely accurate, but the descriptions that emerged leave no doubt that the James brothers and Cole Younger walked the cars that night. When the crash occurred, the occupants of the express car—Assistant Superintendent H. F. Royce, register clerk O. P. Killingsworth, and express messenger John Burgess—piled into one another, leaving Royce with a bloody nose. As they distentangled themselves, they saw two masked men in the door, one of whom promptly yanked off his disguise. “The one whose face was uncovered was of sandy complexion, full whiskered, and wore a broad brimmed hat,” Burgess said.25 His recollection matched that of a couple who saw the gang without masks a day later. “The man who seemed to be the leader,” they reported, had “light hair, blue eyes, heavy sandy whiskers, broad shoulders and a straight, tolerably short nose, a little turned up; a tolerably high, broad forehead, intelligent looking, looked like a tolerably well educated man and did not look like a working man.” This was as precise a description of Jesse James as anyone could ever hope for. They went on to identify Frank James, who “looked like a man well educated, and very polite, not inclined to talk much,” as well as Cole Younger, “large and portly, but not very fleshy; broad shoulders, form straight, is intelligent looking, with large Roman nose, and … made quite a pleasant appearance.”26

  It was Jesse who jumped up into the express car, jerked off his mask with careless bravado, and aimed a revolver at Burgess’s head. “If you don’t open the safe or give me the key,” he snarled, “I’ll blow your brains out.” Burgess gave him the key. After Jesse swung open the heavy iron door, he found $1,672.57, along with another bag for Wells, Fargo & Co., the express firm. The total take would prove to be $2,337, far less than what he had expected. He picked up a U.S. Mail bag and sliced it open, looked inside, then tossed it away. Again he turned on the express messenger. Where’s the rest? he demanded. Burgess could only shake his head. That was all there was, he replied—except for that; he indicated numerous bags jumbled on the floor.27 It was three and a half tons of precious-metal bullion, on its way from Western mines to the gold market in New York.*

  Back in the cars, two other bandits walked down the aisle through a cacophony of screaming women and children. “My God! We shall be killed!” they wailed. “We shall be killed!” The men sat quietly, dazed from the collision that had thrown them all to the floor. Only conductor William Smith thought of resistance. He darted ahead of the robbers, trying frantically to borrow a revolver.

  In the rear he met the fireman Dennis Foley, who had been shoved back onto the train. “Billy,” Foley said sadly, “Jack is dead.” Engineer John Rafferty’s quick reflexes, he explained, had saved everyone—he had reversed power and closed the brakes as soon as he saw the rail move. But after the locomotive toppled over, Foley found Rafferty lying on top of him, dead. His neck had snapped in the crash.28

  Perhaps the calmest group that night, apart from the gunmen, was in the last sleeper car. Twenty-eight aristocratic Chinese students rode together at the end of the train, accompanied by two guardians, on their way to New England colleges. Passenger Randolph Knight noticed that they seemed undisturbed by the mayhem, in contrast to the panicked Americans. One of the guardians, Wong Shung, later gave an interview with such aplomb, an Iowa newspaper wryly noted, that “it appears that their general impression was that this is a pretty hilly country.”29

  The robbery took only ten minutes. Having plundered the express safe, the bandits saddled up and galloped off to the south. They left the bullion behind; the enormously heavy bars would only be a hindrance to carry and a labor to unload without attracting attention. They later learned through the press that the large express shipment of currency they had anticipated had gone out the night before.

  They rode hard toward Missouri, stopping at farmhouses for meals as they had when they were guerrillas. Behind them, Iowa erupted into a frenzy, as special trains carrying detectives and posses rolled back and forth across their path, urged on by a $5,000 reward offered by the management of the railroad.30

  The Rock Island robbery reflected the Missouri raiders’ rising ambitions, which were quickly rewarded with headlines
nationwide. They were not the first to attack a railroad; just three days earlier, the Kansas City Times had noted that the derailing of trains for the purposes of theft had become alarmingly frequent, a complaint echoed in the Railroad Gazette.31 The difference was that most such incidents led to pilfering during the chaos of a wreck; the armed occupation of an entire train was a crime on a much larger scale, and it startled the country. Amid all the outrage and breathless excitement, however, most observers missed the most striking thing about this attack: it was a sign that the bandits had embraced the symbolism created by Edwards and Jesse James after the Kansas City fair robbery. Back then, they had tagged on a political message after the fact; this time, word and deed came together.

  During the robbery in Iowa, one of the two outlaws in the passenger cars began to quote from the “Jack Shepherd” letter to the Kansas City Times. “We’re none of your petty thieves; we’re bold robbers,” he announced, a pistol in each hand. “We’re robbing the rich for the poor. We are Grangers. We don’t want to hurt you; we’re going through the express car.”32 Could anything be more clear? In the rising anger at the railroads, they openly embraced the Robin Hood image, declaring themselves avengers of the working man against the monstrous corporations.