There was one complication, however. The newly symbol-conscious bandits sent another signal that evening in Iowa, one that echoed even more loudly than their words. It was their choice of disguise. When the passengers and crew scrambled off the floor after the crash, they looked up at the doors and saw that their attackers were “masked in full Ku-Klux style.”33
PLUNDER REMAINED the bandits’ prime motivation, but they now displayed a growing determination to make statements with their crimes. After all, this is a large part of why posterity remembers these men out of history’s many forgotten gangsters. But the James brothers and their confederates did not yet have a completely coherent political program when they struck the Rock Island Railroad in 1873. Just as individuals often work through their thoughts in the act of speaking, the bandits shaped their message in the very effort of expressing it. Their symbolism was jumbled, their statements confusing.
Still, it is possible to locate their still-emerging place in the political landscape. Consider, for example, the arguments of historian David Thelen. He examined the bandits’ Robin Hood language in light of Missouri’s railroad agitation, and came to the conclusion that they were defenders of traditional society against outside forces of industrialization. The state’s tightly knit fabric of self-sufficient farmers had been slashed by interfering Radicals, he writes, who introduced the market economy where it was not wanted. Modernizing Republicans “tried to convert farming from a traditional way of life into a profitable business.” Radical promoters, he argues, forced railroads and full-fledged capitalism onto an unwilling populace, which endorsed Jesse James and his comrades in their armed resistance. “At the center of popular support for the bandits,” Thelen claims, “was the belief that they sought to reunite the community and reassert tradition.”34
Thelen’s thesis offers a useful place to start, but it requires serious correction. Missourians were not self-sufficient frontier farmers who resisted the market economy. Perhaps some remote areas existed in relative isolation, but the Missouri River valley—the home of the James-Younger group and virtually all of their supporters—had long been a center of profit-oriented commercial farming. Robert James had grown hemp for distant markets in the South as early as the 1840s. Cole Younger’s father, Henry, had been a wealthy rural entrepreneur. Like most of the wartime guerrillas from western Missouri, their families had owned a larger-than-average number of slaves, whom they rented out or put to work in raising cash crops. The bandits’ families and supporters were among the most market-minded farmers in the state. If anything, the Union victory drove them unwillingly back toward self-sufficiency when their commercial operations were disrupted by emancipation.35
Missouri farmers could not be mistaken for bumpkins living in idyllic isolation. Country newspapers reported market prices in St. Louis and New York; backroads merchants kept up with the current gold premium on greenbacks; women engaged in sewing and hatmaking for profit.36 The Grangers wanted easier and cheaper access to the market, not an abolition of the capitalist system. When the Cass County Patrons of Husbandry met on July 16, 1873, for example, they demanded “the abolition of every restriction upon the commerce of the country.”37
Thelen makes an important point by connecting the train-robbing bandits with the bond-resistance movement, but he misreads that movement’s real meaning. Missourians of all stripes had taken part in the railroad mania of 1867–1872. Several counties had lifted the Oath banning ex-rebels from referendums on bond issues, and secessionists had offered enthusiastic support. In all but one of the cases where county courts issued bonds without a vote, they were acting on citizens’ petitions. Even the Lexington Caucasian had supported a railroad for Lafayette County. “When we say all are interested in such a proposition,” it had declared, “we mean precisely that.” No less a representative of the old order than Jo Shelby had been a partner in the construction firm that was implicated in the Cass County swindle. He had been on the very train that was stopped in the infamous Gunn City massacre. And when John Edwards attacked the railroads for discriminating against Missouri, his answer was more railroads—albeit locally controlled.38
All of this raises serious questions about the bandits’ significance as economic avengers. They struck banks, which seems to fit with the traditional Democratic loathing of powerful money monopolies that dated back to Andrew Jackson. But the banks they robbed were relatively small institutions dependent on local capital; all their Missouri targets were in their own communities (with the exception of Ste. Genevieve, which was in another strongly secessionist section). Such banks were not the target of popular financial discontent in the 1860s and ’70s, which was largely focused on the structure of the national bank system and the volume of currency in the cash-strapped West and South. If anything, farmers wanted more banks, more loans, and allocations of more national banknotes. It is telling that the James-Younger outlaws robbed their last bank in Missouri at the very moment when they began to portray themselves as public heroes.39
Once the bandits decided to appeal for public sympathy, it was inevitable that they would declare, “We’re robbing the rich for the poor.” As armed robbers, they could claim nothing else—though there is no evidence that they did anything with their loot except spend it on themselves. The difficulty lies in going beyond those simple words, to decipher both their deeper opinions and their popularity. Clearly they were not defenders of self-sufficiency in the face of an invading market economy. Equally clearly, they recognized the public rage against the railroads in 1873, and even claimed to be Grangers. But in embittered Missouri, economic protest inevitably mingled with the politics of war and Reconstruction. Even more important than the bandits’ words, when they walked the aisle of the Rock Island train, was the fact that they spoke them through Ku Klux Klan masks.
Missouri’s rage against the railroads, in large part, reflected the Confederate reaction against the Radical legacy and rejection of the trend toward centralization that had begun in the Civil War. When tax rates spiked and local lines began to go bankrupt, secessionists blamed the Republicans. They claimed that the Radicals had used the Oath in the 1860s to ram bond issues down the throats of nonvoting former rebel slaveholders, who were the wealthiest members of their communities. (They conveniently forgot that they had largely supported the new rail lines at the time.) Across the state, the railroad bond protests were closely interwoven with secessionist politics, not agrarian populism. The movement to stop paying interest on the bonds began only after rebels regained the right to vote, and it was concentrated in counties where Confederates were particularly numerous.40
In the bitter debate over Reconstruction, the railways became an axis of political protest by former rebels who attacked the railroad corporations as the private partners of the Republican Party and the national government it controlled. From Cass County to South Carolina, ex-Confederates turned the railways into symbols of Radical corruption, extravagance, and misrule. In southeastern states, the Ku Klux Klan staged attacks on black railway employees amid ferocious speeches against the corporations by white-supremacist leaders. John Edwards depicted the Republican grip on the country as a comprehensive process of “imperialism and centralization.” In political terms, he wrote, this had put the South under the heel of the tyrannical Ku Klux Klan Act and “all manner of desperate and characterless adventurers.” In economic terms, it had led to “nothing more or less than a centralization of moneyed wealth in certain financial and commercial centres, and a corresponding spoilation of the general community.” By robbing the railroad in KKK costumes, the former bushwhackers made a declaration about the South’s continued defiance, especially since several highly publicized Klan cases were under way at that very moment. When the Kansas City Times described their holdup as a “Kuklux raid,” they must have been proud.41
The rebels of Missouri were and always would be Jesse James’s constituency.42 That fact remains paramount despite the tangled messages and symbols that the bandits began to
weave in 1873. In the tense weeks following the Rock Island robbery, for example, Jesse, his brother, and some of their colleagues took refuge in Dover, Lafayette County, an old bushwhacker stronghold. They went to town occasionally, one standing guard while the other ran errands. On Sunday evening, August 24, the brothers and a comrade rode into Lexington, where one attended services at the Methodist church, another visited “a house of ill-fame,” and the third remained outside as a sentry. The next day, Jesse and Frank appeared in town. They were spotted by an old friend and former guerrilla chieftain, most likely Dave Pool. Word leaked out, and a posse gathered to chase them. “But these bold fellows laugh at the authorities,” reported the Lexington Caucasian, “and seemingly invite their sleepy enterprise, by bearding the legal lion in his lazy lair.”
In telling the story of the James brothers’ visit, the fiercely secessionist, white-supremacist Caucasian paid them a glowing tribute. “It will not be a prideless reflection to the few who may sympathize with the high-handed actors, to know that Missouri leads [the country] … in the heroic splendor and perfect sangfroid of her gallant highwaymen,” the paper declared. “We reassert, when it comes to a comparison of what Western Missouri can do in the way of furnishing blood-stirring incidents, the whole country and the world sink into insignificance. These old bushwhackers never fail, and then their coolness and indifference ‘between drinks’ wins our admiration.”43 The bandits’ popularity clearly extended beyond Edwards’s columns, permeating the ex-Confederate ranks.
Word of the outlaws’ further escapades in Clay and Lafayette Counties infuriated Governor Silas Woodson, the first Democrat to be elected chief executive of the state since the war. As a member of the Unionist wing of the party, he took a grim view of the bushwhackers’ continuing depredations. On September 12, 1873, the Liberty Tribune printed a dispatch from Jefferson City that reflected the governor’s reaction to their apparent immunity from capture. “The information received yesterday and today indicates that the Iowa robbers are being shielded in Clay, Lafayette, and Jackson counties,” the report said. “They flit from one county to another, as pursuit comes close, and are evidently kept well informed of the movements of the authorities. They are now in Clay and threaten to burn out certain parties active in efforts to arrest them.” Woodson warned that he would send in an armed force unless the local officials tried harder to capture the bandits, said the anonymous journalist, and he did indeed order Clay County sheriff George E. Patton to organize a platoon of militia. Soon after, the governor issued a reward proclamation for the two James boys, citing their indictment for the murder of John W. Sheets. He offered an almost unprecedented $1,000 for each of them, far more than the standard $300 reward.44
Clay County’s reaction to the uproar reflected its own deep fissures. Local officials naturally expressed indignation. “The impression is abroad that notorious law-breaking men find harbor in this, the garden spot of the State,” Sheriff Patton huffed. “I suggest that a meeting of our citizens be held in the Court House in Liberty on Saturday, September 20th, 1873, for the purpose of organizing a company of men to assist the executive of the State in promoting peace and order.” Not everyone in the local establishment, however, was so outspoken. Editor Miller of the Liberty Tribune exhibited his always keen sense of the county’s divided mind. Despite being an old Unionist, he parsed his own response for his many Confederate readers. The people of Clay “are opposed to all kinds of lawlessness, and mobocracy in particular,” he wrote, conjuring up the image of the armed Radical groups of the 1860s as a greater threat than the bandits. More troubling, he mused, was the governor’s threat of state intervention, which “smacks of the war times when [MSM colonel William] Penick ruled this section. He used to indulge in just such orders as the above, but in the end accomplished nothing.” Besides, he added, simple farmers could do nothing against “armed desperadoes.”45
The truth, as Miller knew, was that many of the locals who had fed, sheltered, and supplied the James brothers when they were bushwhackers now did the same for them as bandits, believing that the boys were still fighting the good fight.
MYTHOLOGY REQUIRES EFFORT. Achilles and King Arthur may have begun as men of flesh and blood, but Homer and Sir Thomas Malory labored hard to make them the figures we remember. By 1873, John Edwards had already done much the same for Jesse James in his Kansas City newspaper, and on November 23, he put the myth in near-final form for a statewide audience.
On that day, the St. Louis Dispatch published “A Terrible Quintet,” a special supplement written by Edwards that ran to twenty densely packed pages. (He had joined the St. Louis newspaper a few months before.) This remarkable paean to the bandits offers compelling evidence of Edwards’s influence both at the paper and in Missouri’s popular culture. The stories that he now told would define Jesse James in the public imagination.46
He began by saying that he was writing the piece at the request of his editors, who wanted “the truth concerning Jesse and Frank James, John and Coleman Younger, and A. C. McCoy,” the men implicated as the core of the bandit crew. He wrote first and foremost of Jesse, devoting eleven of his twenty pages to the outlaw and his older brother. In the article, as in life, Jesse did all the talking, speaking for Frank as well as himself. Edwards had obviously questioned the pair closely, for many of the stories he presented as coming from Jesse’s mouth can be independently verified. As for the half-truths and outright lies, who knows? But the end result was clear: with this extended profile in a major metropolitan newspaper, Jesse James emerged as a heroic figure of statewide stature.
Not all the high points of his later myth appeared in these pages. The tale of his being shot while attempting to surrender, for example, was presented here as a wound received in a standard gunfight. But Edwards told a fanciful version of how the militia had tortured Reuben Samuel, and added a few more stories that bear no resemblance to reality. Jesse, he wrote, was crippled by his lung wound for three full years, until a visit to his uncle’s mineral spa, in Paso Robles, California, miraculously healed him. In the interim, he supposedly staved off constant attacks by Radical militiamen. Edwards had Jesse claiming that five of the state’s troopers came to arrest him on the night of February 18, 1867, but that he managed to chase them away in a wild gunfight, despite his agonizing injury. It was pure nonsense, of course; no militia units were active then, nor was any gunfight reported in the press. But the event described was close enough in time to Bacon Montgomery’s occupation of Lexington to awaken the memories of former secessionists, indirectly associating Jesse with the tragic fate of Archie Clement.47
The entire thrust of “A Terrible Quintet” was to glorify the Confederate guerrilla war in Missouri, and hail these five men as fearless, skillful heroes. It said nothing about railroads or corporations. Instead, it offered up tale after gory tale of payback for Unionist atrocities, of ambushes, battles, and revenge. “The five men you desire a history of are eminently creatures of the war,” Edwards wrote. “There are memories of the struggle, too, in the hearts of some of them that are terrible even yet.” At one point, Jesse’s quotations commented darkly on Reconstruction. He had befriended a U.S. Army major on his journey to California in 1868, he said, an “old-time American army officer—of that time when they had gentlemen in the army, and not shysters, negroes, and Yankee dead-beats.”*
Edwards also persisted in proclaiming them guiltless while simultaneously praising their daring and glorifying their crimes. Readers came away with the contradictory impression that these were innocent men who would never be taken alive. Edwards began, for example, by hailing Missouri’s gunmen as the finest of all Western desperadoes. He went on to quote Jesse’s explanation that John W. Sheets had been murdered by the Brotherhood of Death, a group of fifty survivors of Bill Anderson’s band who had pledged to kill Samuel P. Cox, the guerrilla’s slayer. “I am satisfied Sheets was killed through a mistake,” he said. “I am almost convinced that one of the Brotherhood did it, and that he thou
ght he was killing Cox.” This was an enormous wink at his supporters, who admired him because they believed he was guilty of the charges against him. The essay as a whole was a (barely) encoded plea for rebel sympathy. As Edwards quoted Arthur McCoy, “A true Confederate soldier never betrays a true Confederate.”
As in 1872, Jesse swiftly followed Edwards’s tribute with a letter to his newspaper, asserting his innocence. He also spoke of himself and his brother as “two of Quantrill’s and Anderson’s best men,” directly echoing the language of Edwards’s essay. “We have many enemies in Missouri because of the war,” he wrote. Curiously, he became very specific about his great distance from his home state. “Neither Frank nor myself have been in Missouri since the 3rd day of October, 1873,” he wrote, “nor nearer Missouri than Denver City.” He dated the letter December 20, 1873, from Deer Lodge, Montana, and asked that any return correspondence be directed to the same place.48
The year before, Edwards and James had launched a publicity campaign to simultaneously glorify and exonerate the bandits after the Kansas City fair robbery. Now they had improved upon that model, launching a campaign before a raid, or, rather, a series of raids. After establishing that Jesse was in Montana, the bandits began an unprecedented rampage, possibly as early as January 8, 1874, when a group of gunmen robbed the Monroe-Shreveport stage in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. One week later, on January 15, the Missourians stopped another stagecoach, this time between Malvern and Hot Springs, Arkansas. In keeping with their theme, they asked if any passengers had fought for the Confederacy. A man from Memphis raised his hand, and they immediately returned his watch and the money they had taken from him. They didn’t want to rob Southern veterans, they explained, but “Northern men had driven them to outlawry and they intended to make them pay for it.” They menaced another passenger with a New England accent, whom they mistakenly suspected of being a reporter for the Radical St. Louis Democrat—“the vilest paper in the West,” one of them snarled. A second bandit aimed a shotgun at his skull, saying, “I’ll bet I can shoot his hat off without touching a hair of his head.”49
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