T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  12. A. L. Stimson, History of the Express Business (New York: Baker & Godwin, 1881), 51–99, 108–13, 209–10, 303–22, 369–70; Our Expressman, May 1874; Alvin F. Harlow, Old Waybills: The Romance of the Express Companies (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1934), 48–50, 300, 342; see also Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 58–62. Express companies must be distinguished from fast-freight lines, which were administrative arrangements for moving freight cars across several rail companies without interruption; see Irene D. Neu and George Rogers Taylor, The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 67–79. Each railroad corporation publicly listed its express companies and fast-freight affiliations; see Edward Vernon, ed., American Railroad Manual for the United States and the Dominion (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1873).

  13. Edwin L. Lopata, Local Aid to Railroads in Missouri (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 6–12, 22–37, 62–81, 132–3; Paul W. Gates, “The Railroads of Missouri, 1850–1870,” MHR 26, no. 2 (January 1932): 126–41. The primary dissenting view is that of David Thelen, Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 29–65. He argues that “popular prejudice and conservative fiscal traditions” formed an obstacle to railroad development (for which I find little evidence).

  14. Lopata, 81–105; Virginia Rust Frazier, “Dallas County Railroad Bonds,” MHR 61, no. 4 (July 1967): 444–62; E. M. Violette, “The Missouri and Mississippi Railroad Debt,” MHR 15, no. 3 (April 1921): 467–518, and no. 4 (July 1921): 617–47; Thelen, 63–4.

  15. Lopata, 105–7; St. Louis Republican, April 26 and May 1, 1872; Albert Sigel to B. Gratz Brown, telegram dated May 3, 1872, and Jonathon F. Phillips and F. M. Cockrell to B. Gratz Brown, May 1, 1872, B. Gratz Brown Papers, MSA.

  16. Lopata, 107; Vernon, 501–4; Julius Grodinsky, The Iowa Pool: A Study in Railroad Competition, 1870–1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 1–4, 59–61, 89; see also George H. Miller, Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 3–22.

  17. Charles F. Adams, Jr., “A Chapter of Erie,” North American Review (July 1869), 30–106, quote on 104; see also Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture & Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 57–60.

  18. Annual Report to the President, Directors, and Stockholders of the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad Corporation, April 1, 1874 (New York: Clarence Levey, 1874), 6–9; Annual Report of the Comptroller of the Currency, December 1, 1873 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1873), 7–8, 31.

  19. James A. Ward, Railroads and the Character of America, 1820–1851 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 151.

  20. Grodinsky, 6–38, 108–9; Kansas City Times, November 27, 1872. See also Wyatt W. Belcher, The Economic Rivalry Between St. Louis and Chicago, 1850–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947).

  21. Kansas City Times, February 19 and July 23, 1873; Homer Clevenger, “Railroads in Missouri Politics, 1875–1887,” MHR 43, no. 2 (January 1949): 222; History III, 284–6. Local histories and newspapers abound with stories of Grange lodges forming in early 1873; see, for example, William Young, Young’s History of Lafayette County, Missouri (Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen, 1910), 232.

  22. See, for example, Robert M. Utley’s discussion in Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989), photo insert, 196–7.

  23. The account that follows is based on the following sources: Kansas City Times, July 23, 1873; New York Times, July 23, 24, and 26, 1873; and the Sioux City Journal, July 23–26, 1873. Further notes indicate the source of quotes or specific information when necessary.

  24. Kansas City Times, July 23, 1873; Sioux City Journal, July 23, 1873.

  25. Sioux City Journal, July 24, 1873. For descriptions of Jesse James by those who knew him best, see George Miller, Jr., The Trial of Frank James for Murder (St. Louis: n.p., 1898), 40, 113.

  26. Sioux City Journal, July 25, 1873.

  27. Ibid., July 24, 1873.

  28. New York Times, July 23, 1873.

  29. Sioux City Journal, July 24, 1873.

  30. The night after the robbery, they had dinner with a Mr. and Mrs. Stuckeye in Ringgold County, who provided the fine description above; Sioux City Journal, July 24 and 25, 1873. See also the Kansas City Times, July 23, 1873.

  31. Kansas City Times, July 18, 1873; Railroad Gazette, August 2, 1873. As is often noted, the Reno gang seems to have originated train robbery; see Settle, 47, and James Mackay, Allan Pinkerton: The Eye Who Never Slept (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1996), 188.

  32. Des Moines Republican in the Sioux City Journal, July 24, 1873. This language is all the more striking for appearing in an Iowa newspaper with no connection to John Edwards or other bandit glorifiers.

  33. Kansas City Times, July 23, 1873; Sioux City Journal, July 23, 1873.

  34. Thelen, 13–17, 29–35, 59–65, 70–7.

  35. See chaps. 1–3 for the antebellum James-Samuel family; Marley Brant, The Outlaw Youngers: A Confederate Brotherhood (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1993), 8–15; see especially Richard White, “Outlaw Gangs of the Middle Border: American Social Bandits,” Western Historical Quarterly 12, no. 4 (October 1981): 387–408, which shares many points of this analysis. Dick Liddil testified that during his entire acquaintance with Jesse James, from the 1870s through 1881, former bushwhackers provided hiding places and material support for the outlaws; these guerrillas were identified by Don R. Bowen as members of some of the wealthiest families in Jackson County; see St. Louis Republican, September 9, 1883; Don R. Bowen, “Guerrilla War in Western Missouri, 1862–1865: Historical Extensions of the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19, no. 1 (January 1977): 30–51; and Don R. Bowen, “Counterrevolutionary Guerrilla War: Missouri, 1861–1865,” Conflict 8, no. 1 (1988): 69–78.

  36. See, for example, Kansas City Times, November 1, 1872, and February 6, 1873; on rural millinery, see, for example, the letters of Sarah Harlan, May 3 and June 9, 1865, June 16, 1866, Bond-Fentriss Family Papers, UNC.

  37. Kansas City Times, July 23, 1873.

  38. Lopata, 78–81; Lexington Caucasian, July 25, 1866; St. Louis Republican, April 26, 1872; Kansas City Times, November 27, 1872; Daniel O’Flaherty, General Jo Shelby: Undefeated Rebel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000, orig. pub. 1954), 334–41.

  39. George L. Anderson, “Western Attitude Toward National Banks,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 23, no. 2 (September 1936): 205–16; Sylla, 657–86; Brewer, 356–80; Allan G. Bogue, “Financing the Prairie Farmer,” in The Reinterpretation of American Economic History, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert W. Fogel (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 301–10; Bensel, 262–93. Brewer and Bogue both note that eastern insurance companies provided much of the mortgage lending in the region.

  40. Lopata, 78–81; Thelen, 35–65; Clevenger, 222–4, notes that former Confederate Democrats Richard P. Bland, Francis M. Cockrell, and George G. Vest emerged as spokesmen for farmers’ interests in the 1870s.

  41. Nelson, 81–139; Kansas City Times, November 5 and 9, December 11, 1872; see also Kansas City Times, December 31, 1872, July 23 and 25, 1873; Liberty Tribune, September 19, 1873.

  42. As noted earlier, Dick Liddil later provided a list of sympathizers, all of whom had been secessionists; St. Louis Republican, September 9, 1883; see also the commentary of the Kansas City Journal of Commerce, October 20, 1876.

  43. Lexington Caucasian, August 30, 1873.

  44. Shoemaker, 5: 343–4.

  45. Liberty Tribune, September 12, 1873.

  46. John N. Edwards, “A Terrible Quintet,” special supplement to the St. Louis Dispatch, November 23, 1873, vol. 34, coll. 1424, Walter B. Stevens Scrapbook, WHMC. Settle, 51–6, offers a thoro
ugh review and insightful discussion.

  47. Governor Thomas Fletcher’s orders to call up the militia in December 1866 extended only to the counties south of the Missouri River; a review of the letterbooks of the adjutant general for that period reveals no orders to units to cross to the north side. On March 4, 1867, Governor Fletcher wrote to Major Reeves Leonard that there were no more militiamen on duty in the state; coll. 1013, fold. 494, Abiel Leonard Papers, WHMC.

  48. St. Louis Dispatch, December 29, 1873; Robert J. Wybrow, “From the Pen of a Noble Robber: The Letters of Jesse Woodson James, 1847–1882,” Brand Book 24, no. 2 (summer 1987), published by the English Westerners’ Society, 1–22; Liberty Tribune, January 9, 1874.

  49. Eden, 13–14; Yeatman, 109–10.

  50. Jesse James’s presence would later be confirmed by his wife. Kansas City Evening Star, April 20, 1882.

  51. Eden, 20; St. Louis Dispatch, February 10, 1874; see also Brant, 35.

  52. St. Louis Republican, February 2, 1874.

  53. Ibid., February 11, 1874.

  54. Eden, 14; Yeatman, 21; see also Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, act 1, scene 2.

  55. This account of the Gads Hill robbery draws on the following sources: New York. Times, February 2 and 3, 1874; St. Louis Republican, February 1, 2, 3, and 11, 1874; Boonville Weekly Advertiser, February 4, 1874; Liberty Tribune, February 6, 1874; Lexington Caucasian, February 7, 1874; Yeatman, 19–23; Eden, 13–24; Settle, 49–51. Further citations refer to specific quotations.

  56. St. Louis Republican, February 2, 1874. Most accounts give Alford’s middle initial as “A.,” but the Republican’s report of the conductor’s account gives it as “W.”

  57. Ibid., February 2, 1874.

  58. Ibid., February 1 and 2, 1874.

  59. Ibid., February 1 and 2, 1874. Yeatman, 21, doubts the report that the bandits spoke about not robbing working men, saying that conductor Alford never mentioned it. But Alford would not have known either way, since he was held captive on the platform.

  60. Ibid., February 2, 1874.

  61. Liberty Tribune, February 6, 1874.

  62. St. Louis Republican, February 11, 1874. Eden misquotes the name of the widow Cook as “Cork,” an error Yeatman duplicates. Yeatman, 21, suggests a total haul of $6,080.

  63. St. Louis Dispatch, February 10, 1874.

  64. William Hyde, “Newspapers and Newspaper Men of Three Decades,” Collections of the Missouri Historical Society 12 (1896): 5–24; Our Expressman, May 1874.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Allies and Enemies

  1. A. L. Stimson, History of the Express Business (New York: Baker & Godwin, 1881), 53—6, 108–12, 117–24, 128. In the fiscal year ending April 1, 1874, the Rock Island alone received $107,098.22 in fees from express companies; Annual Report to the President, Directors, and Stockholders of the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad Company, April 1, 1874 (New York: Clarence Levey & Co., 1874), 8.

  2. Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 268–93; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 512; James K. Kindahl, “Economic Factors in Specie Resumption, 1865–1879,” in The Reinterpretation of American Economic History, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert W. Fogel (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 468–79. Edwin L. Lopata, Local Aid to Railroads in Missouri (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 73–4, notes that European dissatisfaction with American railroad bonds began before the Panic.

  3. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), excerpted in T. J. Stiles, ed., Robber Barons and Radicals: Reconstruction and the Origins of Civil Rights (New York: Berkley Books, 1997), 315–16.

  4. Foner, 512–16; Railroad Gazette, December 26, 1874; see also Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 220–31.

  5. Stimson, 369; Alvin F. Harlow, Old Waybills: The Romance of the Express Companies (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1934), 315–17; Our Expressman, August 1875.

  6. Stimson, 331, 341; James Mackay, Allan Pinkerton: The Eye Who Never Slept (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1996), 188; Our Expressman, August 1874, June and August 1875; Sioux City Journal, July 23–26, 1873; Railroad Gazette, August 9, 1873, February 21 and March 31, 1874; Rock Island Annual Report, 1874. Governor Charles H. Hardin’s correspondence with Thomas Allen, president of the Iron Mountain Railroad, strongly indicates that the company never employed private detectives to pursue the bandits, as Hardin had to beg for Allen to make a complaint against one of the gang after he was captured in Iowa; see C. H. Hardin to Thomas Allen, February 27, 1875, and Thomas Allen to C. H. Hardin, May 19, 1875, Charles H. Hardin Papers, MSA. Yeatman, 113, cites the New York World, March 28, 1874, as evidence that the U.S. Post Office hired the Pinkertons. But the World appears to have been reporting rumors. No direct evidence implicates the post office. The U.S. Secret Service frequently handled cases of mail robbery, and sometimes hired the Pinkertons, but it had no role in the investigations of the James-Younger gang. See Record of Arrests and Convictions, 1869–1930, entry 33, and Register of Letters Received at New York, April 1, 1870–September 1874, entry 12, Records of the U.S. Secret Service, RG 87, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

  7. All sources from the Pinkerton agency itself identify only the Adams Express as the hiring party. See, for example, an interview with Pinkerton agent L. E. Angell, Columbia Missouri Statesman, April 10, 1874; an interview with William Pinkerton, Kansas City Evening Star, July 21, 1881; and Allan Pinkerton’s comment that he planned to report to Adams president Dinsmore, in his letter to George H. Bangs, April 17, 1874, Pinkerton Papers. The Adams had hired Pinkerton before; see R. B. Macy, “Detective Pinkerton,” Harper’s Magazine (October 1873): 720–7. For a typical Pinkerton advertisement, see Our Expressman, August 1875.

  8. Chicago Herald, July 2, 1884; Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 254, 261–5; Edwin C. Fishel, The Secret War for the Union: The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 53–5. Fishel, 102, argues that Pinkerton excelled at spy-catching, that McClellan was the “dominant party” in the famous overestimation of Confederate forces.

  9. David R. Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld: The Impact of Crime on the Development of the American Police, 1800–1887 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 7–15, 28–65; Larry K. Hartsfield, The American Response to Professional Crime, 1870–1917 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 40–8; Jacqueline Pope, Bounty Hunters, Marshals, and Sheriffs: Forward to the Past (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), 74–5; Our Expressman, August 1875; R. B. Macy, 720. See also David Johnson’s Illegal Tender: Countefeiting and the Secret Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), ix–xviii, 63–6.

  10. Mackay, 188–208, 214; Hartsfield, 73. Pinkerton wrote of his stroke as a “very severe shock” in a letter dated September 13, 1870; for a typical operation, see Allan Pinkerton to President, Cook County National Bank, June 20, 1872; Allan Pinkerton Papers, Chicago Historical Society.

  11. Pinkerton’s tactics are illustrated in R. B. Macy, 720–7.

  12. The New York World, March 28, 1874, reported that the bandits had gone south to Arkansas, “giving out” that they were going to Texas before doubling back to Missouri. This seems to have been a misreading of Missouri news reports that the bandits had passed west through Texas County; compare with the St. Louis Republican, February 11, 1874. Seven years later William Pinkerton said, “The gang was traced to St. Clair county by a man who was sent on to make a preliminary report, and there the members scattered”; Kansas City Evening Star, July 21, 1881.

  13. Interview with William Pinkerton, Kansas City Evening Star, July 21, 1881. Whicher’s name w
as misspelled “Witcher” in this article, and has been corrected. Detective L. E. Angell confirmed that Whicher was not supposed to make arrests; St. Louis Globe, March 20, 1874. On William Pinkerton’s place in the company, see Mackay, 205 (though he exaggerates somewhat the role of Allan’s sons William and Robert, giving them credit for actually running the agency, which was not the case).

  14. New York World, March 28, 1874.

  15. Interview with William Pinkerton, Kansas City Evening Star, July 21, 1881.

  16. Kansas City Times, September 18, 1872.

  17. This account of Whicher’s visit to the courthouse was written by an anonymous county official, though it seems obvious that it was the recorder, Sandusky; Kansas City Times, reprinted in the Liberty Tribune, March 27, 1874. On Whicher’s state of mind, see an interview with L. E. Angell, St. Louis Globe, March 20, 1874. For the identity of the recorder, never named in this account, see W. H. Woodson, History of Clay County, Missouri (Topeka: Historical Publishing Company, 1920), 335.

  18. Liberty Tribune, March 27, 1874.

  19. Woodson, 352, discusses the Commercial bank and its personnel.

  20. Whicher’s visit to the bank is better known than his earlier visit to the courthouse, since it was reported by L. E. Angell in newspaper interviews; the most reliable account seems to be in the St. Louis Globe, March 20, 1874, but see also St. Louis Republican, March 20, 1874, and an independent investigation by the Hamilton News, quoted in St. Louis Republican, March 23, 1874.

  21. St. Louis Globe, March 20, 1874; St. Louis Republican, March 20, 1874; interview with William Pinkerton, Kansas City Evening Star, July 21, 1881.

  22. Columbia Missouri Statesman, April 10, 1874.

  23. Hamilton News in the St. Louis Republican, March 23, 1874.