Rebel Gold

by Warren Getler

  Writing as Jesse Lee James, Howk first wrote about Jesse James in Jesse James and the Lost Cause, published in 1961 by Pageant Press of New York. Fourteen years later, Howk teamed with journalist Del Schrader, from the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner, to coauthor Jesse James Was One of His Names. In this book the two authors state categorically that J. Frank Dalton was Jesse Woodson James, who, they assert, was born in Kentucky on April 17, 1844 (as opposed to the traditional September 5, 1847, birthdate and the Centerville, Clay County, Missouri birthplace). As such, the authors note, J. Frank Dalton/Jesse Woodson James lived to the ripe age of 107. Their intentionally provocative book sparked immediate controversy. Some critics insisted unequivocally that Jesse was killed in 1882; others charged that many of the book’s core assertions strained credulity; still others criticized fast-and-loose chronologies, misplaced geography, poor spelling and awkward grammar.

  It is impossible to tell how much independent research Schrader, now deceased, undertook. He notes that his own forebears had some positive personal encounters with Jesse Woodson James. He makes no skeptical rejoinders: he merely conveys the story that Dalton-James allegedly told to Howk.9 The authors say that they relied on diaries, correspondence, affidavits and photographs of Dalton-James to patch together the (in parts) compelling volume.10

  It is not possible to evaluate every bald unproven assertion or the sum of assertions in Jesse James Was One of His Names. But it is both possible and worthwhile to highlight some of the more tantalizing claims in the text, particularly as they relate to the Knights of the Golden Circle. To do so, one has to assume that the text is written in symbolic narrative, interspersing potentially factual passages among hyperbole and outlandish dross.

  The authors emphasize the robust sense of humor of the man who they claim was America’s most wanted outlaw.11 At one point, they note that “Colonel” J. Frank Dalton deliberately threw out “whoppers” to journalists in the post-Lawton media feeding frenzy. By doing so, Dalton-James was able to keep much of the history, the players and the victims of the KGC in a confused blur. It was all part, perhaps, of a strategy of disinformation and obfuscation, with select, key messages covertly getting through to the initiated. “For instance, Jesse told the Lawton reporters that … at the age of 67 he enlisted in the Canadian army and fought four years in Europe…. But Jesse hadn’t done these things—he was merely covering up for old compadres still alive,” they write.12

  If Dalton-James had thrown up a few fanciful smoke screens in 1948, his view apparently changed in the three years before his death in 1951. In the opening pages of their 1975 book, Schrader and Howk explain: “Why write the book at all? It was old Jesse’s deathbed wish that the ‘record be set straight once and for all.’ There are many kernels of history and hitherto unknown facts, which may encourage better historians of this day to run down additional information.”13 Schrader and his coauthor say that the KGC had voted in 1916 to “seal its records for 50 years,” or at least to wait until the last known Confederate soldier had died (believed to be in 1959).14

  Thus, the path was clear by the mid-1960s to expose segments of overlooked episodes in U.S. history. Schrader and Howk caution, however, that living descendants of Confederate and KGC associates of Jesse Woodson James “don’t take kindly to revealing exact directions on how to open the many Confederate depositories scattered across the land.”15

  They also make clear that their mysterious biography is not meant to be a paean to Jesse James: “This book was certainly not written to whitewash old Jesse W. James activities. Old Jesse may have rationalized many of his crimes against humanity as being for The Cause (the Confederate Underground) but he was not without his own principles. He had great administrative ability. He was a man of compassion, [and] demanded and received a fanatical loyalty.”16 Ultimately, Schrader and Howk set out to answer this question, unequivocally: “Did Jesse command a ‘gang,’ or as chief of the Knights of the Golden Circle, did he direct the activities of the Confederate Underground Army, which was preparing for a Second Civil War?”17

  The latter view gained some currency in a small, well-researched non-fiction paperback published in 2000. Ralph P. Ganis, author of Uncommon Men: A Secret Network of Jesse James Revealed, combines circumstantial evidence from coded photographs and various oral histories to make the case that Jesse and his gang operated in North Carolina and Tennessee after the Civil War with a “secret network of ex-Confederates.”18 That network, Ganis posits, was most likely the KGC. He relies heavily on a photograph, taken in Nashville in 1879, of Jesse and Frank James and other workers in front of the Mocker Barrel Factory. Several of those photographed are giving suspected KGC-membership hand signals. Significantly, Ganis notes that historians have thought Jesse James–KGC connections to be “too elusive to find.”19 He does not mention the possibility that Jesse may have faked his death and lived well into the twentieth century.

  The following are among the key points that James (Howk) and Schrader made more than a quarter of a century ago—some obviously central, some seemingly obscure—as they relate to Jesse James and the Knights of the Golden Circle. That so many of the assertions highlighted below seem to flow from the perspective of a KGC insider would seem to bolster the book’s credibility. Consider: if J. Frank Dalton were a mere crank and if Del Schrader and Orvus Lee Howk were mere dupes, then at least one of them and perhaps all three certainly possessed an amazingly vivid and detailed sense of much-neglected, or deliberately concealed, chapters in U.S. history. But there is a larger point to the ever-controversial Jesse James Was One of His Names: it has to be assessed within the context of the KGC’s pattern of disguise, deception and coded subtext.

  1. Two Jesse Jameses: First Cousins, Jesse Woodson James and Jesse Robert “Dingus” James.

  One of the most important assertions in Jesse James Was One of His Names is that history failed to realize that there were two Jesse Jameses, one from Kentucky and one from Missouri, who were first cousins and comrades-in-arms.20 History—the book avers—has focused on the Missouri-born outlaw, Jesse Robert James. The latter’s postwar KGC exploits were secondary to those of his slightly shorter but broader-shouldered, wider-faced, Kentucky-born cousin, Jesse Woodson James. Adding to the confusion, each Jesse had a brother who went by the name Frank. All four—the two Jesses and the two Franks—were active in the operations of the KGC after the war and earlier had fought with different units of the Confederacy. Moreover, all four Jameses moved through the KGC’s headquarters in Nashville during the mid-1870s. The book says the KGC maintained its postwar headquarters in Nashville from 1865 to 1884.21 It is not clear whether the four men also gathered as a group, post-1884, in Canton, Texas, and Colorado Springs, Colorado, the said successor KGC headquarters.

  According to the book, after the war Jesse Woodson James led operations aimed at seizing federal assets in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), Arkansas, Texas, as well as in New Mexico Territory, Colorado, Wyoming Territory and other areas in the Far West. He was also active in Mexico and in the Deep South. The postwar Missouri Jesse James, for his part, operated chiefly out of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Kentucky, along with his brother Frank, Bud Dalton and others.

  Jesse Woodson James, who became the head of the inner sanctum of the Knights of the Golden Circle, and his older brother, ex-Confederate Army surgeon Dr. Sylvester Franklin James, were the sons of Capt. George James and Mollie Dalton of Scott County, Kentucky, according to Schrader and Howk.22 Jesse Woodson, during the war, operated mostly in Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky and the Deep South (only once connecting with Quantrill’s guerrillas in Kansas, and occasionally making forays into Oklahoma Territory, Arkansas and Texas).23 In the final two years of the war, he raided Union supply wagons, boats and trains. “We’d go behind the Yankee lines, capture and bury Union payrolls, figuring unpaid soldiers would become demoralized. And we’d grab and run with medicines, blankets, guns, ammunition, quinine … horseshoes, nails, sugar, hams
…,” Dalton-James is quoted as saying.24

  These trans-Mississippi raids were sometimes made in conjunction with Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, KGC allies in the region. The Indian cavalry troops, under Col. Tandy Walker, fought alongside generals John S. Marmaduke, Joseph O. Shelby, and Samuel B. Maxey—all under the overall command of Maj. Gen. Sterling Price. (Recall: Price was identified as the KGC’s Western commander by the U.S. government in the 1864 Holt report.) Following a successful raid on a Union payroll and supply wagon train, at Poison Springs, Arkansas, Jesse and his Choctaw and Chickasaw fighters buried a Union Army pay chest packed with gold and silver coins at Wild Cat Bluff, near Centerpoint, Arkansas, according to Dalton-James.25

  After his wounds had healed at the end of the Civil War, Kentucky-born Jesse Woodson threw himself headlong into KGC operations, according to Schrader and Howk. Among his first assignments, in 1867, was a rescue mission inside Mexico. The task was to extract Confederate general Jo Shelby and his Missouri cavalrymen, who, rather than surrender after Appomattox, had crossed the Rio Grande in July 1865 to seek refuge and to prop up the faltering regime of Emperor Maximilian, an apparent KGC ally.26 A multimillion-dollar award, according to Dalton-James, was later granted by Maximilian to Jesse James for his efforts. That money, in the form of gold coins minted by Maximilian in Mexico, allegedly was hauled by Jesse Woodson James and his KGC cohorts into Texas and parts of Indian Territory. The KGC soon thereafter appointed Jesse W. James comptroller general of all its funds, a steppingstone to his becoming the secret order’s top field commander, write Schrader and Howk.27

  Still, to ensure adequate cover to run a super-secret underground, Jesse James would need to be declared legally dead. This, according to Schrader and Howk, he accomplished on April 3, 1882, in St. Joseph, Missouri, first by bumping off rival Charlie Bigelow, who bore a resemblance, and then by placing the cadaver of Bigelow in the casket that was displayed at the “Jesse James” funeral in nearby Kearney.28 Missouri governor Thomas T. Crittenden, said to be a lifelong friend of Kentucky Jesse, was in on the plan from the beginning—having been bought off, the authors say, long before by the KGC. There was never any doubt, they write, that Crittenden would grant a full and unconditional pardon to Bob and Charley Ford after the two brothers were sentenced to hang for the “murder” of Jesse James.29 The two Fords may have been involved in a well-scripted murder … that of Bigelow!

  It seems that the Jameses, and others in the upper ranks of the KGC, were masters, even geniuses, of deceit. If this death hoax were true, it would mean that Jesse Woodson James—and a fairly lengthy list of co-conspirators—pulled off a triple coup de grace. First, he terminated the life of an annoying rival (who reportedly had been using his name in various robberies). Second, he used the body of his rival as a fill-in at “his” funeral. Third, he made the world believe not only that he was officially dead but that the person buried in Kearney, Missouri, was the one and only Jesse James, the one born there on September 5, 1847.

  The name Jesse Robert James never surfaced. The legally dead and interred outlaw was known to the world as Jesse Woodson James—so said the tombstone and so said the paperwork. Moreover, the Schrader-Howk book asserts that a black colleague of Jesse Woodson James, a loyal confidant and cook named John Trammell, commemorated the hoax (including the murder of Bigelow, in which he was said to participate) by burying several etched bricks.30 Whether apocryphal or not (the bricks were eventually dug up in 1966 and written up, with photos, in the St. Joseph, Missouri, newspaper), the images inscribed are telling. “[One] brick contained an image of a Spanish dagger, the numerals ‘777,’ the letters ‘KGC’ and ‘JJ’. Of course, KGC and JJ stood for the Knights of the Golden Circle and Jesse James,” Schrader and Howk vouch. Trammell died at the age of 118, and outlived J. Frank Dalton to become one of the oldest living Americans at the time. Trammell was the subject of a November 8, 1954, front-page article in the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph entitled “116-Year-Old Jesse James Gang’s Cook Visits Region.” It describes Trammell as a “confidante of Jesse James” and a subject of a scientific research project into twenty-five of the oldest people in the world. In the article, Trammell describes himself as a general handyman of the “rebel” James gang after the Civil War. The article states: “One big reason why he came here was to show Jesse James III of Manitou Springs, a great grandson of the famed Jesse, the location of two caches of gold coins, gold and silver bullion which the original Jesse reportedly buried in the Ute Pass area in 1876.”

  Jesse Robert “Dingus” James and his brother Alexander Franklin James, this “revisionist” theory holds, had operated during the war as much feared bushwhacking guerrillas in Missouri and Kansas. They fought Unionist Kansas “Jayhawkers” on the so-called Western Border of the conflict gripping the nation. Their commanders were the infamous guerrilla cavalry leader and head of the KGC’s Knights of the Iron Hand, William Clarke Quantrill, and Capt. “Bloody Bill” Anderson. At their side was Missouri-born Thomas Coleman Younger.31 Sons of the Rev. Robert James (brother of Capt. George James who was the father of the other Jesse and Frank James) and Zerelda Cole, the Missouri Jesse and Frank Jameses secretly kept in close contact with their Kentucky first cousins, both during the war as Confederates and following the four-year conflict as KGC commanders, according to Schrader and Howk.32

  In a telling passage, Howk describes a reunion between Jesse Woodson James and Jesse Robert “Dingus” James that was arranged in Pensacola, Florida. Howk said that he had walked up to “Dingus,” gave him a silver dollar and said: “Turkey tracks.” Then, handing over another silver dollar, he added: “Seen a turtle go by my friend?” The response was immediate: “Nope, I ain’t seen a turtle, but I know you’re from The Organization—where’s Jesse?”33

  Nowhere do the authors explain the symbolic meaning of “turkey tracks” or “turtle,” but they are among the most important pictorial indicators of buried Confederate or KGC treasure.

  The book’s authors argue that the two sets of James brothers deliberately sowed confusion about the “real” Jesse James and his whereabouts. “The two Jesse Jameses and the two Frank Jameses were not about to set the record straight. The two sets of ‘composites’ were working fine for them in their secret work. All four were unreconstructed Confederates. All four felt their mission in life was to help the South rise again.”34

  Two Jesse Jameses—operating in different places at the same time and for the same cause—is a powerful concept. Numerous chroniclers of the mainstream Jesse James story (that he died in 1882, was the Missouriborn son of Robert and Zerelda, and went to the grave in Missouri as a mere bandit) have been unable to explain how nearly simultaneous robberies attributed to Jesse could have occurred over vast distances. Consider: there was the four-man holdup of the Tishomingo Savings Bank in Corinth, Mississippi, in which some $10,000 in funds and jewelry was stolen on December 8, 1874; then came the five-man train heist the next day of an estimated $30,000 to $60,000 from the Kansas Pacific Railroad, some six hundred miles away in Muncie, Kansas. Surely these could not have been pulled off by the same Jesse James! Even if Jesse and his gang had hopped on a train in Corinth and ridden by rail to Muncie, they could not have made it: train travel averaged a mere twenty-five miles per hour, with frequent whistle stops. As James historian William Settle noted in a respected 1966 biography: “Friends of the Jameses and Youngers often pointed out the incongruity of charging them with both the Corinth and Muncie robberies. Yet it is entirely possible that the leaders had separated and that some of the gang were in Mississippi and others in Kansas at the same time.”35 Settle does not consider the possibility of there being two Jesse Jameses, first cousins and outlaws both.

  Confusion over a Jesse doppelgänger—or, possibly, the presence of Jesse Woodson James in one place and Jesse Robert James in another—would arise repeatedly in history books and local lore. In his recent volume, Frank and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend, author Ted Yeatman notes that Jes
se James, using the alias Mr. Howard, was sighted along with his younger friend, Brushy Bill “Billy the Kid” Roberts, in 1877 in Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, by a Dr. Henry Hoyt.36 Hoyt, who later became the chief surgeon of the U.S. Army, wrote in his memoirs that Howard had a missing fingertip on his left hand. The latter observation—significant because of its specificity and because it came from a medical professional—fits the exact description of a telltale physical characteristic attributed to Dalton-James in the Schrader-Howk book.

  Yeatman (who does not subscribe to the J. Frank Dalton scenario) notes that it cannot be ascertained whether Jesse James had traveled to the Far West from what he believes was James’s base in Tennessee. But Schrader and Howk write that Jesse Woodson James operated chiefly in the Far West for much of the post–Civil War period.

  The Hoyt observation is also significant in that the alias reportedly used by the alleged Jesse, “Mr. Howard,” shows up as one of the seventy-two aliases listed in Jesse James Was One of His Names.37 In addition to Charles Howard, John Davis Howard, and Col. J. Frank Dalton, the aliases included Roy Hewitt, D. H. Moffat and a range of others. Moreover, Jesse Woodson James and other members of the postwar KGC could have assumed the identities of living or recently deceased U.S. citizens, all part of a strategy to constantly move about undetected through the use of disguise and subterfuge.