That task was taken up by James E. Starrs, a professor of forensic science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who had been involved in a number of other high-profile exhumations, including the remains of Dr. Carl Weiss, the alleged assassin of Senator Huey Long, and the five victims of Alfred Packer, the Colorado cannibal.
Starrs obtained a court order and on July 17, 1995, exhumed the remains in the Jesse James grave.* There was no nameplate on the coffin, and almost all the wood had decayed, although the metallic coffin handles were intact. Jesse James had been buried in the clothes he was wearing when he was killed. After the coroner had released his body, he was redressed in these clothes, which the death photo reveals to be rather dapper—but nothing, not even a fragment of his clothes, was found in the remains or in the grave.
Starrs and his team of scientists visually examined the remains. Someone—knowingly or inadvertently—had put the bones back in the casket the wrong way; the corpse was lying prone, with the head and body facing down.
The 1902 coffin had been crushed by the weight of the soil above it to a height of four to six inches, smashing the skull into numerous fragments. After reconstruction of the skull, a bullet entrance wound was found in the rear of the skull that matched exactly the records of the bullet that struck Jesse James behind the right ear. However, contrary to contemporary newspaper accounts (a newspaper issued after James’s murder had reported a hole in a wall of the James house made by the fatal bullet) no exit hole was found anywhere in the reconstructed skull. A bullet was found in the right lung area of the remains, and Jesse was known to have carried a bullet in his chest from the time he had tried to surrender near Lexington, Missouri, in 1865 and was shot; the bullet, a .36-caliber round ball, even matched the type of gun, a Navy Colt, that was allegedly used. (The other bullet Jesse was known to have carried may have been found in the original burial site in 1975. It can’t be said with certainty that it came from Jesse James, since his body was removed from that grave in 1902; over a period of seventy-three years, the bullet might have come from anywhere.) There was a lateral cut around the skull that coincided with a saw mark from the skull autopsy; this also disproved the notion that the remains, as was conjectured, could have been those of Jesse’s wife, whose body had not been autopsied after she died. (A St. Joseph physician reportedly kept the brain of Jesse James, supposedly removed during the autopsy, on his desk for many years.)
Starrs planned to conduct mitochondrial DNA testing of the remains to determine if they were those of the real Jesse James. Mitochondrial DNA testing requires obtaining adequate and interpretable DNA from the bones, and that was a major deterrent for Starrs’s team, since the bones found in Jesse James’s grave had decomposed substantially and were in such a serious state of degradation that they were literally falling apart.
The mitochondrial DNA testing initially did not go well. Starrs’s team went from one bone to another and were unable to obtain anything that could be used for comparison purposes. Finally, the scientists tried the teeth, which are usually well protected by the enamel outer coating. DNA is found under the enamel, in the dentin. Starrs’s team obtained DNA from the molars, which are typically very durable.
It was possible there had been contamination of the remains from microorganisms in the soil and from the hands of the several scientists who had handled them without wearing protective rubber gloves. So before the scientists went to Jesse James’s relatives for their DNA, to ensure that the DNA sequence the scientists had obtained from one molar could be replicated (that is, duplicated in another molar), they tested a second tooth. When they came up with the same sequence as they had obtained from the first one, it was virtually certain either would be representative of the DNA of the person in the grave.
The next step was to take the sequence obtained from the teeth of the corpse and match it against a sequence from known relatives in Jesse’s maternal line who had the same mitochondrial DNA as Jesse James’s sister. Starrs found two living relatives, both, as it turned out, from Oklahoma City. They were two males, one the uncle of the other, and their line of descent was directly back to Jesse James’s sister.
Jesse James’s sister, Susan Lavenia James (1849-1889), married Allen Parmer on November 24, 1870. They had six children before she died from complications of childbirth. One of the daughters, Feta Parmer, married Bert A. Rose. They had a daughter, Dorothy Ann Rose, who married William Jackson. Dorothy and William Jackson had a son, Bob Jackson, a great-grandnephew of Jesse James. It was Bob Jackson, who became an attorney in Oklahoma City, and Jackson’s nephew, Mark Nickol, who donated blood for the DNA tests. Starrs painstakingly verified their lineage with census records, birth and marriage certificates, and other records, and was certain that their mitochondrial DNA would be the same as Jesse James’s.
After scrupulous testing, the DNA from Jesse’s teeth, as well as from a lock of hair Jesse’s family had saved, was found to match that of the two James descendants. As a coup de grace, a piece of archaeological evidence, discovered by X-ray technology, proved clearly that the exhumed remains were indeed those of Jesse James.
Starrs had been trying to determine if there were any bullets or bullet fragments in the grave. There was much debris around the bones in the pit, maybe a thousand different items from the rock and soil, and rather than combing though it inch by inch to find any metallic fragments, Starrs’s team laid out the debris on a screen and X-rayed it. Anything that was metallic in nature would show a radiopacity on the X ray. One object in particular, from the chest area, stood out. It was in the shape of a square.
The object was a bit of a mystery to Starrs, but his ten-year-old grandson, whose hobby was rock collecting, identified it as obsidian, a type of volcanic stone. Later testing confirmed the boy’s conjecture, revealing it to be obsidian, a cheap stone, not a precious one by any means. Starrs also had found very small fragments of a pin that was obviously connected to the stone. Voila! This was Jesse James’s stickpin. A close inspection of the Jesse James death photographs revealed a stickpin in the cravat he had been buried in.
Starrs likened the discovery of the stickpin stone not just to finding a needle in a haystack but to finding a needle in twenty haystacks. By a stroke of luck, this discovery added nonscientific confirmation to his scientific conclusions. Indeed, the evidence, scientific and archaeological, irrefutably proved that the remains in Jesse James’s grave were those of the infamous bandit himself. The findings confirmed as well that all the people over the years who claimed to be Jesse James after the real outlaw’s demise were, in fact, imposters.
Under the court order, the exhumed remains had to be reburied within three months at the Kearney cemetery. The bones of Jesse James were returned in a cardboard box which was sealed inside a wooden coffin, and on October 28, 1995, in what was Jesse’s third funeral, the remains were reinterred not only with the teeth but with the gold found in them. But the Jesse James Home—the preserved home of the outlaw, now moved to a different site and run as a museum—kept and preserved the soil that had seeped into the pelvis and cranium, because it evidently contained ashes and dust from the remains. This material was stored in sacks with the idea that if a scientific method superior to mitochondrial DNA testing came along in the future, there would be dirt samples from the grave of Jesse James that could be tested so the remains would not have to be dug up again.
After the completion of the DNA tests, Starrs returned the artifacts gathered from the exhumation to the James family. They were placed in the custody of Jesse’s great-granddaughter Betty Barr. With the consent of the other five great-grandchildren, Betty Barr turned them over to their current location.
The thieves and murderers of modern history have always run the risk of being callously done in by fellow desperadoes who seek the same thing that brought the infamous criminals notoriety: money. This twist of fate was visited on Jesse James, who in his lifetime robbed, killed, and terrorized the citizenry. In death, the legendary o
utlaw left a host of macabre memories, as well as his stickpin, astonishingly recovered more than a century after he was killed and one of the few tangible artifacts he left behind—a cheap piece of jewelry that is a memento of the last day of his tawdry life and his violent death.
LOCATION: Jesse James Home, St. Joseph, Missouri.*
Footnotes
*According to various accounts, it was either a picture of a racehorse or a needlepoint working of the aphorism “God Bless Our Home,” which, along with “In God We Trust,” was a motto popular in homes at the time. Some historians suggest Jesse was straightening the picture rather than dusting it; having been in the house only a hundred days, they reason, it wouldn’t have had time to get very dusty, and while a little dust would probably not bother an outlaw, a crooked picture might.
*Jesse James, who seemed to live from hand to mouth—pulling off a job, living off the money until it ran out, then going out to pull off another job—apparently left little in the way of funds for his family. After his death, his wife, in need of money, had the sheriff sell the family possessions. The sale brought in about $113, including $15 for Jesse’s dog.
*Starrs obtained the court order in Clay County, where Jesse was buried, but later learned he had obtained it in the wrong court. It should have been obtained from Buchanan County, where Jesse was killed.
*The Jesse James Home displays only the stone of the stickpin and its partial mounting, keeping the pieces of the pin, along with all other remnants of the 1995 exhumation, in storage.
ULYSSES S. GRANT’S SMOKING
STAND
DATE: 1885.
WHAT IT IS: A decorative piece of furniture designed to hold cigars that belonged to the Civil War general and eighteenth president of the United States
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The stand has a three-pronged footed pedestal and a rounded top with indentations on which to put cigars; it is 38¾ inches high. It is made of brass, and in the center at the top is a removable goblet used to hold cigars that bears the initials “USG” on one side and an etching of a horse in mid-leap on the other. The goblet sits on a tray that is 13 inches in diameter; under the tray is a drawer in which reading glasses could be placed.
As its shrewd military leader, Ulysses S. Grant was instrumental in guiding the Union to victory in the American Civil War. He planned and led daring campaigns and forced Confederate strongholds to surrender, surviving it all with such heroic aplomb that he was elected by popular vote to lead the nation he helped reunify. Yet his most perilous battle was against the army of stogies he encountered almost daily during his military and political leadership, a continuing engagement in which the toxins in the dark tobacco cylinders ravaged his body and inflicted torturous pain upon him until he eventually succumbed.
Perhaps it was a combination of the Victorian times he lived in and his own fame that launched the American soldier onto this path of self-destruction, because prior to the 1862 battle at Fort Donelson on the Cumberland in western Tennessee, Ulysses S. Grant was merely an occasional pipe smoker. But with his victory over the Confederates at Fort Donelson—in which he responded to Brigadier General Simon B. Buckner’s proposal for an armistice by making his celebrated written stipulation, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted”—his admirers honored him, as was customary, with gifts, in his case cigars and related paraphernalia, as a token of their appreciation. Grant would often take the time to thank his admirers, as he did in this letter of June 5, 1863, to Mrs. Mary Duncan of New York City: “My Dear Madam I have just received your beautiful present of a Cigar Case and will continue to carry and, appreciate it, long after I could have done ‘smoked’ any number of cigars the Express company are capable of transmitting. …”
Indeed, by the time of the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia in May 1864, in which Grant was attacked hard by Confederate forces but valiantly held his ground, the general was a heavy smoker—thanks in no small part to those who continued to ply him with cigars. In early October 1864, Grant thanked U.S. Representative John Bidwell in a letter: “I have the pleasure of acknowledging the receipt of two boxes of very superior segars sent by you. Please accept my thanks for this mark of your esteem and recollection of your visit to this Army.”
The tobacco continued to roll his way until the general had become thoroughly addicted. Here’s Grant himself in 1865, recalling how he had developed a fondness for cheroots:
I had been a very light smoker previous to the attack on Fort Donelson, and after that battle I acquired a fondness for cigars by reason of a purely accidental circumstance. Admiral Foote, commanding the fleet of gunboats which were cooperating with the army, had been wounded, and at his request I had gone aboard his flag-ship to confer with him. The admiral offered me a cigar, which I smoked on my way back to headquarters. On the road I was met by a staff-officer, who announced that the enemy were making a vigorous attack. I galloped forward at once, and while riding among the troops giving the directions for repulsing the assault I carried the cigar in my hand. It had done out, but it seems that I continued to hold the stump between my fingers throughout the battle. In the accounts published in the papers I was represented as smoking a cigar in the midst of the conflict; and many persons, thinking, no doubt, that tobacco was my chief solace, sent me boxes of the choicest brands from everywhere in the North. As many as ten thousand were soon received, I gave away all I could get rid of, but having such a quantity on hand, I naturally smoked more than I would have done under ordinary circumstances, and I have continued the habit ever since.
Despite warnings that cigars could adversely affect his health, Ulysses S. Grant, pictured above, was an inveterate cigar smoker.
Horace Porter, an aide to Grant who chronicled some of the general’s later military campaigns, reported that after breakfast Grant’s servant would bring the general two dozen cigars, one of which he would smoke immediately; the others he would stuff in his pockets to give out to others or puff on later in the day, whether in the heat of battle or while relaxing. Porter noted that “a lighted cigar was in his mouth almost constantly.” Indeed, Grant smoked from morning to night. As Porter described one memorable day, “Deducting the number he had given away from the supply he had started out with in the morning showed that he had smoked that day about twenty, all very strong and of formidable size. But it must be remembered that it was a particularly long day. He never afterward equaled that record in the use of tobacco.”
In January 1865 Porter wrote, “When the chief had lighted his cigar after the morning meal, and taken his place by the camp-fire, a staff-officer said: ‘General, I never saw cigars consumed quite so rapidly as those you smoked last night when you were writing despatches to head off the ironclads.’ He smiled, and remarked: ‘No; when I come to think of it, those cigars didn’t last very long, did they?’”
When the Civil War ended in 1865, Grant was a war hero, and he would soon find that his admirers’ desire to honor him was insatiable. Private citizens, soldiers, businesspersons, politicians, and others relentlessly imparted to him all types of gifts, and there seemed to be no limit to the expense to which they would go. In August 1865, Grant was given a hero’s welcome in a gala celebration that included a parade and fireworks when he returned to Galena, Illinois, where his family had settled five years earlier, and some citizens of the town bequeathed him a two-story furnished brick house, not the first such gift, which he would only occasionally visit.
After the war Grant determined to moderate his cigar habit. In a newspaper interview that took place in May 1866, during a sitting for noted Maine sculptor Franklin Simmons, Grant said, “I am breaking off from smoking. When I was in the field I smoked eighteen or twenty cigars a day, but now I smoke only nine or ten.”
But aware of his fondness for stogies, soldiers were adamant in lavishing upon Grant, now General of the U.S. Army (the first to hold that rank), a veritable torrent of cigars. Shortly after the USS Susquehanna anchored in Havana harbor
in mid-November 1866, Lieutenant General William Tecumseh Sherman, famous for leading the “March to the Sea” in which his soldiers destroyed rail lines and supplies from Atlanta to the Atlantic Ocean, remarked in a letter to Grant, “I will be sure to lay in for you five thousand cigars of good quality trusting to bring them to you in due season.” Sherman made good on his word, writing Grant just three weeks later from Brazos Santiago, Texas: “When at Havannah I bought you five thousand segars, three thousand at $57, and two thousand at $34.” These notes about the cigars were embedded in detailed reports Sherman made about his military mission to Mexico. Grant himself was not too preoccupied to acknowledge Sherman’s kind interest, as Bvt. Brigadier General Cyrus B. Comstock shortly wrote to Sherman, “General Grant requests me to enclose the within check for the cigars, for $210 in coin. The cigars have arrived but I don’t believe the general who has been under the weather has opened them yet. He sends his thanks.”
Grant continued diligently to thank those who bestowed cigars and related paraphernalia on him. Here’s Grant in a letter of January 21, 1867, to Miss Mary Jane Safford:
I owe you an apology for not earlyer acknowedeing the beautiful token of remembrance which you were so kind as to send me about one month ago. The box containing it came duly to hand and supposing it to be a box of cigars, a present which I often get, it was sent to the house where I have several dozen boxes just like it, though with different contents. I supposed that a letter would come along through the Mail announcing who had favored me, as is usually the case. But no letter came and the matter was forgotten until last evening I had occasion to open a fresh box of cigars, and accidentally opened the one you sent me, and there found your letter and beautiful present. It was the first I knew of your return from Europe. I was indeed glad to hear from you and shall also prize most highly both your letter and the cigar holder which I shall preserve in remembrance of the donor.
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