by Fred Rosen
Inexhaustible and entrancing, even to a man of the cloth. Finally, Robert James could stay home no longer. No matter his family, no matter his responsibilities, no matter his God—he had to try his hand in the gold fields. Along with a group of like-minded men from Clay County, he prepared to leave in the spring of 1850. Like all those other men, he was taking a tremendous chance.
Among cholera, dysentery, smallpox, not to mention injuries and an occasional murder, there was a 25 percent mortality rate in the camps. Of those who went to California in the Gold Rush, one in four never made it back. Multiply that by the three hundred thousand people who flocked to the gold fields in first years of the Gold Rush and that added up to seventy-five thousand dead. Those deaths had a ripple effect on the families of the survivors, as Robert James well knew.
In preaching to his congregation, Robert James had seen boys who lost their father come to no good. If he died, who would be there to counsel his sons Frank and Jesse and lead them on the path of righteousness? Zerelda was a strong woman, but boys needed their father. What man would raise his children? Nothing substituted for a father’s presence and guidance, not to mention the financial burden that would be on Zerelda if something happened to him.
These were questions every man who left for the Gold Rush had to ask himself and answer in his own way. For the most part, it was the men who went and the women who stayed home to tend the families and the farms that the men left behind.
On April 14, 1850, Robert James preached his farewell sermon at New Hope, Missouri. Those who were there said later that he seemed very much taken with the emotion of the moment. He told his congregation that he was not going to California for gold but to minister spiritually to the miners. Most of his congregants nodded their heads and took his assertion at face value. One congregant that day, Jane Gill, did not believe him and later wrote down her response to James’s sermon.
“Aaron made a golden calf to worship whilst Moses was on the mount. And priests and ministers with their members may do the same in this day and have done it no doubt.”
This was a roundabout way of saying that once James was in the gold fields, he would abandon his preaching for what every man wanted, the lure of the yellow nuggets and dust. Whether Robert James really believed he was going to preach is hard to say, but no one who knew him as a farmer and businessman would doubt that he would at least try his hand at gold mining. How could he not, with everyone around him seemingly getting rich? Robert James packed his things.
Fully cognizant that his father was leaving, though he didn’t know for how long, his 2 1/2-year-old son Jesse cried uncontrollably. In halting though plain language, Jesse begged his father to stay. He must have felt like he was being abandoned, but the child’s pleas fell on deaf ears.
Departing on a wagon train from St. Joseph, Robert James soon became a prolific letter writer. As the wagon train commanded by Major Seth Adams went west, James wrote and mailed his letters along the way.
In one, he wrote Zerelda: “Train up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and live a Christian life yourself.… Give my love to all inquiring friends, and take a portion of it to yourself and kiss Jesse for me and tell Franklyn to be a good boy and learn fast.” In subsequent letters he sounded depressed, the privations of his trek clearly getting into his thoughts and then his words.
Sometime in the summer of 1850, Robert James finally came to the Gold Rush town of Rough and Ready. The camp had been there for only one year, its existence pure accident.
Hearing the news of Marshall’s discovery, a group from Shellsburg, Wisconsin, had saddled up to cross the Plains in covered wagons and make their fortune. Their leader was Captain A. A. Townsend. He had been an officer under General Taylor’s command in the late war, and had acquitted himself bravely. It was he who coined the name for their outfit, the Rough and Ready Mining Company, in honor of his former commander. The camp they established north of Coloma acquired the same name.
The Wisconsin miners had been at their work for a few months, showing very little for their labors when in September 1849 a hunter in their employ named Cheyenne Bodie stopped for a drink of water in a shallow stream near their diggings. Bending down, Bodie thrust his hand into the cool, clean water, but before the water touched his lips, something made him stop. His eyes were seeing something he had never seen before. There, in the shallow water, right near his hand, was something glittering. The color was bright yellow. He grabbed for it. The nugget was … gold!
Bodie was so excited, he didn’t know what to do except go back to camp and tell the rest of the men about his find. That was enough. Word soon got out, and Rough and Ready became another boomtown. It turned out that Bodie had found something quite large; anyone who dug in Rough and Ready or sluiced the water hit pay dirt quickly.
To this end Captain Townsend returned to Wisconsin to recruit miners for their claim. The deal was that Townsend would pay their expenses out, and in return, they would agree to work for him for one year, sharing the gold they pulled out of the water and the ground fifty-fifty. Forty men took Townsend up on his offer and returned with him on the long trek to California.
Townsend was back in Wisconsin when, on April 7, 1850, Rough and Ready had a town meeting to decide its future. Its citizens were angry and frustrated. They paid taxes to a state that had not provided them with any sort of law and order. The solution, the townsfolk decided, was to become the first town in the United States to secede from the Union.
Constitutionally, of course, this was illegal. To do so was a federal crime, though the federal government had never had to enforce this provision of the Constitution. As for the government of the state of California, they watched and did nothing as the miners formed the Great Republic of Rough and Ready. To make things nice and legal, a Constitution was drafted that provided for a president, who was then elected.
As their first and soon to be only president, the miners chose E. F. Brundage. Brundage then appointed his own secretary of state and marshal. In other towns, the latter office would be known as “town marshal.” In Rough and Ready it became “republic marshal.” That office, like the other two, was doomed.
On June 28, 1850, the Great Republic of Rough and Ready faced its first big test when a fire raged through the town, destroying nearly every tent, shanty, and lean-to that got in the path of the flames. The republic sprang back, building shacks and shanties and erecting new tents. The place was just too rich to let go because of something as small as a fire.
The Great Republic of Rough and Ready was barely three months old as July 4 approached. When they were still just a town, Rough and Ready would, like the neighboring towns, be getting ready for a grand celebration in honor of the nation’s birthday. Parades, speeches, all kinds of festivities usually marked the occasion. But that was in the past, when Rough and Ready was part of the United States. Now it was its own republic.
The citizens of Rough and Ready felt kind of lonely. More than a few had had cause to regret their initial decision to declare independence from the Union. They had been patriotic American citizens, and then suddenly, they were no longer. They felt displaced in their own republic. And they wanted to celebrate the Fourth just like they always had. The solution was apparent.
A second town meeting was called. With Brundage, his secretary of state, and republic marshal all tendering their resignations, the town voted overwhelmingly to stop being a republic and go back to being part of the United States of America. That done, the July 4 celebration could proceed.
When Townsend got back to Rough and Ready early that fall, he was told of the goings on while he had been away. He had, indeed, missed a lot. The camp had grown and now included a miner/preacher named Robert James, who hailed from Clay County, Missouri. Townsend couldn’t be sure how much mining he did, considering that every spare inch of ground was staked out for miles around and everyone always seemed to be working. A man needed to establish a claim just to have a plot of ground where he
could put his head at night. Hundreds were already working every square inch that was to be had.
Robert James heard of a miner who had recently found an eighteen-pound nugget of gold. Captain Townsend and his brothers, who had accompanied him from Wisconsin, made more than $40,000 in just a few months of work. How much Robert James made digging for gold is hard to say, because no records were kept. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been much.
James had always had a strong constitution, but it could not withstand the diseases in Rough and Ready. Dysentery, cholera, smallpox, jaundice, syphilis, gonorrhea, take your pick, they all were lethal. Sometime during September 1850, Robert James took to bed with a severe illness. As he had no money, a fellow Missourian, Daniel H. Wright, stood his expenses. For two weeks, Dr. Josiah Newman attended him until finally, in the middle of the month, Robert James finally expired.
There was no funeral with a minister such as himself praising Robert James’s life and extolling his virtues. His wife and family were far away and knew nothing about what had happened. In that, they were no different from the families of the thousands of others who died during the Gold Rush. Robert James’s body was placed in a shallow grave. Whether anyone even said a few words of Scripture over the grave is open for dispute.
When Zerelda finally got a letter in October 1850 from Daniel H. Wright informing her of her husband’s death, it contained Wright’s bill for the money he had loaned Robert James during his illness. He had already gotten what was owed him by taking the last $10 from his wallet and by selling the dead man’s mule, belongings, and boots.
Zerelda wasn’t the first Gold Rush widow in the county, and she wouldn’t be the last. Most widows in such a condition moved in with relatives or friends. Not Zerelda. James had made sure to have a white man help to work his farm while he was gone, so at least for a while she could stay there.
On October 25, 1850, the Liberty Tribune carried an obituary with the headline “Death of Rev Robert James.” It said, “As a Revivalist, he had but few equals in this country,” and went onto to describe the prosperity of the Baptist Church in Clay County when it was under his leadership.
That should have been it. Had Robert James been just any other ordinary preacher turned miner, it would have been. But James had miscalculated. He hadn’t taken care of his family, except in the short term.
Robert’s sons Frank and Jesse had to make due without their father’s love and guidance. By all contemporary accounts, it made them angry as they grew up. It didn’t help that both had vivid memories of the time shortly after their father’s death.
On November 21, 1850, Zerelda sat down for the reading of Robert’s will, except there was none. Robert hadn’t bothered. His estate therefore went into probate. Zerelda soon discovered that under the law of the state, her sons inherited everything and she nothing because she was a woman. Because the boys were underage, the court appointed an officer of the court to liquidate the estate and pay off James’s hometown creditors.
January 4, 1851, saw the twenty-six-year old widow, her eight-year-old son Frank—he preferred “Frank” to the more formal “Franklyn”—and three-year-old Jesse standing on the porch as the auctioneer shouted out for bids on Zerelda’s property. Among that crowd of strangers were many friends and neighbors. How humiliating it must have been. Zerelda had enough cash to buy back some of her property, including some beds, a sow, books about baptism that belonged to Robert, and some of his other small possessions. But everything of value went, including Robert’s rifle, the most significant gift a father could leave his son.
In seeking to help out the widow of their beloved preacher, James’s congregation took up a collection for the widow and her children, “He was the humble instrument of God. He saw the awful condition we were in and helped us to see it too as we should have done during his pastoral charge of New Hope Church for seven years. We hereby agree and bind ourselves to relieve his heirs.” They meant, of course, only part of his debt. After that it was a hand-to-mouth existence for Zerelda and her children.
On September 12, 1855, Zerelda remarried, to Dr. Reuben Samuels, in personality the direct opposite of Robert. Where Robert was strong, authoritative, and loving, Samuels was weak, meek, and cold, hardly the sort of personality to father children on the frontier.
The next crucial point where Robert would have made a difference came in 1861. With the Civil War already under way, Samuels stood by tacitly as his eighteen-year-old stepson joined up with William Quantrill. No matter Robert James’s Southern sympathies, he would have died first before allowing Frank to join up with such a scoundrel. Quantrill had defied all of the Ten Commandments before he was twenty-one.
William C. Quantrill was born in Ohio on July 31, 1837. He became a schoolteacher in Ohio and Illinois. That makes him, perhaps, American history’s only mass murderer with such a benign and educated background. Like many a pioneer from the East, his profession did not offer enough challenge, enough adventure, and so Quantrill went west in 1857. The following year came the charge that he was a horse-stealer, a hanging offense in any frontier town. Quantrill quickly found employment as a trail hand on a wagon train traveling west to Salt Lake City.
Quantrill would subsequently be involved in a number of murders and thefts in Utah, and later in 1860 he fled a Utah arrest warrant, taking up residence in Lawrence, Kansas. There, the Southern sympathizer joined a group of abolitionists for the sole purpose of setting them up. The latter had plans to go across the border to Missouri to free some slaves. But Quantrill was working an angle.
Secretly, Quantrill let his proslavery brethren know they were coming. When they got to the Missouri farm to free those slaves, the Southerners opened fire from their places of concealment in the brush surrounding the farm. In a hail of bullets, the abolitionists were cut down by the proslavers. Quantrill—who, of course, survived—smiled when the massacre was over.
In 1861, when Fort Sumter was attacked and the Civil War began, punitive raids by the Kansas-based Jayhawkers began. A guerrilla band, they rode into Missouri to kill slaveowners. Quantrill decided to emulate their tactics, only his Confederate sympathies served as a thin veneer for what he really was: a cold-blooded murderer who liked killing. He enlisted to his banner men of similar disposition, every out-of-work thief and murderer he could find. His lieutenant was seventeen-year-old cherub-faced Archie Clements, who would scalp an enemy’s head and give it to Quantrill as a souvenir.
It was into this band of misfits who showed depraved indifference to human life that Frank James decided to ally himself. If Robert James were still alive, he would never allowed it to happen, but if it did, he would have gotten the rest of his family out of harm’s way. Instead, Zerelda and Jesse stayed put.
That wasn’t too good an idea.
Missouri was considered a “border” state—that is, neutral on slavery. Of course the state wasn’t, and had many proslavery counties besides Clay. Union soldiers stationed in Missouri were under orders from Washington to ferret out Confederate sympathizers, which meant regular raids on the homes of people who had relatives allied with Quantrill. Since Quantrill operated independently except for a brief period when the Confederates mistakenly gave him a captainship and shortly thereafter came to their senses and kicked him out, he was considered an outlaw.
In 1863, a detachment of Union Army soldiers rode out to the James farm. It was still called that despite Reuben Samuels’ residence. The officer in charge, Lieutenant Rip Masters, asked for Frank, to which Zerelda replied that she knew nothing and Samuels shrugged. Jesse, fifteen years old, sassed the Northern soldier and leaped to the attack.
Masters’s response was to punch Jesse senseless; he was then stomped by the soldiers who were in the process of burning the farm to the ground. Robert James, a man of peace, would have counseled patience, and Christ’s dying words “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”
Crap. That’s what the James family had left after the soldiers got finish
ed with their farm. Over time, it would be rebuilt. But Jesse’s heart had been broken when his father went to the Gold Rush, stomped on when his mother remarried, and now it had been shredded by the bluecoats’ beating. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Robert James’s death was the beginning of a downward spiral for Jesse James that became a problem for many.
Soon after that beating, Jesse sought out Quantrill, and at age sixteen in 1864, joined up and was assigned to Bloody Bill Andersen’s detachment. Andersen was another one of Quantrill’s “lieutenants.” He wasn’t called “Bloody” Bill for nothing; he liked to kill and mutilate. Jesse’s first “engagement” was in September 1864. At Centralia, Kansas, Andersen’s detachment, which included Frank and Jesse James and their cousins Cole and Bob Younger, rode hell-bent into the abolitionist town.
Andersen allowed his men to rape the women. Surprising a squad of twenty-six Union soldiers in transit, Andersen and his men cornered them at the town’s railroad station. As Jesse watched, Andersen lined them up side by side and then went down the line of twenty-six, carefully shooting each man in the back of the head. Jesse drank it all in.
In April 1865, with the war finally at an end, blanket amnesty was offered to those who fought for the Southern cause, including the survivors of Quantrill’s band. Quantrill himself, as well as Andersen and Clements, were all dead. To get amnesty, it was necessary for the former “soldiers” to take an oath of allegiance to the United States of America, and to do that, Missourians had to travel to their county seat.
This is the only moment in their lives of the James boys after their father died, where he would have counseled them to do what they did—ride into Liberty, swear the oath, and put the killing behind them. Unfortunately, the James boys happened to be traveling into Liberty during the week of April 14, 1865.
By the time they got to the outskirts of Liberty, news of President Lincoln’s assassination by the actor John Wilkes Booth had been telegraphed. In anger, the Union garrison stationed there decided to shoot any rebels who had the audacity to come into town expecting to swear amnesty.
