by Gordon Kerr
One day, Federal troops rode into the farm and started to set fire to the barns and sheds. Their orders were to burn down the property of anyone fighting on the opposite side. When Jesse protested he was savagely beaten and one report suggests that they tried to hang his stepfather, but he survived.
In 1864, aged 17, Jesse finally got his chance to fight, joining the notorious guerrilla unit led by ‘Bloody Bill’ Anderson, the most feared Confederate guerrilla leader in the country. Anderson was a man who showed no mercy to his enemies. Once, discovering 25 Union soldiers on a train he was holding up, he lined them up outside and shot them dead. In the chaos of the end of the war, Jesse was shot and badly wounded as he tried to surrender. He was nursed back to health by his cousin Zerelda, who was named after his mother. He would later marry her after a nine-year courtship.
At the end of the Civil War, many men found it difficult to adjust once more to peaceful, civilian life. Jesse and his brother Frank joined up with a group of former Confederate guerrillas, led by Archie Clement, that was engaged in criminal activity. A year after the war ended, this gang carried out the first post-war bank robbery in America, robbing the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty. During the raid, Jesse shot and killed an innocent bystander but later claimed to have taken part merely in order to get back the deeds to his family’s land. However, the Liberty bank job signalled the start of a wave of robberies and not long after, they hit the Aleksandr Mitchell Bank in Lexington.
More followed, but it was the December 1869 robbery of a bank in Gallatin, Missouri, that earned Jesse the notoriety that was to follow him for the rest of his life. A man called Samuel P. Cox had fired the bullet that had killed ‘Bloody Bill’ Anderson and Jesse mistakenly thought that the cashier at the bank was Cox. He shot him dead during the raid and became famous. The catalyst for this was the editor of the Kansas City Times, John Newman Edwards, a Confederate sympathiser, who published letters written by Jesse in his newspaper and wrote editorials supporting Jesse’s rebellious political views and actions.
Frank and Jesse joined forces with the Younger Brothers – Cole, Bob and Jim – and some other former Confederate soldiers to form what became known as the James–Younger Gang. Cole Younger had become a Confederate after his father had been murdered by a detachment of Union troops whose captain was said to owe him money. He had joined Quantrill’s men and taken part in the slaughter of 200 men and boys at Lawrence, Kansas. He also rode with Archie Clement after the war.
This gang robbed its way across the West, robbing banks, stagecoaches and, from 1873, trains, often in front of large crowds and often hamming it up for the delighted spectators. On 9 April 1874, when they robbed a stagecoach just across the Missouri River from the town of Lexington, hundreds of spectators follow the action from across the river.
Detective and spy Allan Pinkerton, who was born in Glasgow and emigrated to the New World in 1842, had established a private security and detective agency in 1850 to fight urban professional criminals as well as to break strikes and work against trade unions. The agency had made its name when it had foiled a plot to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln, leading Lincoln to use Pinkerton’s men for his personal security during the Civil War. It was to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, with its proud motto, ‘We Never Sleep’, that the victims of the James–Younger Gang turned in 1874. However, even Pinkerton’s could not tame the James and Younger boys. One agent sent in to infiltrate the gang was found dead shortly after he had arrived at Zerelda Samuel’s farm. Two others posed as cattle-buyers as they followed the gang but met the same fate. One was killed by two of the Younger brothers in a gunfight, in which John Younger also died.
The deaths of the Pinkerton agents added to the embarrassment of the Missouri Governor Silas Woodson. He offered a massive $2,000 reward for their capture and persuaded the state legislature to provide $10,000 to fund the hunt for the outlaws. Jesse and the gang were undaunted, carrying out their most profitable robbery to date when they hit a train on the Kansas Pacific Railroad, near Muncie in Kansas, netting $30,000.
For Allan Pinkerton, meanwhile, it was getting personal. In January 1875 he staged a raid on the James family farm, too late to catch the James boys who had left earlier. An iron incendiary device was thrown into the house, the explosion killing Jesse’s nine-year-old half-brother Archie, and blowing off Zerelda’s arm. A few months later, a neighbour, Daniel Askew, who had provided a base for the Pinkerton’s men who took part in the raid on the farm, was shot dead by an unknown gunman.
The raid, however, persuaded Jesse and Frank to move to Nashville to safeguard their mother. From his base there, Jesse wrote numerous letters to the press, making his political views known.
Possibly the most famous raid in the gang’s history, the attack on the bank at Northfield, Minnesota, also set the scene for the demise of Jesse and the gang.
It was selected, according to Bob Younger, speaking later, because it had connections with two prominent Union generals and politicians – Benjamin Butler and Adelbert Ames. Ames, a former Minnesota Governor, had moved to Northfield where his family owned a mill and had a large amount of stock in the bank.
Frank and Jesse, accompanied by Cole, Jim and Bob Younger, Charlie Pitts, Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell, took the train to St Paul and Minneapolis at the beginning of September 1876. On arrival, they split into two groups, one going to the town of Mankato on one side of Northfield, the other heading for Red Wing on the other side. They bought horses and began to plan the robbery, scouting out the land around the town.
At two in the afternoon on 7 September, they made their move, three of them entering the bank, the remaining five standing guard on the street outside. Word spread that a robbery was in progress and a number of armed men opened fire on the men in the street, immediately killing Miller and Chadwell and wounding the Youngers. A local man was also shot dead. Meanwhile, the mayhem continued inside the bank when cashier Joseph Lee Haywood refused to open the safe and was gunned down.
The remnants of the gang fled, hiding themselves in nearby woods. After several days of dodging posses and road blocks, they had only succeeded in getting a few miles away from Northfield and decided to split up. The Younger brothers were eventually captured near Madelia, Minnesota, while Jesse and Frank made it back to Missouri. The Northfield raid had signalled the end of the road for the James–Younger Gang.
Frank and Jesse spent the next three years living quietly in Nashville, but while Frank seems to have taken to the quiet life, Jesse could not adapt. By 1879 he had assembled a new gang and began a wave of robberies over the next few years in Alabama, Kentucky and Missouri. In October of 1879 they held up the Chicago and Alton Railroad, getting away with $40,000. In September 1880 they robbed a Wells Fargo Stagecoach in Kentucky and, shortly afterwards, a paymaster’s office in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The Seton Bank in Riverton, Iowa, brought them a $5,000 haul. Jesse was well and truly back in business. Dime novels told fantastic stories about him and newspapers raved about his audacity. He grew a beard to enhance his image.
When he hit the Chicago and Alton train again in 1881, the safe did not yield much more than $1,500. So, for only the second time in his career, Jesse ordered the gang to rob the passengers. He walked through the train, the only member of the gang not wearing a mask, introducing himself to the incredulous passengers. It would be his last robbery.
Missouri’s new Governor, Thomas T. Crittendon, was determined to bring down the James Gang, persuading the state’s railroad and express executives to fund a huge reward – $10,000 – for the capture, dead or alive, of the James brothers. Things slowly began to unravel and gang members began to be arrested or killed.
Robert and Charley Ford had been fringe members of the gang for a short while and by 1882 they were the only remaining members apart from Jesse. Unknown to Jesse, however, Robert Ford had recently met with Governor Crittendon and had made a deal to kill the great outlaw and claim the reward.
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nbsp; On 3 April of that year, the Ford brothers were visiting Jesse at his house; Zerelda, Jesse’s wife, was busy in the kitchen and his children were playing outside. It was breakfast time and they were discussing plans for their next job, the robbery of the Platte County Bank. Bob Ford played along, delighted to see that Jesse was not wearing his gunbelt.
Suddenly Jesse spotted something and stood up. He stared at a picture on the wall, saying that it was crooked. He walked over to it, pulled up a small stool and climbed up, reaching out to adjust the angle of the picture.
It was the perfect moment for Ford. Jesse was unarmed and had his back to him, preoccupied with the picture. Ford jumped out of his seat, pulled his revolver from under his coat, took aim and fired from a distance of about four feet. Jesse jerked and grabbed his neck, the bullet having entered his head just below his ear. Another three shots rang out in quick succession as Ford made certain. The stool beneath Jesse’s feet fell over and he crashed to the floor, dead before he reached it.
Five months later, a worn-out Frank James surrendered to Governor Crittendon, declaring: ‘I have been hunted for 21 years, have literally lived in the saddle, have never known a day of perfect peace. It was one long, anxious, inexorable, eternal vigil.’ They tried him, but he was found not guilty and walked free. For the next 40 years, Frank worked in a variety of jobs. He was a shoe salesman and then a theatre guard in St Louis. He was an AT&T Telegraph operator in St Joseph, Missouri, and he worked the lecture circuit with his old comrade, Cole Younger. In 1902 he became betting commissioner at the Fair Grounds Race Track in New Orleans. Towards the end of his life he lived on the James Farm, giving tours for just 25 cents. He died in 1915, aged 72.
The reward money did not bring happiness to the Ford brothers. Charley shot himself a few years later and Bob bought a saloon in Colorado. However, his life was filled with people who wanted to see, as the popular song went, ‘The dirty little coward who shot Mister Howard’; Howard being the identity Jesse had adopted towards the end. Eventually, a customer shot him dead in 1892.
Billy The Kid
Billy the Kid’s entry into life was as enigmatic as his departure from it.
His childhood is shrouded in mystery and even the birth date usually attributed to him – 23 November 1859 – cannot be confirmed absolutely. There is also confusion about the names of his parents. They appear to have been of Irish Catholic descent and may have been Catherine McCarty and a man called either William Bonny or Patrick Henry McCarty and Billy may have been born as Henry McLarty in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Whatever is the case, his father appears to have died around the end of the American Civil War, in 1865, and his mother, having met a man called William Antrim, definitely remarried in Silver City, New Mexico, in 1873 after travelling around the country with him. Sadly, she died of tuberculosis just a year later and 14-year-old Henry was taken in by a neighbouring family who ran a hotel where he washed dishes and waited on tables to pay for his board and lodgings.
The young Henry was reported by schoolteachers and by those for whom he worked to be a willing and well-behaved boy, but in 1875 that all changed when he made the acquaintance of a young thief, drunk and gambler known as Sombrero Jack. One day, Jack stole a bundle of clothing from a Chinese laundryman and gave it to Henry who had no decent clothes to wear. It was discovered in Henry’s room and he was thrown in jail. After a couple of days, he escaped by climbing up the jailhouse chimney, becoming a fugitive. He would remain a fugitive until his death.
Henry made his way to south-east Arizona where he had hoped to move in with his stepfather, whose name he had taken, but when Antrim learned why he had fled Silver City, he threw him out. Henry, on his own and still only 16, hooked up with a man named John Mackie and together the pair made a living from stealing saddles and horses from the army in the Fort Grant area. They were caught and thrown in jail, but, not for the last time, Henry escaped.
Around this time, now known by his famous nickname ‘the Kid’ because he looked so young, he found work as a ranch-hand. Then in 1877 he took a job driving a wagon hauling logs from a timber camp to a sawmill at Fort Grant. A blacksmith called Frank ‘Windy’ Cahill, who was working in the camp, liked nothing better than to bully and humiliate the Kid in front of the other men. One day Cahill attacked Henry during an argument and the young man pulled his gun and shot Cahill. He died the next day and ‘the Kid’ found himself in prison once again. Before the local marshal could arrive to deal with the case, however, he again escaped.
Heading back to New Mexico, he joined one of the most ruthless bands of killers and cattle-rustlers in the south-west, a gang known as ‘The Boys’, led by Jesse Evans. The gang rustled and killed its way towards Lincoln County, New Mexico, with the law breathing down its neck.
They arrived in Lincoln County in 1877, just at the right time. The region was being torn apart by a war between a faction led by wealthy ranchers and another led by the wealthy owners of the monopolistic general store in Lincoln County. In the midst of this, the most acrimonious and bloody feud was between the English cattle rancher, banker and merchant John Tunstall, and the Irishman, James Dolan. Henry and his crew went to work for Dolan, but he fell out with Jesse Evans and ‘The Boys’ and was offered employment by Tunstall.
This move seemed to McLarty to represent a new beginning and what better way to celebrate than to adopt a new identity. From that day on, he went by the name of William H. Bonney. He was welcomed and liked by his new colleagues. One of the other men who worked for Tunstall recalled that: ‘He was the centre of interest everywhere he went, and though heavily armed, he seemed as gentlemanly as a college-bred youth. He quickly became acquainted with everyone, and because of his humorous and pleasing personality grew to be a community favourite.’
One day, not long after the Kid had been hired, John Tunstall was caught unarmed out on the range while herding cattle and was shot dead in cold blood. Tunstall’s murder outraged Billy and his fellow ranch-hands so much that they formed their own gang, the Regulators, with Dick Brewer as leader, and went out in search of the killers. On 6 March they caught up with Bill Morton and Frank Baker and killed them. Then as they made their way back to the ranch, they killed one of their own number whom they suspected of being a traitor.
Sheriff William J. Brady was next, gunned down on Lincoln’s High Street by a number of Regulators, including Billy who was wounded in the attack. On 4 April the killing continued when an old buffalo hunter, Buckshot Roberts, who had been involved in Tunstall’s murder, was killed, but not before he had killed Brewer. Bonney took over as leader and the gangwas now wanted for several killings but especially for Sheriff Brady’s. He went into hiding at the house of Aleksandr McSween, a lawyer and former associate of Tunstall. News got out and an alliance of Dolan’s and Brady’s men set fire to the house with the Regulators trapped inside. When McSween was shot dead fleeing the fire, the Lincoln County War was effectively over.
In 1878 when Lew Wallace became Governor of New Mexico, he declared an amnesty for any man involved in the Lincoln County War who was not already under indictment on other charges. Billy was one such, still under indictment for Cahill’s murder the previous year. So, he now had enemies on both sides of the law, a dangerous situation that was likely to result only in his being gunned down sometime soon.
He decided to call a truce with James Dolan and Jesse Evans. The two sides met and agreed to lay off each other. Afterwards, they went to the saloon to celebrate, getting extremely drunk as the evening wore on. As the townspeople hid indoors, they staggered down the street, bumping into McSween’s attorney, Huston Chapman. Billy claimed that he could see trouble brewing and wanted no part of it, trying to get away, but he was blocked by one of the other men. Bill Campbell and James Dolan pulled their guns and shot the lawyer in the chest, killing him. They then suggested, in their drunken stupour, that they should all go to a restaurant and eat oysters as if nothing had happened. Billy had no choice but to tag along.
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nbsp; When Dolan suggested in the restaurant that someone go and place a gun in Chapman’s hand to suggest that the killing was in fact an act of self-defence, Billy immediately volunteered. Stepping outside, he jumped on his horse and hightailed it out of town.
Governor Wallace was furious when he heard about Chapman’s murder and issued warrants for the arrest of everyone present. The Kid realised that this might be a chance for him to get on the right side of the law once and for all and he wrote to the Governor from Texas offering to testify against Dolan and Campbell if he was granted an amnesty. The two met in March 1879 in Lincoln County, Billy turning up at the meeting with a revolver in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other. He agreed to testify.
The deal was that he would be arrested and put in jail and be freed after testifying. However, neither Wallace nor prosecutor William Rynerson had any intention of letting Billy go. Rynerson insisted that before Dolan was tried, Billy should stand trial for the murder of Sheriff Brady. Billy knew he had no chance and grabbed the opportunity to escape, yet again, when his guard was looking the other way.
He spent the next 18 months rustling cattle and killing where necessary. In January 1880 he shot dead Joe Grant in a saloon in Fort Sumner. Grant was boasting that he would kill Billy the Kid on sight, not realising that the man sitting across the table from him was Billy. The Kid asked Grant at one point if he could have a look at the ivory-handled pistol he was carrying. In those days it was common for men to only put five bullets into a gun, leaving one chamber empty for safety as there were often accidents and mishaps. Billy made sure when he returned the pistol to Grant that the hammer would fall on the empty chamber. He then calmly informed the other man that he was actually seated across from Billy the Kid. Grant pulled his gun and fired but, of course, nothing happened. Billy raised his own gun and shot him. When asked about it later, Billy replied: ‘It was a game for two and I got there first.’
