The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  The following winter, in retaliation, the Pinkertons had mounted a midnight raid on the James farm. On January 26, 1875, a cadre of heavily armed men had surrounded the farmhouse and hurled an incendiary device through a kitchen window. This device may have been, as the Pinkertons’ defenders later claimed, an iron-clad ball of “Grecian Fire”—an early precursor of napalm—intended to illuminate the premises or at worst to smoke out its inhabitants. But when it rolled into the open kitchen hearth, it exploded like a bomb. Zerelda Samuel, a woman numerous historians have erroneously described as Frank and Jesse’s mother, lost her right arm in the blast, and her eight-year-old son Archie perished when a red-hot chunk of the fireball’s cast-iron casing tore into his belly. If Jesse and/or Frank James were at the farm that night—which was never proved—they escaped unscathed. The deadly attack on the Kearney farmhouse had not only failed to bring down the James boys; it had turned into an enormous public relations debacle for the agency. Though the Pinkertons always denied any involvement in the incident, many local citizens who might otherwise have been happy to have seen the region ridded of the robber band came to sympathize with their outlaw neighbors against the invading detectives. Following the raid, a bill was introduced in the Missouri legislature calling for amnesty for the gang, and Jesse James, emboldened by this newfound popular support, lashed out against his pursuers. In a letter published in the Nashville Republican Banner in August 1875, the outlaw threatened that Pinkerton “better never dare show his Scottish face again in Western Mo…. or he will meet the fate his comrades Capt. Lull and Witcher [sic] met.”

  Since then the frustrated Pinkertons, feeling themselves as much the hunted as the hunters, had redoubled their efforts to bring the gang to justice, desperately clutching at any forensic straw that might blow their way.

  Thus, Billy Pinkerton hung heavily on Elena’s every word as she described the Rocky Cut robbery and its dramatic culmination in Jesse and Henry’s mutual recognition. The long-lost brothers, she told him, had embraced and kissed. Then Jesse and Frank had called Cole and Bob Younger into the coach and presented a thoroughly dazed Henry James to their skeptical associates, proudly introducing their brother as a distinguished man of letters. Elena was able to vouch for the veracity of this characterization on the basis of her reading of Roderick Hudson and Henry’s travel notebook, though here she withheld a crucial piece of information from Pinkerton—and not for the last time in their relationship: She actually had the notebook in her possession, having slid it off her lap and secreted it in her reticule in the wake of the author’s hurried departure from the train. In what Elena described as an entirely “jolly” mood, Frank and Jesse had hustled the bemused novelist off the train with them, remarking on what a fabulous haul they had made that evening.

  While recounting these bizarre events, Elena deftly unhooked the three dozen tiny brass clips at the front of her corset, a cumbersome contraption of steel, lace, whalebone, and gutta-percha that reached from her armpits to the fullest part of her hips, shaping her impossibly narrow waist. With an audible sigh, she liberated herself from the girdle’s harsh mechanical embrace and stood silhouetted behind the translucent screen draped only in a high-necked, long-sleeved cotton underbody and an embroidered linen cambric chemise.

  Pinkerton was not about to be further distracted by the ecdysiastic activity taking place behind the screen. At the mention of an additional James brother—and a literary one at that—the detective’s practiced forensic feelers had been set aquiver. While the Younger brothers were clearly every inch the ill-bred backwoods louts they appeared, there had always been something fishy about those James boys: For example, how could one explain Frank James’s well-known penchant for reciting flawlessly and at length from Shakespeare and Milton, or his famous facility with the French and German languages? And what of Jesse’s courtly demeanor, the high diction and impeccable grammar of his frequent self-serving letters to the local newspapers? If what this woman was telling him was true, Pinkerton surmised, he had every reason to believe it might prove the big break in the case.

  He pressed Elena for details, particularly for a precise description of Henry’s physical appearance. Unlike his father, Allan, who had been gifted with a born detective’s nose for sniffing out crime, Billy Pinkerton lacked an instinct for effortlessly worming his way into the criminal mind. The son had picked up the family trade more or less by rote, depending not so much on feel from his substantial gut as on the nascent science of criminology. Unfortunately, the rigorous Bertillon system of facial measurements, to say nothing of fingerprinting or DNA analysis, had yet to be developed, and the identity of criminals in those benighted times usually had to be ascertained on the basis of such gross physical characteristics as height, scars, and facial features, including the notoriously mutable traits of hair color, weight, beards, and mustaches. To this end, the Pinkerton agency maintained an archive of photographs—the world’s earliest and most extensive catalog of mug shots—of which William Pinkerton had carried a selection down from Chicago on the off chance that they might help jog the memory of any recalcitrant witnesses. He now dealt out his little deck of tintypes across Elena’s bedspread, a portable rogues’ gallery that included pictures of the Younger brothers, Frank and Jesse James, and various other suspected members of the gang, along with a photograph of William Pinkerton’s younger brother Robert, which the detective had included partly because any lineup required the presence of a few “ringers” who could not possibly have been involved in the crime in question, and partly for his own fraternal amusement.

  When Elena emerged from behind the screen, wearing—much to Pinkerton’s relief—a full-length and mercifully opaque cerulean satin dressing gown, she immediately pointed to the images of Frank James and Cole Younger. There were a couple of others she thought she might have recognized, though she couldn’t be certain, and on the rest she drew a blank. The likeness of Harry Jones, aka Henry James, was nowhere to be found in the makeshift lineup.

  But the picture that most riveted her attention was the one of Jesse James. In this photograph, the infamous outlaw appeared much younger than he had on the occasion of the recent robbery; it dated from his early days as a guerrilla fighter during the Civil War. “Jesse James had a face as smooth and innocent as the face of a school girl,” wrote Major John Newman Edwards, describing the outlaw during late adolescence in his secessionist apologia Noted Guerrillas, or the Warfare of the Border (1877). “The blue eyes—very clear and penetrating—were never at rest. His form—tall and finely molded—was capable of great endurance. On his lips there was always a smile, and for every comrade a pleasing word or compliment. Looking at his small white hands with their long tapering fingers, it was not then written or recorded that they were to become with a revolver among the quickest and deadliest in the West.”

  Elena was transfixed by the image. If William Pinkerton was a portly walrus, this photo was of a lithe, lean panther. “Oh, my!” she exclaimed, almost involuntarily. And with that, she excused herself and headed for the bathroom.

  Pinkerton called out after his witness, asking what, if anything, she knew about Jesse James.

  “All I’ve heard,” came the reply from behind the bathroom door, “is that he steals from the rich and gives to the poor.”

  At this Pinkerton cut loose a raucous hoot. “He steals, Miss Phoenix, from everyone. And he keeps it all for himself,” the detective bellowed over the gurgle of the running faucets. “All that Robin Hood bunkum you’ve been hearing has been fabricated of whole cloth a yard wide by a bunch of sensationalist newspaper editors and die-hard secessionists who simply refuse to accept the blunt truth of Appomattox. These jokers like to pretend that the James boys are still fighting the Civil War, but even during the war, the regular rebel army wouldn’t sully their ranks with the likes of those varmints. They had to fight as guerrillas with Bloody Bill Anderson’s brigade—the vilest band of bushwhackers and cutthroats that ever disgraced the Stars and Bars. And I
can assure you they haven’t changed a whit in the decade since—unless it’s for the worse. Sure, they may be cunning and daring and all that, but you’d better just forget all your sweet widow-and-orphan fairy tales and that damned newspaper rot about how the poor James brothers were driven from their farm by those evil railroads built with Northern money and Southern blood.”

  “They weren’t?”

  “No, they were not!” boomed the detective. “For your information, the James boys were never driven off that farm—by the railroads or anyone else. As a matter of fact, they’re still on it!”

  Had she just been informed that the bandit was holed up in the adjoining suite of the hotel, Elena could not have been more astonished. “You mean you actually know where he lives?”

  “Everyone does. That’s the devil of it. The place is outside of Kearney in Clay County.”

  “Then why don’t you just go out there and arrest him?”

  Pinkerton gave a bitter snort. “It’s not just a farmhouse—it’s an armed fortress,” he explained. Especially since the botched midnight raid of 1875, “Castle James,” as the locals called it, had become virtually impregnable. There were gunports in all the walls and rumors of secret underground escape tunnels. The Jameses had a hundred ways in and a thousand ways out, and with loyal neighbors and others serving as lookouts, they were always warned of approaching strangers.

  “Others?” Elena asked in a strange flutey tone.

  “Of course.”

  “Then, on this farm, they don’t live…alone?”

  Pinkerton ignored this pointed question. He was finding his witness highly exasperating. A suspicion was beginning to grow on him that Jesse James might have made off with something more of this young lady’s than her amber necklace. She seemed to be in the grip of what the detective would later describe as a “morbid fascination” with the dashing desperado. And if Elena was one of that peculiar breed of women who were fatally fascinated by “bad boys,” she hardly could have chosen better (or, more properly, worse): “I consider Jesse James the worst man, without exception, in America,” Pinkerton’s brother Robert once wrote. “He is utterly devoid of fear, and has no more compunction about cold-blooded murder than he has about eating breakfast.”

  But why, Elena mused aloud from her bath, would such a man—handsome, clever, courageous—devote himself to a life of crime?

  Pinkerton shrugged. “Bad eggs. Rotten apples. What’s the difference?”

  Yet the difference, to Elena, was everything. “Our entire system of justice depends upon it,” she lectured the lawman. “If you would read, for example, the article by the noted physician Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Atlantic Monthly, you might appreciate that the criminal suffers from a kind of moral insanity, and that to judge him by our own moral standards may not be at all appropriate to his condition. We cannot, according to Dr. Holmes, apply the common concept of free will to the behavior of these poor wretches, for the sad fact is that, for whatever reason, they simply have no free will.”

  To the battle-hardened and world-weary detective, all this talk of moral insanity and free will was mere academic twaddle, but to Elena, who had once been treated as something of a moral moron (if not an outright criminal), these questions were of burning personal significance. Like William James—albeit without that brilliant scholar’s thorough conversance with the relevant philosophical literature—she was obsessed by the question of free will: Could people (could she?) actually choose their destinies, or did external factors predetermine their thoughts and behavior? She wondered especially if women were somehow either born or bred to have less free will than men. Were females, like criminals, congenitally excluded from participating fully in the social contract?

  “You sound just like Belle Starr,” remarked Pinkerton.

  “Belle Starr?” Elena thought the name had a lovely ring to it.

  “Sure. She’s always going around saying that since all the laws are made by men, they needn’t be obeyed by women.”

  “Oh, I like that!” Elena laughed. “And where does she lecture?”

  “She doesn’t lecture, Miss Phoenix; she shoots people and steals their money. She’s an outlaw.”

  At this juncture, Elena emerged from her tub and stood framed in the bathroom doorway, clad again in her dressing gown. “I do believe you’re making sport of me, sir,” she complained with a girlish pout.

  “On the contrary,” the detective rejoined earnestly, “I happen to be one who believes that our nation’s greatest untapped wealth lies not in our land but in the potential achievement of our female citizens, who have too long been tethered to hearth and home.”

  Elena came into the room and seated herself at the small vanity beside her bed. “Why, that’s very nicely put, Mr. Pinkerton,” she replied curtly, “but you needn’t feel obliged to patronize me.” Her celebrated golden tresses, released from their coil and highlighted in the glow of the morning sun streaming through the window, cascaded freely over her shoulders. “I hardly expect men to concur with my views.”

  “Oh, but I do!” the detective insisted. He was now in the grip of an inspiration. “You may not be aware of it, Miss Phoenix, but my father hired the first female detective in the country.”

  On a sunny afternoon twenty years earlier, he recounted, a young widow named Kate Warne had appeared at the agency’s Chicago offices seeking employment. Assuming the slender brunette was applying for a clerical position, the elder Pinkerton had been dumbfounded when she announced that she was responding to a newspaper ad he had recently placed for new detectives. At that time, the notion of a female detective was virtually unheard of, and Allan Pinkerton had brusquely informed Mrs. Warne that he had never employed a woman in such a capacity. But the aspiring private eye had persisted, arguing that as a woman, she could be “most useful in worming out secrets in many places which would be impossible for a male detective.” A woman might be able to induce suspected criminals to brag about their exploits, or develop useful information by befriending wives and girlfriends. After a sleepless night of mulling over the proposition, the elder Pinkerton had offered her a detective job the next day. “She succeeded far beyond my utmost expectations,” he later wrote. “Mrs. Warne never let me down!” (In fact, Kate Warne—outside of business hours, he called her “Kitty”—almost certainly became Allan Pinkerton’s mistress.)

  As he recounted this familiar piece of company lore (leaving out the mistress business, of course), Billy Pinkerton continued to study Elena applying herself to her toilette with the serene confidence of one whose task at the mirror had always consisted of bringing out her beauty, never of having to conceal its opposite.

  “She must have been a very admirable woman,” Elena allowed warily, uncertain where all this might be leading.

  “She was,” Pinkerton agreed eagerly. “My brother and I used to call her Aunt Kate when we were little. Whenever she visited us, she always brought a piece of chocolate or caramel candy.” The detective began digging through the inner pockets of his waistcoat, and for a moment Elena feared he was about to produce one of the ancient bonbons. Instead, he withdrew a folded and dog-eared envelope, which he handed to Elena.

  The letter inside was written on stationery bearing the imprint of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, with the famous logotype of a single staring eye over the motto WE NEVER SLEEP (an image often cited as the origin of the expression “private eye”). The letterhead listed as general superintendents William A. Pinkerton of the Western Division and Robert A. Pinkerton of the Eastern Division. Allan Pinkerton, over whose signature the body of the text appeared, was listed as the founder. Elena lowered her hairbrush and read:

  Dear Billy,

  What in hell is going on down there? All I have is reports of continued marauding, and many of our clients are beginning to express the gravest dissatisfaction with our inability to end this protracted war. I seem to have no soldiers but all officers in my regiments—all are capital men to give orders, few w
ill go forward unless someone goes ahead.

  Men like Lull and Whicher are hard to find, I know, but you must replace them in the field. Surely the state of Missouri must have a few tough, honest men in it to do the job. You simply have to try harder to find them. I suppose, too, that you have not yet hired a female detective, but I think that with some effort you will. I give you a description of the class of woman you will require: Say a lady about five feet six or seven inches high, hair dark or light brown. I don’t think blond would do. She should be either married or single, but if married her husband must be dead. Face oval, forehead large and massive. Eyes should be large, whether black, blue, or gray, her feet moderately small. An easy talker but careful and one who can keep her own counsel yet be able to carry on a conversation on any subject and be always self-possessed and natural, although assuming a character. I am anxious to have such a female detective, and if you are able to find such a one, I will be highly pleased. We will find plenty of work for her to do bye and bye. I am anxious for you to give this your strict attention and let me know what you are doing.