The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  Jesse kept his carbine trained on Elena’s heart as she leaned down from the buckboard and handed Henry his portfolio. Fortunately for her, the man with his finger on the trigger was totally ignorant of his target’s recent tête-à-tête with William Pinkerton. If the outlaw had had even the slightest inkling of the hours she’d spent in a hotel room with his archenemy, he might well have dropped her on the spot.

  Henry began flipping through the pages of his notebook, becoming momentarily absorbed in the painfully plodding sentences of its hackneyed travel writing. He must have felt that he was reading ancient history, so far removed was his erstwhile journalistic predicament from his present, more life-threatening one.

  “I cannot believe you would have come all the way here just for this,” he told Elena.

  The author’s skepticism was well founded. Elena had led William Pinkerton to believe that she would be continuing east on her lecture tour, but if she ever did plan such an itinerary, she had abruptly abandoned it following her dramatic encounter with the James Gang at Rocky Cut. (In truth, even before that fateful meeting, her enchantment with feminist politics had been waning. Victoria Woodhull’s premature run for the presidency in 1872 had come to naught, and the movement had been subsequently enervated by the economic depression that had gripped the country the following year, as well as by a profusion of splinter factions and the attendant unproductive bickering.) Though she may not yet have been willing to acknowledge it with her full consciousness, Elena had been wearying of her peripatetic life of “talks and teacups” amid the high-minded company of “brittle old biddies.” After years of lecturing about her God-given sexual rights, she was ready to stop talking about them and start exercising them.

  She reminded Henry that she had just made a long, dusty journey on his behalf, adding that she would be much obliged if he would kindly ask her in to freshen up. The writer looked questioningly back toward the house, where Jesse, apparently satisfied that his brother was not about to be blown to bits by a Pinkerton firebomb or felled by a fusillade from behind the rail fences, nodded the tip of his rifle barrel affirmatively up and down in the gun port. Henry graciously invited Elena into the house to refresh herself.

  She would stay for nearly six weeks.

  Chapter Four

  The plundering of the Number 4 Missouri Pacific Express at Rocky Cut had economic repercussions well beyond Missouri and the fifteen thousand dollars with which the bandits had absconded. While his operatives out of St. Louis and Kansas City were following the rapidly cooling trail of the perpetrators, William Pinkerton himself was making a command appearance back east to consult with a representative of a consortium of railroad and express company investors who were deeply concerned about the rash of robberies blighting the western lines. The representative in question turned out to be none other than Mr. Asa Hite of Hartford, Connecticut, who, as we have noted, had thrown himself headlong into railroad affairs in the wake of his wife’s demise and his daughter’s subsequent precipitous departure.

  When Pinkerton arrived at Hite’s Lord’s Hill estate for this tusk-to-tusk tussle of bull walruses, his host invited him into the mansion’s exquisitely appointed library and wasted no time in small talk before giving the detective a substantial piece of his mind: Here, he complained, was a gang of two-bit border bandits wreaking havoc with the nation’s rail lines. And the losses they were inflicting were hardly confined to the booty they were hauling out of the passenger and express cars. In fact, whatever paltry trinkets and greenbacks were ending up in their grain sacks and saddlebags were by far the least of the problem. More important, their marauding was discouraging business, and not simply the business of moving passengers and freight across the continent. Even further to the point—and here Hite jabbed Pinkerton in the chest with a sausagelike finger—it was the investment business that was suffering. The growth of the railroad industry, and hence of the entire national economy, was being held hostage by a small band of pissant desperadoes. It all stank, in Asa Hite’s carefully chosen word, of pusillanimity, and what especially galled him and his colleagues was that they were pissing away a small fortune on the Pinkertons, who apparently knew who these men were and even where they lived. Why couldn’t the damned agency simply eliminate them?

  This plaintive query uncannily echoed the one Elena had posed to the detective from behind the bathroom door of her St. Louis hotel room scarcely a fortnight before. It was at this moment that Pinkerton’s experienced eye was drawn to a painting on the wall of Asa Hite’s library—George Stanley’s study of Elena as Marie Antoinette en guise de bergère. The likeness was striking, especially to William Pinkerton, who took immense professional pride in his sensitivity to the nuances of human physiognomy and had so very recently been face-to-face with the model. (The detective had no idea that the young woman he had interrogated as “Elena Phoenix” following the Rocky Cut robbery might have been related to his powerful client; nor, for that matter, had Asa Hite the slightest inkling of his daughter’s present whereabouts.) But when Pinkerton, in what he hoped might seem a perfectly innocuous bit of what Henry James once dubbed “the mere twaddle of graciousness,” inquired about the handsome portrait, he could hardly help noting his interlocutor’s patent discomfort. “I perceived,” the detective later reported to his father in Chicago, “that Mr. Hite appeared decidedly ill at ease with the topic. He was clearly disinclined to discuss the painting or its subject, remarking only that it was an amateur work which he kept ‘as a reminder that beauty and goodness are not necessarily one and the same.’”

  Though Hite’s remark was ambiguous—it might as easily have referred to the former queen of France (“Let them eat cake”) as to the portrait sitter—Pinkerton deduced from the older man’s tone and bearing that it would be imprudent to pursue the topic “a jot further.” He quickly returned the conversation to the matter at hand, assuring Asa Hite that fresh, highly promising information had recently emerged about the James Gang, and that it would be only a matter of time before the brigands were brought to justice. Hobbs Kerry, the novice bandit who had helped pile the rail-tie barricade fore and aft of the train at Rocky Cut, had been captured by the St. Louis police and jailed in Booneville to await trial. Under intense interrogation, the inexperienced outlaw had squealed like a sow in heat, spewing forth a full confession of his own part in the crime and providing detailed descriptions of the entire gang, including Henry James, whose role in the affair the young coal-miner-turned-train-robber was understandably fuzzy about. Kerry had even guided lawmen to the bank of the stream where the band had divided up the loot and where, according to Jesse’s biographer Ted P. Yeatman, “payroll checks, bank drafts, and bond coupons, damaged by rain, were found scattered about the site, along with some stray pieces of gold jewelry,” substantiating the veracity of the fledgling felon’s account.

  After taking his leave of Hite’s Lord’s Hill mansion with a pledge to single-mindedly direct the agency’s efforts against the James Gang, Billy Pinkerton repaired to a tavern in downtown Hartford not far from the railway station. Long investigative experience and a powerful thirst had taught him that such seedy venues could often prove the source of much useful intelligence, and there, for the price of a couple of shots of whiskey, he was able to confirm that Mr. Hite did indeed have a daughter, and one with a racy past at that. The informant, however, a local lush named Dick Perry who was not notably reliable even when sober, was purveying an account of the scandal that had become, with the passage of time and the distortion of drink, considerably more lurid than even the sordid circumstances of Elena’s disgrace warranted. In the version of events that Pinkerton elicited from Perry, young George Stanley had been acting as a virtual pimp for Elena, selling his girlfriend’s services to his buddies for “horse and cigar money,” while her own cut of their ill-gotten gains had gone to bankrolling her subsequent speaking tour.

  Thus, in the course of a single day, William Pinkerton came to develop an impression of Elena Hite as both
a distinctly higher and lower sort of woman than he had surmised. And while he had yet to reach the point where he would see her as the key to this most frustrating case, he determined that his next step should be to get a line on the present whereabouts of this very interesting young lady.

  Elena, upon entering Castle James, had discovered that the ménage of the place was a bit more complex than she had foreseen; in fact, it was even more so than Henry James had let on in his letter to William. In addition to Frank, Jesse, and Henry, the resident population of the farmhouse included a wizened former slave called Aunt Charlotte, an ancient addle-brained doctor named Reuben Samuel, and, most notably, Samuel’s wife, Zerelda, a tough old termagant whom the James Boys, out of a combination of respect, affection, and fear, called “Mamaw.”

  Mrs. Samuel, who had been none too thrilled about the recent encroachment of Henry James upon her little domain, looked even less kindly upon the unexpected arrival of Elena Hite. Having lost an arm and a son to the Pinkertons in the firebombing of her kitchen two years before, Mamaw detested the railroad dicks with a virulence that was at least the equal of Jesse’s. She glared at the suspect intruder with gimlet-eyed hostility—until Frank, sensing the lay of the emotional land, adroitly stepped in and introduced Elena as Henry’s wife. This came as something of a surprise to Henry, who had barely digested the image of himself as a fugitive from justice and who now found himself obliged to swallow the identity of a married man—a role he doubtless found even less plausible and considerably more alarming. (He once wrote to William that he believed “almost as much in marriage for most other people as I believe in it little for myself—which is saying a good deal.”) Elena, however, was highly amused with the charade Frank had thrust upon her. She threw herself into her part with impressive gusto, immediately calling Henry “darling” and “sweet-lingtons” and subjecting the author to a wifely display of affection that served only to compound his consternation and to inflame Jesse’s already powerful attraction to her.

  Of the force of that attraction there can be no doubt, nor of the fact that it was mutual. Both Jesse and Elena were physically alluring beings, though there was clearly more than mere animal magnetism drawing them together: Both had in their personal histories what a geologically minded psychologist might have recognized as an uncomformity—an abrupt perturbation in the even strata of their development that had set them painfully apart from their peers in late adolescence and subjected them to the scorn of polite society. Jesse had often seen himself portrayed in the press as Satan incarnate, and Elena, having been savaged by the gossiping Hounds of Hartford, had more than a little sympathy for him.

  Yet for all their ardor, these two horny devils found themselves at first strangely shy with each other, perhaps lending credence to William’s notion of an antisexual instinct or, more likely, merely reflecting mid-Victorian mores and the chilling presence of Mrs. Samuel. (If Mamaw bought in to the taradiddle of Elena being Mrs. Henry James, she doubtless would have seen that improbable union as all the more reason to keep the pretty young thing away from Jesse, who, according to his biographer Marley Brant, “loved as aggressively as he hated.”)

  At the moment, however, the handsome outlaw had something far more pressing on his mind than a romantic dalliance: Hobbs Kerry’s copious confession to the St. Louis police had been receiving prominent front-page play in the newspapers, and Jesse was seething over the turncoat’s treachery—as well as perhaps being envious of all the attention the traitor was garnering with his story. As much a pioneer in the dark arts of self-promotion and public relations as of bank and train robbery, Jesse possessed, as Marley Brant observed, “an irrepressible need to be known.” It was he, according to T. J. Stiles, “of all the outlaws, who was most obsessed with his public image, who sought to push himself into the news.” On one widely publicized occasion, the 1874 holdup of the Iron Mountain Number 7 Express at Gads Hill, Jesse had even gone so far as to prepare in advance a detailed press release for the St. Louis Dispatch, which he handed out to his victims to wire to the paper at the conclusion of the robbery.

  The myth that Jesse was building for himself was founded on two principal pillars, both designed to inspire popular support for his depredations. The first was his image as the last rebel of the Civil War, as Stiles labeled the outlaw in the subtitle of his biographical study. Even over a decade after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the Missouri countryside, especially the “Little Dixie” section of the state in which the Samuel farm was located, was rife with former slaveholders and Confederate sympathizers who remained bitter about the war and nostalgic for the lost cause, and who saw themselves as being ground under the boot heel of what one unreconstructed secessionist called “Yankee avarice, Yankee oppression, Yankee intolerance, Yankee hypocrisy.” These disgruntled “seceshes” formed the core constituency of Jesse’s admirers.

  The second mainstay of the outlaw’s myth was his claim to be no common criminal but, rather, a populist marauder in the tradition of the great peasant avengers of European folklore—Dick Turpin, Jack Shepherd, Claude Duval, and that fabled scourge of Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood. In postbellum Missouri, it was not the sheriff of Nottingham but the banks and railroads that were widely seen to be holding an oppressive sway over the common man—even over many of the common men who were not necessarily die-hard Southern sympathizers. In an oft-cited letter to The Kansas City Times in 1872, Jesse had grandiosely proclaimed: “Some editors call us thieves. We are not thieves—we are bold robbers…I am proud of the name, for Alexander the Great was a bold robber, and Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte…. [W]e rob the rich and give to the poor.”

  It was in this myth-making mode that the outlaw doubtless saw Hobbs Kerry’s newfound notoriety as yet another irresistible opportunity to thrust himself into the limelight and burnish his legend. While taking a stroll around the farm on the afternoon of her arrival at Castle James, Elena was surprised to come upon the famous robber sitting at the “rustic table” under the coffee-bean tree, pen in hand.

  “Why, I thought Henry was supposed to be the literary James brother,” she remarked lightly.

  Jesse was startled. He had been so deep in thought that his celebrated hair-trigger reflexes had for once failed him. (Had Elena been armed, she easily would have gotten the drop on him.) Regaining his composure, he told her that what he was writing was not a novel but a letter to the The Kansas City Times—the follow-up to a note he had sent the newspaper a few days earlier.

  He showed her that earlier note:

  Dear Sir: You have published Hobbs Kerry’s confession, which makes it appear that the Jameses and Youngers were the Rocky Cut robbers. If there was only one side to be told, it would probably be believed by a good many people that Kerry has told the truth. But this so-called confession is a well-built pack of lies from beginning to end. I never heard of Hobbs Kerry, Charlie Pitts and William Chadwell until Kerry’s arrest. I can prove my innocence by eight good, well-known men of Jackson County, and show conclusively that I was not at the train robbery…. Kerry knows that the Jameses and Youngers can’t be taken alive, and that is why he has put it on us…. I will write along article for the Times, and send it to you in a few days, showing fully how Hobbs Kerry has lied.

  Clearly, Henry was not the only resident purveyor of fiction at Castle James. The “eight good, well-known men of Jackson County” who Jesse claimed would prove his innocence were either figments of his imagination or, at best, former bushwhackers and Confederate veterans he hoped could be counted on to cover for him under questioning by the authorities. And by showing her this letter, Elena realized, Jesse must have been testing her own trustworthiness; if she—who, after all, knew perfectly well that he had been at Rocky Cut—had protested the blatant falsehoods he was trying to foist off on the Times’s readership, she would not only have forfeited any chance of getting into his britches, she would have been putting herself, as a potential witness against him, squarely in league with his enemies. She nod
ded and smiled.

  “That’s actually quite nicely written,” she told him, hoping that the tone of her voice wasn’t betraying too much of a sense of either astonishment or condescension.

  Jesse thanked her, even blushing a bit, and not without cause; he could hardly in good conscience—to the limited extent that he was burdened with such an encumbrance—have considered himself the rightful author of the missive. Nor, for that matter, was Frank, who as the better-lettered of the bandit brothers might have been the one Elena would have expected to be writing on behalf of the gang. The older outlaw, however, had always been staunchly against such “carrying on” in the press and had consistently refused to have anything to do with Jesse’s self-aggrandizing epistolary campaigns. So Jesse had come to rely upon the editorial guidance (if not the out-and-out ghostwriting) of Major John Newman Edwards, author of Noted Guerrillas and a cofounder of The Kansas City Times. It was the major’s heavily redacted version of Jesse’s most recent missive that Elena had just pronounced so “nicely written.”

  At the moment, however, the newspaperman and former Confederate officer was no longer available to provide any further such assistance, being, as he put it, “off in the Indian Territory”—the alcoholic Edwards’s jocular private euphemism for a drunken binge. Jesse, who had always been more comfortable wielding a six-gun than a pen, had been left alone to wrestle with a severe case of writer’s block as he struggled to produce the “long article” he had promised the Times. Under the circumstances, he was only too happy to accept Elena’s offer of her rhetorical prowess.

  She drew a chair up next to him and, side by side, the pair set to work. Elena, with her Hartford Female Seminary training, might have lent a proper stylistic gloss to the text, but she shrewdly advised Jesse to garnish his writing with a folksy touch, even encouraging him to commit a number of blatant misspellings and grammatical no-nos she was certain would have set Miss Catharine Beecher’s well-brushed teeth on edge. Their collaboration began: