By the summer of 1876, the haul from these depredations had totaled almost two hundred thousand dollars, with nearly a dozen bank tellers, engineers, express car guards, and innocent bystanders left dead or maimed. But in yet another instance of the outlaw tailoring his narrative to Elena’s perceived sensibilities, Jesse made an assiduous attempt to downplay the savagery of his escapades. Whenever possible, he framed his violent behavior as “self-defense,” though it was hardly lost upon the perspicacious young woman that Jesse’s broad interpretation of situations in which he deemed it necessary to defend himself with deadly force included such trivial provocations as being looked at “the wrong way.” Some folks, the bandit professed, simply “needed” killing: “A man who is a d——d enough fool to refuse to open a safe or a vault when he is covered with a pistol ought to die,” he once wrote to The Kansas City Times, adding with implacable outlaw logic, “If he gives the alarm, or resists, or refuses to unlock, he gets killed.”
The “Rough Rob” of William’s jocular appellation had become rough indeed. Now there would be no turning back, no going home—though all he had originally wanted was to go home. The younger James boys had been irrevocably transmuted into Frank and Jesse. “L’ingénieux petit” Robertson and the “adipose, affectionate” Garth Wilkinson were every bit as dead to the world as if they lay beneath the cold clay of the Carolinas.
Chapter Six
Elena Hite awoke after her night under the stars with Jesse James to discover that her lover and his brothers were gone. Sometime during the wee hours of the morning, the trio had slipped away from the farm in a tarpaulin-covered cart, en route for parts and projects unknown. At breakfast, Zerelda complained from bitter experience that whatever “the boys” were up to would inevitably result in the law descending upon the farm in short order. She insisted that Elena vacate the premises immediately, a decree to which the younger woman readily acceded, concurring with her hostess—especially in light of the outlaw’s revelations of the night before—that she indeed knew too much about Jesse James.
“Maybe not so much as you think, missy,” Mrs. Samuel responded with a cryptic smirk.
Elena loaded up her buckboard and set out up the road toward St. Joseph, fifty miles to the north. She had not been altogether surprised by Jesse’s precipitous departure, which, considering all the late-night scheming that had been going on at the farmhouse, she might well have anticipated—though she would have appreciated the courtesy of a little advance notice. Still, she couldn’t help but revel in a certain lightness, of liberation, a sense of having accomplished her mission and demonstrated (at least to herself) that a woman could pursue her own passions with the same intensity and impunity as a man. She took an immodest satisfaction in the fact that she had not only elicited Jesse’s erotic attentions but had in some sense gained the outlaw’s trust. She had tamed the panther.
These not altogether unpleasant ruminations were soon impinged upon by the appearance on the roadside of a portly peddler who flagged down the buckboard and begged Elena for a ride up to St. Joe.
“Ich dank aych zeyer, frailin,” mumbled the itinerant merchant, hoisting his stout frame with discernible effort up onto the seat beside her. Though it was still early in the day, he was already perspiring profusely under the heat of the mid-August sun and the unaccustomed weight of his pack.
Elena, of course, had no difficulty seeing through the detective’s flimsy imposture. “Please, spare me the Hebrew, Mr. Pinkerton,” she chided.
Her passenger dutifully dropped his masquerade and, cutting straight to the chase, demanded to know what Elena was doing in these parts. She disingenuously replied that she was lecturing, as usual.
“Well, if you’re trying to sell female emancipation to Zerelda Samuel,” Pinkerton ventured, nodding back down the road toward Castle James, “you’re preaching to the pope.”
Elena allowed herself a wan smile. The detective took it as confirmation that she had indeed been a recent resident at the Samuels’ farm. Pressing his advantage, he began to pump her for information, his most urgent aim being to get her to spill the beans about the James boys’ plans. Yet even had she been inclined to cooperate, Elena, having been excluded from the gang’s nocturnal deliberations, would have had precious few beans to spill. She knew only that whatever plot they had been cooking up in Zerelda’s kitchen was something significant, though she had barely a clue as to the where, what, how, or when. She told the detective that she hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about.
But her passenger, still throbbingly cognizant of the previous night’s intimacy between Jesse James and the comely young woman on the seat beside him, brushed aside her denial. At first he didn’t let on that he knew her true identity, or about her recent assignation with the outlaw. But as she remained recalcitrant, he began laying out his trumps.
“Be that as it may, Miss Phoenix—or should I say Miss Hite?”
Elena was taken aback. “Hite is my father’s name,” she warily conceded.
“Indeed, Mr. Asa Hite of Hartford, Connecticut,” Pinkerton pressed on. “And I daresay I find it difficult to imagine that fine gentleman being in the least pleased to know of his daughter’s amorous relations with a certain criminal party.”
“Amorous?”
“It’s hardly a secret around these parts, Miss Hite.”
“I don’t suppose there’s much that is,” Elena responded noncommittally, though she was quick to appreciate the implications of the detective’s line of interrogation—his none too subtle threat that he could easily inform her father she had been fraternizing with the enemy.
Elena tried to tough it out, insisting that if Pinkerton had deigned to take her feminist rhetoric at all seriously, he would have appreciated that she reserved the right to consort with whomever her heart desired.
“So they say in Hartford,” rejoined the detective with a knowing smile. “But I don’t think Zee James would see it that way.”
And thus it was that on a sunny morning in the middle of August 1876, Elena Hite learned that, in the words of the famous ballad, Jesse had a wife. This was an unwelcome piece of intelligence that the detective was only too eager to document by producing from his peddler’s kit a yellowed clipping from the St. Louis Dispatch dated June 7, 1874—a letter to the newspaper from Jesse James:
On the 23rd of April, 1874, I was married to Miss Zee Mimms, of Kansas City, and at the house of a friend there. About fifty of our mutual friends were present on the occasion, and quite a noted Methodist minister performed the ceremonies. We had been engaged for nine years, and through good and evil report, and notwithstanding the lies that had been told upon me and the crimes laid at my door, her devotion to me has never wavered for a moment. You can say that both of us married for love, and that there cannot be any sort of doubt about our marriage being a happy one.
The above account of the outlaw’s wedding, as we now know, was spurious in a number of its details (including the date of the ceremony, which actually took place on the twenty-fourth); but the marriage itself was perfectly authentic, if not quite so blissful as Jesse had proclaimed. And as Pinkerton no doubt had hoped, Elena received this morsel of old news with considerable consternation. Many of the small mysteries of her recent sojourn at Castle James came clicking into place—Jesse’s “experienced” touch, his frequent long absences from the farm, and Mrs. Samuel’s cryptic remark that very morning: “Maybe not so much as you think, missy”—to say nothing of a stinging suspicion about the likely disposition of her prized string of amber beads.
They traveled on for miles in awkward silence, and instead of chauffeuring the detective all the way to St. Joseph, Elena dropped him off at Kearney to catch a train. At the station, Pinkerton tendered her his card and told her she would know where to find him in the event that her memory suddenly improved. Then, playing of necessity bad cop to his own good cop, he pointedly remarked in parting that it would be a shame to see such a well-bred young lady arrested as an
accessory to a crime. Elena observed that, to her knowledge, no crime had been committed, but as she was delivering this canny riposte, her words were being drowned out by the hissing and chugging of the arriving locomotive.
She proceeded on to St. Joseph, where, exhausted from the physical and emotional vicissitudes of the day’s drive, she took to her hotel bed almost immediately upon finishing her supper. And whatever the subterranean workings of her psyche, the detective’s revelation had its intended effect on the young woman: It unleashed her devils. In the early hours of the morning, Elena awoke from a nightmare to the sound of shattering glass and found herself smashing the mirror on the vanity table by her bedside. More than the physical injury (which turned out to be superficial, despite the alarming quantity of blood on her hands, nightgown, and bedclothes), the sheer ferocity of this eruption unnerved her terribly. She was appalled to discover how much anger she must have had roiling within her to drive her to punch a pane of glass. Staring down at her blood-soaked hands and back up at her splintered reflection in the shards of the mirror, she experienced “an abject horror” at her unaccustomed loss of control.
By a certain naïve logic, it might be difficult to understand why Elena Hite would have been so devastated by the unexpected disclosure of Jesse’s marital status. Was it jealousy? Could she have been so deeply in love with the outlaw that she found the thought of sharing him with another woman intolerable? Yet certainly she had shared her men with other women before. (In her Hartford days, one of George Stanley’s circle of young rakes had been betrothed, and another had been recently married.) It would be difficult to imagine that Elena ever dreamed of actually committing matrimony with the outlaw. Indeed, she had put herself on record with him as being foursquare against the institution. She knew “in her bones,” she had told him, that they would never be a couple, and she had repeatedly insisted that despite their lovemaking, he could never “have” her in any proprietary sense. In diary entries written during her sojourn at Castle James, she described their liaison as a fling, an adventure, perhaps something of a carnal reward for her years of “being good” on the lecture circuit, when so many men—to their ultimate regret, bewilderment, and anger—had taken her brazen free-love rhetoric as an invitation to try to bed her.
Or was it less the existence of a documented Mrs. James that disconcerted Elena than the fact that the outlaw had concealed it from her? Yet this, too, would be a difficult notion to credit: Could she really have imagined Jesse James to have been a straight shooter in any but the most literal sense? After all, the man was a notorious murderer and thief, so why not an adulterer and liar as well? Indeed, Elena knew perfectly well from her own complicity in the bald-faced falsehoods he had foisted off on The Kansas City Times that he was not in the least averse to playing fast and loose with the truth.
In writing about men, even in the private pages of her journal, Elena often affected a precociously jaunty and jaded tone, referring to the soi-disant stronger sex as “the little dears” or “those silly beasties,” especially in the context of how easy she found it to manipulate them with her feminine charms and graces. But while, by her own admission, she didn’t mind occasionally acting the cocotte—even taking a perverse pleasure in the sheer audacity of the role—apparently, she could never abide feeling like one.
As a woman of relatively meager years and abundant privileges, Elena was used to enjoying both a protective illusion of invulnerability and a hefty sense of entitlement. Even in the face of the harsh lesson of Hartford, she had continued to live as if she could carry on very much as she pleased without suffering any untoward consequences. But now, in the middle of a bad night, she became cringingly aware of the jeopardy to which she had so recently exposed herself—in putting herself not only at the mercy of a gang of notorious cutthroats, but also in the path of possible arrest, with the attendant prospect of even greater shame and disgrace than she had already known.
After all the comfortable certainties of her doctrinaire feminist vocation and the earthy pleasures of her erotic eclogue at Castle James, she found herself disoriented and deracinated, as if some plush epistemological carpet had been yanked out from under her.
All she knew for sure was that her twenty-third birthday was approaching, and she wanted to go home.
With William Stiles (alias Bill Chadwell) at the reins, the cart in which the James brothers stole away from the Samuel farm under cover of darkness made its way north through the night. At daybreak, they ditched the wagon and met up with the rest of the gang near the Iowa border. Other than Jim Younger, who replaced the traitorous Hobbs Kerry—and, of course, the newcomer Henry James—the band was made up of the same personnel who had robbed the Missouri Pacific Express at Rocky Cut: Frank and Jesse James, Cole and Bob Younger, Clell Miller, Sam Wells (alias Charlie Pitts), and Bill Stiles. Together they all rode to Council Bluffs, where, to avoid arousing suspicion, they split up into three smaller groups and boarded separate trains for Minneapolis. Stiles, a Minnesota native, had cut his teeth on horse-and-revolver work up in the North Star State and was looking forward to returning to his old stomping grounds to “shake it up.” He tantalized his comrades with visions of easy pickings in that somnolent and prosperous northern region whose credulous citizens, he joked, wouldn’t know an outlaw band if they were surrounded by one. He had friends up there who would help them, he promised, and he convinced the gang that they would reap handsome rewards by employing the time-tested guerrilla tactic of striking where least expected.
When the gang reassembled in Minnesota, it was in the raunchy red-light district of St. Paul, where they checked in to the Nicolett House Hotel under assumed names: Frank and Jesse signed in as J. C. Horton and H. L. West of Nashville, Tennessee; Jim Younger was W. G. Huddleson of Maryland; Cole became J. C. King of Virginia; and Charlie Pitts registered as John Wood (or Ward), also of Virginia. Henry raffishly took the nom de voyage of “Rod. Hudson.” (Clell Miller and Bob Younger stayed at the nearby Merchant’s Hotel.) In St. Paul the outlaws mingled with the local population to glean what they could of Minnesota mores. They played poker at Chinn’s & Morgan’s gambling house, boozed and dined on oysters at McLeod’s Ladies’ and Gents’ Restaurant and Sample Room, and got their rocks off at Mollie Ellsworth’s sporting house—although, as Jesse’s biographer Marley Brant recorded, “[o]ne of the more popular girls, Kitty Traverse, later claimed she noticed that one of the men appeared ill and never left his room.”
This doubtless would have been the whore-shy and intestinally impaired “Rod. Hudson,” for in addition to whatever discomfort Henry James was experiencing by virtue of his novel status as a rough rider, he was also suffering from a flare-up of one of his old psychosomatic nemeses: severe constipation. The author had been periodically plagued with this affliction for much of his adult life, most grievously when traveling. On a tour of Italy in the autumn of 1869, he had endured an especially debilitating bout of what he referred to at the time as “my old enemy no. 2—by which I mean my unhappy bowels.” (Old enemy no. 1, we must assume, was his unhappy back.) In a letter to William, which by the estimation of Leon Edel, “in the history of literature may well be the most elaborate account of the ailment extant,” Henry had bemoaned “this hideous repletion of my belly” in excruciating detail. William, on the authority of his newly minted M.D., had responded at equally exhaustive length, providing his ailing brother with an annotated roster of the most eminent bowel boffins in Europe and prescribing various therapies, including croton oil, senna, Epsom salts, and enemas of soapsuds and oil (“as large and hot as you can bear”). Most drastically, William proposed a regimen of electricity in the form of “a strong galvanic current from the spine to the abdominal muscles, or if the rectum be paralysed one pole put inside the rectum.” Shortly thereafter, without having resorted to this shocking treatment, Henry had reported from Rome that he was “immensely relieved of those woes concerning which I sent you from Florence such copious bulletins.”
Now,
as the gang ventured out across the Minnesota countryside in search of promising pickings, Henry spent much of his time holed up in the bathrooms and outhouses of the hotels and farmhouses where they stayed. The writer’s costiveness served only to exacerbate Cole Younger’s already pronounced disdain for the interloper. More than once Younger suggested to Frank and Jesse that they dump their ailing brother—or, better yet, “just put the son of a bitch out of his misery.” But the outlaw James brothers insisted on hewing to their own agenda, perhaps by way of extracting interest on what they perceived as a decade-old family debt, or perhaps because Henry’s continued presence, however ineffectual and inconvenient, provided the Jameses at least numerical parity with the Youngers, against whom they found themselves locked in a perennial tug-of-war for domination of the gang.
Over the next couple of weeks, the outlaws reconnoitered the region in groups of three or four, often posing as cattle dealers, civil engineers, or land speculators while they sized up various possibilities for plunder. During this period they provisioned themselves for their forthcoming exploit—whatever it would turn out to be—with an imposing arsenal of new Colts and carbines, a wardrobe of long white cattlemen’s linen dusters under which to conceal them, and a small herd of splendid, speedy thoroughbreds on which to make their getaway. “[A] connoisseur in horseflesh,” wrote Jesse’s biographer Frank Triplett, “might view with delighted eyes the long barrel, thin limbs and velvet coats of these horses; some of which were fit to make a race almost for the price of a king’s ransom.”
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