The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  When Frank James stepped forward to get a closer look at the safe, the bookkeeper made a lunge for the bandit and tried to shove him into the vault, catching Frank’s arm with the heavy slamming door and almost crushing it. Frank cried out in pain as Bob Younger sprang at Heywood, sending him sprawling to the floor with a brutal blow to the skull from the butt of his pistol. Younger then ordered Alonzo Bunker to lie down next to the dazed bookkeeper while Jesse drew a bowie knife from his billowing linen duster and pressed the long gleaming blade against the prostrate Heywood’s windpipe. “Let’s cut his damned throat,” he proposed (probably with more of an aim to terrorize than to murder). Yet even as the blade of Jesse’s “Arkansas toothpick” etched a thin line of blood across Heywood’s Adam’s apple, the doughty bookkeeper remained obdurate. He gaspingly explained that the safe had recently been set on a chronometer and could be opened only at certain prespecified times. (This, too, was technically the truth, although what Heywood neglected to mention was that the safe, containing at least fifteen thousand dollars in cash, was in fact already unlocked—a crucial piece of information that the increasingly distracted robbers were never to discover.)

  Jesse, growing impatient, yanked the bookkeeper to his feet and frog-marched him into the vault. Meanwhile, Alonzo Bunker struggled to his knees and tried to retrieve a small Smith & Wesson .32-caliber handgun from its hiding place on a shelf beneath the counter. But Bob Younger, who suspected that there was a teller’s cash drawer somewhere, quickly snatched the weapon away and forced Bunker back down to the floor, pressing the tip of his pistol to the teller’s temple and demanding, “Show me where the money is, you son of a bitch, or I’ll kill you!”

  Inside the vault, Jesse threw Heywood down in front of the safe and fired a shot into the floorboards within inches of his head. With Bob Younger and Frank James momentarily distracted by the report of Jesse’s revolver, Alzono Bunker took the opportunity to scramble once again to his feet and make a dash for the rear door of the building. Bob gave chase and fired at the fleeing teller, wounding him in the shoulder. But Bunker managed to stagger out into the alleyway behind the bank, hollering, “They’re robbing the bank! Help!”

  Out in front of the building, things were going even less propitiously for the men on guard than for the robbers inside. To clear the street of carriages and pedestrians, Cole Younger and Clell Miller had sprung to their horses and were galloping back and forth, discharging their pistols and shouting, “Get in! Get in!”

  Seeing the commotion from their post at the bridge, Jim Younger, Charlie Pitts, Bill Stiles, and Henry James spurred their horses and came thundering down Division Street into the fray, whooping, hollering, and firing their revolvers into the air; Cole Younger had given the gang strict orders to shoot only to frighten, not to kill—a directive that, at least in Henry’s case, proved entirely superfluous. The author was packing a pair of big Colt .44s, but it was all he could manage simply to control his high-strung mount: He kept both hands clutched tightly on the reins and never unholstered his pistols. Nonetheless, the other members of the gang, especially Jim Younger, kept a close watch on the writer, concerned that he might do something rash to endanger them all, or that he might try to abscond from their custody.

  Under the onslaught of this second contingent of horsemen, most of the citizens on the street scattered like leaves before a storm; but, as the outlaws were about to discover, they were not to be afforded the respectful latitude to which they had become accustomed when operating on their home turf. Out of either raw courage or sheer foolhardiness, the staunch citizens of Northfield were choosing to express a far less indulgent attitude toward armed robbery than their battle-cowed counterparts back down in Missouri. Henry Wheeler, the medical student, had procured an old Civil War–era carbine with which he ran into the Dampier Hotel across the street from the bank. With a handful of cartridges supplied by the hotel clerk, he raced up the stairs to one of the top-story rooms overlooking Division Street, from which he began firing down on the outlaws. Meanwhile, J. S. Allen, the hardware dealer who had provoked Clell Miller’s initial warning shot, hurried into his store and began passing out guns and ammunition to the townspeople. Anselm R. Manning, the proprietor of Northfield’s other hardware store, grabbed a breech-loading rifle from his stock and hurried out into the street. Another citizen, Elias Stacy, picked up a double-barreled shotgun and a pocketful of shells. All over the town, the enraged Northfielders armed themselves with whatever weapons they had handy and took up positions on rooftops, in stairwells, on porches, and at windowsills to begin blasting away at the bandits.

  With shots ringing out all around him, Cole Younger continued firing into the air and bellowing orders to clear the street. One hapless pedestrian, a Swedish immigrant named Nicolaus Gustavson, stumbled into the bandit’s path and stared blankly up at the furious horseman. “Get off the damn street!” Younger yelled again. But Gustavson, who had only recently arrived in Minnesota, spoke no English, and was most likely drunk to boot, simply stood there as, to Henry’s horror, Cole lowered his revolver and fired a shot into the befuddled Swede’s head. (So much, Henry must have thought, for not shooting to kill.) As the mortally wounded Gustavson staggered toward the gutter, Cole caught Henry’s appalled regard and glared back at the author as if to say, “What the fuck are you looking at?” Henry quickly averted his gaze and did his utmost to emit a bone-chilling rebel yell. But instead of a full-throated whoop, all he managed to squeeze out was “a frightened little pig-whistle.”

  Meanwhile, Clell Miller dismounted once again and ran over to the bank to warn the men inside. “Hurry up!” he shouted through the doorway. “They’ve given the alarm!” As he climbed back on his horse, Miller was rocked in the saddle by a spray of birdshot from Elias Stacy’s fowling piece. The cloud of lead pellets riddled the outlaw’s face, blinding his left eye and pocking his flesh into a gory moonscape. Still, he kept his seat and continued firing off his pistols.

  Amid the chaos of swirling dust, acrid gun smoke, shouting, shooting, shattered windows, and splintered hitching posts, Henry James was making the potentially fatal blunder of lapsing into his characteristic posture of observation. Among the vivid impressions he registered was that of Anselm Manning, armed with the breech-loading Remington rifle he had taken from his hardware store, peering from around the corner of the dry-goods shop and plugging Bob Younger’s tethered thoroughbred squarely between the eyes. As the exquisite animal let out a startled whinny and crumpled to the ground, Manning reloaded and fired at Cole Younger, clipping the outlaw in the left shoulder as he galloped by.

  The gang on the street was caught in the lethal cross fire between Henry Wheeler at his hotel window and Anselm Manning around the corner from the bank. Manning had been joined by Adelbert Ames, who had gotten word of the robbery in progress at his office at the mill and come running toward the action at the Scriver Block. Reverting to his old military mien, the former general began commanding the hardware dealer as one of his troops, directing his fire toward the most promising objectives. Bill Stiles, at well over six feet tall, presented a prominent target even from a block away. With Ames’s calming and coaching, the nervous Manning took careful aim and squeezed off a shot that went straight through the big bandit’s heart. Stiles tumbled off his horse, dropping dead only a few feet from Henry James.

  So engrossed was Henry in the unutterable carnage unfolding all around him that he forgot he himself was a target—at least until a shot from Wheeler’s perch at the Dampier Hotel blew off his high-crowned “Boss of the Plains” Stetson hat. (Had Henry not been hunched down in his saddle owing to his constipated condition, the slug doubtless would have pierced his skull.) The author, abruptly awake to his peril, made a game attempt to execute the old Comanche maneuver of lying low in his saddle, hoping that his horse’s neck and shoulders might shield him from the barrage. But as he leaned farther forward, the placket of his linen duster caught on his saddle horn, leaving him dangling against his horse’
s flank like a floppy rag doll.

  Wheeler, assuming that Henry was out of commission, shifted his attention to the other bandits. One of his subsequent shots hit Jim Younger in the left shoulder. Another struck the half-blinded Clell Miller just below the collarbone, sending the outlaw toppling to the dust, spurting bright red blood from what the doctor in training surmised was his subclavian artery. Cole Younger dismounted and ran over to aid his fallen comrade but, realizing that Miller was already moribund, stripped him of his gunbelt and ammunition, even as Wheeler’s next bullet caught him in the left vastus lateralis. Younger hobbled back to the door of the bank, frantically yelling, “They’re killing our men! Get out here!”

  Inside, the robbers were reaching their wits’ end. With the appearance of his wounded brother at the door, Bob Younger concluded that the moment had arrived to abandon the premises. He hurried out of the bank, closely followed by Jesse James, who paused only long enough to snatch the meager wad of cash on the counter. The last to leave was Frank James. Frustrated that all of his careful planning was coming to naught, and still furious with Heywood for having slammed his arm with the vault door, the outlaw aimed his pistol at the bookkeeper and fired. Heywood lurched toward his desk and crumpled into his chair. Then, with Frank Wilcox looking on in helpless horror, the robber vaulted the railing, pressed his revolver hard against the bookkeeper’s right temple, and fired again. Heywood slumped across his desk, his blood and brains soaking into the blotter as Frank turned and coolly strolled out of the bank to rejoin what was left of the gang.

  Bob Younger had burst from the building to discover his horse lying dead in the dust along with Clell Miller and Bill Stiles, whose riderless mounts were prancing loose. As the robber tried to grab one of the fallen men’s horses, Anselm Manning began taking potshots at him, driving Younger to scurry for cover under a wooden staircase. The outlaw and the hardwareman fell into a pitched gun duel, exchanging fire until a bullet from Henry Wheeler’s carbine across the street smashed Younger’s right elbow. The former guerrilla deftly executed a “border shift,” flipping his gun to his left hand and continuing to fire at Manning, though he was badly injured.

  Frank and Jesse had made it safely out of the bank and up onto their horses. Immediately appreciating the futility of the situation, they signaled to the others that it was time to skedaddle. “It’s no use, boys! Let’s go!” called Frank, even as a bullet ripped into his right leg.

  It was at this moment that a stinging blast of birdshot from Elias Stacy’s shotgun caught Henry’s high-spirited horse in the rump. The startled animal was instantly transformed into a savage bronco—rearing up, wheeling, and bolting down the street with the author, still entangled on the saddle horn, clinging for dear life as Frank and Jesse lit out after him.

  Seeing the Jameses beating their ragged retreat, Bob Younger stumbled out from under the staircase, his shattered right arm dangling limp at his side, just as another shot struck him in the left leg. “Don’t leave me, boys!” he cried. “I’ve been shot!”

  Despite Wheeler’s slug lodged in his thigh, Cole Younger had managed to remount after calling the men out of the bank. Now, as Charlie Pitts covered him with a pair of pistols, Cole galloped through a hail of gunfire toward his wounded brother and, with a superhuman effort, grabbed hold of Bob’s cartridge belt and hauled him up on the back of his saddle. Bob clung to his brother’s waist with his good left arm as a volley of shots tore off Cole’s saddle horn and sliced through his reins. With one hand clutching his horse’s mane and the other still wielding his pistol, Cole took off after the Jameses.

  The exquisitely plotted robbery had devolved into a rout. Desperately hugging the neck of his spooked horse, Henry “led” the remains of the gang back across the Cannon River bridge through a final flurry of bullets whistling past his ears—a couple of them possibly fired by Cole Younger. Frank and Jesse were hot on Henry’s tail, followed by Jim Younger and Charlie Pitts, with Cole and Bob, riding double, bringing up the rear. Pitts, who had managed to remain unscathed throughout the robbery, now caught a bullet in his left arm. Jim was struck in the right leg. Cole was hit in the left hip, the right side, and the right arm. Those citizens who had been unable to procure firearms hurled stones and pitchforks at the fleeing bandits.

  On the far side of the bridge, Jesse and Frank finally caught up with their brother, galloping alongside his runaway mount to rein in the frightened animal and its even more frightened rider.

  It was at this juncture that Henry James discovered, not entirely to his relief, that the cursed constipation which had been vexing him for weeks was now suddenly and utterly behind him.

  Chapter Seven

  On the afternoon of September 7, 1876, over a thousand miles from the chaos and carnage taking place out in Minnesota, Elena Hite arrived in Cambridge to meet with William James. It was a glorious late-summer day in the academic suburb. Students were moving in for the new semester, shouting their hallos across the Harvard Yard or lounging in laughing groups under the shade of the slender elms that lined its crisscrossing paths. Elena, togged up to the nines for the occasion in a cloud of Valenciennes lace, swanned her way along a gauntlet of admiring glances and breezed into William’s office in Lawrence Hall.

  She had girded herself for an immaculate clinical setting bristling with an armamentarium of gleaming medical instruments. But the doctor’s lair turned out to be distinctly unclinical and almost comically unprepossessing. The tiny chamber was barely more than a cubbyhole, strewn willy-nilly with books, academic journals, sketch pads, framed collections of Amazonian lepidoptera, a metronome, horopter charts, and a couple of pieces of tarnished brass scientific apparatus. Other than the disconcerting presence of a large apothecary jar full of decapitated frogs bobbing in formaldehyde, the overall ambiance of the room was casually inviting, as was the man himself. William greeted Elena in his shirtsleeves and offered her a chair he had apparently just appropriated on her behalf from a nearby lecture hall.

  At barely five feet eight, the oldest James brother was not nearly so tall as Elena had imagined, yet he carried himself with a limber grace and a bounce to his step. What struck her most pleasantly about the doctor was his voice, which James Putnam once described as having “a resonance and charm which those who had once heard it, especially in conversation, never could forget.”

  Elena took her seat and arranged the frilly flounces of her skirt about her ankles. She had a secret “test” for the men she encountered, staring into their eyes with a decidedly unladylike directness to gauge their moral—and perhaps erotic—mettle. (She was particularly drawn to those who unflinchingly met and returned her probing gaze.) On this basis she now completed her comparative taxonomy of the James men, of whom she was beginning to fancy herself something of a connoisseur: “While Jesse’s steel blue eyes seem to look through you,” she wrote in her diary, “Frank’s look around you, and Henry’s darker orbs peer into you.” William, she recorded approvingly, “looks at you.”

  When the young doctor gently inquired what had brought her there, Elena sighed and let her elegant shoulders slump a bit, hardly knowing where to begin.

  Back home in Hartford after her collapse out in Missouri, she had failed to regain her equilibrium. Whatever comfort she might have imagined deriving from being under her father’s roof again and amid the familiar furnishings of her childhood had been short-lived at best. She slept poorly, ate either too much or scarcely at all, and found herself cross, restless, and too distracted even to read. All around her, the city rattled with ghosts. Most of her former schoolmates were either married or marrying, and she found herself still shunned. The stigma of her youthful offenses, which had mercifully receded in her memory to little more than a talking point for her gender politics, had come back to nettle her with the full, fresh force of its original sting. Not a day or night went by when she managed to avoid ruminating over her deplorable youth. On Lord’s Hill, the once-fiery feminist orator regressed back into sulky adolescen
ce. Asa Hite neither knew—nor cared to know—the particulars of his daughter’s lecturing life or the crisis that had brought her back to Hartford. She and her father, Elena complained in her journal, merely had “that much else not to talk about.”

  What most haunted Asa Hite, after enduring years of travail in catering to his neurasthenic wife, was the dispiriting specter of history repeating itself with a deranged daughter. He was determined to procure for Elena the very best medical care money could buy, for which he had naturally turned to Dr. James J. Putnam of Boston, who had once treated Amelia Hite at Massachusetts General Hospital during his stint as head of electrics at that illustrious institution.

  While in his neurological research Putnam was still very much in thrall to the nineteenth-century agenda of what Jacques Barzun called “bodifying the mind,” as a clinician he was beginning to suspect that the mind had a mind of its own. “‘The man’ is, above all else, the mind of the man,” he would later write, “and not only the mind as an organ of conscious thought but the mind as an organ of bodily nutrition, and the mind as a vast theatre for the interplay of contending forces that do not always recognize the personal consciousness as their ruler. This is the man that the doctor should learn about and treat.” Having determined that there was nothing organically the matter with Elena, Putnam had struck upon the notion—which he would ultimately come sorely to regret—of referring her for a consultation with William James, who, he once wrote, “was one of the first among professional psychologists to recognize the full bearing of the contributions which medical observation—that is, the psychology of the unusual or the slightly twisted mind—has made to the more classical psychological attitudes and insights.” James, he trusted, would be able to provide a unique and useful perspective on the patient’s condition. And Elena, Putnam hoped, might prove to be not the sole therapeutic beneficiary of his referral: Being painfully aware of William’s distressed state at the end of the summer—he once spoke of James having “a real tendency to occasional depression”—Putnam believed he would be helping take his friend’s mind off his love troubles by passing along this attractive, lively (if somewhat disturbed) young woman for a second opinion.