The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  And then came the rains. Beginning early the following morning and continuing unabated for the next two weeks, a series of torrential downpours swelled streams, washed out bridges, flooded fields, and turned the rural dirt roads into rivers of mud. The deluge proved something of a mixed blessing for the outlaw band: Though it hampered their escape, it also washed away their tracks and hindered their pursuers, even to the extent of discouraging many posse members from persevering in their hunt for the bandits. It achieved little, however, toward improving Henry’s odor or his state of mind. The pelting rain soaked through his clothing down to his skin, inducing a painful, purulent rash on his legs and rear end and dampening his spirit with a pervasive hopelessness.

  Without Bill Stiles or any maps of the region to guide them, and with the sun and stars obscured by furious rain clouds, the fugitives were effectively lost. The best they could do was keep pressing toward what they hoped was the southwest, in the general direction of far-off Missouri. But being unfamiliar with the lay of the land, they were often obliged to seek the guidance of local residents, even of some of the very men who were on their trail—a dangerous exigency that led them on occasion to masquerade as their own pursuers. By the following afternoon, the Cannon River had become unfordable, and the gang was forced to take a detour along the Cordova Road, where they came across a group of workers who had taken shelter from the rain in a makeshift hut. Most of the laborers were German, and Frank addressed them in their native tongue, explaining that he and his companions were part of a posse on the trail of the Northfield robbers and asking where they might safely traverse the swollen stream. When the workers got a whiff of Henry and eyed him inquisitively, Frank came up with a stirring tale of his brother having taken shelter from the robbers in an outhouse and being driven to lower himself into its putrid pit to hide from his assailants. This provided the German roustabouts a hearty laugh, and they cheerfully pointed the way to a nearby bridge.

  That night, after two nearly fatal run-ins with posses and a desperate escape across Tetonka Lake, the outlaws set up camp in the woods near the town of Janesville. Jesse and Henry, being the only two gang members with no suspicious wounds to conceal, approached yet another posse camping nearby. The brothers managed to cadge a small supply of victuals for themselves and the others. In response to the inevitable skeptical inquiries about Henry’s odor, Jesse told them that his comrade was a halfwit suffering the ill effects of having recently gobbled down a bad batch of peaches.

  Whatever fascination the rough-and-ready macho life may have held for Henry James at the outset of his criminal adventure was fading fast, especially during the difficult days that followed, as the gang fell to bickering among themselves about who was responsible for their plight. There were certainly more than enough recriminations to go around: Jesse was berated for his decision to enter the bank when the streets of Northfield were so crowded with pedestrians; Cole Younger was chastised for his cold-blooded gunning down of the drunken Swede; and Frank was admonished for blowing out the brains of the hapless bookkeeper. But much to Henry’s dismay, the brunt of the blame seemed to fall upon him. The author’s edgy presence at the robbery, Cole griped, had “thrown us off our game.” What was more, the alpha Younger asserted, Henry’s reluctance to whip out his pistols and join in the shooting had created “a bad impression,” emboldening the townspeople by making the gang appear “a passel of pussies.”

  Henry’s brothers demurred from springing to his defense, which may have had less to do with any lapse in fraternal solidarity than with their desperate desire to move on. Jesse, especially, was becoming frustrated with their plodding pace. By September 14—a full week to the day after the botched robbery—the gang had gotten only as far as the outskirts of the town of Mankato, a distance of barely fifty miles from the scene of the crime. And Bob Younger appeared to be on his last legs: His shattered elbow had become badly infected, leaving him so weak and dizzy from his high fever and loss of blood that he could barely hold himself upright in the saddle. He rode clutching the saddle horn with his left hand, while another of the gang led his horse along by the reins. Jesse made no secret of wanting to abandon the gravely wounded man to his fate—he argued for “saving six by sacrificing one”—but Cole and Jim Younger were appalled at the notion of deserting their failing brother.

  Frank proposed what he hoped might be a more palatable alternative: He suggested that a group of the less badly wounded men split off from the others, thereby buying some time for the more severely injured outlaws to slow down and recuperate while the faster-moving party divided and diverted their pursuers. In terms of personnel, this scheme meant that the James brothers and Charlie Pitts would strike out from the Youngers. It is likely that at this juncture, Frank and Jesse wanted to leave Henry behind as well, but the Youngers would have had nothing to do with such a proposition, in part because the writer had already shown himself to be less than useless under fire, and in part because, as Cole Younger indelicately put it, he “stunk like shit.” (After a week in the saddle, none of the crew smelled like roses, but Henry’s fecal fragrance had by then risen to a high ripeness that his comrades found truly rebarbative. As William James pointed out in his discussion of the “native repugnancy” of “excrementitious and putrid things” in his Principles of Psychology: “That we dislike in others things which we tolerate in ourselves is a law of our aesthetic nature about which there can be no doubt.”) Frank and Jesse reluctantly assented to taking their malodorous brother along with them, if only to seal the deal; at which point Charlie Pitts, though but slightly injured himself, opted to throw in his lot with the more badly wounded yet less odiferous Youngers.

  There has long been an assumption on the part of some historians that the two outlaw groups must have parted ways on less than amicable terms, but such a supposition is belied by Cole Younger’s subsequent testimony that the Jameses took off “with the knowledge and consent of the others.” More tellingly, before splitting up, the Youngers turned over a number of their personal belongings to Frank and Jesse for safekeeping, along with the bulk of what remained of the fat Rocky Cut bankroll—a sum that must have been considerable. Minnesota historian John Koblas cited a news story from the Faribault Democrat in which the fleeing James brothers were later reported to have stopped at a farmhouse to purchase a loaf of bread, a hat, and two grain sacks. “One of the men,” wrote Koblas, “took out a wad of bills, which according to the farmer, was as long as his arm. It consisted mostly of $100 and $50 bills, and they paid him a dollar and a half.”

  The morning after their first meeting, Elena Hite arrived back at William’s Harvard office for a follow-up visit, still aglow with the warmth of the doctor’s free-will pep talk of the previous afternoon. Indeed, that therapeutic encounter seemed to have bolstered both of their spirits. In place of his informal shirtsleeves of the day before, William was sporting a natty box-pleated belted tweed jacket, striped trousers, a sky-blue Italian silk foulard, and an impeccably polished pair of dark tan oxfords. He had always been something of a dandy—his letters to Henry in Europe were frequently larded with requests for special-order apparel and accessories to be shipped from the continent—and Elena had apparently brought out the Beau Brummel in him. (“We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with them,” he once wrote, “that there are few of us who, if asked to choose between having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetually shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemished form always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment before making a decisive reply.”)

  Elena handed William back his volume of Renouvier’s Essais, which she had dutifully perused overnight; although, as she sheepishly confessed, between the difficult French and the arcane philosophical jargon, much of it had left her head spinning. Fortunately, the professor reassured her, he had no intention of administering a quiz, gallantly adding that even he had struggled with the book in his initial readings.

  The doctor and his patient fell back into a comf
ortable colloquy, the stream of their conversation meandering even farther afield from typical consulting-room material than it had the day before, as whatever pretense of a clinical cast they may have tried to maintain dissipated into a fizzy orgy of general chat. William, whom Henry’s biographer Lyndall Gordon called “the most captivating of the Jameses,” must have been at his most scintillating. (As his sister, Alice, once wrote of him, “he is simply himself, a creature who speaks in another language as Henry says from the rest of mankind and who would lend life and charm to a treadmill.”) Elena, having long been frozen out of Asa Hite’s confidence, reveled in the opportunity to partake in the kind of precocious and sassy badinage with an older male authority figure that she had always yearned to share with her father. William, for his part, was falling easily into the avuncular role of mentor, a stance that was always charged for him, according to his biographer Linda Simon, with “a decidedly romantic, if not erotic, aura.”

  They discovered, among other common interests, a shared love of painting and a mutual connection to that discipline in the person of the French artist Thomas Couture, who had instructed both Elena’s degenerate guru George Stanley and William’s former teacher William Morris Hunt. While studying with Hunt in Newport during the early 1860s, William told Elena, he had briefly entertained an adolescent flirtation with making a career in painting, an ambition that had devolved into yet another contest of wills between himself and Henry Sr.; despite his effusive admiration for Art in the abstract, William’s father, in Linda Simon’s phrase, was “repulsed by the idea that his son would engage in an occupation so spiritually and intellectually vacuous.” (Another of William’s biographers, Howard M. Feinstein, diagnosed his abandonment of his dream to stain canvases for a living as nothing less than a form of “self-murder.”) At least on this occasion, William maintained that he had never really regretted his decision to pursue science over art, and that he had even found his trained painterly eye a distinct asset in his subsequent endeavors, especially his study of anatomy, in which it had sharpened his ability to discern and delineate the underlying structural secrets of the human form.

  “Oh and what, pray tell, do you discern in mine?” Elena laughingly asked. By her own admission, she had a “boundless appetite” for knowing how she appeared to others, whether in her public speaking, in her romantic relationships, or even, in this case, as the subject of a clinical evaluation. (During her own adolescent fling with brush and canvas, she had once executed a challenging dual study of her lovely face and its reflection in a limpid lotus pool—actually, George Stanley’s watering trough—that she had pointedly titled Narcissa.)

  Rising to Elena’s teasing challenge, William picked up a drawing pad and began to sketch out a likeness of his patient. This artistic exercise not only gave him license to shamelessly ogle her alluring contours, it also facilitated their conversational give-and-take, allowing him to elicit an informal psychiatric history of his model.

  As she posed for William’s pen, Elena rambled back over the bleak landscape of her isolated childhood—her mother’s long illness; her father’s relentless pushing of her into society; and her often testy relationships with her schoolmates, to whom she felt intellectually superior yet socially inferior. William, who was as much fascinated with the female mind as Henry—although without enjoying his literary brother’s seemingly effortless ability to vibrate sympathetically to its mysterious wavelengths—was especially intrigued by Elena’s paradoxical mélange of both very high and very low self-regard and her penchant for whipsawing from one to the other with alarming alacrity. He wondered if this might have anything to do with her unconventional behavior.

  Perhaps taking her cue from William’s confession of his clash with Henry Sr. over the aborted painting career, Elena mused that her behavior—or, more properly, as she knew he meant, her misbehavior—might have been a way of “getting back at my father.” William cannily remarked that, as things had turned out, it seemed rather to have gotten her back to her father. (This was the sort of observation that was to become commonplace among Freudian analysts in the next century, though in 1876 Freud himself was still a mere medical student, dissecting the reproductive organs of eels, with psychoanalysis barely a glint in his ambitious eye.)

  The doctor and his patient might have carried on in this affable vein indefinitely, but when Elena reached across William’s desk to accept his sketch for closer inspection, her eye happened to fall upon a copy of that morning’s edition of The Boston Daily Globe, which lay atop the cluttered surface. At the bottom of the newspaper’s front page was a small headline reporting that a daring daylight bank robbery and murder had been perpetrated the day before out in Northfield, Minnesota.

  Elena blanched.

  William, who had picked up the paper on his way to the office and tossed it onto his desktop without having scanned its contents, was oblivious to the headline, which, in any event, contained no mention of the Jameses or the Youngers by name. But he couldn’t help observing the plunge to pallor of Elena’s normally rosy complexion, nor the fact that her gaze was directed elsewhere than toward his painstaking draftsmanship.

  Elena was in a quandary. She was confident that William could have had no notion of her connection to the western Jameses, but she couldn’t be certain whether he was aware of his own. If, as she believed, he had been in correspondence with Henry, he might well have known of the existence of his outlaw brothers in Missouri; yet he would have had little reason to link them to the cursory newspaper headline, which specified only that the crimes had been perpetrated in distant Minnesota. Elena, on the other hand, had ample reason to suspect that the gang had been planning to strike far from their usual hunting grounds and thus intuited the true import of the news item before her. To extricate herself from this awkward impasse, she hastily fabricated a cover story, claiming that she had recently lectured in Northfield and was simply flabbergasted to imagine that charming little college town being the scene of such heinous acts.

  At this point William and Elena brought their heads together over the newspaper and perused the story more closely. The body of the text was short on particulars, having been pieced together hastily from sketchy telegraphed reports the previous evening, but buried near the end of the item were indeed speculations from local lawmen that the crime may have been the work of the notorious James Gang of Missouri.

  Now it was William’s turn to blanch.

  No longer encumbered by the more severely wounded Youngers, the three James brothers, riding freshly stolen horses, at last began to make better time across the sodden North Star terrain, heading due west toward the Dakota Territory. But with posses closing in on them from all points of the compass, ad pickets posted at practically every bridge and crossroads they reached, the Jameses found that after over twenty-four hours of hard riding, they had driven their new horses into the ground. Hoping to throw off their trackers, they dismounted and shooed the worn-out animals in three different directions to serve as decoys.

  Now they were on foot and moving slowly over the soggy landscape. Frank cut a makeshift walking stick from a fallen tree branch, but his progress was still ponderous and painful, the old foot wound from the cannister ball he had taken at Fort Wagner adding to the burden of his more recent injuries. Further impeding their pace, Henry’s back had begun to act up, obliging him to halt repeatedly to fight off crippling dorsal spasms. The brothers appeared to be approaching the endgame of their flight.

  On the evening of September 15, the exhausted trio hobbled up to the door of an isolated farmhouse west of Lake Crystal. Frank, again flexing his polyglot aptitude, explained to the old German immigrant couple who greeted them that he and his colleagues were part of a posse on the trail of the notorious Northfield bandits. They had gotten separated from their fellows, he went on, when the brigands they were chasing had shot their horses out from under them. He then flashed a fistful of greenbacks and offered to pay handsomely for a solid meal and a night’s lodging. E
ven before he could launch into whatever fanciful explanation he had concocted to account for his comrade’s stench, the old couple graciously welcomed them in—on the condition that Henry leave his fetid garments outside by the hog pen.

  After over a week of sloughing through the mire of the Minnesota plains on horseback and on foot, the Jameses found the humble clapboard shanty a veritable palace of luxury. While the old hausfrau prepared a hearty repast of pigs’ knuckles, sauerkraut, and corn biscuits, the brothers took turns bathing in her commodious washtub. Not only did this afford Henry the blessed opportunity to rid himself of his detested odor, it also proved a soothing boon to his aching back. To top off his ablutions and alter his appearance for the first time since the days of the Civil War—and for the last time he would ever do so again until his hair began to gray at the turn of the new century—he shaved off his luxuriant beard.