The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (10 page)

Zee choired at church, she conversed happily with her sister-in-law as they stewed and pickled vegetables or grated cucumbers and onions for catsup, she cooed to her child as he suckled; but alone outside her home she felt shadowed and stalked—footsteps stopped when she did, curtains dropped when she turned her head—and she became so leery and aloof that shopkeepers and neighbors assumed she was snobbish or persnickety or perhaps a little simple.

Her lone male friend was Dr. John Vertrees, whom Jesse hired to live with Zee and her son during the weeks of absence he attributed to his work as a wheat speculator. (The doctor assumed that was a lie manufactured to cover a secret addiction to cards and horse races, for Mr. Howard dressed like a boulevardier and wore a derringer in a hideaway shoulder harness and once presented to his wife an envelope of diamonds.)

Little is known about the James brothers’ activities on the road while they resided in Tennessee, except for the summer and autumn of 1876 in which the James-Younger gang committed two robberies, the second of them being the fiasco at Northfield, Minnesota, in September.

LESS THAN TWO MONTHS
earlier they had robbed the Missouri Pacific Railroad of over fifteen thousand dollars near Otterville, Missouri. As the badmen looted the Adams and U.S. express companies, a minister conducted the timorous through canticles and evangelized for the repentance of sins, and a newspaper account later complimented the robbers who “were well versed in their business” and “remarkably cool and courageous throughout the whole affair.”

But then the St. Louis chief of police arrested a man who’d been bragging about the loot he’d gotten from the robbery, and after rough interrogation, Hobbs Kerry confessed that he was one member of a gang that was governed by Jesse James and included Frank James, Cole Younger, Bob Younger, Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts, and Bill Chadwell.

Jesse sent a letter (which was probably rewritten by Edwards) to the Kansas City
Times
, contending that “this so-called confession is a well-built pack of falsehoods from beginning to end. I never heard of Hobbs Kerry, Charles Pitts and Wm. Chadwell until Kerry’s arrest. I can prove my innocence by eight good and well-known men of Jackson County, and show conclusively that I was not at the train robbery.” He closed with another plea for a fair hearing and signed it “Respectfully, J. W. James.”

By the time the letter was published, on August 18th, Jesse and his brother and Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger were sitting on a railway coach headed four hundred miles north to an area in which the citizens would not be so cautious or on the lookout for thieves. Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts, and Bill Chadwell knitted into the group at depots in Missouri and the eight toured St. Paul’s gambling houses and sat through a Red Caps and Clippers baseball game before they bought thoroughbred horses and tack and rode the Minnesota River to scout Mankato and then Northfield.

Cole Younger coveted retirement in a foreign country before September stripped away but thought he needed more of a subsidy than a Swedish mill town could muster. Meanwhile Bill Chadwell, who’d lived in the state, boasted about the ease of larceny in placid Minnesota and indicated secluded routes and short cuts that could spirit the outlaws to Iowa like a whirlwind in the Book of Kings. And good authorities had told him that General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, the man called “The Scourge of New Orleans,” was an investor in the First National Bank of Northfield: they could revenge his confiscations and slaughter of Confederate soldiers. And that argument worked. Cole Younger later confessed that once they heard about Butler’s involvement in the institution, they “felt little compunction, under the circumstances, about raiding him or his.”

Northfield it was then. On September 7th, Jesse James and Bob Younger and Charlie Pitts dressed in cattlemen’s linen dusters and rode across the iron bridge over the Cannon River into Mill Square, where they hitched their splendid horses. Jesse’s was the grayish brown color that is called dun, the other two were bays; and each had such thoroughbred conformation that men sidetracked to scrutinize and assess them and wondered who the visitors were as the outlaws strolled over to the Scriver Block, which contained the H. Scriver and Lee and Hitchcock merchandise firms and, around the corner, the First National Bank, on Division Street.

At J. G. Jeff’s restaurant each man ordered eggs and bacon and apple pie and dawdled over two pots of coffee as they consulted about varieties of rifles with the same tedious overattention that other customers were giving sorghum and Holstein cows.

Bob Younger was a debonair man with a blond mustache and short brown hair and expressive eyebrows that seemed to crave a monocle. Charlie Pitts was an alias for Samuel Wells, a sometime cowhand with a handsome sunburned head that was square as a chimney, whose skin was so unclean dirt laced it like rainwater stains on tan wallpaper. Jesse had just turned twenty-nine but he seemed to uncle them both, and he took care of the check when Frank slouched by the plate glass window, cuing his younger brother about the tranquility of the town.

So Jesse, Bob, and Charlie returned to the Scriver Block, sitting atop dry goods boxes outside the Lee and Hitchcock store, cutting slivers of wood from the boxes and loafing in the sunlight until two o’clock, when Cole Younger and Clell Miller rode into Division Street from the south. Cole stopped his racehorse and pretended some annoyance with the cinch, winking over the animal’s withers at Jesse, who then stood and walked around the corner to the First National Bank, swiveling into the narrow, windowed doors and slamming both into jolts against brass hindrances on the baseboards. He snicked back the hammer on his .44 and hurtled onto the walnut counter at the unrailed teller opening as Bob Younger yelled out, “Throw up your hands!”

Clell Miller followed the three to the bank, shutting the two doors behind them and standing on the sidewalk with his right hand inside his long linen duster, glancing everywhere. Mr. J. S. Allen crossed the street to see if anything peculiar was happening but Miller prevented the man’s approach. Allen stepped back and then rushed around the corner into an alley, screaming, “Get your guns, boys! They’re robbing the bank!”

A University of Michigan medical student named Henry M. Wheeler was frittering away the afternoon under the green awning of his father’s drugstore, just across Mill Square from the bank. He saw the man in the ankle-length coat impede J. S. Allen and heard the merchant screaming his news; he cried out, “Robbery! Robbery!” to the customers in the drugstore and ran into the Dampier House to retrieve a Spencer carbine he’d seen in the hotel’s luggage room, then scrambled up to the second-floor window that looked onto the street, with three waxed paper cartridges in his hand.

Cole Younger and Clell Miller jumped onto their racehorses and caterwauled and hooted and shot Colts overhead and about, at shingles and signboards and brick corbels, wherever chance swerved their muzzles, and three horsemen clanked in race over the iron bridge and racketed onto Division Street, so that five wild men careered around in an area eighty feet wide, clattering over the planks in the crosswalks and banging away in the air with their guns, cocking their horses after whosoever had not as of then scuttled into commercial buildings.

Jesse James by then walked off the counter in a four-foot drop to the floor and scowled at the two clerks, Alonzo Bunker and Frank Wilcox, who shrank from Jesse as from a furnace, retreating to the bookkeeping alcove. The cashier was attending the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia; the acting cashier was Joseph Lee Heywood. Bob Younger was saying, “We’re going to rob this bank. Don’t any of you holler. We’ve got forty men outside.”

Jesse sauntered over to Heywood and asked, “Are you the cashier?”

Heywood said he wasn’t.

Jesse looked with puzzlement at Bunker and Wilcox and put the same question to them. They crouched away from his left-handed gun and shook their heads in the negative.

Jesse returned to Heywood with ire in his blue eyes and said, “You’re the cashier. Open that safe quick or I’ll blow your lying head off.”

Charlie Pitts saw Clell Miller in argument with J. S. Allen and guessed rightly that they’d already lingered too long. He lurched over the counter grill and clumsied down and Heywood bolted to close a vault that was the size of a walk-in closet. Pitts snagged Heywood’s sleeve and retarded him and the two scuffled, Heywood shouting, “Murder! Murder!” until Jesse jabbed a revolver into Heywood’s cheek and said, “Open that safe inside there now or you’ve got one more minute to live.”

And to convince the acting cashier of that, Pitts snuck behind him with a pocket knife and slit the skin of his throat. Joseph L. Heywood was stunned. He was a slender man in his thirties with a dark beard and a scholar’s look—he could have been an algebra teacher, someone conservative and cultured, and he was, in fact, a trustee at Carleton College. Cut, he looked at Jesse with rebuke in his face as his neck unsealed and blood rolled down his collar like a red shade being drawn.

Jesse ordered him again to unlock the safe and Heywood held a handkerchief to his neck and croaked, “It has a time lock. It
can’t
be opened.”

Jesse struck him cruelly on the skull with his revolver and the cashier caved in. He sat down on the floor and his eyes rose in his skull with faint and he laid himself down with caution for his rickety condition. Jesse then ordered the clerks to unlock the safe, but they said they couldn’t, and had Jesse only made the attempt himself he would have found out that the stove-sized safe at the rear of the walk-in vault had already been unlocked at nine that morning.

Gunfire was now regular outside and Jesse caught a glimpse of Frank and Cole reeling their horses around, one of them cantering up onto the sidewalk, loudly clobbering the wood. Bob Younger had climbed over the counter and insisted that the two clerks kneel as he rifled the till drawers. The cash had been removed from the wooden trays, as it happened, and all he could find were rolls of pennies and nickels in the midst of deposit and withdrawal receipts. Had he looked to a second drawer below he could have gained three thousand dollars.

The clerk named Bunker, who was also a teacher at Carleton College, saw that Jesse was looking on with peculiar fascination as the cashier gave blood to the floor, and that Younger was preoccupied in seeking the currencies. So he rocked back on his shoes and then dashed for the director’s room and the alley door. Charlie Pitts aimed at him and burst slivers from the doorjamb with a shot and the clerk ducked outside. Pitts fired a second time and Bunker floundered down the alley, a rift in his right shoulder next to the collar bone.

Chaos ruled outside. The gang had expected the Northfield residents to cower beneath their onslaught, but the citizens had instead rushed into whatever rooms were close by to search out weapons and ammunition. Elias Stacy claimed a shotgun from a hardware store and tore open a box of shells and chambered one without noticing that it was bird shot. Some businessmen retrieved desk pistols and derringers, common laborers crossed the town from their work with rakes and straw forks and sickles, and boys dodged into the street to pitch rocks and bottles at the skittish, prancing horses. The steam whistle at the river mill was screaming over and over again, girls were yanking steeple ropes so that the church bells were clanging, and men were grunting wagons into the streets in order to restrict the available exits.

A Scandinavian immigrant named Oscar Seeborn mistook the pandemonium on Division Street for a celebration of some sort or as the general brand of American violence that he’d been warned about on his passage west. So he barged ahead with innocence and neutrality evinced in his smile even as an outlaw instructed him to go back in an English he couldn’t yet understand. When Seeborn stepped away from the man’s pistol he was murdered.

At about the same time, Clell Miller saw Elias Stacy walk into the street with a shotgun and raise it in his direction, and then Clell was clouted off his mount with a load of bird shot in his cheek and forehead like a black tattoo of a constellation. Though blood ran down his face in bars, Miller ascended onto his saddle again and raked his horse toward the man who’d shot him so that when Clell returned the exchange it would be from inches. But Henry Wheeler had his carbine trained on Miller from overhead in the Dampier House and a lead ball the size of a blouse button slammed into the outlaw’s clavicle with such force it towed him off his horse and flat on his back in the street.

Cole Younger fired at Stacy and missed, then at the Dampier House window, but Henry Wheeler crouched back into the room. Cole descended from his horse and asked Miller, “How bad is it, Clell? Do you think you can ride?”

“I don’t know.” His subclavian artery was severed. All his blood was in his chest. He raised on his elbow and looked around as if he’d awoke in an unfamiliar bedroom. Then he died and bowled over onto his nose in the dirt. Cole unbuckled Miller’s ammunition belt and leaped back onto his horse.

Anselm Manning owned the hardware store across the alley from the First National Bank and he sidled down that alley with a rifle that could only be loaded with one cartridge at a time. It made him concentrate. He walked out into the street and judged his chances of getting the moving outlaws and when he saw two just beyond the racehorses tied in front of the bank, he trained his sights on them. But they dodged him by sinking low, so he adjusted slightly lower and killed the closest horse. He then levered the rifle in the alley but realized the ignited cartridge was lodged in it, so was obliged to go back to his hardware store for a ramrod. He was back at the alley entrance within a minute and looking around the corner when he spied Cole Younger. His shot strayed wild but caught a signpost in such a way that it glanced right and tore into Cole Younger’s side, making him groan and grit his teeth as his horse jerked around in fright.

Manning retreated again and grinned at a man in the alley. “Got lucky,” he said and then walked out, loading a third shell in the breech and cocking the rifle as he maneuvered to get his sights on Bill Chadwell, who was sitting on his horse eighty yards away, acting as a sentry. Manning was a thoroughly unguessing man and he gave his body as a target as he calculated and engineered, causing men in the alley to anxiously call him back. But he stayed out there just long enough to get off a shot that went through Bill Chadwell’s heart, killing him at once, so that Chadwell slowly declined from his saddle in the graceless swoon and slide of happenstance and gravitation, until his fingers lightly swished the dirt with each ungainly horse motion.