The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (36 page)

Thomas Crittenden’s secretary saw Bob Ford’s communiqué only after perusing the morning’s correspondence, but he immediately telegraphed the St. Joseph authorities for particulars and made arrangements for the governor to go there as soon as Crittenden returned from a meeting in St. Louis. The governor groaned when he was greeted with the news, and according to Finis C. Fair, the secretary, Crittenden said over and over again on their walk to the executive mansion that he regretted the Fords did not apprehend Jesse James alive.

At noon in St. Joseph, O. M. Spencer, the prosecuting attorney for Buchanan County, scheduled a coroner’s inquest for three o’clock that afternoon and visited the Fords in Enos Craig’s office in order to inform them that he didn’t actually believe their stories about acting in concert with the government and that he intended to prefer charges of murder against them. He said, “I don’t care if Mr. James was the most desperate culprit in the entire world; that fact wouldn’t justify you in killing the man except in self-defense or after demanding his surrender, and the law is very explicit on that point.”

Bob looked at the floor but Charley smirked at O. M. Spencer and asked Enos Craig when lunch would be served.

At Seidenfaden’s funeral parlor on Fourth and Messanie streets, the cadaver was made void and then swollen by a cavity injection that was the substitute, then, for embalmment. A starched white shirt was exchanged for the stained one, but the cravat and remaining clothes were the same that Jesse James wore when he walked to the cigar store that morning.

On his second day of work with the Alex Lozo studio, a man named James W. Graham got the chance to become renowned at twenty-six by gaining the city marshal’s permission to be the only photographer of Jesse Woodson James. He set a single-plate, eight-by-ten-inch studio camera on a box and, with William Seidenfaden and two men, carried the cadaver from the laboratory into the cooling room where those who’d expired were exhibited in a case of ice.

Correspondents from Kansas City, Independence, Richmond, and Kearney were already in the city and clustered behind the crimson cord and stanchions in the cooling room, writing their impressions and comparing the physical features on the remains with the two available photographs of Jesse at seventeen and twenty-seven.

Graham and the undertaker’s assistants strapped the body to a wide board with a rope that crossed under his right shoulder and again over his groin, then they tilted the man until he was nearly vertical and let the camera lens accept the scene for a minute. The man’s eyes were shut, the skin around them was slightly green, and the sockets themselves seemed so cavernous that photographic copies were later repainted with two blue eyes looking serenely at some vista in the middle distance. Likewise missing in the keepsake photographs was the mean contusion over his left eyebrow that would convince some reporters that it was the gunshot’s exit wound and others that it showed the incidence of Bob Ford’s smashing the stricken man with a timber. The body’s cheeks and chest and belly were somewhat inflated with preservatives, necessitating the removal of the man’s thirty-two-inch brown leather belt, and making his weight seem closer to one hundred eighty-five pounds than the one hundred sixty it was. His height was misjudged by four inches, being recorded as six feet or more by those who wrote about him.

Graham carried the photographic dry plate back to the Lozo studio for development and many in addition to the newspaper reporters followed him, awaiting prints that sold for two dollars apiece and were the models for the lithographed covers on a number of magazines.

The body of Jesse James was lowered onto a slab that was surrounded with crushed ice and Mrs. Zee James was escorted into the cooling room by Enos Craig. She was so overcome with anguish and sorrow that she swooned in the city marshal’s arms and then catatonically sat in a chair, disinclined either to cry or talk, unmindful of other visitors, merely staring at the slain thirty-four-year-old man until two in the afternoon.

Bob and Charley were in the midst of perfunctory interviews with reporters by then. Many noted that the Fords appeared to be proud of their accomplishment and contemptuous of the men who’d sought the James gang of late. Their comments were sneering, snide, argumentative, cocky, misleading. Charley preempted most of the conversations, exaggerating his role and responsibilities in order to insure the governor’s indulgence. Bob lied about being an employee of the Kansas City Detective Agency, about being twenty-one, about Jesse’s wearing four revolvers instead of two .45s, about never having joined the James gang, about shooting Jesse through the left temple, when the man turned around, rather than to the rear of his right ear. When they were asked whether they feared retribution from Frank James, Bob answered in a sentence that seemed rehearsed: “If Frank James seeks revenge, he must be quick of trigger with these two young men; and if we three meet anywhere, it will be Bob Ford who will kill Frank James if there’s anything in coolness and alertness.”

A policeman returned from the cottage with clean clothes for Charley, a gray tweed suit for Bob, and after they’d washed and changed, the Fords were issued shotguns for a short walk under rain-lashed umbrellas to the Buchanan County Courthouse.

The circuit courtroom was on the second floor and was already more jam-packed than an immigrant ship, with pallid women in the pews and children squeezed between the balusters of the bar and boys piggy-backed on their fathers’ shoulders. Sitting in the aisles and pushing down the alleys and shoving into every cranny were correspondents from all the closer towns, shopkeepers with aprons on under their sweaters, intimidatingly mustached businessmen in nearly synonymous suits and slickers, farmers with droopy hats and fierce-looking beards, everyone staring as six policemen and the Ford brothers strode to the reserved seats on the defendant’s side, their bootheels clobbering the oak wood flooring, their suit coats stuffed behind their pistol grips.

Mrs. Zee James was sitting with Marshal Enos Craig on the plaintiff’s side, wearing a black silk dress and dark brown veil; in the second row was Henry Craig with a yellow legal pad on his knee, his round spectacles far down his nose. He gave Bob just a glimmer of a smile and then found justification to make some sort of notation. Bob crouched forward and saw that Zee was crying, he saw the prosecuting attorney instructing Coroner Heddens at the clerk’s table, he looked around the room. People began making comments on his attractiveness, expressing surprise at his slightness and age, gossiping about his peccancy, sending him looks of scorn; but Bob governed his own emotions, reading his fingers as Coroner Heddens and a jury of six men came in from the judge’s antechambers and a bailiff announced the inquisition was in session.

Charles Wilson Ford was the first witness called to the stand. He testified that he was twenty-four years old and in residence on the Ray County farm of Mrs. Martha Ford Bolton when he first made the acquaintance of Jesse James in 1879. He said, “He was a sporting man and so was I. He gambled and drank a little, and so did I.” Charley claimed he’d never stolen anything with the James gang, but most of his further statements were true. His lisp was not much noticed. Rain fell straight as fishing line outside and gradually cooled the courtroom. Heddens asked if Bob came to St. Joseph to assist in robbing a bank and Charley apprised the coroner of their plans for a Platte City attempt. “Jesse said they were going to have a murder trial there this week, and while everybody would be at the courthouse, he would slip in and rob the bank, and if not he would come back to Forrest City and get that.”

The coroner stood near the plaintiff’s table with his hands in his pockets. He was unpracticed at cross-examination and all too aware of the many attorneys observing his performance. He lamely asked, “What was your idea in that?”

Charley continued as if the man’s inquiry were logical and incisive. “It was simply to get Bob here where one of us could kill Jesse if once he took his pistols off. To try and do this with his pistols on would be useless, as I knew that Jesse had often said he would not surrender to a hundred men, and if three men should step out in front of him and shoot him, he could kill them before he fell.”

O. M. Spencer was aghast when Dr. Heddens then released Charley without a more exacting interrogation but chose to let the matter rest until he could manage the questioning at the Ford brothers’ trial. Charley swaggered back to the wooden chair and slouched down in it so that all the eyes would be off him. Bob said, “You did fine,” and Coroner Heddens called Robert Newton Ford to the stand.

People strained their necks and rose from their seats and jumped to see the shootist. He strode with confidence to the bailiff, calmly swore not to perjure, and then complacently revealed himself to the courtroom audience, smiling with arrogance and gladness. He was twenty years old but looked sixteen. His gray suit was new, he seemed exceptionally well groomed, his short brown hair was soft as a child’s. He was very slim but sinewy, with stark bones that seemed as slender and hard as the spindle struts on a chair. His facial features were refined, his complexion was flawless and without color (sunburn was then tantamount to dirt), and except for something cruel about his mouth Bob Ford might have been thought rather pretty.

The coroner commenced his easy catechism and Bob answered with a voice that was authoritarian and certain, even haranguing in its tone. He presented a comparatively accurate narrative of the preceding four months, misspeaking some dates and making the ten-thousand-dollar reward seem his only motive for the murder.

Heddens asked, “What have you been doing since you came here?”

“My brother and I go downtown sometimes at night and get the papers.”

“What did you tell Jesse you were with him for?”

“I told him I was going in with him.”

“Had you any plans to rob any bank?”

“He had spoken of several but made no particular selection.”

The coroner was a little confused about the variation from Charley’s statement about the Platte City Bank but went on. “Well, now will you give us the particulars of the killing and what time it occurred?”

“After breakfast, between eight and nine o’clock this morning, he, my brother, and myself were in the room. He pulled off his pistols and got up on a chair to dust off some picture frames and I drew my pistol and shot him.”

“How close were you to him?”

“About six feet away.”

“How close to him was the hand that held the pistol?”

Bob sent the coroner a reproachful look for the pointlessness of the question and said, “About four feet I should think.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He started to turn his head but didn’t say a word.”

“Was Jesse James unarmed when you killed him?”

“Yes, sir.”

The coroner gave Bob permission to step down and the court was adjourned until 10 a.m. on Tuesday. O. M. Spencer moaned.

Henry Craig said, “You’ll get your chance, Spencer,” and the two attorneys strolled to a restaurant in order to argue their strategies.

In the meantime, the Fords tardily returned to jail in a cold rain. A cluster of black umbrellas were raised over them by policemen and a crowd followed them with admiration, congratulations, catcalls, jeers, and surly looks. Sheriff James R. Timberlake rose from a chair when the two scurried inside. Door locks were thrown and the window shades were drawn as Timberlake walked the Fords back to their cell. He told them to make no agreements without consulting Henry Craig or William H. Wallace, to make no arrangement about an attorney since a good one was already considering the case, and to get their accounts of the assassination straightened out—according to the reporters he’d chatted with, there were too many inconsistencies; in some versions Charley was not even in the room when the shot was fired.

Bob Ford explained, “I was just having a little fun.”

“Fun,” said the sheriff.

Dick Liddil was resting on a cot next to theirs. He stood when the Fords came in and exchanged greetings with Charley, but it was clear that Dick was aggrieved and he could only stare with anguish at Bob. Timberlake suggested that it might be safer for Dick if he remained in jail overnight and Dick said, “It’s all right, Jim. I’ve gotten used to it.”

Sheriff Timberlake was intercepted outside by a correspondent with the St. Louis
Democrat
and used the occasion of an interview to correct some misconceptions, saying Jesse knew that Bob Ford was there on a mission and was only waiting for the right time to kill the boy. “For ten days I suffered mortal agony, expecting any hour to hear that Bob was dead, and when at last I did hear of the killing, and how it was done, I knew in a minute that Jesse had only taken off his revolvers in the presence of Bob to make him believe that he stood solid. He never dreamed that the drop would be taken upon him then. That very night, on the ride toward Platte City, which had been seemingly agreed upon, Jesse would have shot Bob Ford through the head sure.”

Railway companies had by then rather gleefully scheduled special coaches that would carry the inquisitive to the city at greatly reduced rates; thus a thousand strangers were making spellbound pilgrimages to the cottage or were venerating the iced remains in Seidenfaden’s cooling room. Reporters roamed the city, gathering anecdotes and apocrypha, garnering interviews with the principals, relentlessly repeating themselves, inaccurately recording information, even inventing some stories in order to please a publisher.

The man who offered thirty thousand dollars for the body of Charles Guiteau sent a telegram to City Marshal Enos Craig offering fifty thousand for the body of Jesse Woodson James so that he could go around the country with it, or at least sell it to P. T. Barnum for his “Greatest Show on Earth.” Notwithstanding his guarantee to Mrs. James, Craig appears to have given the proposal some strong consideration, and appears also to have craved the criminal’s guns, for on Wednesday Governor Crittenden angrily interceded in the matter with a wire to O. M. Spencer that said: “Just informed your officers will not turn over the body of Jesse James to his wife nor deliver his arms to me. I hope you will have done both. Humanity suggests the one, and a preservation of such relics for the state the other. His jewelry should be held for the present.” The governor also sent the state militia to St. Joseph on the 3rd in order to preserve the peace and to protect his increasingly threatened clients.