The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (37 page)

However, the militia had not yet arrived when six horsemen in raincoats and slouch hats rode inside the fence at 1318 Lafayette Street. They had short rifles or shotguns in saddle scabbards, revolvers made their coats wide at the waist, and they were laughing at some sally or jest when a policeman in navy blue walked out of the cottage to meet them. They were unnerved when they saw him, some were affrighted, but one man merely scowled and asked the policeman what happened to the owner. When they received word that the man they sought was shot, one of the six groaned, “Oh, God, no!” and because they steered away and left the city at once, it was thereafter conjectured that they were recruits to the James gang that not even the Fords knew about; which of course lent credence to Bob’s claim that Jesse meant to kill them. Little was made of the six men’s unanticipated appearance and precipitate departure—there was simply too much frenzy and ferment in the city for the episode to make an impression on the authorities.

Mr. Seidenfaden concluded his day by noting in a black ledger: “Apr. 3. Mr. Jesse James killed. Number 11 S. casket with shroud, $250. Shroud $10. Paid.” That was an extravagance: the casket was an imitation rosewood that was made with galvanized iron; the lifts and lugs were silver; the mattress and pillow were cream-colored satin. Two hundred sixty dollars was more than ten times the price of a standard funeral, but the costs were entirely covered by “gentlemen who wished to remain anonymous.” It was only much later that the gentlemen were revealed to have been James R. Timberlake and Henry H. Craig.

Jacob Spencer, the man who owned the St. Joseph
News,
went into his library late that afternoon and began seven nights’ work on what would become
The Life and Career of Frank and Jesse James,
a two-hundred-page book that sold out as soon as it reached the stores on April 12th. (Spencer claimed later that five hundred thousand copies would have been needed in order to meet the demand.)

A man crept into the cottage that night and cut out a swatch of the blood-stained carpet; the next afternoon he was in Chicago selling square inches of the material for five dollars.

The governor wanted to be certain that the man on ice was Jesse James, so a party of acquaintances and Clay County neighbors (including two cousins) were sent to St. Joseph via a Missouri Pacific train and at midnight viewed the remains. Mattie Collins was the most greatly affected by the sight: she called Bob Ford a cur and a scoundrel, rashly cursed William Wallace and Henry Craig in their presence, maintained that it was that slut Martha Bolton who’d orchestrated everything, and carried on like an overexercised actress until Wallace commanded, “My dear lady: cease!”

One by one the identifiers were asked by Craig if they recognized the man, and all corroborated that it was indeed the man they’d schooled or soldiered or been on the scout with. Dick Liddil said, “That’s Jess all right. I’d know his hide in a tanyard.” Four of them then signed a statement certifying “that we were well-acquainted with Jesse James during his lifetime, that we have just viewed his remains now in the custody of the coroner at this place and have no hesitation in saying that they are unquestionably his.”

Soon after they left, at about 1 a.m., Coroner Heddens and three other doctors, among them George C. Catlett, the superintendent of the insane asylum, stole into the cooling room in order to perform an autopsy. They noted the cadaver was “a man of fine physique and was evidently possessed of unlimited powers of endurance.” They sawed open the skull and followed the .44 caliber bullet’s route from its entrance at “the lower part of the occipital bone on the right of the median line” to “the junction of the suture which divides the occipital, parietal, and temporal bones of the left side.” According to Catlett, “The brain was a most remarkable one, and showed the great will power, earnestness, and determination of the man. It also showed thought and courage and in most men would have accomplished wonderful things.”

They saw two round scars within three inches of the man’s right nipple and after surgery realized, with some astonishment, that the man had managed a vigorous life without the service of his right lung. They also recorded a bullet wound in a leg, the scar of a lanced abscess in the right groin, a fractured interior anklebone of the left foot, a missing inch of the left middle finger, a brown birthmark above the right elbow. The doctors then restitched the sectioned skin and cleaned and dressed the cadaver with such care that their post-mortem was secret for more than a week.

The remaining night was calm.

ON TUESDAY MORNING,
Police Commissioner Henry Craig, Sheriff James R. Timberlake, James Andrew “Dick” Liddil, and Deputy Marshal James Finley were tactfully examined by a tired Coroner Heddens. Little that was unanticipated was said. Timberlake stated he’d known Jesse James since 1864 and recognized the cadaver as being that of the criminal. (His words at Seidenfaden’s were “Jesse, I’ve looked for you for a long time.”) Timberlake volunteered the theory that Jesse would have killed the Fords if Bob hadn’t shot him first, that Jesse only removed his revolvers in the Ford brothers’ presence in order to pacify them. He reminded the court that Jesse James had announced his intention of killing Governor Crittenden, Dick Liddil, and one or two others in the gang “as they were surrendering too fast, and he would be in danger if they were permitted to live.”

Henry Craig admitted that Bob “was not regularly employed by us, but acted in good faith, and according to our instructions, and assisted in every way he could to aid us,” an acknowledgment that caused a stir of rebuke in the courtroom but meant so much to the careers of the Fords that Bob smiled with gratitude and relief when he heard it said.

In the course of the Tuesday proceedings, Mrs. Zerelda Samuels arrived at the railroad station and was greeted by a great throng awaiting her on the platform. She moved in their midst like an Amazon queen—six feet tall, two hundred twenty-eight pounds in weight, the largest form in the crowd, but with a sovereignty that made her seem even grander. She accepted solace and sympathy from a great many there, gathered sprays and nosegays of wildflowers, and then rode in a carriage with grave indignation to Seidenfaden’s parlor.

She tottered as she walked to the stone slab on which her third-born son slept. She was too mentally and spiritually limited to contemplate the sorrow that the man she mourned over had caused the wives and mothers of his many victims; she only contemplated her own grief and wept as she stroked his white sleeve. A man asked if the remains were really Jesse James and she said, “Yes, it’s my son; would to God it were not.” She then caressed his cold cheek and cried with great lamentation, “O, Jesse! Jesse! Why have they taken you from me? O, the miserable traitors!”

Mr. Bowling Browder, a Kentucky hotel owner who’d married the sister of Zerelda Mimms, then steered Mrs. Samuels out to the carriage that carried her to the courthouse. Some correspondents accompanied them. She said, “You know, he must’ve had a foreshadowing that this was about to happen. One of the last things he said to me was ‘Mother, if I never see you on earth again, we’re sure to meet in Heaven.’ ” She was practiced enough with reporters to pause while they wrote down that statement, and then she continued with vituperations against the government and angry professions of her son’s charity and goodness.

They reached the circuit courtroom just as Deputy Marshal Finley was concluding his brief testimony and as Coroner Heddens was preparing to call for a recess. The Ford brothers were removed from the courtroom through the judge’s antechambers in order to avoid the press, so they missed the attention-getting entrance of the magisterial Mrs. Samuels in a long black gown and veiled sunhat. She was seated with Mrs. James and the two children but then saw Dick Liddil slumped on a side bench. She rose at once and, with the vast courtroom audience attending her, shook her mangled right arm damningly at Dick and railed, “O, you coward! You did all this; you brought all this about! Look at me, you traitor! Look upon me, the broken-down mother, and on this poor wife and these children! How much better it would be if
you
were in the cooler where my boy is now than here looking at me! Coward that you are, God will swear vengeance upon you!”

The courtroom assembly strained to see Dick’s reaction, some further off even climbing onto the seats; Dick looked around with annoyance and bewilderment and then meekly said, “
I
wasn’t the one who killed him. I thought you already knew who did it.”

Henry Craig peered across the room at Dick and shushed him with a parental finger to his lips. Coroner Heddens wisely interrupted the scene by calling first the mother and then the pregnant wife of the deceased to the stand, asking them merely to give their names and current residences and to verify the identity of the remains. Then, lacking any reason to continue the inquest, he requested that the coroner’s jury of six men, “all good and lawful householders in the township of Washington,” be impaneled until they could render a judgment as to how and in what manner and by whom the said Jesse W. James came to his death. Their verdict was returned before noon and the Fords were summarily indicted for first-degree murder.

The St. Joseph
Gazette
was sold out by then and its seven-column account of the assassination was being reprinted verbatim in many newspapers throughout the country. Scare headlines were not yet in use, so that
JESSE, BY JEHOVAH
was wedged into a single column and was followed by five three-line decks that read: “Jesse James, the Notorious Outlaw, Instantly Killed by Robert Ford—His Adventurous Career Brought to an Abrupt Close on the Eve of Another Crime—Ford Gets into His Confidence and Shoots Him from Behind While His Back Is Turned—Jesse a Resident of St. Joseph Since the Eighth of November Last—An Interview with Mrs. James and the Testimony Developed Before a Jury.”

The account began: “Between eight and nine o’clock yesterday morning Jesse James, the Missouri outlaw, before whom the deeds of Fra Diavolo, Dick Turpin and Schinderhannes dwindled into insignificance, was instantly killed by a boy twenty years old, named Robert Ford, at his temporary residence on the corner of Thirteenth and Lafayette, this city.

“In the light of all moral reasoning the shooting was unjustifiable; but the law is vindicated, and the $10,000 reward offered by the state for the body of the brigand will doubtless go to the man who had the courage to draw a revolver on the notorious outlaw even when his back was turned, as in this case.”

And there followed a narrative of the assassination as set forth by the Fords. John Leonard wrote that the news of the shooting “spread like wildfire” but that few people gave it credence. Inevitably, the excitement in St. Joseph and Kansas City was compared to that created nine months earlier when President James A. Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau.

On the afternoon of the 4th, Zee consented to an interview, in which she said she was thirty-five rather man thirty-seven and went on to prevaricate about her late spouse. She said Jesse was not a good scholar and that his spelling was rudimentary, but that he read incessantly and could compose letters like he was pouring water, and never striking a word. She said he was quiet and mild and affectionate, never smoked tobacco nor consumed alcoholic beverages, was always playing with the children. She talked about his practicality and acumen at finance and then made the familiar claim that the circumstances of geography and history compelled him to commit the very few crimes for which the James gang was actually accountable. She stated, without close questioning or contradiction, that the couple had worked in contentment on three farms at various times but authorities had always conspired to drive them off and confiscate their property. The correspondent mentioned that it was estimated the James gang had collected over a quarter of a million dollars in fifteen years, and Zee replied by saying she hadn’t an inkling where the money could’ve gone, she only knew they’d always been poor.

Cole Younger was interviewed in the Stillwater penitentiary but magnanimously tempered his antipathy for Jesse by limiting his comments to tales of the Civil War and a physical description of the outlaw. And a girl who’d once thrown snowballs with the man she knew as Thomas Howard said she’d “never met a more perfect gentleman. Whenever I came to his house he bowed very politely, and in a dignified manner offered me a chair and conversed in the most accomplished manner. Much has been alleged against him but I don’t believe half of it.”

Many newspaper editorial pages on Tuesday carried columns applauding the assassination because it was cheap, expeditious, and successful, but the newspapers’ correspondents were at odds with that judgment, seeming only to record conversations with people who were sympathetic to the victim or skeptical that he’d really perpetrated all that the government said he did. In consequence, antagonism to the Fords was increasing. It was rumored that some Crackernecks intended to steal and enshrine the remains, that Bob would be lynched on the day that the body was interred, that Frank James was in the city with vengeance on his mind—this “mysterious stranger” was eventually revealed to be a German barkeeper who was known as Dutch Charlie. By afternoon the Fords had received at least two menacing letters, one of them crudely printed under the official seal of the Tennessee House of Representatives. It read: “To the Ford Brothers you have Killed Jessie James but you did not get his Pal so Jessie James shal be Avenged i will kill you both if i have to follow you to the end of the earth you cant escape my Vengeance.”

A reporter asked the Fords if they were at all cowed by the threat and Charley was again the one who answered, “No, sir, we fear no one. You tell this fellow from Tennessee to give us his name and we’ll meet him on even ground.”

Bob added, “Give me my guns and let me know who he is and I will meet him anywhere he will name in the United States.”

The writer was clearly impressed by the boys’ courage and resolution and said in summary, “If the worst comes, they will sell their lives as dearly as possible.”