The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (40 page)

Judge William H. Sherman took his seat at the bench after one o’clock and once the court clerk crossed to the recorder’s table, O. M. Spencer stood and requested that Robert Newton Ford be the first arraigned. Bob rose and swayed a little as the prosecuting attorney read a grand jury’s accusation that on the third day of April, Ford had willfully, feloniously, and with malice aforethought, killed Jesse W. James and was now being summarily charged with murder in the first degree. Spencer turned to the prisoner and with great formality asked, “What plea do you make?”

Bob responded, “Guilty!” as if pestered by ceremonies, and then presumptuously sat down.

Spencer raised a second grand jury indictment and with some irritation and frustration read the name of Charles Wilson Ford, pronouncing a premeditated murder charge and receiving the same reply.

The courtroom was then filled with controversy and whisperings and Bob reveled in it. He swiveled in his chair and crouched around the deputies to wink at his brother Elias and at Henry Craig, wave to some reporters he’d met, and pugnaciously smile at those who clearly wished him ill. Doniphan nudged him around.

Judge Sherman ruminated for many minutes and inscribed some thoughts in his elegant longhand before sitting toward the bench and saying, “Under the circumstances, there is only one thing I can do and that is to pronounce sentence here and now. You have pleaded guilty to murder in the first degree, and it only remains for me to carry out the provisions of the law. It remains for others to say whether the sentence is carried out.” Sherman glanced at his writing and commanded, “Robert Ford, stand up.”

Bob smirked but arose.

“Have you anything to say as to why sentence should not be pronounced upon you?”

“Nothing,” said Bob.

The judge looked at him sternly but without passion or righteousness. He said, “Robert Ford, you have pleaded guilty before the court to the crime of murder in the first degree, and it becomes my duty to pass the sentence of death upon you. It is therefore the sentence of this court that you be taken to the Buchanan County Jail and there safely kept until the nineteenth day of May 1882, and at that time to be taken to some convenient place and hanged by the neck until you are dead.”

Bob then lazily slumped down in his seat and Charley was ordered to stand and receive the same sentence. Charley listened with aggravation and outrage that he might be executed without having fired a shot, but Bob simply laughed at the judge in a haughty and mocking way that he thought would be interpreted by correspondents as audacity and pluck. It was not.

Then Sheriff Thomas and the deputies and attorneys walked the Fords back to jail and checked all newspaper reporters for firearms before they were admitted. Bob was asked how he felt and he answered, “Bully.” Charley was asked if he’d actually hang and he answered, “Why, I should smile. The governor will attend to that part of the business; that’s in the contract.”

City Marshal Craig couldn’t abide the Fords any longer, so he collected the revolvers and rifles and articles that had been stored as evidence and carried them to 1318 Lafayette Street. Zee James received him graciously and served him sponge cake and coffee.

Meanwhile the Fords were packing their clothes in luggage that Elias had brought and were predicting that the pardon would come by evening. Bob wrapped his .44 caliber Smith and Wesson in yesterday’s newspaper but then weighed the gun with repugnance and gave it to young Cory Craig in gratitude for the many errands that boy had gone on. His only instructions were that Cory should get a gunsmith to engrave on the nickel sideplate: Bob Ford Killed Jesse James With This Revolver At St. Joseph, Mo. 1882.

Charley sat up from a nap and patted his pockets for cigarette papers. He’d apparently overheard the impromptu presentation, for he commented to Bob, “Your shoes must be starting to pinch.”

“I don’t need any mementoes,” said Bob. “I’ve already got everything fast in my head.”

At 3:45 p.m., Colonel John Doniphan climbed onto a box in the city marshal’s office and soberly read aloud to the assembled press a telegram in which the governor granted an unconditional pardon to Charles and Robert Ford.

Henry Craig ran to the jail cell and greeted the Fords with the news but few others joined him in congratulating the two.

ON APRIL 19TH,
1882, two days after his unconditional pardon and release from jail, Bob Ford was arrested in Richmond, Missouri, on the charge that he’d murdered Robert Woodson Hite, and Bob was obliged to beg two thousand dollars in bail from J. T. Ford, the father he’d always made efforts at forgetting. “Isn’t this typical?” Mr. Ford said with spleen and all too apparent pleasure. “You come to me crying and pleading and whimpering like a little girl, please give me the money, daddy, and I’m the one to clean things up.”

Bob glared as the elderly man jerked his shoestrings tight with a grunt. He said, “Maybe you’re the one I should have killed.”

Mr. Ford glanced with anger and fright at his youngest child and saw that the boy was grinning. He considered the garden outside his window as he often would when he composed his sermons and then pulled himself up from the overstuffed armchair and prepared to make a trip to town, only adding nastily, “How perfectly our good Lord put it in the parable of the prodigal son.” By the time the cashier’s check was made out, many customers at the Hughes and Wasson Bank had come by to say Bob shouldn’t take to heart the words of John Newman Edwards.

Edwards was then living in Sedalia, about sixty miles west of Jefferson City, and was managing editor of the
Daily Democrat
, which was singular among Missouri newspapers in its attenuated suspicions that Jesse James couldn’t have been killed in such a manner. Soon the corroborating evidence was overwhelming, however, and Edwards considered making a pilgrimage to Kearney to attend the funeral, but instead purchased six bottles of whiskey and “went to the Indian Territories.” And it was not until one week after the interment that the Sedalia
Daily Democrat
published his scathing philippic on the subject of the murder.

It began: “Not one among all the hired cowards, hard on the hunt for blood money, dared face this wonderful outlaw, one even against twenty, until he had disarmed himself and turned his back to his assassins, the first and only time in a career which has passed from the realms of an almost fabulous romance into that of history.”

He continued with a mixture of apology, reprimand, and angry screed, saying Jesse’s transgressions were outgrowths of the Civil War. “Proscribed, hunted, shot, driven away from among his people, a price put on his head, what else could he do, with such a nature, except what he did do?…He refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters. Would to God he were alive today to make a righteous butchery of a few more of them.”

Edwards called the murder “cowardly and unnecessary” and castigated the commonwealth of Missouri for having “leagued with a lot of self-confessed robbers, highwaymen, and prostitutes” in having a citizen assassinated without confirming “that he had ever committed a single crime worthy of death.” The government and the conspirators had succeeded, Edwards acknowledged, “but such a cry of horror and indignation at the infernal deed is even now thundering over the land that if a single one of the miserable assassins had either manhood, conscience or courage, he would go as another Judas and hang himself. But so sure as God reigns, there never was a dollar of blood money yet obtained which did not bring with it perdition. Sooner or later there comes a day of vengeance. Some among the murderers were mere beasts of prey. These, of course, can only suffer through cold blood, hunger, or thirst; but whatever they dread most, that will happen.”

Bob Ford read that commentary, of course—he’d acquired from Jesse the daily routine of reading every newspaper available. He read without much resentment its implicit denunciation of Crittenden, Craig, Wallace, and Timberlake (“sanctimonious devils, who plead the honor of the State, the value of law and order, the splendid courage required to shoot an unarmed man in the back of the head”) and its imputation of his sister Martha (“into all the warp and woof of the devil’s work there were threads woven by the fingers of a harlot”) but nothing upset and preoccupied him like the phrase
whatever they dread most, that will happen.
It seemed more than a simple curse; there was the ring of something presaging and prophetic about it, it was the sort of thing Jesse would say.

On May 13th a justice of the peace in Ray County accepted the two thousand dollars in bail along with Bob’s promise that he would be present for the court trial. Bob reportedly told him, “I keep my appointments, Your Honor.” Then Bob and Charley went to Kansas City with Sheriff Timberlake in order to supply further information about the James gang to the government. The journey was announced in the press against all instructions and a pro-James newspaper invited the public to greet the Fords “in some appropriate way” at the railroad depot. However, the sheriff let Charley and Bob jump from the caboose upon arrival, and they nipped around the train to a waiting carriage as Timberlake escorted two cuffed and camouflaged policemen through the gathering. One policeman was struck in the cheek with a rock and needed eight stitches to close the cut, the second policeman got into a fistfight and only Timberlake’s strong intervention kept him from getting disfigured.

Then Finis C. Fair joined the Fords in Henry Craig’s law office in order to present them with their rewards, but first he spoke at dulling length, explaining and adapting with the intricacy, circumspection, and loftiness that was regarded as a signal of good breeding. He made a preamble about the governor’s July 1881 proclamation, saying the extra five thousand dollars that was promised for the arrest and conviction of one of the James boys couldn’t be justified in the circumstances of manslaughter and, second, funding depended upon the railroad companies and their complete cooperation in providing the money. Some of these companies had proven themselves to be irresponsible, Fair said, still others were parsimonious. And there was a third component to consider, that it was not only the Fords who’d made the capture possible, there were good men who’d struggled for many years at great risk, and these civil servants too, the governor felt, should take some part in the profits. (Henry Craig diplomatically slipped from the room.)

Charley was exasperated. He slumped deeply in a chair and stared gloomily at the ceiling, sighing as the governor’s secretary moved from point to point. Finally he asked, “Are we going to get a plug
nickel?
”

Bob sneered at Finis Farr. “It’s just that there’s these raspberry cough drops that Charley’s got his heart set on.”

They each were given a large brown envelope with two hundred fifty dollars inside. Farr anticipated them by saying, “You two can complain if you want but that’s the only cash available; anything else would come straight from the governor’s pocket.”

Charley said, “Well, let’s not be too hasty in turning that down neither. I mean, it spends just the same, don’t it?”

Farr reacted testily. “Many prisoners would be happy to
pay
five thousand dollars to get a governor’s pardon. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

Charley put the envelope inside his shirt and responded, “Appears to me we already did.”

SO THEY WERE READY
for a change of atmosphere and providence when George H. Bunnell arrived in Richmond squiring a poshly costumed actress who’d apparently patterned herself after the great Lillie Langtry and spoke with an emphatic and highly suspect English accent. Bunnell was a New York showman with a museum of curiosities and living wonders in Brooklyn and a repertory company that played one-night stands in cities and resorts throughout the East. He made a party of a cheap cafe supper that evening and as Bob and Charley gaped with aspiration at the actress, he persuaded them to sign a contract with his “players guild,” guaranteeing them costly publicity and promotion, repeated engagements before large audiences, payment of fifty dollars for each of six evening and two matinee performances per week, plus an aggrandizing script “crafted by one of America’s most accomplished playwrights” and the professional improvements of a Broadway director. He’d misinterpreted the newspaper stories about the Fords: he presumed they were explosive and stormy men of great prominence who’d already rejected multiple opportunities while the actual case, of course, was that nothing had yet happened to make them feel either prosperous or respected and by May even the town of Richmond was inhospitable to the Fords. People crossed the street to avoid passing them, shop clerks refused to acknowledge them, every mailing included letters of asperity, reproof, and warnings that they too would be shot when next their backs were turned. By the time George H. Bunnell came around they were living in protective custody inside the Ray County courthouse and splitting a nightwatch at the single high window, often scaring children away by clapping saucepans together.

William H. Wallace procured the necessary permissions for the Ford brothers to quit Missouri and they proceeded, incognito, to New York City in June, gaping at the strange new geography outside the passenger coaches, their noses against the windowglass like snails whenever the train precariously crossed a gorge or hairpinned up a steep mountain. George Bunnell generally stayed close to Bob during the journey, as if the young man were an invaluable object to which he’d just gained possession. They would sit in the dining car with a silver service between them and with men of color refilling their coffee cups at brief intervals, and Bunnell would ask Bob yet again to give an account of how he killed Jesse James, designing a stage presentation from those story ingredients that Bob rarely forgot.

The Ford brothers’ try-outs quickly verified Bunnell’s prior conviction that Bob possessed some acting talent and Charley not a jot, and the unaccredited playwright made allowances for that incongruity by casting the script as Bob Ford’s proud and complacent reminiscence, calling it
How I Killed Jesse James.
Bob was taught not to saw the air with his hand nor to split the ears of the groundlings but to give temperance to his passion, to keep within the modesty of nature, and to imitate humanity; Charley was only expected not to slouch or mutter and to transport his sicknesses to the alley before letting them go.