The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (44 page)

She was an inveigler. She would cozen many of her guests, invite them into her confidence, make them feel especially privileged, at last agreeing to sell them a stone from the grave or, at much greater cost, a worn shoe from one of the James boys’ steeds (these she bought from a village blacksmith in wheelbarrow loads; the stones were shoveled from Clear Creek and spread on the grave once a week). If they asked to take a photograph of Zerelda in her black rocking chair in the yard, she would appeal to them to mail back a copy as a sweet remembrance, and these snapshots she’d sell to new visitors as soon as she received them. She petitioned for and accepted a free pass from the Burlington Railroad in atonement for its crimes against her family, and then spent each trip lumbering down the aisles, steadying herself on the seats as she chronicled her life for the passengers and castigated the Burlington company.

She remained a strong and overwhelming woman even as she crossed into the twentieth century. She outlived three husbands and four of the eight children she bore and she showed no signs of sickness when she retired to a Pullman sleeper in 1911 and there died of a stroke at the age of eighty-seven.

On the Monday after Easter in 1882, Zerelda Mimms James auctioned off most of the contents of the cottage on Lafayette Street. A common coal scuttle that was once warmed by the great man’s hand garnered twice its cost, the coffee mill that Mary played with on April 3rd brought the widow two dollars, Mary’s highchair, seventy-five cents, the chair Jesse stood on and the feather duster he fiddled with went for five dollars each. Two horses and saddles in the stables were confiscated as stolen goods, slivers of the floorboards were ripped up as mementoes, painted wood siding was being stripped off the cottage when the police came to restore order.

And yet Zee was penniless and she would remain that way in spite of many generous efforts to bring her to solvency. Someone enterprising signed Zee onto a speaking circuit but she was unwilling to exaggerate and actually too shy for public address, so an orator was paid to retell the legend with extravagant histrionics as the crying widow looked on. The preview rehearsals were atrocious, however; Zee kept shaking her head at the man’s preposterous hyperbole and she couldn’t be heard when she responded to questions from the audience. The program was judiciously canceled and she accepted work as a cook for a while, but she suffered a miscarriage in July, recuperated slowly, and soon depended upon a subscription of several hundred dollars that was raised for her by Major John Newman Edwards.

Zee moved back to Kansas City in 1882 and worked there as a cleaning woman and seamstress in a manner that many construed as penitent. She joined Mrs. Samuels in suing J. H. Chambers, publishers, for royalties from
The Life, Times, and Treacherous Death of Jesse James,
a book they’d earlier denied collaborating on. A jury awarded them $942 and the article about that was the last news about Zee; she thenceforth retired from the public eye, shunning reporters, seeking retreat, staying with one of her five sisters and brothers for months at a time and then regretfully moving on.

She felt crippled, forsaken, marooned. She saw no other men, she mixed with other women solely at church socials, her only company was her children, most of her clothing was black. She thought of Jesse as her vitality, her vigor, her crucial ingredient; once he was gone she was a prey to fatigue and sickness and instability until she gratefully accepted death in 1900 at the age of fifty-five.

Her daughter, Mary, grew into an intelligent and pretty but rather inconspicuous woman who married Henry Barr, an affluent farmer much older than she was, and gave birth to three boys on property across the road from her father’s birthplace. Her hair changed from ash blond to chestnut brown as she aged and it delighted her that she resembled Jesse at least in coloring, but she called no particular attention to her heritage and many who knew her when she passed away in 1935 were surprised by her maiden name.

Her brother took great advantage of the name Jesse Edwards James. He was a sprinter in high school and, in the summer, an office boy in the real estate investment company run by Governor Crittenden’s son. He played semi-professional baseball, ran a cigar stand in the courthouse, received a college scholarship from Thomas Crittenden, and became an attorney-at-law in Kansas City and Los Angeles. He was once accused of robbing the Missouri Pacific Railroad at Leeds in 1898, and Finis C. Farr, the governor’s private secretary in 1882, acted as counsel for the defense without fee. Mrs. Zerelda Samuels gave her grandson an alibi by claiming he’d been sitting on the porch with her when the robbery occurred, just as Jesse James, Sr., seemed always to be when earlier crimes were committed. The jury acquitted the man but the judge was rumored to have said, “Jesse, I find you not guilty, but don’t do it again.”

When Jesse was twenty-four he wrote the memoir
Jesse James, My Father;
in 1921 he financed and acted in the movie
Under the Black Flag
, and some years later was a highly paid technical advisor to Paramount Pictures when they produced their counterfeit
Jesse James,
starring Tyrone Power. Jesse Edwards James died in California in 1951. Of his four daughters, one was an escrow officer for the Bank of America, another worked in the Federal Reserve, and a third sold Liberty Bonds.

IN MAY
1882, the Missouri state legislature was asked to vote on a resolution “to commend the vigilance and success of the civil officers of Clay and Jackson counties and the citizens of western Missouri for their efforts in bringing the [James gang] to justice.” Spittoons were thrown at the sponsor of the resolution and he was upbraided with such outrage and ridicule that the session was soon adjourned.

It is not very startling then to see that Timberlake, Craig, Wallace, and Crittenden were politically ruined by their involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Jesse James. James R. Timberlake could read the signs clearly enough that he sought the county collector’s job rather than reelection as sheriff, and yet he was roundly defeated and moved to New Mexico to work as a cattleman. Governor Crittenden called him back as deputy United States marshal but he retired from office soon after his wife died and returned to his Liberty livery stables. He started taking morphine to cure insomnia, and he succumbed to an accidental overdose of the narcotic in 1891.

Henry H. Craig ran for Kansas City marshal in 1882, but received only a small percentage of the vote. He never again gained even a party’s nomination but he did acquire some prominence in the private practice of law and it was partially because of the sponsorship of Henry Craig that the junior Jesse James could study for the legal profession.

William H. Wallace stayed on as prosecuting attorney for another year but couldn’t resist attempts at a higher office. He lost races for Congress in 1884, the United States Senate in 1901, Congress again in 1906, and governor in 1908 before he gave up and applied himself to the cause of prohibition.

Thomas T. Crittenden once realistically assumed that he would be reelected governor, then join his uncle in the United States Senate or join his childhood friend John Harlan on the United States Supreme Court, so he was shocked and stung when the Democratic Party withheld even its nomination for governor from him, preferring the former Confederate general John S. Marmaduke. Senator George Vest came to his aid by suggesting Crittenden as a foreign ambassador but President Grover Cleveland rejected the motion on the grounds that Europeans would recognize the ex-governor as the man who “had bargained with the Fords for the killing of Jesse James.” Cleveland instead made him consul general to Mexico City, and, after a change of presidential administration, a friend whom Governor Crittenden appointed as a judge repaid the favor by making Crittenden referee of the Kansas City Bankruptcy Court, which he manfully accepted as a great honor and responsibility. He suffered a stroke at a Kansas City baseball game and died in the stands in 1909.

In the late eighties Dick Liddil joined Bob Ford in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and acted as his partner in a Bridge Street saloon, but he really wasn’t much help. He was hopeless with arithmetic, lackadaisical with cleaning up, and in his despair would strip off his apron and stroll out of the place, preferring the companionship of horses that ate apples off his palm in the livery stable next door. J. W Lynch made the attractive proposal that Dick sample a thoroughbred named St. John and a string of other racehorses on the Eastern and Southern circuits and the partners split up. Dick would never again see Bob or Martha, nor would he admit any past association with the James gang. He competed at Saratoga, Pimlico, and Churchill Downs and produced so well that he came to own a good many racehorses himself, and he was grooming one in Cincinnati, Ohio, when he grew oddly weary and went to sleep on the straw floor of a stall, and there James Andrew Liddil died of natural causes, at age forty-one, in 1893.

Of the Younger brothers, only two survived the nineteenth century. John had been killed by Pinkerton detectives in 1874. Bob yielded to consumption in the Stillwater prison infirmary in 1889, his last words to Cole being “Don’t weep for me.” A significant segment of Jim’s ruined jaw was surgically removed after the gang was arrested near Madelia and his only nourishment for twenty-five years was whatever could be sipped from a spoon. Cole lost most of his hair and added forty pounds in prison. Mostly as a relief from routine, he and Jim volunteered as subjects for phrenological studies that concluded Cole was a loyal and steadfast but unforgiving man who could have made an excellent general; and that Jim had considerable artistic and literary talent but no faculty for getting money.

The two were released from Stillwater in 1901 and took jobs selling cemetery monuments for the P. N. Peterson Granite Company. Jim sought to wed a writer named Alice Miller but was forbidden a marriage license because the Minnesota attorney general ruled that a man still under a life sentence must be considered legally dead. Soon thereafter his fiancée changed her mind about Jim and in 1902 he committed suicide in the Reardon Hotel in St. Paul, leaving an anguished letter in which he said he was “a square fellow, a socialist, and decidedly in favor of Woman Rights.”

The governor attested to his sorrow and remorse for the tragedy by granting a full pardon to Thomas Coleman Younger, and with mingled gloom and gladness Cole returned to Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

ALEXANDER FRANKLIN JAMES
was in Baltimore with his wife and child when he read the news about the assassination of Jesse James. He had spurned his younger brother for being peculiar and temperamental, but once he perceived that he’d never see Jesse again, Frank was wrought up, perplexed, despondent. The East seemed a foreign country to him, and whichever city he visited seemed an uninhabited island without Jesse alive. He was suddenly lonely, nostalgic, morose; he might have yearned for suicide were it not for Annie and Rob.

He was inaccurately sighted in St. Joseph, Kansas City, and Kearney in April and May 1882, but in fact stayed on the coast through spring and summer, writing letters of overture and negotiation to the journalist John Newman Edwards, who routed them in turn to Governor Thomas Crittenden.

Frank assumed the alias of B. F. Winfrey and moved west in autumn, meeting with the governor on October 5th, 1882, at five in the afternoon. Crittenden had jubilantly invited state officials and approving reporters to his Jefferson City office in order to share in the opening of a “Christmas box,” a surprise which they presumed referred more to Major John Newman Edwards than to the grave, august stranger who was with him. But then Edwards gestured to the stranger and grandly introduced Mr. Frank James and the man strode forward, removing a revolver and Union Army cartridge belt, and presented them to the governor, saying, “I want to hand over to you that which no living man except myself has been permitted to touch since 1861, and to say that I am your prisoner.”

One day later, Frank James gave an interview to the St. Louis
Republican
in which he said: “If I were governor charged with upholding the laws of a great state cursed by such a band of outlaws who terrorized the state, I would take desperate measures to meet such desperate men. They would have to go as in this case they have gone. Such is the fate of all such bands. But what must be the suffering of such a pitiful creature as Bob Ford? For a few paltry dollars he has, while on the verge of manhood, brought upon himself a blighting curse that will never leave him in all the years to come.”

The government accorded privileges to Frank James; he was given parties, genteel receptions, magnificent presents and accommodations, an opulent coach on the train that carried him to Jackson County; to some it seemed the state of Missouri surrendered to Frank James rather than the other way around. People learned of his journey north and swarmed to the railroad stations along the way, at which Frank needed only to show himself and shyly wave to receive a wild ovation.

Prosecuting attorney Wallace couldn’t construct a convincing case against Frank in Independence, so the outlaw was sent to Gallatin to stand trial for the murder of John Sheets in 1869, and for the murders of Conductor William Westfall and Frank McMillan in the Winston train robbery of 1881. Edwards was able to recruit seven aspiring politicians as counsels for the defense, including a former lieutenant governor and a former congressman who was a commissioner of the Supreme Court of Missouri. Since the courtroom was too small to accommodate the crowds, the trial was moved to the Gallatin Opera House, where the sheriff sold tickets of admission.

The prosecution’s case depended upon the confessions of Clarence Hite, Whiskeyhead Ryan, and Dick Liddil; but Hite died of consumption before he could take the stand, Ryan was already in jail on a robbery sentence and had nothing to gain by angering Frank James or his confederates, and although Dick was precise and persuasive in both his testimony and demeanor, the accusations of a convict, horse thief, profligate, and roustabout were not given much credence.