Homegrown Terrorist
CROKE, BILL
Homegrown Terrorist Debunking the romance of Jesse James. BY BILL CROKE Long biographies of short lives must seek subjects who did a whole lot of living in their brief spans. In Jesse James: Last...
...Two gang members immediately fell dead (Clell Miller and William Chadwell...
...sympathies were the equal of her outlaw sons'), Jesse Woodson James was an adolescent at the start of the Civil War that caused his native Missouri so much heartbreak...
...I surrender my arms to you...
...He immediately hooked up with Frank with the idea of exploiting their colorful pasts...
...Ford was in the employ of Missouri's new governor, Thomas Critten-den...
...Another of James's mentors was Archie Clement, so diabolically formidable that even among Anderson's men he was thought to be too violent, earning the sobriquet of "Bill Anderson's Scalper...
...For twenty years they killed and burned their way across the border states to build nothing, to accomplish nothing, and to gain nothing—except a notoriety sufficient to mount a minor wild-west show for the amusement of eastern city dwellers...
...Unlike his brother, he had kept a low profile during their larcenous careers, and this quiet humility served him well in the end...
...Two trials failed to convict him...
...All three were wounded and captured within days...
...Jesse's older brother Frank enlisted in the Confederate army in 1861 to serve with the infamous guerrilla fighter William Quantrill, and by the war's end a sixteen-year-old Jesse was an active participant...
...Sometimes the brothers robbed simply to put on a brazen show...
...Jesse swore personal revenge (never performed) on Allan Pinkerton for the atrocity, and the Missouri press made martyrs of the James Gang, spurring them on to more criminality...
...The fire resulted in a small portion of the house's being burned, serious injuries to Zerelda, Reuben, and a paid black servant named Ambrose, and the death of eight-year-old Archie Samuels, Jesse and Frank's half brother...
...From 1866 to 1876, they regularly robbed banks and trains across the border region, from West Virginia to Kansas...
...He was also known—but not admired—by the Pinkerton Agency...
...Stiles uses Jesse James's bloodsoaked thirty-four years as an occasion to construct a primer on the Civil War and Reconstruction—a time in which, if they'd had the phrase "The Politics of Personal Destruction," it would have been applied literally...
...They raided their Union-sympathizing neighbors, shooting down farmers in their fields and spreading murder and arson westward into Kansas...
...Ames was nearby but emerged unscathed...
...The James brothers—now the object of a national manhunt—disappeared into Tennessee under assumed names...
...It turns out that no gang members were present (although they had been there earlier in the evening...
...Other than a short incarceration upon surrendering, Frank James never spent a day in jail...
...The James brothers came from a family of minor slaveholders (the widowed Zerelda having remarried a doctor named Reuben Samuels) who deeply resented the prospect of freeing those few slaves who worked the small farm that Zerelda ruled with an iron fist...
...In a scene made famous in movies and popular culture, Jesse James was shot in Independence, Missouri, on April 3, 1882—shot in the back of the head by Bob Ford as he stood on a stool dusting a picture of his Tennessee home...
...Anderson made "a moveable kingdom of terror...
...And he was known and admired for always having a fast horse...
...The heat was on Frank, and he soon surrendered to Crittenden in a legendary encounter, telling him: "Governor, I am Frank James...
...As Stiles writes, "Missouri's war was small scale, intensely personal, and intensely vicious...
...It is the saddest and truest commentary on those Missouri terrorists...
...It was this hubris that would eventually bring about their downfall...
...His huge ego also saw this as a small-scale invasion of the north, likening it to Robert E. Lee's 1863 expedition to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania...
...Jesse himself was the author of many boasting letters to editors...
...Unlike the citizens of Missouri, the Minnesotans fought back...
...Marmaduke also refused to extradite him to Minnesota to stand trial for the Northfield raid...
...In Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, T.J...
...Never before had a gang stopped a train, boarded it, and methodically robbed it and its passengers...
...A serial rapist who preyed particularly on black women, he killed for pleasure and was directly responsible for the murder of more than two dozen Union soldiers—veterans of Sherman's Georgia campaign—taken off a train near Centralia, Missouri, in 1864...
...The trains meant commerce and an influx of new settlers, and eventually a Missouri more northern than southern...
...They have not been out of my possession since 1864...
...Pinkerton agents made a clumsy attempt to capture the James brothers and avenge those deaths by bombing Zerelda Samuels's house on a cold January night in 1875...
...After the war, the James brothers first set themselves to settle old scores, but they soon took the practical view that banks and other "Unionist" businesses were the enemy—and lucrative targets that would finance their ongoing partisan terrorism...
...Jesse James, a 1939 classic film starring Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda, presented the outlaw as a rebel Robin Hood avenging wrongs perpetrated by the Yankees and the railroad...
...Ford himself was murdered in Colorado in 1892...
...The border states were sharply divided on the national slavery question...
...The Youngers did...
...They once held up a stagecoach near Lexington, Missouri, while hundreds of citizens watched from a hill above...
...Bob died of tuberculosis in a Minnesota prison in 1889...
...The train robbery was along the tracks of the Rock Island Railroad near Des Moines, Iowa, on July 21, 1873...
...A string of central counties in Missouri, originally settled by slaveholding Kentuckians, supported the southern cause and produced a breed of guerrillas known as "bushwhackers" (for their expertise at ambush...
...Born in 1847 to Robert Sallee James (a Baptist minister who died young) and Zerelda Cole James (a woman whose steely toughness and southern Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming...
...They were the first bandits to perform an armed robbery of a bank in the daytime, and they were the first to rob an entire train...
...In 1885, a new governor, John S. Mar-maduke, an ex-Confederate, pardoned him, and instructed him to return to his farm and avoid "fairs and fast horses, and to keep strictly out of sight for a year...
...Moving across this anarchic landscape was the teenage Jesse James, an apprentice among masters—particular-ly William "Bloody Bill" Anderson, with whom James rode for a year...
...Lee's surrender at Appomattox meant nothing in Missouri, as the violence continued and the state became a hotbed for the nascent Ku Klux Klan...
...Jesse James was still fighting the Civil War ten years after the fact...
...Jesse, with his wife Zee, rented a farm near Nashville as "John Davis Howard...
...But the truth is much worse: Jesse James was a charismatic and vicious sociopath, a young man enamored of violence and a megalomaniac who craved fame...
...Two of them, Charley and Bob Ford, would be his undoing...
...Trains were attractive because express companies such as Wells Fargo used them to ship large amounts of cash...
...Cole was paroled in 1901 and pardoned in 1903, whereupon he was allowed to return to Missouri...
...They even had their own unofficial press agent in the person of John N. Edwards, an ex-Confederate officer who wrote for the Kansas City Times...
...Northfield was a disaster...
...Edwards's laudatory pieces included one with the fawning title of "The Chivalry of Crime," where he celebrated the James brothers' daring feats "of stupendous nerve and fearlessness" and portrayed the criminals as the political saviors of the old Missouri...
...A teller was killed, and the robbers left empty-handed, Jesse and Frank riding for their lives...
...Their most notorious raid was on the First National Bank of North-field, Minnesota, on September 7, 1876, and it is a case study in Jesse James's megalomania...
...Charlie Pitts would die in the coming days...
...The Northfield adventure was, like much else James did, politically motivated...
...James himself was shot through the lung, a wound that enhanced his reputation as one of the few prominent bushwhackers to survive the battles with Union troops...
...The Democratic papers in Missouri treated them like heroes and trumpeted their exploits...
...Sometimes American history is almost unbearable...
...An inveterate reader of newspapers, James discovered that a man named Adelbert Ames—a decorated Union veteran and ex-Reconstruction governor of Mississippi—had moved to Northfield, Minnesota, invested in business there, and deposited $75,000 in the First National Bank...
...Pinkerton was especially obsessed with Jesse James, because the outlaw through his bushwhacker contacts had managed to have murdered three of Pinkerton's finest, notably a prized agent named Joseph Whicher...
...The former occurred in Liberty, Missouri, on February 13, 1866, and netted the nine participants $58,000...
...Jim committed suicide in 1902...
...Hiring actors to play themselves, they produced a show called "The Great Cole Younger and Frank James Historical Wild West," the two aging gunslingers content to let their lifelong tragedies dissolve into farce...
...Allan Pinkerton was a transplanted Scotsman and nineteenth-century J. Edgar Hoover...
...One of the aspects of Jesse James's criminal genius was his uncanny ability to elude capture...
...The James brothers can be credited with two firsts in the annals of American crime...
...Last year's minor movie American Outlaws continued the theme...
...By the time authorities arrived, he was usually long gone...
...The gang was hampered by uncooperative bank tellers, and, as word spread that the bank was being robbed, townspeople began shooting at them from sidewalks and storefront windows...
...They also came to see the railroads as the ultimate threat to the rapidly evaporating antebellum way of life...
...The three Younger brothers, Cole, Bob, and Jim, rode up and down the street returning fire as they attempted to provide cover for their comrades...
...Woodson," installing his family on a farm where he put in long days, as he resolved to leave his old life behind...
...So James decided to rob the bank and kill the much-despised Ames...
...But Jesse soon slipped off to Missouri to resume his criminal ways, now with new associates...
...This was a holdover from his bushwhacker days of traveling at night and riding long distances up streams to erase any trail...
...Though James was a staple in the Missouri papers, the national press had been ignoring him for some while, in favor of stories about the scandal-ridden Grant administration, the upcoming presidential election, and George Custer's unpleasant collision with destiny on the Little Bighorn...
...Frank did likewise as "B.J...
...Jesse James has come down to us cloaked in romantic myth, thanks to nineteenth-century hagiography and twentieth-century Hollywood...
...They were publicity hounds who loved to read about themselves in the newspapers...
...Both Anderson and Clement died in the battles of the time...
...From his headquarters in Chicago, he dispatched his agents to outlaw hotspots around the country...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 9
