The Mammoth Book of the West (33 page)

By the time of Bole’s release Western-style outlawry was on the decline. The badmen were hung, shot, in prison, or
had been deterred by the increasing effectiveness of law enforcement. There would be a later flowering of female outlawry, and the Wild Bunch were still to have their prime, as were Bill Doolin’s “Oklahombres”. The Doolin gang were dangerous men, for they were the offspring of a criminal dynasty on the middle-Border which had 30 years of gunfights and larceny behind it: the dynasty of Jesse Woodson James, the most celebrated bank and train robber in American history.

Much the most potent Mexican–American resister to Anglo racism was Juan Cortina in Texas. A well-to-do rancher, Cortina witnessed an Anglo marshal pistol-whipping a Mexican in Brownsville on 13 July 1859. When the marshal refused to stop the abuse, Cortina shot the lawman in the shoulder, scooped up the Mexican on his horse and lit out for safety. Two months later Cortina returned to Brownsville with an armed force. He released Mexican prisoners from gaol and summarily executed four Whites who had killed Mexicans but escaped punishment. Cortina then announced the founding of the “Republic of the Rio Grande” and issued a “Proclamation to Texans” which began:

“There is no need of fear. Orderly people and honest citizens are inviolable to us in their persons and interests. Our object, as you have seen, has been to chastise the villainy of our enemies, which heretofore has gone unpunished. These have connived with each other, and form, so to speak, a perfidious inquisitorial lodge to persecute and rob us, without any cause, and for no other crime on our part than that of being of Mexican origin . . .”

For six months “Cortina’s War” spilled along the south Rio Grande Valley ending only when the minority Anglos called in the US Army. Juan Nepomuceno Cortina himself escaped across the border to Mexico, where he continued his new military career and became a general in the Mexican Army.

The man who held up a train, a gold-laden stagecoach, or a bank, was seen as a Robin Hood, even though he forgot to share the loot.

We are rough men, and used to rough ways.

On the winter’s afternoon of Tuesday 13 February 1866, twelve horsemen rode into the small town of Liberty, Missouri, and robbed the Clay County Saving Association Bank of $70,000 in bonds, currency and gold. Few, save for the stunned cashiers, saw the deed, for most of the townspeople were in the warm of the courthouse enjoying a local case. One who did witness it was a local youth, George “Jolly” Wymore, who watched the thieves uncertainly from the other side of the street. As the robbers rode out of town, one of them stopped and shot Wymore four times.

The citizens of Liberty were less shocked by the brutal shooting – murder in the Border County was a commonplace – than they were by the armed raid on the bank. Only once before had such a thing happened in the whole
of the United States; in 1864 Confederate officer Lieutenant Bennett H. Young had raided three banks in St Albans, Vermont. Young’s robbery had been patriotic: the raid on Liberty had no such noble excuse. It was for private gain.

It was also the beginning of the criminal careers of two men who would become pre-eminent in the folklore of Western outlawry: Jesse Woodson James and his elder brother, Alexander Franklin (“Frank”) James.

Sons of a farmer and Baptist minister, the James brothers were born (Jesse in 1847, Frank in 1843) into a Missouri torn by violence and sectional strife between pro- and anti-slavery forces. When the Civil War came, the family aligned with the Confederate cause, not least because they were slave holders. In 1863 Frank joined the Confederate Raiders of William Clarke Quantrill, a notorious plunderer and murderer. A year later, the slim, boyish Jesse – “Dingus” to his friends – joined a guerrilla band led by one of Quantrill’s lieutenants, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, whose habits included the tying of victims’ scalps to his horse’s bridle. At Anderson’s side James received an introduction into wholesale atrocity. At Centralia, Missouri, he participated in the massacre of 24 unarmed Union soldiers. With the end of the war in sight, Jesse attempted to surrender at Lexington under a white flag. However, since he was a guerrilla, Union forces shot him on sight. Seriously wounded in the right lung, he came close to death. Those nursing him included his first cousin, Zerelda Mimms, later to be his wife.

In the years following the surrender of the South at Appomattox in April 1865, Missouri was awash with embitterment and listless veterans steeped in killing. Many settled down, but some did not. Among the latter were ex-guerrilla
leader Arch Clements, whose war crimes had been so extensive that he was one of the few Confederates not to receive a parole. Almost certainly it was Clements, not the James brothers, who put together the gang who robbed the bank at Liberty. Those recruited by Clements included, in addition to Jesse and Frank James, a former Missouri bushwhacker, Thomas Coleman “Cole” Younger. Thus did Jesse James and Cole Younger meet. It was the beginning of a fateful relationship.

Cole Younger was the son of a well-to-do family from Lee’s Summit, Missouri, and had distinguished himself in both depredation and honour during the Civil War. While he had participated in Quantrill’s infamous raid on Lawrence, Kansas, he had also intervened to save the lives of his former teacher, Stephen B. Elkins, and a captured Union officer. In one of the war’s more tranquil moments, he had also met Myra Belle Shirley, later to become infamous bandit queen Belle Starr. The relationship would continue for several years, and Shirley would bear his daughter, Pearl.

Younger’s taste of bank robbery at Liberty was obviously to his liking, for over the next few years he gradually introduced his three brothers, John, James and Robert (“Bob”), into the outlaw fraternity.

After Liberty, the Clements gang robbed a bank at nearby Lexington, but had to settle for $2,000 because the vault could not be opened. The gang’s next ventures were disastrous. Clements himself was shot in an ambuscade on a follow-up visit to Lexington, a job at Savannah brought no booty, and a hold-up at Richmond turned into a bloodbath in which three citizens were killed. Enraged townsfolk then lynched several actual or alleged members of the gang. A fifth raid, on Independence in northwest Missouri, by contrast, was a notable success.

Although Jesse James helped plan the gang’s hold-up
of the Norton-Long bank in the quiet town of Russelville, Kentucky, on 20 March 1868, he was not among the seven who showed up. The raid turned into a minor gun battle when Cole Younger, after trying to cash a counterfeit note, put a gun to the head of the bank’s elderly president, Nimrod Young. The old man made a run for the door and reached the street, a bullet creasing his scalp as he did so. The robbers departed the bank with $14,000 but had to fight their way out through aroused and armed citizens. One of the gang, “Big George” Shepherd, shouted to a bystander, “You needn’t be particular about seeing my face so well you’d remember it again.”

This bravado resulted in Shepherd receiving a three-year term in penitentiary, when the Russelville bank hired a private detective from Louisville, D. G. Bligh, who traced Shepherd back to his Missouri home.

On 7 December 1869, the James brothers raided the Davies County Bank at Gallatin, Missouri. This was the first robbery in which they were positively identified. When the local press branded them outlaws, a still free Jesse James wrote to the
Kansas City Times
complaining that not only was he guiltless in the Gallatin affair, but since the war he had “lived as a peaceable citizen, and obeyed the laws of the United States to the best of my knowledge.” The editor was Southern in sympathy, and regularly proclaimed that the James boys were innocent Confederate war veterans unfairly persecuted by (Yankee) authorities.

After Gallatin, the James brothers, in close cooperation with the Youngers (“the James–Younger gang”), undertook bank jobs from Alabama to Iowa. They also extended their operations to include hold-ups of stores, stagecoaches and trains. Although train robbery had been pioneered in America – and possibly the world – by the Reno brothers, when they flagged down and boarded a train in Indiana
in 1866, the James–Younger gang made it their speciality. Their attack on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad train at Adair, Iowa, was typical. In preference to holding up the train, they posed as passengers and at a chosen point in the journey, whipped out guns and “busted” the train from within. The driver was shot, and the legitimate passengers so cowed that they dared not resist. On this occasion, the gang got a moderate haul of $3,000 in cash, plus such valuables as they found on the passengers.

If the James–Younger gang were ruthless, they were also impudent and audacious, daring in a manner which caught public imagination. The examples were legion. After robbing the bank at Corydon, Iowa, the gang rode up to the local church, where a political meeting was in progress. Jesse interrupted proceedings, to announce: “We’ve just been down to the bank and taken every dollar in the till.” Then he and his confederates, raised their hats, let out a yell, and galloped away. He once gave a dollar to the driver of a train he had robbed so that the driver could drink to James’s health. On another occasion, in 1872, the Jameses visited the Kansas State Fair and left with the contents of the box office. Around the same time, they dropped by to see a journalist whose sympathetic accounts of their activities had delighted them. The James boys gratefully presented him with a gold watch. Somewhat startled, he refused, thinking it might be stolen. “Heck no,” said a wounded Jesse James. “This ’un we bought with our own money.”

The year 1874 was the peak of activity for the James–Younger gang, their crimes over the 12 months comprising: three robberies of stagecoaches; two train robberies; a raid on the bank at Corinth, Mississippi; hold-up of a store at Bentonville, Arkansas; and the robbery of two omnibuses at Lexington, Missouri. In a somewhat novel turn,
they also robbed a steamboat at Point Jefferson, Louisiana.

Such a catalogue of efficient crime had its price for the gang, as well as those robbed. Early in March 1874 John Younger was killed by Pinkerton detectives hired by the banks and railway companies to track the gang down. (A Pinkerton and a deputy sheriff died in the same gunfight.) Ten months later, on 5 January 1875, a Pinkerton undercover agent spotted the James brothers at the Clay County house of their mother, Zerelda Samuel, she having married Dr Reuben Samuel after the death of the boys’ father in 1850. The agent, Jack Ladd, managed to get a message out, and by night-time the house was surrounded by a posse of Pinkerton men. They tossed into the house a metal object, which they later claimed was a flare to let them see their target. The James family always insisted that it was a grenade.

The device exploded, blowing Zerelda Samuel’s arm off. Her nine-year-old son by her second marriage, Archie Samuel, was killed by a fragment of metal casing.

The tragedy only increased public sympathy for the James–Younger gang, whose popularity was already considerable in areas which had sided with the South and which viewed railroads and banks as oppressive monopolies. So great was public anger that the state legislature came very close to voting an amnesty for the entire James–Younger gang.

Jesse James himself, in fact, was fast turning into an American Robin Hood; as the “Ballad of Jesse James” would later have it:

Jesse James was a lad who killed many a man

He robbed the Glendale train.

He took from the rich and he gave to the poor,

He’d a hand and a heart and a brain.

Typical of the stories to circulate about Jesse James was the one in which he helped a poor widow whose mortgage was about to be foreclosed. James lent her the money to pay the banker – and then robbed the banker as he rode away, so taking his money back. In truth, the recorded noble generosity of Jesse James, American Robin Hood, amounts to the dollar given the robbed train driver and a share in a gold watch given to an admiring pressman.

Despite the public backlash caused by their attack on the James house, the Pinkertons embarked on a campaign of overt harassment against the gang in their heartland of Clay County. This availed the detectives little, but it did indirectly lead to the downfall of the James–Younger robber band. With Missouri uncomfortably full of Pinkertons and lawmen wanting the generous bounty on the gang – $5,000 for any known member, $15,000 for Frank James and $25,000 for Jesse James – the outlaws decided to venture further afield. The place they chose was Northfield, Minnesota, on 7 September 1876.

Northfield was a death trap. Eight of the gang rode in, wearing linen duster coats to hide their weapons. While the rest kept guard, Jesse James, Bob Younger and another gang member, Samuel Wells (“Charlie Pitts”), rushed into the First National Bank and delivered the standard order: “Throw up your hands!” However, a teller, Joseph L. Heywood, ignored the injunction and tried to slam the door on Pitts as he entered the vault. James then demanded that Heywood unlock the safe. When Heywood told him that it had a time lock and could not be opened, Pitts pistol-whipped the teller and slashed him across the throat. Meanwhile another teller, A. E. Bunker, had got to the back door of the bank unobserved and broke into the
street. Spotting him, Pitts put a bullet through his shoulder, but the teller managed to scramble to safety. The three bandits then tried to rejoin their cohorts outside. As they left the bank, one of them turned and shot the unconscious Heywood dead.

Outside, Cole Younger, hearing a shot from inside the bank (Pitts’s attempt to shoot the teller Bunker), had panicked and shot an innocent bystander. Within seconds angry townspeople had grabbed guns and opened fire on the outlaws. Clell Miller was peppered in the face with buckshot, then shot off his horse by a medical student with a carbine crouched at a second-floor window. Another of the gang’s riders, William Stiles, was also killed. For 20 furious minutes, the gang had to fight their way out of town, with Frank James, Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger all sustaining wounds. When Bob Younger’s horse was felled, Cole picked him up under fire and, with the rest of the gang, managed to gallop through the last ring of the townspeople’s fire.