2

1865–1881

We have been charged with robbing the Gallatin bank and killing the cashier; with robbing the gate at the Fair Grounds in Kansas City, with robbing a bank at St. Genevieve; with robbing a train in Iowa, and killing an engineer, with robbing two or three banks in Kentucky and killing two or three men there, but for every charge we are willing to be tried if Governor Woodson will promise us protection until we can prove before any fair jury in the State that we have been accused falsely and unjustly. If we do not prove this then let the law do its worst.

We are willing to abide the verdict. I do not see how we could well offer anything fairer.

JESSE W. JAMES

in the Liberty Tribune, January 9, 1874

HIS WIFE WAS ZERELDA Amanda Minims, a first cousin to the James brothers, her mother being their father’s sister, their mother, Zerelda, being the source of her Christian name. She’d nursed Jesse through pneumonia and a grievous chest wound at her father’s boardinghouse in Harlem, which is now northern Kansas City, and Jesse would later claim with great earnestness that he never looked at another woman after that. He lost thirty pounds, he coughed blood into his fist, he sank into fevers that made his teeth chatter, she told him, like five-cent wind-ups. He fainted sometimes while throned in plumped pillows, while Zee spooned him gravied vegetables and noodles; he hacked into a tin spittoon and cleaned his mouth with a bedsheet and apologized to his cousin for his sickness, said he normally had an iron constitution and the endurance of an Apache.

Jesse was eighteen and glamorous then; Zee was twenty and in love. She’d grown up to be a pretty woman of considerable refinement and patience. She was conventional in her attitudes and pious in her religion, a diligent, quiet, self-sacrificing good daughter who was prepared for a life quite apart from the one that Jesse would give her. She was small and insubstantial then, with a broad skirt and corseted waist and breasts like coffee cups. Her blond hair when unpinned could apron her shoulder blades but she wore it braided or helixed (each morning a new experiment) and she combed wisps from her forehead with jade barrettes. Her features were fragile but frequently stitched with thought, so that even when she was most serene she seemed melancholy or, when older, censorious; Jesse could be as shy and restrained as a schoolboy around her, and she would often consider him one of her children after they were married.

But in 1865 she’d heat towels with tea kettle water and carefully drape them over her cousin’s face; she’d wash his fingers as if they were silverware and close her eyes as she bathed his limbs and blow his wet hair as she combed it. She hunched on a Shaker chair beside his bed as he slept and stitched JWJ on his four handkerchiefs and on the region of his long underwear where she presumed his heart was seated.

They’d been playmates in childhood. Frank was two years older than she was and too rough and refractory to be good company for a girl, but Jesse was a good-natured, adoring boy two years younger than she was and he was willing to do whatever she suggested so long as they didn’t amalgamate with his grudging big brother. When her mother died Zee moved from Liberty to Kansas City, where she grew up in the family of her older sister and Charles McBride, and they kept up a haphazard correspondence until the Civil War. Long, illegible letters would come to the girl from Jesse, the first offering his sympathy for “your mama’s being called back,” but many of them telling how much he missed his papa (who’d died of cholera on a mission to California) and how unhappy he was with his own overbearing mother and his stepfather, Dr. Reuben Samuels. He wished he could have gone to Kansas City with Zee, or he wished that it had been he who’d died in infancy rather than Robert, the second-born son. On one occasion he ran away from Kearney to be with her at Hallowe’en, but they most often saw each other on holiday visits when Jesse would ask if there were any boys he could fight for her or would beg her not to think that his kissing a girl named Laura meant he was no longer obligated to Zee.

The Civil War interrupted their romance. Desperate, inept, and undisciplined Union Army troops were meddling with and imprisoning much of Missouri’s civil population, often plundering their crops and supplies or pillaging their shops, so that their Southern sympathies were magnified. Indignant young men who couldn’t sign on with General Shelby and the Confederate Army were joining with the irregular guerrilla bands, such as that of William Clarke Quantrill, which Frank was riding with by 1862, and in reprisal, the pro-Union state militia punished the families. They went to the Kearney farm and roped Dr. Reuben Samuels as he tried to escape into a root cellar, but he wouldn’t give them any intelligence about the guerrillas’ plans or movements so they flipped the rope over the limb of a sideyard coffee bean tree and snugged a noose around his neck, jerking him off the ground four times, nearly strangling the man, and causing slight brain damage that would increase as he grew older. They then pressured Mrs. Zerelda Samuels for information, manhandling her even though she was pregnant (with Fannie Quantrill Samuels), and, giving up on her, went after the sixteen-year-old boy who was working the bottomlands. Jesse would write, days later, that he was wrangling with a walking plow when he glanced to his right and saw the militia galloping toward him, their guns raised, their coats flying. They ran him until his legs were rubber and one man scourged him with a bullwhip as Jesse dodged from one cornrow to the next, striping his skin with so many cuts and welts his back looked like geography. Only weeks afterward, they arrested Mrs. Samuels and his sisters Sallie and Susan (aged four and thirteen) on charges of collaboration, locking the mother and two daughters in a jailhouse in St. Joseph. Quantrill’s lieutenants, among them Bloody Bill Anderson and Cole Younger, organized for a raid on Lawrence, Kansas, where they slaughtered one hundred fifty defenseless males in less than two hours, looting and burning the town’s buildings, and then getting drunk in the pillaged saloons to glorify their victory. Frank James was there. General Thomas Ewing issued General Order Number 11 in reaction to the massacre, evicting more than twenty thousand residents from counties in Missouri that were congenial to the guerrillas. Dr. Samuels gathered their belongings and moved his family to Rulo, Nebraska, just over the border, and soon after that communications and Sunday visits from Jesse ceased and Zee learned, in 1864, that her wild and willful cousin was riding with Bloody Bill Anderson.

He was called Bloody Bill because of gossip that he’d chopped off enemy heads with his pirate’s sword and rode under the Black Flag with seven scalps joggling against his saddle. Jesse James was his preferred recruit; of the boy, Anderson would say, “Not to have any beard, he is the keenest and cleanest fighter in the command.” And Jesse responded to the praise with worship and imitation.

Jesse snuggled inside two coats in his sleeping room as he storied with Zee about days and nights of looting, robbing, and setting fires. He said he’d been with Arch Clement when he executed twenty-five Union soldiers on furlough whom they’d come across on a train from St. Charles, and he’d charged Major A. V. E. Johnson’s company at Centralia with Frank and two hundred guerrillas, annihilating over one hundred men in less than twenty minutes and killing Major Johnson himself. (Frank still wore the Union Army cartridge belt that he stole from a victim there.)

He said he’d drawn the short straw and been selected to reconnoiter a Union bivouac: he’d slithered into their midst at night with a tanner’s knife and had come out slimed with blood, having slit each of the six men’s throats from ear to ear. He told her how a Yankee bullet smashed his left middle finger at the nail and ruined his rifle stock. His brother made him so intoxicated on whiskey that Jesse couldn’t end his sentences, and then Frank snipped at the bone and skin with barber scissors until he’d neatened the finger to his satisfaction. At Flat Rock Ford two months later, a Minie ball punctured his right lung and he was assumed dead at seventeen, but he was walking again within four weeks and was exacting his vengeance in six.

And then, he told Zee, in August of 1865, five months after Robert E. Lee surrendered his sword at Appomattox, Jesse had returned from exile in Texas and had ridden with a detachment of Southern partisans into Lexington to receive a parole that was promised them. But members of the Second Wisconsin Cavalry overlooked their white flag of truce and fired broadside on the Confederates. Jesse was slammed in the chest not an inch from the earlier scar and he was nearly crushed beneath his stricken horse; but he extricated himself and staggered into the woods where two cavalrymen hunted him in seizing thickets until he shot a snared and rearing horse and the soldiers lost stomach for the chase. Jesse said he slept that night through in a creek in order to cool his fever and watched his blood curl into the water and unweave. He maintained it was his delirium and pure orneriness that enabled him to tow himself with roots and weeds into a field of timothy grass where a plowman discovered him and doctored him with liniments and cooked chitterlings before delivering Jesse to Major J. B. Rogers, the Union commander at Lexington. A surgeon delved into the gunwound with some ambivalence, then let the bullet remain and ruled that Jesse was all but deceased, and the government paid his railroad fare to Rulo, Nebraska, where his mother and kin still were. After eight weeks Jesse’s health was so little restored that his mother boated with him down the Missouri River to Harlem so that he would not die in a Northern state. “And you were here,” Jesse said with no little melodrama, “and you anointed me with ointments like the sisters of Lazarus, and I have come forth from the tomb.”

As Jesse talked the sun down, the hours late, Zerelda smiled and dreamed of him as he had been and was and would be. It seemed everything about him was dynamic and masculine and romantic; he was more vital even in his illness than any man she’d ever known. And he wooed her after a fashion. He was fascinated by attitudes and accomplishments her sisters would have considered common, he was attentive to her silky voice, her sweet disposition, he commended her spelling and her penmanship, which he thought was perfect as that of Piatt Rogers Spencer (it was not). She would do kitchen chores with her sisters and feel constantly criticized; she would dine at the long boardinghouse table with sour renters and feel juvenile and undiscovered; she would shop in Kansas City and feel indistinguishable from every other woman she saw, so that she couldn’t wait to get back and gain in stature with the stairs to his room.

When Jesse complimented her she said, “No, I’m not pretty; but it’s all right for you to say so.” And when he first kissed his cousin with passion, Zee said, “If you told me three years ago that this was going to happen, I would’ve laughed, and then I would’ve dreamt about it all night.”

She awoke before sunrise to collect bowls of colorful autumn leaves for his bedside and to furbelow her ordinary dresses and cook him batches of sugared delicacies that he could eat, possibly, the corners of. She thought of her mountainous meals for Jesse as communications of her enormous love and of her condition, without him, of famine. She wished to know all he knew, to feel what he did, to touch him and inhabit him and let him learn her secrets and desires. She wished to observe him as he chewed and shaved and read the testaments and asked for the vase and urinated (even that, she was loath to admit; that in particular). She made believe Jesse was her husband; she mourned that she wasn’t more beautiful, more sophisticated, that she was most likely the lowliest female her cousin had ever encountered. She worried that Jesse would someday leave the Mimms boardinghouse without discerning her affection; she hoped—and then chastened herself for it—that Jesse would never get well but would forever need her and demand her attentions so that she could surrender her father’s prissy name, renounce her unimpassioned life, and marry into the grueling pursuit of caring for and worshipping this Jesse Woodson James.

On Thanksgiving Jesse decided he could venture downstairs and did, leaning on her and smiling with mortification as the diners toasted and cheered. He asked to make a benediction over the food and recited from Luke, “When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee.” He had become reverent and grateful in his recuperation and intimated his vocation would be to follow his deceased father into Georgetown College in Kentucky and vest himself as a minister of God. He interlocked his fingers with those of his nurse and said he was so indebted to her it brought him to the brink of tears. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

Zee answered softly, “I can think of a way,” and on Christmas he proposed marriage.

THE ENGAGEMENT LASTED nine years. He returned to the farm of his mother and stepfather, three miles northeast of Kearney, Missouri, about twenty miles from Kansas City. He was reinstated in the New Hope Baptist Church and went to the river on christening day in order to cleanse the Civil War from his soul, but received no instructions in religion beyond those he could glean from revival tents and what were then called protracted meetings. His mother scoffed at his inspiration of joining the clerical life and he could find no other work so he divided his time between agriculture and Sundays with Zee at the Samuels table.

The farm had remained much as it was when his mother inherited it from Reverend Robert Sallee James’s estate: about three hundred acres of corn and oats and meadows, thirty sheep, some cattle, a stable of horses, a yoke of oxen, a barn, a four-room house with seven-foot ceilings and a portico lifted by white posts, and two freed black servants left over from a chattel of seven slaves. The house contained two brick kitchen fireplaces that were wide as a jail, secondhand furniture hauled up from Kentucky and polished with linseed oil, and a library that dealt with mathematics, theology, astronomy, horticulture, oratory, Latin, and Shakespeare. Jesse would escort his cousin into the sitting room and break the binding of a book to read aloud whatever passage caught his fancy and then he’d grin at Zee as if he’d done something beguiling and quaint.

He’d visit his fiancée in Harlem and they’d stroll in the cold, embracing their fleece coats, or trade sips of cherry squeeze and soda water near the furnace at the apothecary. They’d chat about neighbors and relatives, give each other nicknames, or recline on their backs and oversee the fire’s slow extinction behind the sitting room grate. His health was still so precarious that he needed to stop on each step he climbed and his stomach couldn’t always completely capture his food, so their activities were constrained, their nights early, their social engagements were often fraught with illness and regrets.

She introduced Jesse to her girlfriends at parties but it seemed all he could do not to nod off over his tea; sometimes she lost him entirely to other rooms and attics where he could browse like an auction bidder. Whereas his own chums delighted him; he sent coded letters to aliases at tavern addresses and was jubilant when a note came back; even after his friends had taken leave he would savor their conversations, retell stories to Zee that were still vile and indelible in her mind, indicate the characteristics he found most attractive in the rowdies.

Jesse introduced Cole and Jim and Bob Younger to her in Kearney and she sat through a meal and several foul cigars with the four before she excused herself to walk on the lawn in her sweater so she could hear silence and take in the dark like a sedative and become somehow less alive. Jim and Bob were fine—cordial and slender and irresistible—but Cole was a red-haired beef of a man with sideburns and a horseshoe mustache, even more boisterous and extroverted than Jesse, a twin to him in his facial features, and the two in combination were so electric and incandescent Zee felt slow and shut-in and scorched.

And Cole was cruel; he fetched the viciousness in Jesse; he boasted with sayings like “I cooked his hash,” and frightened Zee with a Civil War tale about fifteen Jayhawkers he’d tied belly to back in a row in order to test an Enfield rifle at close range. Cole’s first shot bore into three men instead of the ten he intended and he had commanded, “Cut the dead men loose; the new Enfield shoots like a pop-gun!” He needed seven shots to slaughter all fifteen and said he reverted to the Army Springfield .45 from then on. Jesse listened with cold-blooded admiration, as if he’d had a rather intricate mathematics problem broken down on a blackboard; Zee brooded on how harrowed and deserted the last man killed must have been, hearing the rifle detonations and the moans of the Kansas soldiers, sustaining the lurch and added strain of cadavers on the ropes as execution moved toward him a body at a time.

And she would remember later that Cole mentioned the robberies of the banks in St. Albans, Vermont, where Confederate soldiers in civilian clothes showed their grit by getting the money in broad daylight and walking right out into the street. She would remember that because of a St. Valentine’s Day newspaper account about two men in soldiers’ overcoats who’d robbed the Clay County Savings Bank in Liberty, Missouri, and ridden off with twelve accomplices into a screening snowstorm.

Jesse came to the boardinghouse with divinity fudge and a red paper heart on which he’d doggereled about ardor, and as Jesse nudged a lizard’s fringe of flame from some embering logs, they talked about the crime, Jesse saying that it was really only just deserts for all Easterner-owned corporations like that. He asked, “How much loot does it say they got?”

She read that the thieves filled a wheat sack with sixty thousand dollars in currencies, negotiable papers, bonds, and gold. She also noted that a boy who happened by was killed by one of the men and that he was a student at William Jewell College, where Jesse’s father had once been on the board of trustees. “George Wymore?” she said. Jesse was still a moment and then said, “I know his folks.” She asked, “You don’t think it was the Youngers, do you?” He flicked the oiled paper back from the divinity fudge and broke off a sliver before sitting down on the floor next to her. He said, “I only know Cole’s been poor and Frank’s been with him.” He glared at the fire for a minute, his good lung not yet strong enough for him to breathe without gasps, his skeleton so evident that he seemed a young man dying. He said, “I’ll bet it was accidental,” and then he changed the subject.

Alexander Mitchell and Company, a banking house in Lexington, had two thousand dollars stolen from a cash drawer in October 1866. Five months later six bandits walked inside a firm in Savannah and demanded that Judge John McLain hand over the keys to his vault. He wouldn’t and an incensed man shot him in the arm (which in result was amputated), but the outlaws exited without McLain’s cash. And in May 1867, a rustler told his jail inmates in Richmond that the local bank would be robbed that afternoon. The rumor carried and the town square was monitored, deputies were readied, and the teller locked the two wide doors of the Hughes and Wasson Bank. Then twenty yipping, howling outlaws in slouch hats and linen dusters galloped onto the main street and fired at second-storey windows. A robber broke the clasp lock with a bullet and six men marched inside and the bank lost four thousand dollars. But citizens constructed a roadblock and resistance. Mayor John B. Shaw was killed while rushing the thieves, his revolver kicking with each wild shot. Several men in the gang had ridden over to the jail in order to release Felix Bradley, the rustler in confinement there, but a boy named Frank Griffin raised a cavalry rifle in the courthouse yard and fired on them. Someone aimed an answering shot at him and his forehead was staved in. His father was Berry Griffin, the jailor, who went insane when his son was killed and raced across the dirt street and tackled a robber’s boot and stirrup. The horse skittered and screamed. The robber looked at Griffin as if he were an inconvenience, and he lowered his revolver to the man’s head and fired, burning hair with the gunpowder spray. The man sank under the horse. With a section of his skull blown off and the robber fired a second time to make sure the jailor would remain dead. And then the gang rode out of Richmond without any casualties of their own, although Felix Bradley was soon lynched by an angry mob.

Zee Mimms read that account as she’d read the accounts of the other robberies, and then she knelt with her arms crossed on the windowsill, her chin on her wrist, looking out beyond the pink blossoms of the yard’s cherry trees to the cinder alley that Jesse would trot along on another man’s horse. He would arrive with something expensive and inappropriate—a brass candelabrum, a garlic press, a wire dressmaker’s dummy—and if she broached the issue of the Richmond murders, he’d maintain he hadn’t yet heard the news and then look sick with sorrow and pity as she told him about the Hughes and Wasson Bank and Mayor Shaw and the Griffins; or he’d maintain the marauders were most likely driven to the crime by an unforgiving enemy that would never give ex-guerrillas a chance at more regular jobs. He would ignore her questions or laugh about them and he’d grow forbidding if she insisted he tell her where he’d been over the week, and yet when Jesse came—with a walnut metronome—Zee decided to find out what her fiancé did with his hours: Did he weed and water? Did he drink? Did he whore? Did he mumble-the-peg, fling sticks to dogs, whittle turtles from oakwood? Did he ride into peaceful towns and train his pistols on shopkeepers and college boys as outlaws ransacked the bank? She jested her inquiries so that she would not offend, but lies and evasions were what she received in answer, or Jesse cartooned his endeavors, saying, “I’ve just been sitting around the house practicing the alphabet.”

She said, “You haven’t been doing anything bad, have you?”

“ ’Course not.”

“You haven’t been gallivanting around with the Youngers?”

He glowered at her and said, “I guess that’s my own business, isn’t it.”

Zee looked pained but practical. “I’m going to be your wife.”

His eyes seemed hysterical and what strength he had seemed governed only with great difficulty. He struggled with a thought and then shrugged back into his riding coat. “I can’t remember when. I worked the farm last. I’m always changing horses and I’m gone for days at a time. I’ve got shotguns and six-guns in every room, I’ve got gifts to bring you and I’ve got greenbacks in my pocket and if you look in my closet you’ll see more fancy clothes than you will in all of Clay County. So you tell me what I do for a living. You figure something out and then you tell me if we oughta forget about getting married.”

And Jesse was outside and climbing onto a stolen horse as Zee angrily shut the curtains. She folded up the newspaper and slid it under a cobbler’s door down the hall, she put a picture of Jesse at seventeen inside the top drawer of a jewelry box, she pushed the metronome’s pendulum and as it ticked in three-quarter time she gradually crouched by it with her crying eyes in her palms.

THE JAMES AND YOUNGER BROTHERS larked into Kentucky in March 1868, and at the same time a man calling himself a cattle dealer visited the Nimrod Long and Company Bank in Russellville, Kentucky, chatted about escrow accounts, and departed. Soon thereafter the cattle dealer returned with four other men who drew revolvers from under their coats and received over twelve thousand dollars, which was thrown into the same wheat sack that had been noted in the Missouri robberies. Shopkeepers located revolvers and fired on the robbers in their ride out but ten sentries who were stationed on the avenue covered their getaway.

A Louisville detective named Yankee Bligh took on the Russellville case for a consortium of financiers and he identified Cole Younger and his confederates as the probable bank robbers. He was also concerned that two men named Frank and Jesse James had bloodied the bedsheets of a hotel in Chaplin, more than a hundred miles from the incident. A sallow man under a greatcoat had clutched his side as he slunk away from the open hotel room door and his grave older brother had informed the maid that the man’s Civil War injuries were still uncured. His wince when he moved, however, persuaded her that the wound was reopened in a scrap. And Jesse sealed the detective’s suspicions about the James brothers’ involvement when he mailed his fiancée a card that said a physician had instructed him to go to California or else lose his vitality.

He went to the Paso Robles Hot Sulphur Springs resort owned by his uncle, Drury Woodson James. There he mended his lung and recovered from an ear infection by consuming lemons and oranges and castoreum in addition to a pound of fish every day. A photograph of him at the time showed a cadaverous man with sunken cheeks and eyes darkened with hollow, his left hand clutching a cane; he would never again be as sick as he was then: Jesse would later say it was a condition that was brought on by being away from Missouri and Zee. It took him four months to convalesce and then he vacationed in San Francisco on stolen cash that he doubled with casino roulette and monte. He lounged in steam baths, he stood at the prow of a ferry, he ate six-course meals in French restaurants, he sinned in fandango saloons where the “pretty waiter girls” wore ostrich-feather bonnets and red silk jackets but nothing whatever below that except shoes, and for a dollar would let Jesse contemplate what he had never spied outside of art museums. It all made him feel guilty and unmoored, and it wasn’t long before he was climbing aboard a train that would carry him back to Missouri and make him himself again.

Zee was visiting her Aunt Zerelda at the Kearney farmhouse when Jesse arrived. His mother made an opera of his coming home and cooked a supper of pork and pies, complaining all the while of the illnesses and sleepless nights her boy’s going had brought her, and reporting on the many deputies and Pinkerton detectives who were skulking around the place. “Seems like I’m spending every minute making up alibis for you.” She proclaimed, as they were eating, that she’d attempted to get cash for some negotiable papers “the boys” had swiped from the Clay County Savings Bank but that a manager had snootily refused her. She asked if Jesse knew that it was Mr. Nimrod Long of Russellville who paid half the tuition for Jesse’s father to go to Georgetown College. She asked if Jesse wasn’t ashamed of himself. Through it all, Jesse miserably eyed Zee but saw that she was simpering at Zerelda as if she were speaking the lightest of gossip. And as the couple strolled down to Clear Creek to flip pebbles into the water and chat, Jesse saw that the woman he was pledged to had changed. Zee called herself a milkweed, a nuisance, a scold; she regretted her prying into his affairs, regretted giving him arguments when she knew that he needed allegiance and love. She wanted to accommodate him, to be a good wife to him, and nothing else really mattered to her. And that seemed to be true, for thenceforth Zee avoided all rumors and newspaper stories about the James-Younger gang, she shied from conversations about criminal acts and politics, she refused invitations into society, she never inquired again about the robberies or murders attributed to Jesse; instead, she’d accepted a simple, stay-at-home life for herself and was no more conscious of the James brothers’ crimes than she was of the Suez Canal or the mole on her back or the dust kittens under the sofa.

And yet Jesse made some efforts at conventional work: he was a millwright, a machinist, a coal salesman; he plowed in the sun with three pistols hooked onto his belt; he swapped cattle at the livestock shows. He would start a job with good will and industry, but then he would walk away from it because he was belittled or maltreated or weary and bored. Each occupation became a day-or week-long deception, for he was twenty-one years old and had already settled into the one career that suited him.

During the five years between 1869 and 1874, the James-Younger gang robbed the Daviess County Savings Bank in Gallatin; stole six thousand dollars from the Ocobock Brothers’ Bank in Corydon, Iowa; six hundred dollars from the Deposit Bank in Columbia, Kentucky; four thousand dollars from a bank in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri; two thousand dollars from the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway near Council Bluffs, Iowa; twenty-two thousand dollars from the Iron Mountain Railroad at Gads Hill, Missouri; three thousand dollars from the Hot Springs stagecoach near Malvern, Arkansas. And so on. Jesse shot John Sheets in the head and heart and the banker drained off the chair; his clerk scurried into the street and the bandits fired twice, catching him fat in the arm. A cashier named R. A. C. Martin was told to open a safe and answered, “Never. I’ll die first.” “Then die it is,” said Cole and raised his dragoon revolver to Martin’s ear and fired. An iron rail was winched off its tie as a passenger train slowed on a blind curve and the locomotive tilted into the roadbed and then crashed to its side in weeds, crushing John Rafferty, the engineer, and scalding Dennis Foley, the stoker, so badly that he died within weeks. The six thieves were dressed in the white hoods and raiment of the Ku Klux Klan—for what reason, no one knows—and collected three thousand dollars in compensation for putting an end to two lives.

Stopping the increasingly common robberies became so paramount that the United States Secret Service and private detectives from Chicago and St. Louis joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency in stalking the James-Younger gang. Allan Pinkerton’s son William established headquarters in Kansas City and split his operatives between pursuit of the Youngers and the Jameses in the counties of Jackson and Clay; and yet, though many could recognize the gunslingers and their regular sanctuaries were known, investigators only came to misfortune when they got close to the gang.

John W. Whicher was assigned Dr. Samuels’s farm and, upon receiving a spy’s report that the James boys were present, walked there with a carpet bag and in poor man’s clothes on a cold night in March. He’d just crossed the wooden bridge over Clear Creek when he caught a slight noise, and then Jesse jerked the man’s chin back with his wrist and asked, “You looking for something?”

Arthur McCoy and Jim Anderson (Bloody Bill’s brother) scrabbled up from under the bridge with guns out and Whicher said, “I’m only looking for work. I was hoping to find a place on a farm. You happen to know of any?”

“Yep,” said Jesse. “I know just the right place for you. And Satan’s got it all prepared.”

Whicher was seen again at 3 a.m. near Owen’s Ferry, his mouth gagged and his legs tied astride a gray horse; and on March 11th his body was discovered in a cistern, still gagged and riddled with bullets. A note was pinned to his lapel that read: “This is the way we treat Chicago detectives; if you’ve got any more send them along.”

Only days later Captain Louis Lull and two associates were overtaken in the rain-soaked woods of St. Clair County by John and Jim Younger. They cocked shotguns and ordered the operatives to drop their pistols. They complied. But then Lull’s right hand glided down to a derringer and he shot it at John Younger, cutting into the jugular vein so that it surged red sleeves of blood out even as the dying boy got off a shot and killed Lull. One of the scouting party sprinted away through the woods but Jim Younger only gazed at his kid brother, who was tangled under his frightened horse. He then gazed at Edwin Daniels, the man who brought the operatives there, and calmly triggered his shotgun, catching the guide in the neck.

At Gallatin an overexcited black racehorse had torn from the rail before Jesse had mounted. He was dragged forty feet on a frozen dirt street, his greatcoat lumping up near his neck like a plow collar, before he could disentangle his boot and broken ankle from the stirrup. He hopped one-footed and climbed Frank’s arm and the two brothers galloped off on one horse as the filly sulked on a church lawn, her saddle rocked over to her flank, the left stirrup clinking on the flagstones when she browsed.

The filly was incontrovertible evidence linking the James brothers to the Missouri robberies, and yet they were again supported by Major John Newman Edwards, the grandiloquent author of Shelby and His Men and Noted Guerrillas, or The Warfare of the Border, in which Frank and Jesse James were gloriously mentioned. Edwards helped Jesse inscribe a letter to Governor McClurg denying involvement in the Gallatin crimes, claiming he had not murdered John Sheets, had not even been near Daviess County, that he had sold the filly a week beforehand and could furnish a receipt; however, he could not give up just yet and risk a vigilance committee that might lynch him.

Governor, when I can get a fair trial, I will surrender myself to the civil authorities of Missouri. But I will never surrender to be mobbed by a set of blood-thirsty poltroons. It is true that during the war I was a Confederate soldier and fought under the Black Flag, but since then I have lived a respectable citizen and obeyed the laws of the United States to the best of my knowledge.

Frank James smiled uncharacteristically when he read that and commented that he thought he was guilty of all those crimes but now he was having an argument in his mind about it.

If the James-Younger gang was beginning to be looked upon by the common people as champions of the poor, it was principally due to Jesse, who was the originator of their many public relations contrivances: the claims that Southerners and clerics were never robbed, the occasional donations to charity, the farewell hurrahs in honor of the Confederate dead. The James-Younger gang stole the treasures from each ticket holder in the Hot Springs Stagecoach except George Crump, of Memphis, who revealed he had been a soldier under the Stainless Banner. When they robbed the Iron Mountain Railroad at Gads Hill, they searched the passengers’ hands for calluses because they had purportedly forsworn harming workingmen or ladies in order to concentrate on “the money and valuables of the plug-hat gentlemen.” After ransacking the express car there, Jesse inserted an envelope into the conductor’s coat pocket and said in practiced words, “This contains an exact account of the robbery. We prefer this to be published in the newspapers rather than the grossly exaggerated accounts that usually appear after one of our jobs.”

The press release declared: “The most daring on record—the southbound train on the Iron Mountain Railroad was robbed here this evening by several heavily armed men and robbed of dollars.”

It rehashed their methods and indicated the direction of their flight and the colors of their horses, concluding, “There is a hell of an excitement in this part of the country.”

They rode west across Missouri, staying on farms overnight, one account saying they “conducted themselves as gentlemen, paying for everything they got,” and that fact alone seemed by then enough to certify that the criminals were the James-Younger gang; and yet when the St. Louis Dispatch printed its story implicating them in the robbery, Major Edwards sent a Western Union telegram to the city editor, saying: “Put nothing more in about Gads Hill. The report of yesterday was remarkable for two things—utter stupidity and total untruth.”

At the 1872 Kansas City Fair, Jesse and Frank and Cole brushed ahead of an idled line to the entrance gate, fastening red neckerchiefs over their noses. Cole and Frank extracted revolvers from beneath linen dusters and Jesse snatched the ticket seller’s tin cash box. He knelt in the dirt and pilfered over nine hundred dollars in greenbacks and coins as Cole and Frank rotated with irons and menacing looks. A thousand gawkers milled around, amazed by the convincingness of the actors and the skit as a ticket seller ran from his booth and wrestled Jesse for the cash box, beckoning for assistance. Cole knocked a woman aside and shot at the seller and missed but ruined the leg of a small girl. And then the three outlaws shoved through the crowd, unhitched their horses, and cantered off.

Days later Jesse showed himself at the Harlem boardinghouse, shaved and hair slicked and redolent of witch hazel. He was jovial and jittery and couldn’t sit still. He chewed mints. He was solicitous of his cousin, asked about Zee’s health, her moods, her pastimes. They snacked on sliced bananas and milk. And when she washed the dishes, he eased behind her, girdling her small waist with his hands, then massaging her back and shoulders. He moved her blond hair aside with his nose and kissed her neck. “Oh, that gives me goosebumps,” she said, and clacked a bowl in a bowl. His hands widened their transit over her ribs until his fingers grazed the sides of her breasts and withdrew and then insisted on more sensation of Zee with the next advance. Zee dried her hands and revolved and kissed Jesse on the mouth and they moaned in embrace for a minute. Jesse said, “If someone’s ear was to the door just now they’d think we were moving furniture.”

She smiled. “Oh, I cherish you so.”

He caressed her and asked, “Do you mind if I get liberal with you?” and she answered, “Yes,” at the word liberal, and “Yes,” at the end of the sentence.

“You do mind.”

“I’m unmarried,” she said, and then it registered that she was stopping a man who robbed and shot at people from fondling parts of her that she would otherwise pay scant attention to. Zee decided to relent when next he asked, but Jesse didn’t ask, he simply scratched his chestnut brown hair and smiled and looked for whatever exit that offered itself. He reached under his coat to the back of his trousers and hauled out a folded Kansas City Times that he flattened on the kitchen table. “If you don’t read another thing in your life, this is what you should last feast your eyes on.” He rapped his knuckles on a newspaper column and Zee bent over the table to see it, drawing a swing of hair away from her cheek.

It regarded the robbery at the Kansas City fairgrounds as “a deed so high-handed, so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators.”

Jesse straddled a chair. He blinked and darted and exercised his eyes. He followed a finger to the side of his head and back, and then to his nose, his chin.

The heels of Zee’s hands had numbed from her lean and hair had again fallen across her brow. She stopped reading and simply said, “The boarders will be coming down for supper in an hour and I’ve got to cook it by myself.”

“Can’t that man write though? He’s got more ee-magination than Georgia’s got cotton.”

Zee unsacked hard biscuits onto a plate. She cut tomatoes over a saucepan and juice ran down her wrists. Lard melted and slowly twirled in a skillet over a fire. Jesse grew morose as she ignored him. She saw him glaring at her once and then she saw him reading another newspaper that must have appeared from another pocket.

He read: “ ‘The Chivalry of Crime. There are men in Jackson, Cass, and Clay—a few there are left—who learned to dare when there was no such word as quarter in the dictionary of the Border. Men who have carried their lives in their hands so long that they do not know how to commit them over into the keeping of the laws and regulations that exist now, and these men sometimes rob. But it is always in the glare of day and in the teeth of the multitude. With them booty is but the second thought; the wild drama of the adventure first.’ ”

She pulled down a jar from the pantry and kept her back to Jesse as she dipped into the jar with a spoon. He continued: “ ‘These men are bad citizens but they are bad because they live out of their time. The nineteenth century with its Sybaritic civilization is not the social soil for men who might have sat with Arthur at the Round Table, ridden at tourney with Sir Launcelot or won the colors of Guinevere; men who might have shattered the casque of Brian de Boise Guilbert, shivered a lance with Ivanhoe or won the smile of the Hebrew maiden; and men who could have met Turpin and Duval and robbed them of their ill-gotten booty on Hounslow Heath.’ ”

Zee reached for but overturned a canister of black seasonings that spilled across the counter. Her creased dress as she tidied and the rucked wool stockings at her ankles were all that Jesse could see. He rocked forward in his chair as if his boots were stirruped. He said, “Just let me read on a little bit,” and he moved his finger along as he did: “ ‘It was as though three bandits had come to us from the storied Odenwald, with the halo of medieval chivalry upon their garments and shown us how the things were done that poets sing of. No where else in the United States or in the civilized world, probably, could this thing have been done. It was done here, not because the protectors of person and property were less efficient but because the bandits were more dashing and skillful; not because honest Missourians have less nerve but because freebooting Missourians have more.’ ”

She said in mute tones, “I don’t care what John Newman Edwards says.”

“How’s that?”

She wheeled with storm and sorrow in her face, her hands locked on her ears. “I don’t want to know!” she cried. She even stamped a shoe. And then she hustled out, her skirt inch-raised, and the swinging door clapped her departure.

Jesse limped over to the stove and clamped a potholder around the handle to move a skillet that was beginning to smoke.

A general mopiness and depression began to plague Jesse, and Frank sought to dispel it with a trip to the Hite property near Adairville, Kentucky. However, it was there Jesse learned his sister, Susan Lavenia James, was planning to marry Allen H. Parmer, a man whom Jesse despised. The very idea of Susie’s being private with Parmer so plunged Jesse into despair that he chewed sixteen grains of morphine in a suicide attempt.

By the time a physician came, Jesse was sleepwalking and there seemed to be no hope that he’d recuperate; but Frank persuaded his younger brother to keep moving by whispering that the Yankees were coming or that Pappy was being strangled in the coffee bean tree. He gave Jesse two empty .44s so he could rage around the room, crying and carrying on until he collapsed with the morphine overdose and all they could do was pray for the repose of his soul. Just about sunrise Jesse abruptly woke up with a powerful appetite, as if he’d experienced only a peaceful sleep, and that evening he journeyed back to Kansas City where he prevailed upon Zee to marry him by convincing her of his complete repentance.

ON APRIL 24TH, 1874, Reverend William James, an uncle to both parties, joined Zee Mimms to Jesse James at the Kearney home of the bride’s married sister, who also served as the bridesmaid. Zee wore her mother’s white wedding gown though its train and veil had been browned by an attic trunk. They were shivareed in a one-room log cabin near Noel, and then journeyed to Galveston, Texas, accompanied by Frank, who would marry Annie Ralston two months later.

After a week in Galveston the couple was supposed to steam south to Vera Cruz, but Jesse had boated the Gulf of Mexico with his brother one afternoon and the blue water terrified him. The waves were big as the roofs of houses. He allowed a lead fishing weight to sink and it had gone so deep it stripped all the reel line from his spool. Who could prove it ever bottomed? Maybe it banged up against a China Sea junk at the other end of the world.

So they leisured at a coastal hotel and Zee peeled and sliced apples for her husband under a broad pink umbrella as a correspondent for the St. Louis Dispatch interviewed the famous Jesse James. The newsman was amiable and cautious and needed little more than social notes but it was nevertheless a catechism and the first of her husband’s characterizations she’d witnessed. His manners were decorous, his charm, while charlatan, was fetching, his sentences were dexterous, his thoughts glanced away from ensnarements like minnows. Zee pared a careful, red-skinned spiral from the fruit and listened with amazement as he braided and invented, and she wondered if she’d underestimated Jesse and scaled him too small, if she was so accustomed to him she hadn’t realized he was still as romantic and remarkable as the near-dead eighteen-year-old she’d nursed. She was ready, that season, to revise all her opinions of him. She had shrunk into a maiden who was deferential and daughterish, and it pleased Zee beyond good sense when Jesse placed his excellent hand atop hers.”

She saw that the correspondent had apparently asked the groom for a sentiment about his bride, because Jesse looked at her with amorous concentration and said, “We had been engaged for nine years, and through good and evil report, and notwithstanding the lies that have been told about me and the crimes laid at my door, her devotion to me has never wavered for a moment. You can say that both of us married for love, and that there cannot be any sort of doubt about our marriage being a happy one.”

It wasn’t at all happy for the first year. At summer’s end the couple returned to Missouri and concealed themselves in the sewing rooms and harness sheds of relatives until Jesse could get around to renting and cultivating a farm. Meanwhile she was rooting out a scandal that claimed it was the James-Younger gang that stopped two omnibuses on each side of the Missouri River one Sunday afternoon in August. Even though he was one of the victims, Professor J. L. Allen went so far as to blather, “I am exceedingly glad, as it looks I have to be robbed, that it is being done by first-class artists, by men of national reputation.”

And on December 8th, five men caused the Kansas Pacific Railroad to brake at the Muncie, Kansas, depot by stacking ties on the tracks. They uncoupled the Pullman coaches and towed the express and baggage cars ahead some two hundred yards before ransacking them of thirty thousand dollars. The express company immediately tendered a reward of one thousand dollars for each outlaw, dead or alive.

In early January Jesse shook Zee awake and read the verses in the Gospel of Matthew pertaining to the Holy Family’s flight from Herod into Egypt, saying he’d been getting premonitions and thought they ought to fly from Missouri. He was somehow so persuasive that Zee yielded to his proposition and by the next week they were renting a house in Nashville, Tennessee, where they would soon be joined by Frank and his new wife, Annie. (Annie Ralston had told her parents that she wanted to visit relatives in Kansas City and left home with a valise and trunk. Frank met her train and eloped with Annie to Omaha, whence she sent the note: “Dear Mother: I am married and going West.” Her parents had no idea who her husband was, or even that she’d been courted, and her father was understandably shocked when detectives surrounded his house and ordered the occupants out with their hands up.)

So the James boys were not in residence on the night that Allan Pinkerton’s detectives sloshed through snow to the Kearney farmhouse they called “Castle James.” In order to smoke the criminals outside, the Pinkerton operatives soaked a cotton wad in turpentine, tied it around a rock, and pitched it through windowglass into the kitchen, spritzing flames across the plank flooring. Dr. Samuels got up from his sleep and, when they called for the James boys to give themselves up, yelled out that his stepsons had disappeared, then poked the cotton wad into the fireplace as Zerelda spanked out the fire with a dishtowel. No sooner had the couple done that, however, than a soot-blackened railroad potflare smashed through another windowpane, and when Reuben Samuels swatted it onto the coals with a broom, the cauldron accidentally exploded.

Shrapnel tore through the stomach of Archie Peyton Samuels, the James’s nine-year-old stepbrother, and the boy died within hours. A maidservant who slept by the pantry had a slice taken from her cheek and swooned for loss of blood. And Mrs. Zerelda Samuels suffered such a mangling of her right hand that surgeons had to saw it off above the wrist.

The James brothers’ only public reaction to Archie’s death and the maiming of their mother came in an impassioned, misspelled letter from Jesse that appeared in the Nashville Banner in August. He listed once more the misrepresentations about his activities and then centered his fury on Allan Pinkerton, writing:

Providence saved the house from being burnt altho it was saturated with Turpentine & fiered with combustible materials and the shell did not do fatal work and they fled away to the special train that was waiting to carry them beyon the reach of outraged justice. This is the work of Pinkerton, the man that sed in his card that he just wished to set himself right in the eyes of the world. He may vindicate himself with some, but will never dare show his Scottish face again in Western Mo. and let me know he is here or he will meet the fate of his comrades, Capt. Lull & Whicher met & I would advise him to stay in New York but let him go where he may, his sins will find him out. He can cross the Atlantic but every wave and white cap he sees at sea will remind him of the innocent boy murdered and the one-armed mother robbed of her son (and Idol). Justice is slow but sure and there is a just God that will bring all to Justice. Pinkerton, I hope and pray our Heavenly Father may deliver you into my hands & I believe he will for his merciful and protecting arm has always been with me and Shielded me, and during all my persecution he has watched over me and protected me from workers of blood money who are trying to seek my life, and I have hope and faith in Him & believe he will ever protect me as long as I serve Him.

Jesse and Zee were then renting a cottage at 606 Boscobel Street under the aliases of J. D. and Josie Howard; Frank leased the Big Bottom farm as B. J. Woodson, and Annie added the first letter of his Christian name to become Fannie.

Zee gave birth to a son on New Year’s Eve, 1875, and they christened him Jesse Edwards, for his father and the newspaper editor, but discretion caused them to call him Tim, and he was seven years old before he learned his actual name. Jesse would saunter downtown with his son hipped like a paunchy cat or bundled inside his overcoat so that the infant’s bewildered head poked between the lapels. He sat the baby in his homburg hat, he dangled him over rivers to give Zee a fright, he snuck him looks at his pinochle cards, hung a blue derringer over his crib, screwed a unlit cigar in the child’s mouth and practiced ventriloquism in taverns.

Zee choired at church, she conversed happily with her sister-in-law as they stewed and pickled vegetables or grated cucumbers and onions for catsup, she cooed to her child as he suckled; but alone outside her home she felt shadowed and stalked—footsteps stopped when she did, curtains dropped when she turned her head—and she became so leery and aloof that shopkeepers and neighbors assumed she was snobbish or persnickety or perhaps a little simple.

Her lone male friend was Dr. John Vertrees, whom Jesse hired to live with Zee and her son during the weeks of absence he attributed to his work as a wheat speculator. (The doctor assumed that was a lie manufactured to cover a secret addiction to cards and horse races, for Mr. Howard dressed like a boulevardier and wore a derringer in a hideaway shoulder harness and once presented to his wife an envelope of diamonds.)

Little is known about the James brothers’ activities on the road while they resided in Tennessee, except for the summer and autumn of 1876 in which the James-Younger gang committed two robberies, the second of them being the fiasco at Northfield, Minnesota, in September.

LESS THAN TWO MONTHS earlier they had robbed the Missouri Pacific Railroad of over fifteen thousand dollars near Otterville, Missouri. As the badmen looted the Adams and U.S. express companies, a minister conducted the timorous through canticles and evangelized for the repentance of sins, and a newspaper account later complimented the robbers who “were well versed in their business” and “remarkably cool and courageous throughout the whole affair.”

But then the St. Louis chief of police arrested a man who’d been bragging about the loot he’d gotten from the robbery, and after rough interrogation, Hobbs Kerry confessed that he was one member of a gang that was governed by Jesse James and included Frank James, Cole Younger, Bob Younger, Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts, and Bill Chadwell.

Jesse sent a letter (which was probably rewritten by Edwards) to the Kansas City Times, contending that “this so-called confession is a well-built pack of falsehoods from beginning to end. I never heard of Hobbs Kerry, Charles Pitts and Wm. Chadwell until Kerry’s arrest. I can prove my innocence by eight good and well-known men of Jackson County, and show conclusively that I was not at the train robbery.” He closed with another plea for a fair hearing and signed it “Respectfully, J. W. James.”

By the time the letter was published, on August 18th, Jesse and his brother and Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger were sitting on a railway coach headed four hundred miles north to an area in which the citizens would not be so cautious or on the lookout for thieves. Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts, and Bill Chadwell knitted into the group at depots in Missouri and the eight toured St. Paul’s gambling houses and sat through a Red Caps and Clippers baseball game before they bought thoroughbred horses and tack and rode the Minnesota River to scout Mankato and then Northfield.

Cole Younger coveted retirement in a foreign country before September stripped away but thought he needed more of a subsidy than a Swedish mill town could muster. Meanwhile Bill Chadwell, who’d lived in the state, boasted about the ease of larceny in placid Minnesota and indicated secluded routes and short cuts that could spirit the outlaws to Iowa like a whirlwind in the Book of Kings. And good authorities had told him that General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, the man called “The Scourge of New Orleans,” was an investor in the First National Bank of Northfield: they could revenge his confiscations and slaughter of Confederate soldiers. And that argument worked. Cole Younger later confessed that once they heard about Butler’s involvement in the institution, they “felt little compunction, under the circumstances, about raiding him or his.”

Northfield it was then. On September 7th, Jesse James and Bob Younger and Charlie Pitts dressed in cattlemen’s linen dusters and rode across the iron bridge over the Cannon River into Mill Square, where they hitched their splendid horses. Jesse’s was the grayish brown color that is called dun, the other two were bays; and each had such thoroughbred conformation that men sidetracked to scrutinize and assess them and wondered who the visitors were as the outlaws strolled over to the Scriver Block, which contained the H. Scriver and Lee and Hitchcock merchandise firms and, around the corner, the First National Bank, on Division Street.

At J. G. Jeff’s restaurant each man ordered eggs and bacon and apple pie and dawdled over two pots of coffee as they consulted about varieties of rifles with the same tedious overattention that other customers were giving sorghum and Holstein cows.

Bob Younger was a debonair man with a blond mustache and short brown hair and expressive eyebrows that seemed to crave a monocle. Charlie Pitts was an alias for Samuel Wells, a sometime cowhand with a handsome sunburned head that was square as a chimney, whose skin was so unclean dirt laced it like rainwater stains on tan wallpaper. Jesse had just turned twenty-nine but he seemed to uncle them both, and he took care of the check when Frank slouched by the plate glass window, cuing his younger brother about the tranquility of the town.

So Jesse, Bob, and Charlie returned to the Scriver Block, sitting atop dry goods boxes outside the Lee and Hitchcock store, cutting slivers of wood from the boxes and loafing in the sunlight until two o’clock, when Cole Younger and Clell Miller rode into Division Street from the south. Cole stopped his racehorse and pretended some annoyance with the cinch, winking over the animal’s withers at Jesse, who then stood and walked around the corner to the First National Bank, swiveling into the narrow, windowed doors and slamming both into jolts against brass hindrances on the baseboards. He snicked back the hammer on his .44 and hurtled onto the walnut counter at the unrailed teller opening as Bob Younger yelled out, “Throw up your hands!”

Clell Miller followed the three to the bank, shutting the two doors behind them and standing on the sidewalk with his right hand inside his long linen duster, glancing everywhere. Mr. J. S. Allen crossed the street to see if anything peculiar was happening but Miller prevented the man’s approach. Allen stepped back and then rushed around the corner into an alley, screaming, “Get your guns, boys! They’re robbing the bank!”

A University of Michigan medical student named Henry M. Wheeler was frittering away the afternoon under the green awning of his father’s drugstore, just across Mill Square from the bank. He saw the man in the ankle-length coat impede J. S. Allen and heard the merchant screaming his news; he cried out, “Robbery! Robbery!” to the customers in the drugstore and ran into the Dampier House to retrieve a Spencer carbine he’d seen in the hotel’s luggage room, then scrambled up to the second-floor window that looked onto the street, with three waxed paper cartridges in his hand.

Cole Younger and Clell Miller jumped onto their racehorses and caterwauled and hooted and shot Colts overhead and about, at shingles and signboards and brick corbels, wherever chance swerved their muzzles, and three horsemen clanked in race over the iron bridge and racketed onto Division Street, so that five wild men careered around in an area eighty feet wide, clattering over the planks in the crosswalks and banging away in the air with their guns, cocking their horses after whosoever had not as of then scuttled into commercial buildings.

Jesse James by then walked off the counter in a four-foot drop to the floor and scowled at the two clerks, Alonzo Bunker and Frank Wilcox, who shrank from Jesse as from a furnace, retreating to the bookkeeping alcove. The cashier was attending the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia; the acting cashier was Joseph Lee Heywood. Bob Younger was saying, “We’re going to rob this bank. Don’t any of you holler. We’ve got forty men outside.”

Jesse sauntered over to Heywood and asked, “Are you the cashier?”

Heywood said he wasn’t.

Jesse looked with puzzlement at Bunker and Wilcox and put the same question to them. They crouched away from his left-handed gun and shook their heads in the negative.

Jesse returned to Heywood with ire in his blue eyes and said, “You’re the cashier. Open that safe quick or I’ll blow your lying head off.”

Charlie Pitts saw Clell Miller in argument with J. S. Allen and guessed rightly that they’d already lingered too long. He lurched over the counter grill and clumsied down and Heywood bolted to close a vault that was the size of a walk-in closet. Pitts snagged Heywood’s sleeve and retarded him and the two scuffled, Heywood shouting, “Murder! Murder!” until Jesse jabbed a revolver into Heywood’s cheek and said, “Open that safe inside there now or you’ve got one more minute to live.”

And to convince the acting cashier of that, Pitts snuck behind him with a pocket knife and slit the skin of his throat. Joseph L. Heywood was stunned. He was a slender man in his thirties with a dark beard and a scholar’s look—he could have been an algebra teacher, someone conservative and cultured, and he was, in fact, a trustee at Carleton College. Cut, he looked at Jesse with rebuke in his face as his neck unsealed and blood rolled down his collar like a red shade being drawn.

Jesse ordered him again to unlock the safe and Heywood held a handkerchief to his neck and croaked, “It has a time lock. It can’t be opened.”

Jesse struck him cruelly on the skull with his revolver and the cashier caved in. He sat down on the floor and his eyes rose in his skull with faint and he laid himself down with caution for his rickety condition. Jesse then ordered the clerks to unlock the safe, but they said they couldn’t, and had Jesse only made the attempt himself he would have found out that the stove-sized safe at the rear of the walk-in vault had already been unlocked at nine that morning.

Gunfire was now regular outside and Jesse caught a glimpse of Frank and Cole reeling their horses around, one of them cantering up onto the sidewalk, loudly clobbering the wood. Bob Younger had climbed over the counter and insisted that the two clerks kneel as he rifled the till drawers. The cash had been removed from the wooden trays, as it happened, and all he could find were rolls of pennies and nickels in the midst of deposit and withdrawal receipts. Had he looked to a second drawer below he could have gained three thousand dollars.

The clerk named Bunker, who was also a teacher at Carleton College, saw that Jesse was looking on with peculiar fascination as the cashier gave blood to the floor, and that Younger was preoccupied in seeking the currencies. So he rocked back on his shoes and then dashed for the director’s room and the alley door. Charlie Pitts aimed at him and burst slivers from the doorjamb with a shot and the clerk ducked outside. Pitts fired a second time and Bunker floundered down the alley, a rift in his right shoulder next to the collar bone.

Chaos ruled outside. The gang had expected the Northfield residents to cower beneath their onslaught, but the citizens had instead rushed into whatever rooms were close by to search out weapons and ammunition. Elias Stacy claimed a shotgun from a hardware store and tore open a box of shells and chambered one without noticing that it was bird shot. Some businessmen retrieved desk pistols and derringers, common laborers crossed the town from their work with rakes and straw forks and sickles, and boys dodged into the street to pitch rocks and bottles at the skittish, prancing horses. The steam whistle at the river mill was screaming over and over again, girls were yanking steeple ropes so that the church bells were clanging, and men were grunting wagons into the streets in order to restrict the available exits.

A Scandinavian immigrant named Oscar Seeborn mistook the pandemonium on Division Street for a celebration of some sort or as the general brand of American violence that he’d been warned about on his passage west. So he barged ahead with innocence and neutrality evinced in his smile even as an outlaw instructed him to go back in an English he couldn’t yet understand. When Seeborn stepped away from the man’s pistol he was murdered.

At about the same time, Clell Miller saw Elias Stacy walk into the street with a shotgun and raise it in his direction, and then Clell was clouted off his mount with a load of bird shot in his cheek and forehead like a black tattoo of a constellation. Though blood ran down his face in bars, Miller ascended onto his saddle again and raked his horse toward the man who’d shot him so that when Clell returned the exchange it would be from inches. But Henry Wheeler had his carbine trained on Miller from overhead in the Dampier House and a lead ball the size of a blouse button slammed into the outlaw’s clavicle with such force it towed him off his horse and flat on his back in the street.

Cole Younger fired at Stacy and missed, then at the Dampier House window, but Henry Wheeler crouched back into the room. Cole descended from his horse and asked Miller, “How bad is it, Clell? Do you think you can ride?”

“I don’t know.” His subclavian artery was severed. All his blood was in his chest. He raised on his elbow and looked around as if he’d awoke in an unfamiliar bedroom. Then he died and bowled over onto his nose in the dirt. Cole unbuckled Miller’s ammunition belt and leaped back onto his horse.

Anselm Manning owned the hardware store across the alley from the First National Bank and he sidled down that alley with a rifle that could only be loaded with one cartridge at a time. It made him concentrate. He walked out into the street and judged his chances of getting the moving outlaws and when he saw two just beyond the racehorses tied in front of the bank, he trained his sights on them. But they dodged him by sinking low, so he adjusted slightly lower and killed the closest horse. He then levered the rifle in the alley but realized the ignited cartridge was lodged in it, so was obliged to go back to his hardware store for a ramrod. He was back at the alley entrance within a minute and looking around the corner when he spied Cole Younger. His shot strayed wild but caught a signpost in such a way that it glanced right and tore into Cole Younger’s side, making him groan and grit his teeth as his horse jerked around in fright.

Manning retreated again and grinned at a man in the alley. “Got lucky,” he said and then walked out, loading a third shell in the breech and cocking the rifle as he maneuvered to get his sights on Bill Chadwell, who was sitting on his horse eighty yards away, acting as a sentry. Manning was a thoroughly unguessing man and he gave his body as a target as he calculated and engineered, causing men in the alley to anxiously call him back. But he stayed out there just long enough to get off a shot that went through Bill Chadwell’s heart, killing him at once, so that Chadwell slowly declined from his saddle in the graceless swoon and slide of happenstance and gravitation, until his fingers lightly swished the dirt with each ungainly horse motion.

Cole Younger, who could calculate the odds against success better than the more unyielding James brothers, got his horse close enough to the windowglass to yell in to Jesse, “The game’s up! They’re killing all our men!”

Jesse had already guessed that. He’d heard the gunfire and seen blue gunsmoke roil and churn against the glass. He reconsidered the First National Bank’s untampered-with safe for a second but sleeplessness or panic had snailed his brain and all he could do was blink. He said, “You two go,” but as Charlie Pitts and Bob Younger scurried out, Jesse walked back to Joseph Heywood, who was blacked out on the floor. Then he reached his revolver down and blew the man’s skull into fractions.

Outside, a man named Bates crossfired from the second floor of Hanover’s Clothing Store, and Elias Stacy ran up the outside stairs to a corner office on the Scriver Block from which he continued to fire bird shot down on the thieves. Henry Wheeler had loaded another cartridge and crept up to the Dampier House window. He saw Stacy’s bird shot smack Cole Younger’s hat off and in the next instant triggered his second cartridge, which tore off a segment of the man’s shoulder.

Jim Younger was shot in the mouth, obliterating his front teeth, and he spilt blood like coffee as his horse racked in front of the drugstore.

Bob Younger’s bay horse was the one killed by Manning, so he slunk over to some crates and boxes for cover. But Manning jogged around the Scriver Block to get to the other side of the outlaw and his gunshot made Bob Younger’s right sleeve sail as the ball crashed into the man’s elbow. Younger switched his revolver into his left hand and crouched around to get even with Manning, but Henry Wheeler looked down and with his third cartridge wrecked Bob Younger above the right knee.

Frank James reared his horse to twist it toward the Dampier House, but then felt a hurt in his thigh as if someone had driven an iron stake into the bone. He could feel his blood run down his shin into his boot, and he saw Jesse come out of the bank like a sleepwalker, easily climbing onto his grayish brown horse and cantering west on Division Street without giving anyone more than a few shots. And so Frank shouted, “They’ve got us beat!” and five shellacked horsemen raced toward the Cannon River bridge until Cole looked for his brother Bob and saw him scarecrowed in the street, broomsticked on his good left leg. Bob cried, “Don’t leave me! I’m shot!” and Cole pivoted around as many guns shot at him, reaching to Bob with pain as he said, “Get on behind me,” and gripping Bob by the cartridge belt to bring him up onto the croup of his horse. And then they sprinted out over the iron bridge, jouncing with agony in the gallop, their blood coasting back from their wounds.

TELEGRAMS THAT WARNED of the outlaws’ flight were by then being sent to each Minnesota sheriff’s office, but the James-Younger gang enjoyed the good luck of riding through Dundas, three miles west, as the telegraph operator was eating lunch. Shoppers and street people looked on in surprise as the spent and collapsed party in cattlemen’s dusters loped by on expensive racehorses that were dripping blood.

They stole a Morgan draft horse from a man’s wagon team and then got a saddle on loan from a farmer by saying they were deputies in pursuit of some horse thieves. They then strapped Bob Younger to the Morgan horse but within a mile the cinch snapped and Bob flopped off to the road. Jesse looked upon him like something peculiar in the road and pranced his racehorse impatiently as Cole picked up his unconscious brother and put Bob’s feet in his own saddle stirrups, riding with his arms around him as Bob rolled sloppily in their run.

When they ascertained that they were not being followed, the six washed and drank in the Cannon River and sat with exhaustion in the haven of shade trees. Charlie Pitts was unscathed so he watered and soothed the horses. Jim Younger sliced his linen coat into strips and tied the bandages over his mouth. Frank James numbed his injury with a tourniquet that he released a little with each minute. Cole Younger fabricated a sling for Bob’s arm and a binding for his leg, then wadded a bandana inside the shoulder of his coat and beamed his near-bald head with soaked leaves. They weren’t penitent over what they’d attempted; their sorrow reached to the limits of their bodies and no further, all their anguish was in their skin. Jesse came back from his reconnaissance and slid down the river bank, threshing weeds aside. Their predicament made him pitiless and when he looked at Bob Younger’s sleep, he spat. He said, “I don’t have a clue about where we are. Could be Delaware for all I know.”

“Could be Sherwood Forest,” said Frank, who in normal circumstances was never droll. And then he said, “Maybe we ought to go.”

Cole threw a stick. He and Jesse hadn’t been on good terms for more than two years—they were always vying for management of the gang and Cole regarded Jesse as too headlong in attitude—so he generally ignored what Jesse said, giving his ear only to Frank. Cole said, “Bob’s too sick.”

“Then let’s leave him,” said Jesse.

Cole glared up at the man and said, “I’ve still got my gun, Jess.”

And Frank angrily said to his brother, “Go gather the animals.”

Jesse ascended through the green weeds and grass, yelling back, “Give up that one man and you just might save five!”

By that time, the bodies of Clell Miller and Bill Chadwell were seated on a parlor bench in Northfield where their shirts were removed and their wrists crossed on their laps and photographs were taken. Their cameos later centered a souvenir card: the catch of death made them look bewildered and frazzled. Soon thereafter the cadavers of McClellan Miller and William Chadwell were sent to the University of Michigan medical school for classroom dissection, and for more than fifty years the skeleton of Clell Miller stood forlornly in Dr. Henry A. Wheeler’s consultation room.

The James-Younger gang meandered the woodlands of Rice, Waseca, and Blue Earth counties for a week, sometimes recrossing the same ravine four times in their windings, or clocking a village so that stores and hovels shied from at noon were confronted a second time at two. With Bill Chadwell gone, they were gloomily lost in green woods or limited by foreign creeks and rivers that were too deep to ford. Even as late as four nights after they’d run out of Northfield, the bedraggled gang was spied by boys who lived no more than fifteen miles away. At a small hotel near Shieldsville a posse of ten from Faribault was eating supper when the gang rode up to water their horses and became perplexed by the great variety of shotguns and rifles angled against the hotel’s porch railing. Jesse crept up to the porch and pressed against the screen, peering in. The posse then stopped talking or chewing or lifting their spoons and looked at Jesse with apprehension or stupidity, perceiving at once who he was; and they sheepishly permitted him to jump down and sprint away with his gang before they got up from their suppers.

The rains came and the gang was in swamplands with nearly one thousand manhunters looking for them. They gave up their horses and walked on foot at night, sleeping during the day under tents made from sopping blankets and shrubs. They couldn’t hunt wild game so they chewed grass and wild mushrooms, growing weaker as the nights grew increasingly cold. Jesse’s stamina was extraordinary, however, and he couldn’t stand the recurring pauses and delays. He complained that they were procrastinating and that it was like trying to make a getaway while pulling a hospital along. He considered the Youngers, and especially Bob, as impediments to ever getting back to Missouri, and once, in mean temper, put a gun against Bob Younger’s skull and was going to pull the trigger when Cole lunged at him, and only Frank and Charlie Pitts together were able to wrestle him off.

It was then that the James brothers split from the Youngers and Charlie Pitts. Days after they parted company, Jesse’s predictions came true, for Sheriff Glispin and his posse surrounded the four in the Younger gang. They were slogging through the mires of the Watonwan River near Madelia, and a gunfight ensued. Charlie Pitts was instantly killed with a Minie ball that crashed through his chest at the collar. Bob Younger was shot in the right lung but survived, as did his brothers, although Cole was stricken with eleven gunshot injuries and a blackened eye that gloved the entire right side of his face, and Jim fell with five wounds that included a cartridge ball that crannied beneath his brain and another that so shattered his jaw he could never again chew food.

The Youngers were medicated at the Flanders House in Madelia and were viewed in the Faribault jail by Pinkerton detectives and newsmen and crowds of the inquisitive, for whom Cole sorrowed about his sins and cited scripture and broadcast his love for mankind and the Baptist church, even cunningly leaked a tear or two so that resentments might be lessened. At the Younger brothers’ trial each man acknowledged his crimes and his guilty remorse so that instead of execution the judge sentenced them to the state penitentiary at Stillwater, Minnesota, there to remain for life.

The James brothers’ tracks were lost outside of Sioux Falls in the Dakota Territory, where it seems they rustled two blind horses from a farmer and, having long since become peeved with each other, gladly separated. The next information about either man was in a letter sent by some chagrined Pinkerton operatives who had relaxed from their hunt for the Jameses, in order to dine at the Whaley House in Fulton, Missouri, and had invited to their table a man who had charmed them with wicked stories and then left a note under their hotel room door, educating them about the fact that he was Jesse James. It was the sort of bravura performance that had become typical of Jesse James in society: he would later palaver with detective Yankee Bligh in Louisville and make the same admission about his identity via a postcard that read. “You have seen Jesse James. Now you can go ahead and die.”

MRS. ZEE JAMES conceived a second time in 1877, within a few weeks of Annie, and the two women exhausted entire mornings reporting their sensations and cravings, but the James brothers rarely saw each other and if they met didn’t speak. Frank thought Jesse had overtaxed his mind and saw good evidence for that judgment, for Jesse had silenced himself around Zee, he ate alone on the back porch, he followed his shoes as he walked; he ignored his wife’s condition until the last months, then made her hide from public view.

He was one to read auguries in the snarled intestines of chickens, or the blow of cat hair released to the wind, and the omens since he arrived in Nashville had forecast three years of bad luck that moated and dungeoned him. And he saw verification of his forebodings in all he tried to do. He had invested in commodities and lost so much he’d been forced into weekend work hauling rubble and trash. He had sold corn and seen the proceeds thieved by a rich landowner named Johnson who had no inkling who J. D. Howard was and paid insufficient attention to his menacing letters. He had traveled to Chicago in order to assassinate Allan Pinkerton but never found an occasion that did not seem devious and dishonorable. (He wanted a duel at sunrise with flintlock pistols. But instead he was offered potshots as Pinkerton exited from buildings or cabs, or nasty incidents in restaurants while he dined with operatives and their ladies—blood would spray the waiter’s coat, Pinkerton would tow the tablecloth as he sank, screams would shatter the glassware.) So Jesse went dejectedly home while sleuths and local constabularies continued the hunt for the Jameses in four states.

He had headaches that were fierce as icepicks behind his eyes. The cottage was wreathed by high bushes and lowering trees so it was as gloomy as twilight through the afternoon, and Jesse would sit alone in that eerie calm like broken furniture surrendered to a black lagoon. He’d purchased a contraption for peeling apples that he would dismantle and oil and reassemble, but his rifles dulled with smut, his horses ganted in their barn stalls, he wore the same clothes for weeks. He was like a man in a wheelchair, a man enfeebled with a stroke; his words were slurred, he noticed events seconds after they occurred, his neck seemed too frail for his head and his eyes sank to consider his brittle fingernails. Then he would awake and he would be transformed, his movements were raced and his mind was electric and his comments were snide and sarcastic, so that whenever he left for his livestock auctions and farm sales and derbies or wherever it was he went, Zee was relieved to see him go and welcomed Dr. Vertrees as one would a rescuer.

Twin sons were born to Zee in February 1878, and she named them Gould and Montgomery after the two doctors who’d delivered and cared for them until they succumbed to the crib deaths that were common among infants in that era. About then Annie gave birth to a boy who was christened Robert Franklin James and Zee had the minor consolation of nursing him when Annie’s milk was insufficient. But Jesse’s grief was huge. He thought of himself as the cause of their miseries and Zee would awake at night to see him sitting on the edge of the mattress, his blue nightshirt rucked and screwed about him, a white buttock windowed by the gather at his waist, his papa’s pencil-marked Holy Bible open in his hands.

He began to call himself Dave, a nickname from childhood that Zee never really got accustomed to, and he began gathering in the cottage some rough guests from Missouri: Tucker Bassham, a man called Whiskeyhead Ryan, a good-looking horse thief named Dick Liddil, an ex-Confederate soldier named Jim Cummins, and Clell Miller’s brother Ed. Zee regarded them all unfavorably but gave Jesse no instructions about them for they seemed to gratify him in a way she could not, and she was pregnant again and wanted nothing more than an unchallenging life in Nashville, Tennessee.

She knew Frank James was getting along: his pedigreed hogs were awarded first prize for Poland Chinas at a county fair; when the crops were in he made cedar buckets for the Prewitt-Spurr Lumber Company; he was registered to vote and among his friends were the sheriff of Davidson County and a judge from the Eighth Circuit Court. But Jesse only raced horses—Roan Charger, Jim Malone, and one that especially pleased him, Skyrocket—and when she brought up the notion of a farm, Jesse agreed with her but thought it ought to be in the New Mexico Territory, and in July 1879 journeyed west to Santa Fe and the Las Vegas hot springs, staying there with a boyhood friend named Scott Moore so that Zee gave birth to their daughter, Mary, in a room at Frank and Annie’s house, and the child was a month old before her father ever saw her.

Annie partially convinced Zee that Jesse was a preposterous, irresponsible man, but America seemed spellbound by him. Correspondents sought to locate him, mysteries about the James brothers were considered in editorials, reports of their robberies seemed to be such a national addiction that nickel books were being published in order to offer more imaginative adventures. Insofar as it wasn’t them that the James gang robbed, the public seemed to wish Jesse a prolonged life and great prosperity. He was their champion and their example, the apple of their eyes; at times it even seemed to Zee that she wasn’t Jesse’s only wife, that America had married him too. And it seemed a joy to many of them when a reinvigorated James gang—without the man’s more prudential older brother—robbed the Chicago and Alton Railroad at Glendale, Missouri, in October 1879.

Some men with six-guns pushed the checker players at Joe Molt’s corner store fifty yards to the Glendale depot, where the station attendant ate the barrel of Jesse’s revolver until he agreed to whatever the outlaw commanded. Jesse then wrecked the telegraph apparatus with a crowbar (Tucker Bassham thought it was only a sewing machine) and the red flag was raised next to the railroad tracks in order to notify the engineer that passengers wanted on. After Dick Liddil climbed aboard the locomotive, Ed Miller sledged in the express car door, and currencies, bonds, and securities were swept into a meal sack and divvied six miles out of town, each in the company receiving $1,025, more than most of them could make in a year. The engineer told newspaper correspondents that the captain of the group had come up to him prior to riding off and had said, “I didn’t get your name, but mine is Jesse James.”

His pretext was that setting up a farm required a great deal of money, and he made an effort to persuade Frank to join him when again the James gang was plundering, but Frank was settled and intransigent and in the course of one of their increasingly common arguments Frank smashed a beer bottle against the Colt that Jesse had pulled in exasperation.

So Frank was again not with the James gang when, in November, they moved against the Empire City Bank. It appeared, however, that someone had spoken of their intentions, for the gang was forestalled by a preliminary reconnaissance that showed more than a dozen townsmen inside, each with more pistols and shotguns than he could possibly use. The gang therefore fragmented, with most of them returning to their chores as if they’d merely been on a club excursion, but Jesse and Whiskeyhead Ryan met again in September 1880 to rob the Mammoth Cave sightseers’ stage in Kentucky. Five men and Judge Rutherford Rountree and his daughter, Lizzie, were ordered out of the stagecoach at gunpoint and gave up $803 and jewelry, including a diamond ring that Jesse would later slip on his wife’s finger, and a gold watch that was a gift to the judge from the governor of Kentucky and was found two years later among the belongings of Mr. Thomas Howard of St. Joseph, Missouri. Ryan sipped from a pint bottle of whiskey during the presentation, and, as Jesse jumped onto his horse, complimented the passengers for their graciousness, drinking to their continued well-being. Judge Rountree would later recognize T. J. Hunt as one of the culprits and the poor man would be imprisoned for eighteen months before the judge’s mistake was repaired.

Jesse displayed the ring, the gold watch, and the money to Frank James, and then made a practice of sashaying by his older brother’s workplace in his gentleman’s clothes. The temptation of an easier income at last became too persuasive and Frank joined Jesse and Whiskeyhead Ryan when they stopped a government paymaster on the road to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in March 1881, splitting a five-thousand-dollar payroll three ways.

It was Frank’s ill luck then that he was immediately suspected of participation in the Muscle Shoals holdup, the only robbery he’d committed since Northfield in 1876, and it was only the compelling polemics of his lawyer, Raymond B. Sloan, that kept him out of jail. Then, on March 26th, Whiskeyhead Ryan gripped a mahogany bar in a grocery store saloon and swallowed a shot glass of sour mash after each of twelve cove oysters. He got surly and then he got arrested and in his buckskin vest was found more gold than a man of his capabilities ought to have owned. Descriptions of him were telegraphed to police departments around the country and Kansas City responded with a wire petitioning the state of Tennessee to extradite William Ryan to the state of Missouri.

Overnight the B. J. Woodson and J. D. Howard families vanished from Nashville, and by the summer of 1881, Zee was again in Kansas City and mothering a six-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter in a bungalow on Woodland Avenue. Jesse was calling himself J. T. Jackson in remembrance of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, the Confederate general, and Zee was again feeling dwarfed by her husband, subsidiary to him. It seemed they moved and lived and concealed themselves according to his will, and she dwindled under him like a noon shadow, she was no more than an unnoticed corner of the rooms he filled. She could imagine a life without Jesse but knew it would be without consequence or surprise, nothing would be in jeopardy, and she would die a completely ordinary woman, one as insipid and colorless as the girl who stitched initials into handkerchiefs and read Robert Browning by candlelight. Much later Frank Triple would write that Jesse “married a woman, who while amiable, good, and true to him in every sense of the word, yet possessed no will of her own, and whose mind, weak, plastic, and yielding, took form from, rather than shaped that of her husband. To such a mind as this, no matter how good, no strong effort is a possibility, and it will sooner drift into the channels of excuse and justification than to make a bold, strong stand against wrong.” Zee could only agree.

ON THE NIGHT of July 14th, Sheriff Pat Garrett stole into a sleeping room on Pete Maxwell’s ranch in the New Mexico Territory and there shot and killed the twenty-one-year-old outlaw who was known as Billy the Kid.

And on July 15th, two days before Mary James’s second birthday, two wary men of unequal heights and qualities bought tickets for a Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific sleeper to Des Moines, Iowa. They would not stay on the train long enough to conclude the journey. They were overdressed, as was common then, even in a sultry July: each wore a gentleman’s vest and suit cut in the English style, a black slouch hat, calf-high Wellington boots, and an open white linen duster of the sort that cattlemen used to keep cow grime off their pants legs and to protect against railroad soot and sparks. It was not immediately evident that they were carrying heavy Navy Colt revolvers or that the jaunty sport of the two had shoe-dyed his spruced hair and beard.

They lodged themselves magisterially in an opulent, chandeliered drawing room that was called a palace car. Shades were still strapped down to the sills to keep out the pernicious late afternoon sun and Jesse pushed them aside to peer out at the porters and railway policemen. And when they jolted into motion, Jesse moseyed from one coach to the next, stooping to look at the countryside, tipping his hat to the more antique women, pivoting only slightly away if ever a railroad employee approached.

He interrupted his partner’s nap at six to suggest they visit the dining car, where some passengers would later recall their speaking about the robbery of the Davis and Sexton Bank at Riverton, Iowa, four days earlier, a holdup then accredited to the James gang, but which the two men were positive was actually accomplished by Poke Wells and his gang.

The man eating across from Jesse was Ed Miller, the rugged, unintelligent younger brother of the late Clell Miller, and a good friend of Charley Ford, whom he’d introduced to Jesse at a poker game in 1879 and whom he’d arranged to make part of the James gang of late. Ed Miller looked much like Clell—brown eyes and waxy brown hair the color of coffee beans, and a smug, vulgar, open-jawed face that seemed rigid enough to barge through wooden doors. He sank into the dining car chair as if he were delighting in a too-occasional, good hot soak and Jesse guided a match beneath his cigar until a duplicate flame licked up from the tobacco. They talked about the new governor, Thomas T. Crittenden, a Democrat and a onetime Union colonel who’d been financed by the railway companies in his 1880 campaign. His inaugural address-in January pledged the government to the job of ridding Missouri of the James gang, and Jesse said he was going to take measures to guarantee his men’s allegiance. He whispered, “You won’t none of you get away with bargaining or making exchanges. I’ve got a wife and two children I’ve gotta look out for.”

“You can trust me,” said Miller.

Jesse rocked back in his dining car chair, his fingers lacing his hair like a shoe, his green cigar angled up, and he gave himself over to a long thought before saying, “I know I can, Ed.”

Then a middle-aged conductor in a blue suit and cap tapped the dining car table with a finger as he politely carped that cigars could only be enjoyed in the smoking car. Jesse reacted genially, saying that was exactly where they were going.

Soon after 9 p.m. on the milk-stop train, they were in Cameron, thirty-five miles east of St. Joseph, and stepping up into the smoking car were two glum, sweating men in long wool coats who—though they’d been chatting together on the depot platform—diverged once they were in the smoker, the younger sitting forward, the larger man sitting just ahead of Jesse James and Ed Miller. The man sitting forward was Robert Woodson Hite, the Kentucky cousin of the Jameses, and the man closer to Jesse was his brother, Frank, his sandy sideburns shoe-dyed black and lifts in his riding boots giving him two inches in height. He looked just once at Jesse, tilting up his exaggerated nose, and then he lighted a cigarette and looked out at the Cameron buildings that were slowly gliding away.

They were going eleven miles north to Winston. A good many yards beyond that was a stone trestle that bridged Little Dog Creek and there Dick Liddil, Charley Ford, and Wood’s brother, Clarence Hite, were tying seven horses in a copse of trees. They then trudged back along the roadbed with Dick assigning jobs to his more agitated partners. They could hear crickets and frogs in the weeds and as they gained the Winston depot they could hear singing in the Presbyterian church.

Already on the depot platform were Mr. A. McMillan, a masonry contractor, and a crew of four that included his two sons. They were going home to Iowa that Friday night and were joshing and goosing each other; the James gang avoided giving the crew their faces when they achieved the platform, and the three were straggled along it when the locomotive’s headlight yellowed their skin. McMillan and the four got on, but the brooding gang lingered. Conductor Westfall slanted out from the smoking car, his left arm hooked in the grab rail, and hollered, “All aboard!”

Dick Liddil called out that they were only waiting for somebody, and when the conductor swung back inside they plunged through engine boiler steam to jump up onto the front and rear porches of the U.S. Express Company car, just behind the coal tender.

Conductor Westfall moved down the smoking car, gripping seats to steady himself when the rolling stock jerked forward, spraddling his legs out like a man on a horse when he stopped to punch a spade design into a passenger’s ticket. He didn’t see the guns in Frank’s hands, didn’t see Ed Miller’s glare.

They’d gone only forty yards and Westfall was checking a sleeping man’s ticket when Frank pushed a blue mask over his nose and pulled himself up, yelling, “Stay in your seats! Don’t move!” And when a man laughed at the joke of that James boys act, Frank fired his guns every whichway, into the floor, the gas lamps, the ceiling, making ears ring and making the forty passengers sink down beneath their crossed arms. Westfall straightened at the gun noise and edged just enough into it that he caught a shot between two ribs. His right hand went to the injury and he groaned and then staggered out of the smoking car as Ed Miller and Wood Hite joined in the gunfire; but Jesse James gave Westfall only the chance to get out the car door before his unaccidental gunshot killed the man and Westfall teetered off his legs, banging down the iron stairs and sliding off the train onto the roadbed.

Frank McMillan and John Penn were standing outside the smoking car in the July night when the gun noise began. They crouched down and a lead ball crashed through an overhead window, spiderwebbing the glass, and John Penn jacked himself up to peek inside and drop down again. McMillan asked, “Who is it?” and Penn said, “I can’t tell,” and Frank McMillan was craning his neck to look inside for himself when a lead ball punched into his forehead above his right eye, stopping his life instantly. His body collapsed just as the air brakes screeched and McMillan too slipped off the slackening train.

Jesse, Wood Hite, and Ed Miller were by then running forward through gunsmoke to get into the express company car, and Dick Liddil and Clarence Hite were scuttling over a coal pile to the locomotive in order to guarantee that it wouldn’t go further than their horses. But a crewman had switched on the automatic air brakes, which meant Dick had to command the engineer to bring the train gradually along until it was over Little Dog Creek.

Charley Ford was standing by the baggage agent’s passageway with a disguise on, a gun cocked near his ear, but he gave way to Jesse, who rammed against the wooden door as if his bones were made out of timber, slamming the door into a packing case. He slapped aside the agent, Frank Stamper, and then rammed against an interior door as Charles Murray, the express messenger, was jarring an outside door shut. Ed Miller pushed Stamper into a wall and pressed a revolver into the agent’s cheek, saying, “You get out of here!” Stamper stepped outside and looked at the long gray beard hooked over Charley Ford’s ears, and Frank James, who was by then walking along on the ground, gripped the baggage agent by the leg and jerked him into a pratfall. “Keep your seat,” Frank said.

Jesse scared Murray into yielding the key to the express company safe by saying one man was already killed so they had nothing to lose by killing him too. The only light in the express section was a coal-oil lantern that was hanging from a finger hook and though Jesse was thorough in gathering over three thousand dollars into a grain sack, he missed a good deal more in gold bullion and grieved about it for a week.

He then said to Murray, “Get down on your knees.”

The messenger glowered. “Why?”

“You oughta pray; I’m going to kill you.”

“Hey?” Miller called.

“Get down!” Jesse said.

Murray withdrew a little and replied, “You’ll have to make me.”

“All right,” Jesse said, and surprised him by socking his pistol into the man’s skull so that Murray dropped like emptied clothes. Jesse looked abjectly at the man he’d so easily rendered unconscious and then he cocked his pistol to put it against Murray’s head.

Ed Miller cried, “Don’t shoot him!”

And Jesse grinned and uncocked his pistol and then picked up the grain sack. He said, “Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do,” and then jumped down from the express car.

And then the robbery was over. The James gang sprang down to the ground and down through the weeds and ran into the night, cutting their reins instead of untying them and then riding south through the woods.

CHICAGO NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS—who were still smarting over the loss of immigrants to St. Louis and Kansas City—made a great deal of the Winston train robbery, alleging that “in no State but Missouri would the James brothers be tolerated for twelve years.” Missouri was being called “The Robber State” and “The Outlaw’s Paradise,” and yet the governor had the authority to offer only three hundred dollars for capturing the outlaw. Governor Crittenden would later write: “Concluding that the James gang pursued its lawless course for the money in it, oftentimes acquiring large sums, I determined to offer a reward of $50,000; so much for each capture and conviction, which in my opinion would be a temptation to some one or more of the gang to ‘peach’ or divulge on their associates in crime. As money was their object in the first place in their lawless pursuit, I believed an offer of a large sum as a reward would eventually reach those who had become tired of the life, and more tired of being led on in blood and crime by a desperate leader.”

He arranged a meeting with the general managers of the railroads and express companies operating in Missouri and persuaded them to contribute to a common fund from which the governor could offer rewards of five thousand dollars for the arrest and conviction of each person participating in the robberies at Glendale and Winston, with a further five thousand going to anyone who could bring in Frank or Jesse James.

Jesse organized the September 7th robbery of the Chicago and Alton Railroad at Blue Cut to “spit in the governor’s eye,” and again the James gang got away with it, and Jesse brought Frank and Clarence Hite and two Ray County boys named Ford to the bungalow in Kansas City. And it seemed to Zee it could go on and on like that, with Jesse going off for days and weeks and then coming back with the jolly good cheer of a man given money and youth. It upset her but she didn’t complain; instead she looked for messages in the green tea leaves and made herself giggle when that seemed the right thing and then she stayed with her knitting like an indulgent mother until Jesse limped into the room and whispered, “You go to sleep.”

Then she was awake again and the tattercrossed quilt was under her chin and the grandfather clock had chimed three. She closed a robe around herself and huddled a little at the bedroom door and saw Jesse in a ladder chair next to the side window. He sucked on a lump of chewing tobacco and seemed to contemplate the moon. Raindrops tracked reeds on the misted glass and wind disarranged the trees. His night thoughts seemed to walk the room. His eyes were on the street. A cocked revolver was across his knee but he lent it no more notice than a smoker would a cigarette.

Zee watched Jesse sit there for several minutes and didn’t say a word, and then she felt someone watching her and saw in a corner of the room the boy who called himself Bob Ford. He looked at her spitefully, and then he receded into darkness and she heard the screen door latch shut.