And the No-Dang-Good Jesse James Revue finishes up with today’s sights including a bank he held up and a house where straightening a picture turned out to be the last thing he ever did.

Woke up: at the same time as always. Blast.
Breakfast: A couple plums and Sugar Frosted Flakes. Now we’re talking. I haven’t had this stuff in years. And really, as good as it was, I probably won’t have it for a couple more years. Starting the day off immediately with sugar just turns out to be a mistake for me. I’ll have to plan my next fix or else wonder why I feel like taking a nap in an hour.
E-mail: Looked in on my e-mail and had to (a) delete a mess of stupid spam and (b) do some actual work. Rats! Don’t you hate that being a grown-up means you can’t totally play hookey anymore?

Bank prep
So I’m off to the Jesse James Bank Museum. Well, I’ll eliminate some of the blogging follow-up by spelling out what little I know now:

February 13, 1866 — Frank James, Cole and Jim Younger and nine more members of the gang robbed the Clay County Savings Bank in Liberty, Missouri of $62,000. Upon their retreat from the bank a 17 year-old boy was killed. This was the first robbery of the gang and the first daytime robbery of any U.S. bank during peacetime.

And this started the whole “legend” thing happening. Up till then, there probably wasn’t anything special — just another angry young man who had done some things worth bragging about (and some not worth telling anyone) in the war. Jesse tried to surrender in Lexington in May of 1865, but was shot in the chest. He managed to survive — the whole family seems really adept at surviving, if nothing else — but probably didn’t have any skills that didn’t involve shooting and taking chances.

The other questions I have going into this. They may or may not get answered:

• What about the women in his life? His mother Zerelda had to have been one tough cookie. She stood nearly 6′ tall in a day when the average man was only 5′5″ high, and she lived to be 86 in spite of having eight kids, running a farm and losing half an arm (and a son) in an unfortunate accident with Pinkerton agents. But what was she, a Ma Barker type or something? Didn’t she ever think of setting that boy down and saying, “Now Jesse, there’s not really a lot of future in robbing banks and trains”?

  And what about his wife Zerelda? (No, that’s not a typo. His wife had the same name as his mother. That’s not a Freudian thing, it’s a hillbilly thing. His wife was his first cousin. They called her Zee to avoid confusion.) He married her in 1874 and it seems like he and his gang robbed a stagecoach while they were honeymooning in Texas. Oooo, romantic highwayman — whatever. But wouldn’t that stuff start to get a little old? By the time she’d had two kids, wouldn’t she want to have a long talk about some nice civil service job where a person wouldn’t be pursued by posses?

• What did James think of it? — The glory days when he felt like he was on a crusade against the Yankees led to the inglorious days of taking the money that other people had earned, shooting unarmed men during peacetime and then getting written up in the paper by a sycophant with an overactive imagination — didn’t he ever just want out?

  Not that I’m likely to get a handle on that one at all. It seems like everyone was interested in trying to get inside his head. With all the overblown “Robin Hood” stuff, it looks like people wanted to make something out of him that he never was. What he actually was may have died with him.

  There is some relevance in our current events. Angry young men lacking in any civilized restraint who are using a crusade to pursue their own thuggery? Sounds too familiar. Different times and different culture, to be sure. But is there anything that starts to make them change from the inside?

Well, gotta go.

After the Jesse James Bank Museum
Lunch: Campbell’s Golden Butternut Squash Soup; Rold Gold pretzels; king size PayDay. Does everybody get it? Get the bank robbery tie-in? Okay, everybody gets it. So …

I could have called this portion of our program “Sometimes You Can’t Even Believe the Internet.” About the only thing that was right was that the Clay County Savings Bank in Liberty was robbed. But Jesse wasn’t there. He was still recuperating from the gunshot wound he’d gotten in Lexington, though it’s likely that the plan was his.

But then, it seems like there are quite a few reasons that the truth has been hard to come by. Michelle, the tour guide, mentioned that originally it didn’t have to do with some misplaced hero worship or anything. It was probably just fear. People didn’t say what they knew because they didn’t want to get gunned down.

Oh. I didn’t think of that.

Other points of interest:

• This wasn’t just the first peacetime bank robbery in broad daylight — it was the first successful bank robbery, period. Kind of hard to believe that no one ever thought of it before, but apparently those were better times. “So why did they have a vault?” I asked. Michelle looked over at it. “That would be to keep your money safe from fire.”
• Since there was no such thing as fiduciary insurance in those days, the bank had to call in all its loans just to try to pay its own debts. Many homes and farms were foreclosed on, and of course, anyone who had money in the bank was suddenly flat broke. So much for the whole Robin Hood thing.
• No one was ever charged for this crime and no one ever confessed, so there’s really no way of knowing what happened to the money. But assuming they split the $62,000 in equal shares, each man would get about $5,000 in a day when an upper middle class annual income was $300.
• Apparently, I was wrong about James as a hard-living, hard-drinkin’ kinda guy. Michelle said that he was devoutly religious and didn’t habitually swear, drink, smoke or gamble. Oops — and me with Whiskey Chicken still on my breath. The shame of it!

As I was leaving, we talked a little about the legend of Jesse James and how it got perpetuated. “You have to understand,” she said. “There are some people — mostly older generation — who think that the movie with Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power is gospel truth. You can’t tell them that that’s not the way it happened.”

“Is there one you like for accuracy?” I asked.

“Hmm. I’d say ‘Long Riders.’ They got a lot of brothers to play brothers in the movie — Dennis and Randy Quaid, James and Stacy Keach — and so the casting is just great. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a snore.”

I was surprised she’d say that. “Oh, really?”

“Well yeah,” she said. “Y’know, because it’s so accurate.”

There you go. That’s the problem with blaming Hollywood. They may not know the truth, but they know what makes money.

Okay, off to See The Bullet Hole.

Beverage: Sioux City Sarsapirilla
Sound Track: “Peter Gunn Theme” by the Art of Noise; “No One Lives Forever” by Oingo Boingo.

The James Home, St. Joseph, MO
The house where Jesse was shot is a teensy little thing, of the type that everybody used to be fine with before we’d discovered great rooms and vaulted ceilings. It was moved a couple blocks from its original location so that it could be a more accessible tourist attraction, and it looks puny and out of place where it is now. A sign on the outside saying “The Jesse James Home. SEE THE BULLET HOLE,” kind of completes the picture of seedy ghoulishness.

April 3, 1882 — Bob Ford with his brother Charles enter Jesse’s home at about 8:27am. When Jesse turns to straighten a picture on the wall, Bob shoots him just below the right ear, killing him instantly. His body hit the wall then fell to the floor lying on his back. Within no time at all word quickly spread throughout the town that Jesse James had just been assassinated.

The “bullet hole” has been picked at by so many macabre souvenir-hunters over the years that that whole area of the wall is now behind a piece of plastic. The silly thing about it is that in spite of the sign in front, it’s not even a bullet hole. In 1995, James was exhumed so that DNA tests could prove once and for all that he was Jesse James. Besides proving that he was, they also found that there was also no exit wound. No exit wound, no bullet hole in the wall. (Are you with me, faithful CSI watchers?) So everyone’s been mightily picking at a nailhole or something.

Just another pathetic note in a sad and bizarre finish. I feel like I’m just tired of the whole story from beginning to end. How in the world someone like this gets admired and treated like a hero is beyond me.

But then I might just be a bitter woman. I did get the answer to question number three. Was James ready to turn over a new leaf?

Nope. The creep was planning a bank robbery in nearby Platte City and talked with his gang of cutting a bank teller’s throat even though he didn’t have to. This from the the guy who died straightening a picture that said “God bless this house.”

Robert Ford tells a story to the effect that last Sunday, James was lying on the bed at this house while his [soon-to-be] slayer was reading to him an account of the late exploits of the reputed James gang. In which was predicted the early capture of Jesse. The latter laughed and remarked that he might have to go under eventually, but before he did he would shake up the country once or twice more.

Shake up the country? Boy, what an egotist! This story comes from the best find out of this last leg of the JJ Revue — a copy of the St. Joseph Gazette that was published the day after the shooting. Only four pages long, it carries entire testimonies from the coroner’s inquest as well as interviews and stories circling around the family and the local response to the news of the shooting.

“Jesse, by Jehovah.”
Not sure that religious Jesse would have cared for that headline, but apparently everyone in town was just amazed that they had had a famous outlaw in their midst.

The St. Jo Gazette also filled me in about Jesse’s girls (Greg told me I had to get that pun in there somewhere) — Zee and Zerelda. Well, the paper’s extensive coverage gives me enough to answer my questions about them too, but I’m kind of sorry I asked. Consider this interview with Zee, done in a question and answer format with the reporter:

“Is it true that Sheppard was ever wounded in an encounter with your husband?”
“No, that is not true. Many deeds and robberies have been charged to Jesse which he is as innocent of as a child. …

“Has he always been kind to you?”
“He always treated all with kindness … He only spoke bitterly against traitors. He never would hurt a man except in self defense — not even if he suspected him. They tell some hard things on him, but a better man never lived.”
“Did you ever advise him to abandon his career?”
“I often talked with him.”
“What did he say?”
“He said nothing. He was always kind to me and the children. I’ll go down to my grave before I’ll tell what I know against him, even if he is dead. … I denied that it was Jesse and tried to shield them all I could. There is no justice if they are not punished. they ought to be punished as severly as Guiteau, and more, because they are traitors.”

Yeech! Do you get an impression of a sort of demon-possessed Tupperware lady? Same old pattern we see all the time on the news. My man, my child is innocent no matter how many lives he’s taken, but anyone that causes him grief needs to be flayed alive because they’re pure evil. Think I’m exaggerating? Get a load of this underplayed exchange:

Mrs. James is a middle-aged lady apparently of a quiet, retiring disposition and a kindly voice. She was anxious to be left alone with the boys [Charles and Bob Ford] “only for a minute,” but Marshal Craig evidently suspected that her wish was prompted by a desire to wreak vengeance upon her husband’s slayer, and kindly but determinedly denied her request.

But Zerelda the Widow is just the warm-up round for Zerelda the Mother. Here how mom came off at the coroner’s inquest:

She said she had been cruelly wronged. Her children were killed and her home desolated. “Look at this,” said she, pointing to the stump of her right arm. She then in substance declared that the Fords had murdered her son for the reward, …
“Where are the men who killed him?”
Marshal — “In the jail.”
Mrs. Samuels — “Can I see them?”
Marshal — “Well, no; not now, Mrs. Samuels.”
Mrs. Samuels — “Oh! I want to see the man that killed my child.”

And in case you think that’s just a mother’s grief talking, here’s another of those telling little moments, this time recounted by the reporter as Zerelda and Zee packed things up at the house:

As other objects were being packed, she would break forth into bitter remarks concerning “the traitors,” as she called them and adjured her audience with dramatic emphasis never to turn betrayer.

So you’re packing up your belongings after your son who killed 17 people was killed, and you want to make sure that his son knows that all that matters is keeping some twisted tribal code of loyalty. So … no. No guilt at what kind of son she raised, and no sense of justice that the killer was killed.

So my work’s just about done here, right? The only other piece of information seems to come from Jesse himself. One picture at the house had a reproduction of some writing done in a scrawling hand. The docent at the museum didn’t know anything about it.

I was someone fighting a cause.
I was outlawed.
No one but God knows my heart.
– Jesse W. James

Gotta love the passive tense there — “I was outlawed.” And I could really grow to dislike the word ’cause.’ By the way, here’s a quote from St. Tikhon of Zadonsk I came across. I never could find a smooth way to transition to it, but it seems like a fitting last word:

Hate is bitter both to the hateful and to others. Love is sweet to both the lover and the beloved. Hate devours and binds the heart. Love looses and broadens the heart. Hate kills; love gives life. …Hate is hard and cruel. Love is soft and tender.

So what have we learned?
Well, I’d love to wrap everything up in a big ribbon, but I can’t. My last movie choice is probably one that hasn’t come out yet. There’s a movie about the end of Jesse James’ life arriving soon called “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” Good luck to them in trying to present everything that’s wrong with these events and still somehow make a good story of it. Since the truth about the guy is such a vaporous thing, I suppose they’re free to fabricate and lie as much as anyone else. Heck, the whole James family lived on lies. There’s a little justice in other people doing their share now.

As for my nonsense, I’m glad to say I’m sick of all the junk food and the long hours pursuing silliness when honest people are working. I didn’t hurt anybody or anything, but that’s sort of not the point. You don’t want to adopt a lot of pietistic posturing, and you certainly don’t want to lose perspective — even this fleeting look into an outlaw’s life should tell me that. But I suppose that’s why I got interested in his women. In their own way, they made it happen as well. It’s not always easy to notice when you’re doing the wrong thing. If you’re helping bad things to happen, that can still be the point at which you’re extending hell onto the earth.

On a more practical note, I certainly will consider some modifications to the roadtrip idea. It turns out to be exhausting. Heck, I haven’t gotten to bed before 2am since Wednesday — what kind of self-indulgence is that? I probably could use to be more organized. Big surprise there.

Still … pretty fun overall. It had some surprises and no small amount of the kind of exploration that can be the most invigorating part of a trip. But for now, I’m tired. The dog’s tired. I’m not going to be at all sorry to go back to work tomorrow.

No, really.