[Jesse James] laughed and remarked that he might have to go under eventually, but before he did he would shake up the country. — Robert Ford, St. Louis Republican, April 7, 1882
I took a drive to Centralia over the Memorial Day weekend. I-70 was throttled with traffic, so I ventured north on one of the alphabet roads to wind my way to the small rural town north of the Missouri River. The fields were tall with spring grass, and livestock grazed placidly. In front of small homes stood hand-printed signs announcing fresh eggs and vegetables, home-cured bacon and sausage for sale.
From Callaway County westward, to Clay County, at the Kansas border—where Jesse James is buried—is the region known historically as “Little Dixie.” During the Civil War, “Bloody” Bill Anderson’s guerrilla band roamed this area, which had the largest slave population in Missouri. After the war, it was Jesse James’ territory, north of the river. Former Confederates who were sympathetic to him gave him aid. Others remained silent and lived in fear.
Centralia’s city square is empty on this Saturday afternoon—but a reference map shows where to find the site of the Centralia Massacre.
That day, September 27, 1864, Jesse and Frank James rode with a party of 80 guerrillas led by Anderson into Centralia. In short order they set about plundering the pro-Union town—breaking into homes and demanding money, helping themselves to food and whiskey—until a train entered the railroad station.
Inside were 23 Union soldiers returning to their homes in Missouri and Iowa, on furlough after participating in Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s campaign through Tennessee and Georgia. They were unarmed.
In short order, by Anderson’s command, they were executed in cold blood.
A battalion of the 39th Missouri Infantry entered Centralia not long after the murders and took up pursuit. South of town, Anderson’s guerrillas got word of the approaching force and set up an ambush. No match for the veteran guerrillas, the green volunteers were annihilated.
That evening, Anderson’s crew mutilated the bodies of the Union dead.
Today, it’s easy to miss that battlefield, marked only by a small bronze plaque on a dirt road. It is a quiet and serene patch of ground, the blood of that day long ago become part of the soil, the grass growing, the seeds of the cottonwoods spinning together along the roadside.
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Near Gray Summit, a fading billboard advertises Meramec Caverns. Its depiction of the James Gang looks more like a motley tribe of hooligans than romantic desperados. A bronze sculpture of Jesse and Frank James stands lookout at the entrance of the caverns, where, according to the Meramec Caverns website, “it afforded a complete hideout for men and horses after train and bank robberies.” Such claims are dubious. Jesse James had about as much need of a cave hideout as Tony Soprano.
At the I-44 exit to the caverns, in Stanton, Mo., the Jesse James Wax Museum stands, a curious remnant of Route 66 Americana. The small frame house contains the usual souvenirs—T-shirts, shot glasses, coffee
cups—with various depictions of Missouri’s most notorious native son.
Six dollars buys entrance to the wax museum, with its pitiful series of tableaux depicting Jesse at war, Jesse holding up the Clay County Bank and Jesse resurrected. The “revelation” to be found here is that Jesse James was not assassinated by the coward Robert Ford in St. Joseph, Mo., on April 3, 1882. The killing was a ruse, and, some 70 years later, in Lawton, Okla., Jesse made himself known to the world again. He was brought to Stanton by Rudy Turilli, who founded the Meramec Caverns tourist site. Faded clippings on display at the museum show that the news of a 100-year-old Jesse James attracted a fair amount of media attention over the years, the way Sasquatch, crop circles and Elvis
sightings do.
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This month, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is scheduled for release, with Brad Pitt in the role of the enigmatic outlaw. In the promotional trailer, Pitt emerges out of a cloud of steam from a stalled train. He glowers menacingly. He stands, beautiful as only Brad Pitt can be, with a prairie sunset behind him. Casey Affleck, playing Robert Ford, speaks, his voice heavy with a sense of awe: “Jesse James was bigger than you can imagine.” The overall effect is haunting, rhapsodic and dreamy. The cast includes Sam Shepard as Frank James and Mary-Louise Parker as Jesse’s wife, Zee. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Ron Hansen. A gifted prose stylist, Hansen combines image, language and a sure sense of timing to move his narrative along. His Jesse James is calculating and cruel yet appealing in the way such menacing figures often are. You understand why the teenage Robert Ford is drawn to him, wants to become him—and, inevitably, betrays him. Ford wants to shake up the country, too.
Jesse James has been portrayed in film and television by Tyrone Power, Robert Wagner, Robert Duvall, James Dean, Roy Rogers, Macdonald Carey, James Coburn, Colin Farrell, Kris Kristofferson, Rob Lowe, Audie Murphy, Lee Van Cleef and at least a hundred others. The standard story is one of the proud victim who goes out to avenge the wrongs done against him, his family and other innocents. James’ cinematic image may not be as quaint as wax, but it’s as flatly drawn as a cartoon.
If the legend of Jesse James persists, it follows a template created during his life by John Newman Edwards, a newspaperman who wrote for what was then the St. Louis Dispatch. In postwar Missouri, Edwards, who had been a Confederate during the war, found James the ideal symbol of the anti-Republican cause. (At that time the Republicans were the party of Lincoln and Grant, of Reconstruction and the enforcement of civil rights for recently emancipated African Americans.) In his most famous editorial, “The Chivalry of Crime,” Edwards presented James and his gang as figures to be revered, Confederate victims and martyrs; he even likens them to medieval knights. Edwards wrote: “A feat of stupendous nerve and fearlessness that makes one’s hair rise to think of it, with a condiment of crime to season it, becomes chivalric; poetic; superb.”
Enter Roy Rogers, knight errant.
But for the romantic outlaw to retain our sympathies, significant erasure is required. In historian T.J. Stiles’ illuminating biography Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, the legend recedes and the face of the killer fills the foreground. Stiles’ reassessment casts James as a political terrorist—one whose bank and train robberies were performed as political acts promoting the cause of the vanquished Confederacy and the removal of federal occupation forces from the former slave states. Jesse James set out to shake up the country. The Confederate guerrilla–turned–bank robber selected banks controlled by Republican leaders. His men wore Klan hoods as they held up trains. A slave owner, he and his family kept their servants in perpetual bondage long after the Civil War. Jesse’s goal was to redirect Missouri and the nation toward extremism, and he succeeded: Reconstruction was abandoned and, with it, the cause for civil rights. Decades of segregation, racial discrimination and lynching all belong to James’ political legacy.
Jesse James began his terrorist education as a member of Anderson’s “death squads,” as Stiles labels the Missouri bushwhackers. He describes the aftermath of the Centralia Massacre: “The rebels walked among the dead, crushing faces with rifle butts and shoving bayonets through the bodies, pinning them to the ground. Frank James bent down to loot one of the corpses, pulling free a sturdy leather belt. Others slid knives out of their sheaths and knelt down to work. One by one, they cut 17 scalps loose, then carefully tied them to their saddles and bridles. At least one guerrilla carved the nose off a victim. Others sliced off ears—or sawed off heads and switched their bodies. Someone pulled the trousers off one corpse, cut off the penis and shoved it in the dead man’s mouth.
“In this blood-drunk crew, of course, stood Jesse James.”
Rarely, if ever, is that Jesse seen: where he stood, what he stood for.
