The end is near for the illustrious Jesse James

To the 21st century person, age 34 is still incredibly young, but in the 1880s, it was already middle-aged. For Jesse James, after living over half his life on the run, suffering numerous shots, one that was near-fatal, and years of living with a lead ball in his right lung – he felt older than his years.

I can imagine Jesse sitting on the porch of the little house in St. Joseph, Missouri, in early spring 1882, atop a small hill – the sounds of his children, Jesse Jr., and Mary playing and listening to his wife, Zee, humming in the kitchen as she began cooking dinner. He may have sat back in his rocking chair quite satisfied ... or contemplated that the peaceful scene should be an every day occurrence. But that would be impossible, for he wasn't really Mr. Howard, he was Jesse James – feared outlaw and killer and wanted by half a dozen states, sheriff's, deputies, politicians, railroad barons and Pinkerton's men.

He could never run away from the truth.

The law was closing in and he could feel it to his very core.

Jesse didn't want to go down in a gunfight, he didn't want to be captured and lynched. He wanted to go down in a blaze of glory – somehow in a manner that would leave him remembered as a martyr.

Jesse's last few months on this earth would be to move toward that end. And succeed he did.

As Jesse aged, his beliefs and obsessions became even more bizarre. By the time he was living in St. Joseph, he believed in out of the body experiences, sorcery, precognition, eating grass when sick and, in contrast, he would flip through the worn pages of his late father's Bible and read whatever verses he would land upon – pondering their meaning and how they applied to him.

If anyone failed to grow up and mature, it was Jesse James. Today we would call it Peter Pan syndrome. He lived the concept to the fullest.

He was vain about his looks and exercised fanatically. Even at 34 and suffering from that errant shot to his lungs in 1865, he was strong and muscular.

He played with his children and wooed his wife. He was polite while out and about, presenting himself as a genteel man of the highest breeding. No one ever suspected who he truly was.

His voice was rather high-pitched and could be annoying when he got excited – bringing the Missouri twang with it. He was left-handed and was missing a part of his left middle finger having shot it off just prior to joining Quantrill's Raiders in 1864. He always kept that hand out of sight – it was an identification marker for law enforcement.

Jesse's emotions and personality ran the gamut from quiet and serene to gregarious and irrational. A vibrant aura clung to him and made heads turn when he entered a room. Indeed, Jesse James commanded a room – he was larger than life.

He was handsome and most likely resembled his father, though no known photographs of Robert James exist to this day. Jesse looked nothing like his older brother, Frank, who had a large nose and even larger ears that protruded from his head.

Jesse's bright blue eyes darted nervously all the time – his eyes blinking constantly. One could almost picture his entire body a little herky jerky with movement, the blood coursing through his veins a little bit faster than everyone else's, his heart pounding harder, his brain firing like sparks.

As Jesse reached his 34th birthday on September 5, 1881, he was, for all intents and purposes – dying and he knew it.

In my opinion, after 17 years of living with a lead minie ball in his right lung, Jesse was suffering from lead poisoning. Symptoms include: abdominal pain, headaches, difficulty in thinking, concentrating or making decisions, pale skin, fatigue, muscle weakness, personality changes, mood swings and trouble sleeping and Jesse had nearly all of those symptoms.

He suffered greatly from insomnia and his mood went from upbeat and positive to moody and paranoid, he worked out frantically – possibly because he felt his muscles weakening daily and his muscular stature had kept him in the saddle all those years. He personality changed constantly, which included the oddball obsessions he worked over and over in his mind.

Since the last robbery, known as the Blue Cut, on Sept. 7, 1881, the gang had scattered. Frank had taken Annie and Bob and gone to Maryland. And Jesse grew more and more nervous about one of the gang going to the authorities. None of the gang members were former war comrades. They were all younger and had no sense of loyalty to the James brothers.

By the first of the year, Wood Hite, Jesse's cousin, had been shot dead by Bob Ford – unbeknownst to Jesse at the time. And Jesse had paid a visit to Ed Miller, former gang member Clell Miller's brother, and Ed had conveniently disappeared – his body discovered sometime after Jesse's visit.

Jesse was unaware that Bob Ford had shot his cousin. In fact, Hite had been quarreling with Dick Liddil over Liddil's wooing of Hite's young stepmother. Ford got in the middle of it when Hite turned his gun on Liddil and he shot Hite dead. The shooting had taken place at the home of Ford's sister, Mattie Bolton in Richmond, Mo.

They first wrapped Wood's body in blankets and dumped him into an stream. Later his body would be allegedly dumped in one of the farm's wells.

Several years ago I interviewed Pat Faulkner of Kearney, Mo., who had grown up in the old Bolton/Ford house in the 1940s and professed it to be haunted. Pat told me that when her father moved them into the house, the owners at the time informed her father they weren't to drink out of one of the wells as it was the "body" well.

She also said that from time-to-time, she had witnessed ghostly activity, things moving in one of the upstairs rooms, a shadow in the upstairs window and an awful smell coming from a tunnel they discovered that led to the other side of the pasture – likely an escape tunnel from the James days.

This is the Bob Ford home (owned by his sister, Mattie Bolton), before its 1955 destruction. It was about two miles east of Richmond on Highway 10. The site is now occupied by the Waller family. Charley Ford shot himself in the east bedroom (right side of photo) on the second floor in 1884. (Photo courtesy of Pat Faulkner)

Besides Wood Hite being murdered in that house, it was the same house in which Charlie Ford shot himself a few years after Jesse's death. Unfortunately, the house was torn down in the 1950s and a new one built in its place.

Bob Ford had begun hanging around the gang around the time of the Blue Cut robbery. He was young, only 18 years of age and given to hero worship of Jesse. For years he had collected the comic book renderings of the James gang and fancied himself knowledgable on all things Jesse and Frank.

A young Bob Ford. (Photo courtesy
of the Jesse James Farm & Museum)

Frank wouldn't give Bob the time of day, but Jesse seemed to like the attention and adoration, even though at times it got quite uncomfortable, such as when Bob told Jesse that they had many things in common that were oddities: Jesse had had twin sons – Bob had twin sisters; Jesse's father was minister – Bob's father was a part time minister; Jesse's father was named Robert – Bob was actually Robert; they had the same number of letters and syllables in their names; they both had blue eyes, were of the same height and weight. It was scary and Jesse froze solid when Bob told him all of this.

With Jesse as slippery as he'd been for all those years, as astute as he was in discerning who was friend or foe, as much as those who couldn't be trusted could get his hackles up – he didn't seem to see Bob Ford as dangerous.

Or did he?

Did Jesse knowingly set himself up to be taken down by Bob Ford, placing him forever in the history books and western lore as a Robin Hood character – a person to be heralded as a sympathetic character? Or was he duped?

We shall soon see.