Story of Jesse James’ son played out in court

Was he guilty – or just guilty of being the son of the wrong man? Did he just hang out with the wrong friends, or did friends in high places help spare his life?

Those and other questions from a fascinating bit of local history playing out this weekend in a re-enactment of the 1899 trial of Jesse James Jr., accused of robbing – not very successfully – a Missouri Pacific train in Kansas City, not far from where the stadiums stand today.

The performance is based on the latest book by Raytown attorney Ralph Monaco, who also is president of the board of the Jackson County Historical Society. The book is “Son of a Bandit: Jesse James and the Leeds Gang.”

What we know is that a train was stopped and some of it was blown up. We know the railroad and its Pinkerton agents held one man for quite some time until he gave them the name of Jesse James Jr. We know his father was long dead, his uncle had beaten the rap at a couple of trials and that there was great sympathy for the James family in many parts of the community.

“Everybody wants to know the rest of the story,” Monaco says.

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On Friday afternoon, Monaco and more than a dozen others condensed the five-day trial to a couple of hours at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, a performance they will give again this weekend in Independence and Liberty. Lawyers gathered for an afternoon of history and continuing education and served as the jury.

Here are the more-or-less uncontested facts: On the night of Sept. 23, 1898, a group of masked bandits, armed with pistols, stop a Missouri Pacific passenger train near Leeds Junction. Their target is the express car with its safe holding about $2,000 in gold, silver and cash.

They threaten the man working in the express car but, frustrated, one of the bandits decides to use the seven sticks of dynamite he has brought – a bit much for the job. They leave the employee in the car, facing a near certain death. There’s some problem with the dynamite. The bandits relent and let the man out. Finally, it appears, the fuse is burning.

Boom – and there’s not much left. The bandits search in the dark for loot, but the railroad later says it’s missing only about $30. A couple of get-away buggies are seen speeding away.

The Pinkertons get on the case, setting up shop at the Hotel Savoy, and they turn up W.W. Lowe (played by attorney Joe Hudgens). Robbing trains was a hanging offense in Missouri in those days, and the Pinkertons – in particular, a Detective Harbaugh, played by Keith Fangman – hold Lowe for a couple of weeks. James’ attorneys later say they were sweating Lowe until he gave up a name.

The name he gives them is Jesse James Jr.

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There’s no doubt the son of the infamous Jesse James had it rough – traumatic at times – when he was little. Many in the family were living under assumed names, trying to evade attention after the many robberies and killings Frank and Jesse James had been accused of in the years after the Civil War.

Monaco as James tells the jury he didn’t know his own real name, or his father’s, when he was small. The family moved 25 times, he figured, before moving from Kansas City to St. Joseph, when he was 6. In that quiet house one morning in 1882, Robert Ford, a member of the James gang, shot Jesse James in the back.

Jesse Jr. saw the whole thing. He even went to a closet and grabbed a shotgun to take revenge, though his mother took it away.

After that, he tells the jury, he became the family’s provider, taking his first job at 11, eventually working at the Armour meat-packing plant in Kansas City.

Then there’s the complicated history of things. The governor who wanted Jesse and Frank James caught and tried was Thomas Crittenden. He put up a reward – but not, Monoco stresses, a dead-or-alive reward. Jesse and Frank were popular figures. Both had been Confederate guerrillas, and many saw a Robin Hood aspect to robbing greedy railroads. Ford pulled the trigger against Jesse, but many blamed Crittenden.

It is Crittenden’s son who tries to put things right. Thomas Crittenden Jr., who would later become mayor of Kansas City, helps the James family finance a house. He holds a key job in Jackson County government, and he finds a lucrative business for Jesse Jr. – running a sundry shop right in the County Courthouse in the River Market, selling cigars, cigarettes and chewing tobacco. In those days, of course, men smoked, chewed and spat right in their offices.

“Can you imagine having the sundry market ... inside the courthouse?” Monaco says.

A courthouse is full of all kinds of people, lawyers, judges and other upstanding citizens as well as the kinds of folks who find themselves in trouble with the law. Jesse Jr., now 23, gets to know many of them. Judge John Ward Henry (played by attorney Dan C. Sanders), testifies that he’s “a fine young man. ... He comes from good family stock.” Others hanging around the tobacco shop are more questionable, some of whom will be charged along with James for robbing the train.

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Detective Harbaugh tells the press that detectives have their man and have made their case but that they won’t get a conviction because the judge has gone against Reed so many times.

It certainly comes off that way in the re-enactment.

County Prosecutor James A. Reed (Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Michael Manners in a role he has played before) produces a surprise witness. It is a William Smith (attorney Aaron J. Racine) who claims to have been a passenger that night. When the train stopped, he says, he was curious and stepped off to see what was going on. He saw something up toward the engine and walked up. He startled Jesse James Jr., who wheeled and drew his pistol on Smith. It was dark, but there was enough light to see him, he says. And another witness – Lowe – said Jesse had trouble all night with his mask slipping.

“That’s him,” Smith says in the courtroom, pointing at James. “That’s him right there. That’s the man.”

The witness is excused, but before he leaves town The Kansas City Star reports that he’s a convicted criminal – he stole a bag of flour – and the defense demands that he be brought back. He is – in handcuffs, which Reed loudly protests will prejudice the jury. He gets little sympathy from the judge, Dorsey Shackleford (played by real Judge John M. Torrence).

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The Jackson County Historical Society, relying heavily on Monaco and others, puts on these re-enactments every couple of years.

“Living history’s a major component” of what the group does, says Executive Director Steve Noll. “People don’t want to go to museums. ... They want to get into this immersion.”

Two years ago, it was the 1910 Swope murder trial, which involved some of the same people and same actors as in this weekend’s production.

“Ralph is our master of trial resurrection,” Noll says.

Monaco wrote this book during the work for that trial. He had done previous research and then came across a St. Louis newspaper headline: William Lowe, in the end, recanted his accusation against James.

“I said, ‘Now I’ve got a story,’ ” Monaco said.

He’s already at work on the next book, about two local World War II veterans, one who served in the Pacific and one in Europe. And, he says, there’s one more local trial for Reed – later a U.S. senator and candidate for president – probably coming in a couple of years.

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Hovering over the whole trial, not saying an audible word, is Frank James (played by Gregg Higginbotham, a well-known local historical re-enactor who last year portrayed Robert Van Horn in a production about the artist and politician George Caleb Bingham).

He sat next to his nephew for the whole trial, Monaco says, whispering comments to defense attorney. At one point, he escorts his mother to the witness stand.

“Jesse James is iconic. Frank James has stood trial twice,” Monaco says.
Frank’s presence is huge, Monaco says, “literally like a resurrection from the grave of the James-Younger gang.”

After the verdict, Frank and young Jesse head for a bar, enjoying a drink and many handshakes.

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Witnesses do their best.

Edwin Hills (David Bears), the man tending to the safe, says he got a good look at young Jesse’s eyes and nose, and, yes, that’s him. But his statement shortly after the robbery was that it was a big man, about 6 feet, who led the gang. Defense attorney Finnis Farr (Jackson County Counselor Stephen Nixon) presses him hard. The defendant is maybe 5-foot-7. Hills concedes the point.

Henrietta Hollenbeck (Gloria Smith of Independence, also active with the Historical Society) says Jesse is a fine young man and, yes, we heard the explosion and saw buggies speed past but couldn’t tell who was who.

Jesse’s grandmother says family members were on the porch of a home, visiting, when the explosion was heard. On cross-examination, she’s not sure Jesse was there at the time or not.

Finally, Jesse takes the stand, denying it all. He says he did hear the explosion.

“We really had no clue what it was.”

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Ultimately, Monaco says, it’s a sad story.

Jesse James Jr. becomes a lawyer. He marries and has four daughers, though he and his wife separate and reconcile repeatedly over the years. He moves to California, where he loses a lot of money on a couple of movies about the James story in the 1920s. In one, he plays his father.

Mental illness takes hold. He’s essentially unable to practice law after about 1930. He dies in Riverside, Calif., in 1951.

“Jesse did have some real serious issues and had a breakdown. ... It’s a sad story,” Monaco says.

But on that day in February 1899, jurors sided with him. It was the same on Friday, with a few dozen lawyers sitting as jury. What do you think, Monaco asks? Who votes guilty?

Not a hand goes up.