Killer from Missouri

Desperate Men (296 pp.)--James D. Horan--Putnam ($4).

He was born one day In the county of Clay And came from a solitary race.

Jesse James's posthumous pressagents; the ballad singers, have molded him to heroic proportions. So have most of his biographers. Lacking anything sounder than a dubious mixture of octogenarians gossip and Missouri legend on which to base their judgments, they have served up a dauntless, do-gooding 19th Century Robin Hood who carried the honor of the Old South in one hand and a parcel for the poor in the other. Few in the ballad audience wanted it otherwise. If the storybook Jesse was short on flesh and blood, at least he satisfied a secret, belly-warming yen for bygone Wild West heroism.

Several years ago, Robert Pinkerton II,* head of the same Pinkerton National Detective Agency which plodded patiently (but unsuccessfully) along in Jesse James's dust for 16 years, decided that he had had enough. The bold bandit who stared grimly out of the agency's secret files was no kin to the song-and-celluloid desperado whom everybody knew. Pinkerton decided to open the files and let the world see what its hero looked like all dressed up in his police record.

Cut Off Their Ears. Hearstling (New York Journal-American) James Horan (Out in the Boondocks, U.S.S. Seawolf) snapped up the offer. Desperate Men is the result of his year-long sifting of the Pinkerton files. On the strength of this new evidence, Author Horan makes a new appraisal: "[Jesse James] was a completely pitiless killer." His opinion of some of the other Old West badmen who turn up in the files is not much better.

Jesse learned to kill in the Civil War. The son of a steel-willed, thrice-married mother (whose first husband, Jesse's father, was a preacher) ran away at 16 to join the Southern guerrillas. His commander, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, liked to cut off the ears of the Yankees he killed and hang them on his horse's bridle. "Dingus" (Jesse's nickname) equaled him in savagery, finally rose to share the command of a guerrilla gang fighting in Texas. After one battle he "cold-bloodedly finished off the Reverend U.P. Gradner, who pleaded that he was 'chaplain of the 13th Kansas' as the grim-faced boy blew out his brains."

"Mind Your Ps and Qs." In the fall of 1865 Jesse drifted back to Clay County, Mo. with other guerrillas "who refused to believe that the war was over." There was scarcely a Saturday night that Jesse's gang didn't shoot up Liberty, the county-seat. There Jesse was arrested for the first & only time in his life--by a Republican sheriff who let him and his gang go with a mild warning "to mind their Ps and Qs." The James gang sneered. In February 1866 they thundered back into Liberty and held up a bank.

During the next 15 years, in half a dozen states, the James gang robbed scores of banks and trains, killed ruthlessly, and often for no reason at all. Most of the killings were committed at close range, for Jesse's marksmanship was "miserable." Readers who believe that Missouri's most famous killer stole to give to the poor have been Robin Hoodwinked, Author Horan says, and assembles impressive evidence to prove his point. On the credit side, Dingus gets two gold stars from his biographer: 1) "He appeared to be faithful to his wife and to be fond of his children," and 2) "His personal courage never seems to have been questioned."

Misty Mourners. In his home state, public opinion on Jesse was often divided, but after he was killed in 1882 by Bob Ford, a reward-seeking member of his gang, many a misty-eyed Missourian mourned him as the last defender of the Confederate cause. Cheers greeted a jury's acquittal of Jesse's Bible-reading brother Frank, who surrendered after Jesse was killed, and "the careers of Governor Crittenden and Prosecutor William Wallace were ruined because of the fight they waged against the Clay County outlaws."

As an antidote to grumpy Jesse's grim career. Author Horan fills out his last hundred pages with the story of another Pinkerton-pestered train robber, jovial Butch Cassidy, whose fun-loving Wild Bunch operated out of Hole in the Wall, Wyo. in the 1890s. Author Horan thinks Butch's story is "more colorful and daring," but most readers will disagree. Even debunked, Jesse James is still the feature attraction in any Wild West show.

* Great-grandson of the agency's famed founder, Allan Pinkerton. After detectives wounded his mother and killed his stepbrother, Jesse James stalked the senior Pinkerton for four months on the streets of Chicago, never brought himself to shoot.

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