Legends of the Old West - JESSE JAMES Ep. 6 | "The Coward"

Episode Date: December 16, 2018

Three years after the Northfield raid, Jesse assembles a new gang to resume his career as a robber, but he quickly spirals downward into paranoia and suspicion. One by one, the new gang members fall as the law closes in on Jesse. A young man named Robert Ford brings the story to an end, and truly launches the legend. Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Lego Fortnite. Lego Fortnite is the ultimate survival crafting game found within Fortnite. It's not just Fortnite Battle Royale with minifigures. It's an entirely new experience that combines the best of Lego play and

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comfort and refinement on the road to the western frontier. In 1860, the Pony Express used the hotel as its headquarters when it began its celebrated but short-lived mail service to California. People considered the hotel a marvel, but at the time, it was located too far from downtown St. Joseph, Missouri to be prosperous. In just six years, it was a hotel three times and a women's college twice. In April of 1882, during its third stint as a hotel, it was called the World's Hotel, and it welcomed some suddenly famous visitors. A mother and her kids had been abruptly thrust into the spotlight, and they had nowhere else to go. Mrs. Howard checked in with her two children, Tim and Mary. It was a confusing

and frightening time for the kids. Six-year-old Tim was about to learn that his name was not Tim Howard. He would soon find out that he was named after his father, and his father's name was not John David Howard, as he'd always thought, or even Thomas Howard. He was about to learn the long, extraordinary history associated with his father's real name, Jesse James. Young Jesse Edwards James would learn all of this sometime after his mother was forced to check into the World's Hotel, because their little house a block away was a crime scene and still had blood on the parlor floor. The two young men who had been staying with them had been arrested after what the newspapers were calling a tragedy.

They were brothers, and the eldest was Charlie, who was just three months shy of his 25th birthday. From this point forward, Charlie hated himself and would spend the rest of his life trying to outrun his name. But it was his younger brother Bob who would achieve true infamy in April 1882. His name would be known far and wide, and he would become one of the most recognized and despised men in America. He ended the life of Jesse James, but truly gave birth to the legend. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able

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Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. Shopify is also the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across 175 countries. Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash realm, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash r-e-a-l-m now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash realm. From Black Barrel Media, this is Season 3 of the Legends of the Old West podcast. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this is the final episode of a six-part series on Jesse James.

After the disastrous Northfield raid, Jesse and Frank tried to go straight, but Jesse couldn't handle the boredom of a normal life. He assembled another crew and went on one final crime spree, but he no longer had the public support he had once enjoyed. And he sank deeper into paranoia and suspicion. One by one, his gang started to die or turn traitor until he was left with only two allies,

Charles and Robert Ford. At the end of the episode, stay tuned for a sneak peek of Season 4, Red Clouds War. And now, here's the Season 3 finale and the end of the Jesse James story. It's Episode 6, The Coward. After the epic escape from Northfield, Jesse and Frank became ghosts as far as the general public was concerned. In the 140 years since the raid, numerous theories and second-hand accounts of their whereabouts have surfaced,

but we'll probably never know for sure where they hid or how they avoided capture. Part of the reason was likely that the nation shifted its focus to a larger event. As the momentum of the manhunt faded away in October and November of 1876, the presidential election consumed the country. The race between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes ended up being the most contentious and absurd in American history. Voters went to the polls on November 7th, two months after the Northfield raid, but the winner was not declared until March 2nd, 1877, five months later. The result brought a true end to Reconstruction. Former Confederates had already regained the right to vote and had swept in many of their

Democratic candidates. Even though Hayes was a Republican, the radicalism of the late 1860s was almost entirely gone. In 1877, John Newman Edwards released his romantic ode to the Bushwhackers when he finally published Noted Guerrillas. Times were changing. They were changing slowly. Outlaws and outlaw gangs still roamed the West for another 20 years. But they were changing nonetheless. The people of Missouri weren't necessarily going to turn in Frank and Jesse, but the bandits could no longer say they were fighting against the establishment by robbing banks and trains.

Fewer and fewer people accepted that excuse. And it was a thin veil anyway. They certainly had political motivations for some of their targets, but their actions came from pure greed, nothing more. Early in their careers, Jesse had equated them to Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. But they never gave away a dime of their money. They were robbers, plain and simple. And in 1879, they got back to robbing. The return to crime was not like flipping a switch, especially for Frank. The brothers laid low for the end of 1876 and the first half of 1877. They moved to Tennessee in the summer of 1877, near the area

where Jesse had lived during the Huntington, West Virginia bank robbery of 1875. They knew the area, and their uncle George Height lived no more than a day's ride away, just over the border in Kentucky. Jesse went back to using the alias John Howard, and Frank called himself Ben Woodson. It seemed like Frank had undergone a real change with the move to Tennessee. He worked as a sharecropper, and then began hauling wood for a lumber company. It was back-breaking labor for a man in his late 30s

who had never had a job in his late 30s who had never had a job in his adult life. But he enjoyed the work. He quit cursing and joined the Methodist Church, and in February 1878, his son Robert was born. But Jesse missed the action of the robberies and the celebrity that followed. He missed the excitement, and by 1879, he had begun to wander back to Missouri with the thought of raising a new gang. In June, he and Z welcomed their daughter Mary to the family, and by the fall of 1879, he had assembled his new recruits. On October 8th, he got back into the train robbing business. Jesse had known James Andrew Little for six or seven years by the time he chose the younger man to be his protege in the new gang.

Dick Little, as everyone called him, had been a farmhand in Jackson County, which was straight south of Jesse's childhood home in Clay County. Jesse rounded up four more men to fill out the ranks, two of whom were Ed Miller and Wood Hite. Ed was the younger brother of original gang member Clell Miller, and Wood was Jesse's cousin, the son of Jesse's uncle George. The last two were Daniel Basham, who went by Tucker,

and an Irishman named Bill Ryan. These were not men he'd grown up with. They were not men he'd gone to war with and had robbed with for years. Those men, the originals from the James Younger gang, were gone. Clell Miller, Bill Chadwell, and Charlie Pitts were dead. Bob, Cole, and Jim Younger were serving life sentences in the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater. The brothers had miraculously recovered from the serious wounds sustained during and after the Northfield raid,

and now they were scheduled to spend the rest of their lives behind bars. This new gang would target the Chicago and Alton Railroad near Glendale, Missouri, a tiny town surrounded by heavy timber. They heard that a shipment of gold bullion was on its way from Denver that was worth $380,000. The James Younger gang had been forced to leave behind a huge shipment of bullion in its very first train robbery when it had derailed the Rock Island line in Iowa. The robbers had been a long way from their home base in Missouri and had no way to transport the ore.

But now, the gold was coming right through Jackson County, the heart of James Gang territory. Jesse used the James Younger Gang's classic blueprint for train robberies. Round up the townspeople, force one of them to signal the train to stop, and then rob it and disappear into the timber. It happened more or less according to plan. The gang came away with $6,000, but there were numerous signs that the old days were gone. Jesse probably recognized some of them, but others he probably missed. Jesse probably recognized some of them, but others he probably missed. The biggest problem with the robbery was that there was no gold.

It had been offloaded in Kansas City for shipment on a different train. But that kind of thing happened. It was a hazard of the trade. The other problems were more concerning. The express messenger who guarded the money said there was $60,000 in the safe, but when Jesse opened it, he only was $60,000 in the safe, but when Jesse opened it, he only found $6,000 in cash. The rest of the value was in the form of checks, which were worthless to the robbers. In the three years since Jesse's last train robbery, checks had become a more acceptable form of currency, and now financial companies no longer had to ship large quantities of hard cash from place to place.

And then, as the gang escaped, Jesse pulled one of his old stunts. He handed the train crew a press release. He wanted to capture the glorious headlines of the old days, but the attempt was hollow. The press release was full of all the old arrogance, but now it lacked purpose. The gang members had once thought of themselves and called themselves bold robbers who were fighting for the little guy. But politics had changed. Jesse couldn't use the cover story of attacking the oppressive regime that hurt his countrymen. So now, instead of looking like bold robbers, they just looked like petty thieves. And the geography around Jesse was changing. He still had his supporters and his primary stronghold of Clay and Jackson counties,

but those counties were also ground zero for the expansion of Kansas City. In the 15 years between the end of the Civil War and the Glendale train robbery, train robbery, the population of Kansas City exploded. In 1865, it was 3,500 people. By 1880, it was almost 56,000. As the city grew, it ate up territory that used to hide the James Gang. Finally, and perhaps most painfully, Jesse was snubbed by his old compatriot John Newman Edwards. Jesse had sent Edwards a note asking to get together while he was in Missouri. Edwards never responded. But even as Jesse's star faded, he had no plans to stop robbing. Jesse returned to Tennessee after the Glendale robbery.

But in the spring of 1880, he traveled back to Missouri to meet up with some of his new gang members. He rendezvoused with Ed Miller and an old friend from his guerrilla days, Jim Cummins. Jesse also made new friends whom he would enlist in the robberies down the road. The home of Martha Bolton had become the epicenter for Jesse's new crew. Martha rented a farm in Ray County, right next door to Clay County, where Jesse's mother still lived. Martha was an attractive widow, and Dick Little had become sweet on her, so he was frequently at her house. Martha's two brothers also lived there, Charles and Robert Ford. Charlie was the older of the two, and he and Jesse quickly

became friends. But Jesse was uneasy around Bob. Bob was just 18 when he met Jesse James, and he had idolized the outlaw since childhood. Jesse was 32 by that point, but he had spent as many years in the saddle as a guerrilla fighter and robber as Bob had spent on the earth in total. Based on the life Jesse had lived, he might as well have been 60 compared to Bob's 18. And in 1880, Bob had more fuel for his imagination as the legend of the outlaw Jesse James really took off in popular culture. Four new books were published that romanticized Jesse and his outlaw friends. The Life and Adventures of Frank and Jesse James and the Younger Brothers was the first. It was followed by The Outlaws of the Border, and then The Border Outlaws and The Border Bandits.

Frank and Jesse had entered the era of pulp fiction. Technically, these books were supposed to be non-fiction, they weren't actually novels yet, but that didn't stop the authors from taking extreme liberties with the facts. They really believed, you never let the facts get in the way of a good story. By the summer of 1880, Jesse was on an emotional roller coaster that would last for two years. When he was up, he was jovial and loved to gamble and go to the horse races. But he lost so much money gambling that his wife became genuinely worried. When he was low, he sank deep into paranoia and suspicion.

And two things happened that summer that fueled his paranoia and created suspicion around him. In July, Tucker Basham was arrested for the Glendale robbery. The word was that he had named Jesse and Ed Miller in his confession. That made Jesse's steadily growing paranoia worse. He began to wonder who might betray him next. And then sometime later, a decomposing body was found on the side of a road in Missouri. It was thought to be the body of Jesse's friend, Jim Cummins,

but it wasn't. It was Ed Miller. Ed had been riding a horse that had belonged to Jim when he was last seen in the company of Jesse James. No one knows for sure when or why Jesse killed Ed Miller, but some accounts say it was as trivial as an argument over tobacco. Regardless of the details, most everyone agrees Jesse did the killing. Jesse took the horse Ed had been riding and stashed it at his uncle's farm in southern Kentucky. By the end of the summer, Dick Little and Bill Ryan were with Jesse in Tennessee, and they were planning their next robberies,

despite the suspicion over Ed's disappearance and Jesse's anxiety about the upcoming trial of Tucker Basham. Jesse and Bill robbed a stagecoach, and then the three men robbed a miner's store in Kentucky. But the robberies produced very little money for the effort. And at this point, the downward spiral truly began. Jim Cummins visited Tennessee a month after the second robbery, and he began to pepper Jesse with questions about Ed Miller.

Jesse had told Charlie Ford that Ed had become sick and had gone to Hot Springs, Arkansas to recover. Now he told Jim that Ed was recuperating from his mysterious illness in East Tennessee, and that he might never get well again. Jim became more and more suspicious that something dark, as he put it, happened between Jesse and Ed. During Jim's time in Tennessee, he learned Frank and Jesse were not getting along. Jesse was keeping close company with Bill Ryan, who drank too much and whom Frank hated. Jesse moved his family from house to house in the Nashville area, never staying in one place very long, and his paranoia made him irritable and angry.

One day, Jesse started an argument with Dick Little and pulled a gun on him before Jim broke it up. And then Jim went to George Heights Farm and discovered Ed Miller's horse. Later, he finally gave voice to his full suspicion. He told a friend that he thought Jesse had killed Ed Miller. Jim's suspicions about Jesse pushed Jesse to become more and more suspicious of Jim. Jesse began to fear that his old friend might turn him in to the police. According to Dick Little, Jesse tried to convince the other members of the gang to help him kill Jim Cummins. Little said he refused, and by early 1881, Jim could feel the heat rising. He disappeared with only the clothes on his back.

Jim's flight made Frank and Jesse panic. They quickly packed some things and left Nashville to spend a cold winter's night away from town. They thought Jim had turned them in, and they waited for a posse to ride down on them, but it never came. They returned home the next day, but now both were on guard, day and night. While relationships between the gang members frayed in Tennessee, the people of Missouri elected a new governor. On January 10, 1881, Thomas Crittenden launched his crusade against the James Brothers and all others like them. He devoted a big chunk of his inaugural address to saying it was time to end the outlaws and to do away with their support network and their political protectors. laws, and to do away with their support network and their political protectors. Jesse may have heard about the governor's speech, but he was more likely concerned with his next robbery.

Despite the suspicions that swirled around him for Ed Miller's death, and his anxiety about Jim Cummins' disappearance, he was still a robber, and he had work to do. On March 11, 1881, he struck the payroll for the Army Corps of Engineers in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Jesse, Bill Ryan, and a third man who was probably Wood Height traveled south to Alabama where the engineers were working on a canal project for the Tennessee River. They captured the courier who was transporting the payroll and then escaped into Tennessee before the man could make it back to the army camp to alert his superiors. They stole more than $5,000, but the Muscle Shoals robbery was truly the beginning of the end for the James brothers. The consequences of the robbery ruined the lives of the James boys in Tennessee and sent them on the run again. The dominoes started to fall,

and within seven months, Frank and Jesse would separate, never to see each other again. Bill Ryan, one of the two men Jesse took with him on the Muscle Shoals job, was arrested on March 25, 1881. The Irishman loved to drink, and he got thoroughly drunk in a saloon in southern Kentucky and started running his mouth about being an outlaw. But he had called himself Tom Hill in the saloon, and no one knew if that was his real name or an alias. And after he was arrested, he stopped talking altogether.

The next day, Dick Little saw the story of Tom Hill's arrest in the Nashville newspaper and knew immediately that Bill Ryan was in custody. He hurried to Frank and Jesse and told them the news. This time, they could not afford the wait-and-see strategy they had used when Jim Cummins disappeared. They had to move, now. Jesse, Frank, and Dick Little headed up to George Heights Farm to hide out. Jesse sent his family to a friend's house in a neighboring county. Frank packed up his wife and young son and put them on a train to Kansas City. Frank packed up his wife and young son and put them on a train to Kansas City.

Bill Ryan had been transported to Nashville, and he stuck to his story about being Tom Hill. But regardless of his name, he was identified by the courier in Muscle Shoals as one of the robbers. For the next week, Frank, Jesse, and Dick Little hid with James' family relatives, and then they decided it was time to leave the area for good. Jesse collected Zee and the children and put them on a train to Kearney, Missouri. Then he and Little followed on horseback. Frank lingered in Kentucky for another week, but then he joined his family and his brother in Missouri.

It seemed like it had happened almost overnight. Frank's legitimate life in Tennessee was gone. He hadn't participated in a robbery in nearly five years, and now he was on the run again, thanks to his brother. By mid-April, they were all settled in Missouri. Jesse chose to live right in the middle of Kansas City, though he now wore a full beard and dyed it black to disguise his face. He used the last name Jackson when he moved his family into a small cottage. Frank's movements are more mysterious. He later claimed that he visited his sister in Texas and he sent his family to the farm of Confederate General Joe Shelby

and then on to California. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1881, Jesse's neighbors in Kansas City thought he was a gambler because he was gone so often. He was most likely making plans for robberies that never happened. That summer, the first dime novel about the James Boys was published. It was called The Train Robbers, or A Story of the James Boys. In June, Bill Ryan was extradited to Kansas City. His true identity had finally been uncovered, and Missouri Governor Thomas Crittenden ordered him back home to stand trial for the Glendale train robbery. The governor was making progress in his quest to bring down the outlaws. He already had Tucker Basham in prison for the Glendale job, and now he convinced the young man to testify

against Bill Ryan. Basham had pled guilty to his part in the heist and had been given a 10-year sentence. He was happy to testify against Bill Ryan to get out of jail immediately. happy to testify against Bill Ryan to get out of jail immediately. But as the legal teams prepared for the trial, Jesse and Frank struck again. On the night of July 15th near the village of Winston, Missouri, five men boarded the Rock Island train. Frank, Jesse, and Wood Hite sat down in the smoking car. Clarence Hite, Wood's younger brother, and Dick Little stepped onto the platform of the express car.

Without warning, Jesse jumped up and started firing in the train car. Terrified passengers hit the ground, and Jesse's bullets ended up hitting two men, the conductor William Westfall and a passenger named Frank McMillan. Both men died immediately. The gang quickly emptied the safe in the express car and leapt off the train. They mounted their horses and rode into the Crooked River Basin, an area Frank and Jesse knew well from their time as guerrilla fighters in the Civil War. This was a completely new tactic

for the gang, and more violence than usual. But many accounts of the robbery say the killings were accidental. Jesse wasn't aiming at the two men and wasn't trying to murder them in cold blood, but they died nonetheless. Clarence Hite later said Jesse felt bad about killing the conductor, but in the days that followed, Jesse learned the conductor had been the same man who drove the special train of Pinkertons to attack his mother's farm, and he was then glad of the outcome. Following their typical custom, the gang split up after the robbery and laid low for the next six weeks. But in that time, loud voices arose from all quarters to condemn their actions.

The Kansas City Times, the newspaper founded by John Newman Edwards and which had supported the James boys ten years earlier, now turned on them completely. The paper called the raid the most atrocious of the many desperate robberies of this class that have disgraced our state of late years. Farmers in the countryside began to withdraw their outward support, but they also complained that they were in tough spots.

They didn't want to support Jesse, but they also weren't crazy enough to tell him no if he stopped by their farms in need of food and shelter. Even in Kearney, which was essentially the James boys' hometown, people began to say openly that they should be caught and hanged. Governor Crittenden wanted to use these changing winds to his advantage. He knew the current gang was filled with members who did not share the bond of loyalty of the James Younger gang. These new men were in it for money and fame. Reward money had not tempted previous gang members to turn on each other, but he thought it might work now.

The problem was, recent laws had restricted the amount he could offer. So he convened a quiet meeting in a St. Louis hotel 10 days after the Winston train robbery. The governor met with some of the most powerful men in the state to decide a course of action. They were vice presidents, superintendents, managers, and attorneys who represented every railroad company in Missouri, as well as a popular gunpowder manufacturer and the United States Express Messenger Company.

The governor wanted money, lots of money, and the men agreed to give it to him. lots of money, and the men agreed to give it to him. Three days later, Governor Crittenden officially made the James brothers the most wanted men in America. He offered rewards of $10,000 for each of the brothers, five upon capture, five upon conviction, and $5,000 per man for the other three who were involved in the Winston raid. Handbills were printed and circulated throughout Missouri. The amount was staggering, and it would ultimately produce results. But not yet. In the short term, it gave Jesse exactly what he wanted. Headlines. He was re-energized, and five weeks later, he and Frank struck the Chicago and Alton Railroad at a spot called Blue Cut. As with their first robbery eight years earlier, Blue Cut was chosen because it was a place on the line where the train would have to slow down for a curve. Cut was chosen because it was a place on the line where the train would have to slow down for a curve. It was only a mile or so away from Glendale, the site of Jesse's robbery two years earlier.

The Blue Cut robbery was staged exactly five years to the day after the Northfield raid, and it featured the five men who now had huge bounties on their heads, plus one, Charlie Ford. their heads. Plus one. Charlie Ford. September 7th, 1881. Glendale, Missouri. It was a Wednesday night, and the Chicago and Alton train made the turn toward the Blue Cut excavation site. The train's engineer was not surprised to see a man on the tracks in the distance waving a red lantern that signaled there was trouble ahead and the train was supposed to stop. Trains often stalled making the turn, and the engineer initially thought this was what had happened. But then he saw the man set the lantern on a pile of stones on the tracks, and he knew immediately they were being robbed. Robbers rushed onto the train from both sides of the tracks, and they were armed with an arsenal of rifles and pistols.

The gang dragged the engineer back to the express car and made him break down the door. They ordered the express messenger to open the safe, and when he moved too slowly, they bashed him over the head with a gun. When he finally did open the safe, it contained less than $400. For just the second time in his career,

Jesse ordered his men to rob the passengers. As the gang left the express car, they didn't know they were leaving behind far more than $400. There was a second safe in the car, hidden under a cluster of chicken coops. As Jesse walked through the passenger cars, relieving people of their valuables, he was back to his old self. He talked the whole time, sometimes quoting the Bible, sometimes threatening action he might take in the future, and all the while, reveling in the attention from his audience. When the robbery was complete, he gave a deep bow and said, Goodbye. This is the last time you will ever see Jesse James. Jesse's pronouncement was accurate, to an extent.

The blue-cut train robbery was the last robbery of the James gang. In the hours after the raid, posses poured over the ground around the robbery site. Governor Crittenden issued a statement of outrage that called on all the people of Missouri to rise up against the outlaws. In two small ways, they did. First, Bill Ryan, who had been arrested after the Muscle Shoals robbery, was found guilty at his trial. He was the first member of the James gang to be found guilty by a jury, and he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. On the heels of the verdict came the second small act of defiance. A group of former Confederate soldiers issued a statement that condemned the actions of the gang. And the soldiers went even further. They said they wanted

nothing less than the extermination of men like the James Boys, whom they called enemies of society. There was now immense pressure on the gang, and the gang started to crack. Jesse watched every man with a suspicious eye. Wood Hite and Dick Little began a feud that escalated quickly. They were both interested in Martha Bolton, the sister of Bob and Charlie Ford. A couple weeks after the Blue Cut robbery, Jesse summoned them to the farm of Wood Heights' father in Kentucky. They were to discuss plans for another

train robbery. But Wood and Little pushed each other beyond the point of no return. They got into a fierce argument and stormed out into the yard. They pulled their guns and fired at each other, but they were so angry they missed badly. At that point, Little left the gang and traveled back to Missouri, back to the home of Martha Bolton and Bob and Charlie Ford. Frank James also put distance between himself and the gang. In October, he and his wife took a train through Kentucky and Tennessee and then on to Virginia. They roamed through Virginia and North Carolina, looking for a place to settle, before finally deciding on Lynchburg, Virginia. This was where Frank spent his time as events in Missouri spiraled out of control.

events in Missouri spiraled out of control. In November of 1881, Jesse moved out of Kansas City with the help of Charlie Ford. They moved Jesse's family to St. Joseph, where Jesse rented a house on the corner of Lafayette and 21st Street under the name of Thomas Howard. The family, plus Charlie, settled in for the rest of November and most of December. Seventy-five miles away in Martha Bolton's home near Richmond, Dick Little walked downstairs for

breakfast on the morning of December 4th, 1881. He found Wood Hite sitting at the table. They immediately started arguing, and Wood jumped up with his gun in his hand. The two men stood at either end of the table firing at each other as fast as they could pull the triggers. Wood shot Little in the right leg. Then Wood's head snapped back. He slumped to the floor, dead from a headshot. Bob Ford later claimed he fired the bullet that killed Jesse's cousin, but whoever did it, the result was the same. Dick Little or Bob Ford had murdered a close relative of Jesse James. Now they were in a race against time. If Jesse

found out, they were dead men. They buried Wood's body in a shallow grave in the timber behind the house. On Christmas Eve, Jesse and Charlie moved Jesse's family one final time. Jesse wanted a house on a hill that commanded a view in all directions, and he found it at 1318 Lafayette Street, one block north of the Patey House Hotel, which was now called the World's Hotel. The week after Christmas, Jesse took Charlie to go see Little at Martha's house. But Jesse was alarmed to see that Little was not his usual self. He was sullen and edgy and nervous.

Jesse didn't understand the change in his friend's behavior, and he didn't like it either. And causing him further anxiety was the fact that his cousin Wood was suddenly nowhere to be found. But he didn't yet associate Wood's disappearance with Little's behavior. Some further anxiety was the fact that his cousin Wood was suddenly nowhere to be found, but he didn't yet associate Wood's disappearance with Little's behavior. Jesse and Charlie returned to St. Joseph, and Jesse's world started to collapse. In early January 1882, the sheriff of Clay County stormed Martha Bolton's house with a posse. They were looking for Dick Little, but he slipped out a back door and hid in a field all night and the next day. Little knew his time was up. He could either face the authorities or face Jesse James.

He chose the authorities. He sent Martha to secretly meet with the governor. Governor Crittenden offered Little a deal. Surrender and testify against the James boys and you won't be prosecuted. Little accepted and turned himself in on January 24th. But Martha wasn't done. She whispered a second offer to the governor during their meeting.

Her brother Bob had information about Jesse and a plan he could carry out for the right price. The governor said he was open to hearing more. One week later, Governor Crittenden was at the annual ball for a local militia at the St. James Hotel in Kansas City when he was told that a young man was waiting in another room. He slipped away from the festivities and met face-to-face with Robert

Ford. They quickly came to an agreement. Bob would receive the reward money and a full pardon for what he was about to do, and the governor would receive Jesse James. Bob was one week away from his 20th birthday. By the end of January 1882, Dick Little was in custody and giving a confession to the authorities, and Bob Ford had made a deal with the governor. In early February, those events led to a raid on the farm of Jesse's uncle, George Hite. The posse captured Clarence Hite, the younger brother of Wood. The lawmen raced Clarence back to Missouri. They confronted him with Little's confession, and Clarence pled guilty to the robbery of the train near Winston. With the arrest of Clarence, there were now only two men left with Jesse,

There were now only two men left with Jesse, Bob and Charlie Ford. In the final week of March 1882, Jesse summoned Bob to move into the house on the hill in St. Joseph. Jesse was planning a bank robbery in his home state for the first time in 13 years. And then, on March 31st, the news of Dick Little's surrender hit the newspapers. Jesse had been an avid reader of papers his whole life, and Bob and Charlie knew there was no way to hide the information from him. Jesse's suspicions skyrocketed. With Little's surrender now public, and the governor waiting impatiently,

Bob knew he couldn't delay any longer. The biggest problem was, he and Charlie were scared. Jesse never took off his guns, and they were terrified to try anything while he was armed. But two days later, something strange happened. Monday morning, April 3rd, 1882. St. Joseph, Missouri. It was hot that morning. After breakfast, Jesse and Charlie went out to the stable to feed and curry the horses. When they returned to the house, Jesse took off his coat and his vest. With those two garments removed, he decided to take off his gun belt too. He said he worried that people might see him walking around heavily armed and then become suspicious.

In the parlor, Jesse noticed a picture on the wall that looked dusty. He picked up a brush and stepped up onto a chair to clean the picture. Z was in the kitchen with the children and didn't know her husband busied himself with housework in the other room with his back turned to Bob and Charlie Ford. As Jesse dusted the photo, he heard two noises he knew very well. Bob and Charlie racked back the hammers on their pistols. Charlie winked at Bob that it was time to do it. Bob pulled the trigger first. He fired one shot, and the bullet tore through the back of Jesse's head, above his left ear. Charlie didn't fire at all. Jesse toppled off the chair and crashed to the floor.

Zee rushed in from the kitchen, and Charlie tried to say that a gun had gone off by accident, but he and Bob were already running from the house. They sprinted to the telegraph office and sent a wire to the governor. They had done it. They had killed Jesse James. Zerelda James, her son Jesse, and her daughter Mary spent the next few days in the World's Hotel as St. Joseph turned into chaos around them. For the next month, the papers in Missouri wrote of almost nothing but the life and death of Jesse James.

Three days after the murder, Jesse was buried in Kearney and 2,000 people attended the ceremony. The governor lived up to his agreement with Bob Ford. Bob and Charlie were arrested for the murder and then pardoned by Crittenden. But they were forced to split the reward money with various lawmen. And Crittenden maintained for the rest of his life that he never sanctioned the murder of Jesse James. His deal with Bob was for the capture of the outlaw. Frank James learned of his brother's murder through the newspapers on April 5th or 6th. For the next several months, he negotiated his surrender with Governor Crittenden.

In the end, it was John Newman Edwards who helped get it done. In the immediate aftermath of the killing, Edwards had railed against the act and the Ford brothers in the Sedalia Democrat newspaper. On October 5, 1882, Edwards brought Frank James to the governor's office in Jefferson City for a formal surrender ceremony. Frank was cool and collected. He introduced himself and calmly unbuckled his gun belt. His weapons were unloaded and he handed them to Crittenden. Over the next four years, Frank was scheduled to have four trials. Only two happened and he was acquitted in both. The prosecution dropped the other two cases. By the spring of 1885, there was only one possible legal matter pending. Frank's participation in the Northfield Raid.

Frank stayed clear of Minnesota for the rest of his life, and he was never prosecuted for the raid, which would have been tough anyway, because the younger brothers were loyal to their friends. They'd never admitted Frank and Jesse had been on the raid. Bob Younger died in Stillwater Prison of Tuberculosis in 1899 at the age of 35. John Newman Edwards died of a heart attack that same year. Cole and Jim were paroled two years later after having their sentences reduced. Jim took his own life in a St. Paul hotel room in 1902. Cole wrote a memoir of his time as an outlaw in which he admitted to only one crime, the Northfield Raid. In 1903, he reunited with Frank James and they traveled with a stage show called The Cole Younger and Frank James Wild West Show.

Both men finished their lives in their home state of Missouri. Frank gave tours of his family's homestead for 50 cents apiece before he passed away February 18, 1915. Cole followed him one year later, March 21, 1916. Just five years later, the first movie about Jesse James was made, with his son playing the role of the father. Jesse James had become big business the moment he was killed. He had left his family destitute, and Z was forced to auction their possessions to make money. Photographers sold pictures of Jesse's body, and you can see those pictures online today.

Visitors flocked to Jesse's home in St. Joseph. They marveled at the bullet hole in the wall by the picture he had been adjusting when he was shot. None of them knew it was a true oddity, because the bullet that killed Jesse James was found in his brain during an autopsy. The firing of that bullet was reenacted night after night for sold-out audiences up and down the East Coast and throughout the Midwest. For almost two years, Bob and Charlie Ford performed a stage play about their assassination of the famed outlaw. They were received well in New York, but audiences in Louisville, Kentucky booed and hissed and called them murderers and robbers.

Charlie sank into a dark place. He became addicted to morphine and came down with tuberculosis. On May 4, 1884, he shot himself in the chest. Bob drifted down to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he opened a saloon and then became a city policeman. But his reputation as a man who shot people in the back drove him out of Las Vegas. He moved north to Colorado and opened saloons in Walsenburg and Pueblo before finally settling in Creed. in Walsenburg and Pueblo before finally settling in Creed. On June 8th, 1892, ten years and two months after he killed Jesse James, Robert Ford was gunned down in his saloon. A man named Edward Kelly, or Edward O. Kelly, walked into the bar with a sawed-off shotgun and said,

Hello, Bob, and then pulled the triggers. Bob was initially buried in Creed and then moved to his hometown of Richmond, Missouri. His tombstone reads simply, the man who shot Jesse James. Jesse's original tombstone featured an epitaph written by his mother that said, in loving memory of my beloved son, murdered by a traitor and a coward whose name is not worthy His current tombstone in the Mount Olive Cemetery in Kearney, Missouri, features just one descriptor. Assassinated. Thanks for listening to Season 3 of the Legends of the Old West podcast. I say that at the end of every episode, as you know, but seriously, thank you for being a part of it. The show began on April 1st, which seems like an eternity ago at this point, and this is the last episode of 2018.

The show has grown like crazy in those eight months, and I can't thank you enough for listening. And at the end of every episode, you hear me mention ratings and reviews on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Those really do help the show, and this season we passed a milestone. The show has a five-star rating and has been rated and reviewed more than 300 times on Apple Podcasts. And I consider that to be a pretty high number for an independent operation like this. Thank you guys for taking the time to do that. Every season, we submit the show to iTunes and see if we can get it featured and get a little more love for the Old West up there with all the major players, and those ratings and reviews can only help the cause. And now I want to say a special thanks to Aaron Aylsworth in Phoenix, Arizona.

He helped with the early stages of research for this series. And then to the Mighty Orc, my friend in Houston, Texas, who created the theme song you're listening to right now. I've actually had a couple people ask about sources for this series. I always list them at the end of the season, but it's cool you're interested, so there are three big ones you want to keep an eye out for. All the sources are listed on our website at blackbarrelmedia.com, but here are the top three. Jesse James, Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles. Frank and Jesse James, The Story Behind the Legend by Ted Yeatman.

James, The Story Behind the Legend by Ted Yeatman. Lastly, Shot All to Hell, Jesse James, The Northfield Raid, and The Wild West's Greatest Escape by Mark Lee Gardner. And now, to wrap it all up, as promised, here's a sneak peek of next season. Council fires burned deep into the night along the banks of Goose Creek in northern Wyoming. Thousands of Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors talked about the coming campaign against the Bluecoats in the fort 80 miles south. Oglala Sioux War Chief Red Cloud commanded the largest Native American army ever assembled to fight the invaders from the east. The whites wanted the gold in the Montana mountains to the west. They wanted passage to California. They wanted to crisscross the prairie with iron rails for their locomotives, and they wanted the prairie itself.

But that land was sacred to the tribes of the northern plains, and it was home to millions and millions of buffalo that made up the great northern herd. Red Cloud had gathered this vast army to fight for their hunting grounds. He gave a passionate speech, and then retired to his lodge to make battle plans with his lieutenants. For six months, they had terrorized the soldiers in the fort, and now it was time to wipe them out. But a day's ride south of the garrison,

a column of cavalry was on its way to reinforce the fort. The infantry at the outpost had been picked off two or three at a time until they were so depleted they had no hope of survival on their own. The cavalry unit was full of battle-tested veterans from the Civil War and it was led by a hard-charging commander, but nothing in their experience prepared them for the environment and the style of warfare they were about to face. When Red Cloud unleashed his forces, he gave the U.S. Army a war it had never seen before. It was the only time in U.S. history

that the government was forced to sign a peace treaty with Native American tribes to stop its own bloodshed. The story of Red Clouds War is Season 4 of the Legends of the Old West podcast. Si vous faites vos achats tout en travaillant, en mangeant ou même en écoutant ce balado, alors vous connaissez et aimez l'excitation du magasinage. Mais avez-vous ce frisson d'obtenir le meilleur deal? Les membres de Rakuten, eux, oui. Ils magasinent les marques qu'ils aiment et font d'importantes économies, en plus des remises en argent. Et vous pouvez aussi commencer à gagner des remises en argent dans vos magasins préférés, comme Old Navy, Best Buy et Expedia, et même cumuler les ventes et les remises en argent. Sous-titrage Société Radio-Canada remise. Téléchargez l'application gratuite Rakuten et ne manquez jamais un bon deal. Ou allez sur rakuten.ca pour en avoir plus pour

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