The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel by Ron Hansen Page B

Missouri’s civil population, often plundering their crops and supplies or pillaging their shops, so that their Southern sympathies were magnified. Indignant young men who couldn’t sign on with General Shelby and the Confederate Army were joining with the irregular guerrilla bands, such as that of William Clarke Quantrill, which Frank was riding with by 1862, and in reprisal, the pro-Union state militia punished the families. They went to the Kearney farm and roped Dr. Reuben Samuels as he tried to escape into a root cellar, but he wouldn’t give them any intelligence about the guerrillas’ plans or movements so they flipped the rope over the limb of a sideyard coffee bean tree and snugged a noose around his neck, jerking him off the ground four times, nearly strangling the man, and causing slight brain damage that would increase as he grew older. They then pressured Mrs. Zerelda Samuels for information, manhandling her even though she was pregnant (with Fannie Quantrill Samuels), and, giving up on her, went after the sixteen-year-old boy who was working the bottomlands. Jesse would write, days later, that he was wrangling with a walking plow when he glanced to his right and saw the militia galloping toward him, their guns raised, their coats flying. They ran him until his legs were rubber and one man scourged him with a bullwhip as Jesse dodged from one cornrow to the next, striping his skin with so many cuts and welts his back looked like geography. Only weeks afterward, they arrested Mrs. Samuels and his sisters Sallie and Susan (aged four and thirteen) on charges of collaboration, locking the mother and two daughters in a jailhouse in St. Joseph. Quantrill’s lieutenants, among them Bloody Bill Anderson and Cole Younger, organized for a raid on Lawrence, Kansas, where they slaughtered one hundred fifty defenseless males in less than two hours, looting and burning the town’s buildings, and then getting drunk in the pillaged saloons to glorify their victory. Frank James was there. General Thomas Ewing issued General Order Number 11 in reaction to the massacre, evicting more than twenty thousand residents from counties in Missouri that were congenial to the guerrillas. Dr. Samuels gathered their belongings and moved his family to Rulo, Nebraska, just over the border, and soon after that communications and Sunday visits from Jesse ceased and Zee learned, in 1864, that her wild and willful cousin was riding with Bloody Bill Anderson.
    He was called Bloody Bill because of gossip that he’d chopped off enemy heads with his pirate’s sword and rode under the Black Flag with seven scalps joggling against his saddle. Jesse James was his preferred recruit; of the boy, Anderson would say, “Not to have any beard, he is the keenest and cleanest fighter in the command.” And Jesse responded to the praise with worship and imitation.
    Jesse snuggled inside two coats in his sleeping room as he storied with Zee about days and nights of looting, robbing, and setting fires. He said he’d been with Arch Clement when he executed twenty-five Union soldiers on furlough whom they’d come across on a train from St. Charles, and he’d charged Major A. V. E. Johnson’s company at Centralia with Frank and two hundred guerrillas, annihilating over one hundred men in less than twenty minutes and killing Major Johnson himself. (Frank still wore the Union Army cartridge belt that he stole from a victim there.)
    He said he’d drawn the short straw and been selected to reconnoiter a Union bivouac: he’d slithered into their midst at night with a tanner’s knife and had come out slimed with blood, having slit each of the six men’s throats from ear to ear. He told her how a Yankee bullet smashed his left middle finger at the nail and ruined his rifle stock. His brother made him so intoxicated on whiskey that Jesse couldn’t end his sentences, and then Frank snipped at the bone and skin with barber scissors until he’d neatened the