Missouri



Traveling out to Jesse James' boyhood home down
 a road lined with farms, this display caught my eye.

  OK, So Show Me: State No. 46, Missouri 

As I crossed the border into the "Show Me State", dusk loomed. What I first noticed was the hills. In Nebraska and Iowa, just now in the rear view mirror, the closest I got to a road with any grade at all was on highway off-ramps. Here, in the northern foothills of the Ozarks, the car toiled up and down many rolling hills. Not something I expected.

My goal was to finish the day cooped up in any brand of economy motel near St. Joseph, Mo., a city of 75,000 or so, hard by the east bank of the Missouri River about 50 miles due north of Kansas City. Triple-A lists many such lodgings in that area but, damn, if I could find just one of 'em along the way.

I had to think part of my problem was the signs pointing to exits off the highway (I-29 south) were labeled with letters, just letters; for example, one sign might say A, H, J in bold type inside separate panels. That's it. No idea where these ramps led, farm routes being my best guess. Made my maps useless. Again, not something I expected. 



The road signs in Mizzou seem like a bit of an inside joke.

 Tired now, the day growing longer, I struggled off the highway, down the eight miles or so of back country access road and into St. Joseph or "Jo-Mo" as some locals labeled it when I stopped for directions.
Jo-Mo was the headquarters of the Pony Express during its short-lived 18-month heyday just before the Civil War. Coast-to-coast telegraph service would come to the fore just in time to bring home the bad news from that conflict.
The Express' HQ was a hotel, the Patee House, just one block away from the home where an American legend, The Outlaw Jesse James, was ambushed and killed in early April 1882, shot in the back of his head by "The Coward" Robert Ford abetted by his feckless brother Charles. After the murder, James' press-savvy family received reporters at the Patee (more on the James gang below).
Sure, Jo-Mo sounds exciting, but all that was 130 years ago and beyond. Present day, I can report, the downtown sidewalks are rolled up by nightfall and everyone, it seems, goes home. Well, maybe they don't go home but they don't stay around here. At least on Mondays. There's supposed to be a casino hereabouts, but you can bet I didn't find it.
Another place that caught my attention when I was storyboarding this final Day 1 stop in Jo-Mo was the Glore Psychiatric Museum. According to my research, it holds such exhibits as a tranquilizing chair, restraint cage, wet-pack sheets (Yikes!) and, yes, lobotomy instruments. Considering the futility of this lodging search, these measures began to sound somewhat attractive. Unlike other local spots, this museum was open on a Monday, but I was a couple hours too late. Good thing! I saw its sign in town pointing the way, but decided to stay away.
I shambled up and down steep hills in an empty downtown, then tooled back out by the highway, sometimes in circles. Finding no place to coop, I hit the highway south to try my luck closer to KC.
It's possible I'm giving Jo-Mo the short shrift as it was a Monday (Slo-Jo-Mo?)and I was full up with fatigue. So, with neither the city or your correspondent seemingly at their best that evening, I can't give you balanced observations but I can offer up this website: http://www.stjomo.com/  . Try it, just in case you go.
Keeping an eye peeled for any sign of a motel, I drove about 20 miles, past more of those single-lettered ramp signs and a bunch of spinach farms, the money crop hereabouts or so I was told. Finally, I spied the neon sign for a nearby truck stop and pulled off at the exit and down the road into it.
It was your classic trucker's oasis, a combination gas station, motel, diner, country store and laundromat, its roomy back parking lot humming with cross-country sleeper rigs lined up in close proximity, their generators cooing in unison like huge cooped pigeons.
At the Farris Truck Stop in Faucett, Mo. you can eat in the diner about 20 hours a day, play bumper pool or the lottery, watch a big-screen TV sitting on leather couches in the lounge, rent a personal shower room, and buy beer, CDs and DVDs, fishing lures, power tools, even a new mattress for your 16-wheeler's cabin bed. You could find just about everything on the store racks.
Perfect. I took a room, Spartan at best, but it did have a flat-screen. And a flat bed, come to think of it.
After a restless night, spoiled by too much caffeine, I ate a hearty breakfast in the diner amongst a slew of truckers and a sprinkling of locals. I then recovered the $15 deposit for returning my room's TV remote, filled up on gas (even though a half-a-tank remained after 170 miles on Day 1) and headed for Kansas City.
First stop of five on Day 2: Jesse James' boyhood home, a farm in Kearney, a now-quiet hamlet just northeast of the city.

The James Gang wasn't just a rock band...


At the James' farm,  I joined a tour of the infamous farmhouse with a group of folks who rode in on Harleys. The guide, Linda, later told me I fit right in, 'til I opened my mouth.

It's a beautiful morning, sunny over royal blue skies with nary a cloud in sight. But it's a bit chilly and the winds are howling! The radio reports say they're causing a lot of damage just east of where I am and northward up through the Midwest. The airports in Chicago are closed due to Mother's Nature's fury. Lucky man I am that I traveled through the Windy City a day previous.
Speaking of radio reports, you can't miss the fact agriculture is king here with grain and soybean prices and cattle futures headlining the local news. You've got a plethora of farms, agricultural schools, colleges and museums, huge Farm & Home chain stores along with used tractors for  sale lots and signs for 4-H Clubs along the roadway but, just in case you forget who's boss, you get a reminder every half-hour on the radio.
On the way out to the James' spread, I passed many farms, some equipped with grain silos, others with water tanks, and a few fronted with scarecrows or festooned with funky displays like the one pictured atop this post.
Many farms have natural ponds on the property, some with diving boards and ladders. This looks like a good life, a peaceful posting that demands hard work as well as fair play. You must get a sense of accomplishment, growing what you eat and selling the rest. Later, at the end of a hard day, a cannonball into your own personal pond. In the winter, I'm sure there's ice on it for skating. Sounds good. I'm a touch jealous just thinking about it.
After a few twists and turns, I found the James Farm. It consists of two main buildings, a museum-gift shop and a ramshackle old farmhouse, the boyhood home of the James bothers, Jesse and Frank, and their family.
Dad Robert, a Welshman, grew hemp, was a Baptist minister who help found the local college, William Jewell, and a slave owner. Robert died ministering to miners in 1850 during the California Gold Rush when Jesse was just three years old.
Mom Zerelda, said to be a tough character in her own right, remarried twice more. There's a complicated family tree which I won't detail here but, suffice to say, it's amazing this family held together through the turmoil preceding and accompanying the Civil War period.
Missouri was a border state but Clay County was tagged "Little Dixie" for its slave holding ways. Indeed a group of six slaves had toiled on this very farm for the family. Historians contend that this area was so split over slavery the Civil War began a full decade earlier around here.
Hot-headed Jesse and his well-read older brother Frank along with like-minded outlaw Cole Younger made their bones in a violent wartime trade by riding with several guerrilla groups, among them the infamous Quatrill Raiders, a group of treacherous "Bushwackers" loyal to the Confederacy and said to be responsible for several cold-blooded massacres, including one for the record books just west of here at Lawrence, Kansas.
Local forces faithful to the the Union's cause or "Jayhawkers" were so put off by the James brothers' murderous forays they tortured Jesse's stepfather in a bid to find the brothers and then forced the family off the farm and out of Clay County temporarily.


That's your correspondent next to

 Jesse James'  gravestone behind

 the family's farmhouse.

This was a war within a war, nasty, un-Civil, if you will, practiced by partisans outside any military jurisdiction. Missourians fighting each other, truly brother against brother. Next door, "Bloody Kansas" kept pace.
This was ruthless, rough stuff,  manhunts, ambushes, some more cold-blooded massacres and then a round of bloody retribution. No rules and no visible finish line. Like a not-so merry-go-round.
And that was before Reconstruction, a period not exactly all hearts and flowers.
Post-war, the victorious "Jayhawkers" were in the process, with federal consent, of legislating the losing rebels to second-class status
Angered by these events, the brothers reunited after going their separate ways in the latter days of the conflict.
Jesse, a-k-a "Jack Shepard" (cue quizzical looks on the faces of "Lost" fanatics), had survived two life-threatening chest wounds, and now, alongside older brother Frank and Younger, began his civilian criminal career with other surviving war marauders.
The first known daylight bank robbery ever took place in nearby Liberty, Mo. in the winter of 1866 with one bank employee fatally wounded. Thus started a 15-year blitz of 25 bank, stagecoach and train robberies and murders which stretched as far away as Minnesota, Texas and West Virginia, perpetrated by a gang which sometimes numbered over 30 members. In its first train robbery, in next door Iowa, the gang wore Ku Klux Klan hoods, signalling its overall sympathies.
With the area in shambles post-war and law-abiding citizens few or far away, the murderous gang was romanticized as American Robin Hoods, although no evidence exists of such largess. It's unclear how many of these crimes Frank and Jesse conspired in but, with the dawning of a new decade, the James brothers were famous, fodder for many newspaper accounts.
Later labeled the "classic American bandit" by poet, essayist and biographer Carl Sandburg, Jesse embraced his new found celebrity, finding a kindred spirit in a fellow ex-Confederate, ever the rebel but then editor of the Kansas City Star, who published a series of letters from James proclaiming his innocence, slamming Reconstruction efforts and generally boosting his already robust nationwide profile.
Domesticated somewhat now, Jesse in 1874 married a first cousin, Zee, the woman who earlier nursed him through his Civil War injuries, had a couple of kids and bought the house in St. Joseph where he later met his maker.
The brothers had made a lot of enemies along the way, but none so fierce and tireless then those employed by the Pinkerton National Detectives Agency, tasked with the gang's destruction by several of its well-heeled victims.
The farmhouse was the site of a late January 1875 bushwhacking raid by a posse of "Pinks" and assisted by some Jayhawkers, still aggrieved Civil War rivals of the Jameses with an axes to grind.
The raid climaxed with a firebomb tossed through a window and into the small kitchen dominated by a large granite fireplace. The blast claimed the life of a younger half-brother, Archie, and cost mother Zerelda an arm. Neither Jesse or Frank were in the farmhouse that night, and the heinous conduct of the raiders gained the family a measure of popular sympathy. The Missouri legislature almost (thisclose) granted the brothers amnesty.
In September 1876, the gang attempted to rob a bank in Northfield, Minn., just south of Minneapolis. In scenes later chronicled by Hollywood, the gang was delayed inside the bank by the tactics of staffers and then barely escaped an angry mob of heavily armed townsfolk, leaving several members dead along with some of those civilians. Subject to a dogged manhunt and then a fierce gun battle when found, Cole Younger and his brothers, Jim and Bob, were wounded and captured. With most of the gang now under arrest or six feet under, only Jesse and Frank slipped away scot-free.
The gang was decimated and so, once again, the brothers split up. Frank laid low and Jesse formed a new gang and continue his robbing and pillaging. After a few botched forays with this inexperienced gang, this fledgling criminal enterprise collapsed. An angry Jesse shot a couple of his new associates and then returned to Clay County while Frank hightailed to Virginia.
It was in that St. Joe home purchased several years earlier that Jesse made his fatal mistake, turning his back to the treacherous turncoat Ford brothers. Jesse's murder made for sensational national headline. The Fords were soon sentenced to hang, but the governor pardoned them, convenient since the governor was said to be the catalyst for the ambush.
Charles Ford killed himself several years later and Robert was hunted down in Colorado and killed in 1895 by a stranger intent on avenging Jesse's betrayal.
Jesse's death and funeral was often discredited by many as a red herring and, in 1995, his body was dug up in a nearby Kearney cemetery where it had been moved to in 1902 from the family farm and subjected to DNA testing proving it was indeed Jesse's.
Despite the fact the county had since bought the farm and supported a museum there, Jesse's body was reburied in downtown Kearney next to his wife and first cousin Zee.
Jesse James' outlaw exploits are truly the stuff of American legend. The gunslinger, a proven murderer, bank robber, train robber and probable bigot, is ingrained on the American psyche. Somehow, criminals seem to get a lot of slack when it comes to history. Jesse James and, to the same extent, Billy The Kid have largely gotten a pass. Millions upon millions of young kids have recalled their names while playing Cops & Robbers or Cowboys & Indians.
Sculptors and artists have immortalized him. James has been chronicled in poetry, story, song, comic books, TV shows and, so far, 45 movies, mostly Westerns.
He was portrayed several times in 1921 films by his own son, Jesse "Tim" James Jr., once with sister Mary also in the cast. Tyrone Power, Roy Rogers, Audie Murphy, Robert Duvall, Kris Kristofferson, Colin Farrell and Brad Pitt among many others took on the role. Both Henry Fond and Johnny Cash played Frank.
Besides those Westerns, there's the 1965 science fiction offering "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter" and a Bob Hope comedy vehicle, 1959's "Alias Jesse James." Even the Three Stooges got into the act with the 1965 film, "The Outlaws Is Coming." Unfortunately for Stooges fans, it's a Curly Joe. Master German filmmaker Wim Wenders took his own eclectic shot at the legend.
Artists from Cher to Springsteen and many in between have recorded paeans to the outlaw. Joe Walsh and The James Gang co-opted their moniker, singing all the way to the bank.
Jesse James is a cottage industry hereabouts with museums, landmarks, film festivals, driving tours and re-enactments of famous capers the centerpiece of annual celebrations.
The museum at the farm includes many exhibits, documents, saddles, spurs and weapons, pictures, paintings and even an autopsy table and primitive medical instruments (Watch out! The rusty bone saw made me somewhat queasy). There's a room lined with some of the movie posters for films mentioned above. There's a historical film detailing the James' family story playing on a loop and an informative tour available of the farmhouse, which is maintained as much as possible in its original state although it was partly rebuilt after the Pinkertons' explosive ambush.
Out in back of the house is the grave from which Jesse was taken in 1902. Its marker reads, "In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here", an epitaph penned by his mother Zerelda who returned and lived at the farm, guarding Jesse's grave like a sentinel until it was disinterred and moved in 1902. She died in 1911 at age 86, passing away in Oklahoma on board a train bound for San Francisco.
Wandering frontier America as a fugitive, Frank worked all sorts of odd jobs, at times selling shoes and taking tickets for Burlesque shows. Finally, tired of keeping one eye always open and "living in his saddle", he surrendered his gun to the rascal governor who engineered Jesse's murder five years earlier. He was tried and acquitted. Twice.
His freedom and celebrity now secure, Frank toured with Cole Younger in an eponymous Wild West show. Younger had been paroled from a life sentence in a Minnesota prison just after the turn of the century. But, once again tired of the road, Frank joined his mother at the farm, spending his golden years there until his death in 1915 at age 72.
Named after the family matriarch, Jesse's widow Zee went broke after his murder and, along with Jesse's progeny, moved to Kansas City to live with her brother. Suffering from constant depression and forever clad in funereal black, she died penniless at the dawn of last century at age 54.
His brothers long dead, Bob from consumption and Jim a suicide, Cole Younger declared in 1912 that he himself had found God. He then met Him face-to-face just three and one-half years later. Got to wonder how that meeting went?
Cole's sordid story has had its own Hollywood heyday with Gilligan's Skipper, Alan Hale Jr., Richard Coogan, Phillip Carey (TV soap "One Live To Live" mainstay Asa Buchanan), Cliff Roberston, David Carradine, Randy Travis and Jimmy Caan's boy Scott taking on the ruthless role.
Jesse's son Jesse "Tim" Jr. married, had four daughters and earned a good living as a Los Angeles lawyer. He died in 1951. Mary married shortly after her mother's death, had three boys and a girl, and died in Kansas City in 1935.
Frank and his mother, each in separate periods of dotage yet both sensing easy scores, divined the worth of a powerful family legend and, ever vigilant, tried to make a few bucks off the farmhouse, she fabricating souvenirs, he giving nickle tours.
Both, you can be certain, would probably get a kick out of the fact, a century after their deaths, people still buy tokens of their times at the well-stocked gift shop adjacent to the museum. But, if they knew, they might demand a cut.
I heard tell there that friends of the museum employees often would prank-call them, asking, "Hello... Yes... Is this the Billy The Kid House?.. Can Billy come to the phone?"
I was sorely disappointed in the state of affairs in Lincoln County, N.M. when I went there in 2006 to chronicle The Kid's participation in the infamous 5-Mile Gunfight and found the area neglected. I'm satisfied that the James Gang won't be so forgotten.
(A rehabilitation of The Kid seemed to be under way in New Mexico as New Year's 2011 loomed. Rumors emerged about the outgoing governor considering a pardon for the hardcore outlaw, completing a deal allegedly made in 1878 by a predecessor, then-Territory of New Mexico Gov. Lew Wallace. The deadline approached and the international publicity machine kicked into high gear, a desired effect, no doubt, of these dubious machinations. But, literally as the sun rose on his last day in office, publicity-hound Gov. Bill Richardson chose the right path and refused to mess with settled lore. Smart. Hey, Land of Enchantment, why not just clean up the related Lincoln County sites instead? A bucket of paint, just a few signs and maybe a small visitor-friendly informational kiosk or two could do wonders there.)
History of all kinds has value. Anything important ends up as history. Everything else fades away.
There's website: http://www.jessejamesmuseum.org/ and should you go out to the farm, ask for Linda. A seasoned tour guide, she'll give you the lowdown.

Besides Lincoln County, I also have visited:

• Pecos, Texas, courthouse seat of Judge Roy Bean, "The Law West Of The Pecos", and home to a great cowboy museum and site of a famous gunfight where Pecos' favorite son and champion, Barney Riggs, sneaked a metal plate under his shirt to deflect bullets fired by two local rogues under the direction of renegade Texas Ranger, “Deacon Jim” Miller. Always suspected, never convicted, rogue with a badge Miller later engineered the bushwhacking of Sheriff Pat Garrett, the man who “outgunned” Billy the Kid. Miller later swung from the rafters of a Oklahoma barn.
• The No. 10 bar in Deadwood, S.D. where "Wild Bill" Hitchcock - holding "a dead man's hand" of Aces & Eights - was ambushed and killed, himself, like Jesse, shot in the back of the head by a coward. I could not, regrettably, get the trailer up that steep hill in Deadwood to take in his grave site next to Calamity Jane;
• The grave site and museum in the mountains high above Golden, Colo. of famous Indian fighter and Wild West showman "Buffalo Bill" Cody;
• Glenwood Springs, the Colorado old-time spa town where chronically ill gunslinger "Doc" Holliday finally gave in to consumption;
• "The Hole In The Wall", the Utah redoubt of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and their cohort.
• Also, on separate visits to the Lone Star State, I took in the Davy Crockett Memorial and The Alamo.

Never did get far enough south in Arizona to see the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, the capstone of Marshall Wyatt Earp's legend, but I spent some time in each of the nine bars found on Front Street in Nome, Alaska where Earp, a sometimes lawman, sometimes jailbird but always a card sharp and gunslinger, ran several of the saloons and gambling spots located there during that area's Gold Rush at the turn of the last century.
I may have unknowingly crossed paths with Bat Masterson and his trademark Bowler at any of the above listed 18th Century hot spots but I can't account for that. So, skipping Bat and his hat but with Billy The Kid, Wild Bill, Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, Doc Holliday, Judge Bean, Davy Crockett, Butch and Sundance and, now, Jesse James, much like Lewis & Clark in a previous post, I'm moving the Wild West over to the done column. Gunslingers? Check.

Still to come concerning Kansas City, Mo. and vicinity: Four more great stops, the Truman Presidential Library, the Negro Baseball Hall of Fame and its neighboring American Jazz Hall of Fame as well as a KC-K BBQ stop that is the stuff of legend.
One big day, one great place. KC's a destination city. Who knew?