TRUE LOVE or killing time

One of the amazing resources we have today is the gift of the Internet. A person like me, planted in the hills of Texas, can research the latest and best information about anything, anywhere. And that resource just grows and grows. The latest and best info today might seem mundane and commonplace the next time you search the same subject... and sometimes you just search better and find a new and valued source of information, which can revolutionize everything.

BUT you have to be aware that some people are not careful with “facts” and make all kinds of unsubstantiated claims... which can be absorbed, but with skepticism. Still, sometimes they are merely the first to say the unmitigated truth... and it just sounds strange. The longer you mull over it, the more reasonable it sounds. My belief is that the Truth always comes out. And, this is crazy, the truth never sounds like the truth when you first hear it. Our lives are inundated with spin and urban legend and plain lies... So I try to warn my readers when something is merely unproven conjecture. I do not repeat things which I believe are false... unless it is to debunk them. But I also fight to keep an open mind... in case the truth is still trying to come out.

And sometimes, you step into a quagmire of conflicting and mostly unproven conjecture... all possible, none verified, and all irresistible.

Here is one such swamp... and my mucky attempt to wade through it and share the stench of history with you!

 THREE tintypes of Emmett Dalton... (numbered) certainly more than was known to exist!

Emmett Dalton became a published if not celebrated writer - and a construction contractor and even a western movie actor and producer when he got out of prison. After misspending is youth following his older brothers all over Oklahoma, robbing trains and banks and establishing himself as a legendary western anti-hero, Emmett settled down as a somewhat reliable citizen. He got married to an old outlaw flame named Julia Johnson/Gilstrap/Lewis, who according to his books had “waited” for him. His writings were a shameless effort to capitalize on his criminal career, and to sanitize his dear Julia, and to a greater degree, her sister Lucy, who, according to legend, had courted his brother Bob, the leader of their outlaw gang. Emmett's three outlaw brothers had all been killed, as well as all the other gang members, supposedly leaving Emmett and his wife as the only living witnesses and last word on things Dalton. His books became the Dalton legacy, and a powerful spin on their story.

Emmett wrote his self-serving version of the Dalton boy's gradual plunge into crime, one he blamed on a California express detective, the railroads and corrupt lawmen and prosecutors, and he also revealed how much the gang depended on intelligence provided by one “Eugenia Moore,” who Emmett claimed to have been from their old home place in Missouri (there were several), and whom he thought to be beautiful, intelligent, brave, energetic and loyal to the gang. Eugenia's outlaw genius and activity would have rivaled any female outlaw's in the Western Halls of Infamy.

Posing as a magazine writer, Eugenia scoped out railroad installations from the top to the bottom of Oklahoma, translated Morse Code transmitted over the telegraphs, discovered major money shipments, and rode alone on horseback over hundreds of miles to inform the gang wherever they were hiding in the wilds of the Great Plains. Whatever her real name, Moore's valued information led to several successful train robberies, most of which were executed within a day's ride from the known home of two sisters historically associated with the Daltons, Julia (b. 1870) and Lucy Johnson (b. 1868- d.1892?).

My tintype of Lucy Johnson.

Eugenia was also instrumental in the Dalton's survival after each holdup. After providing the gang with essential reconnaissance, she then expedited their get-away, gathering ammunition and fresh horses at a pre-planned destination. Then after several successful operations, Bob Dalton unexplainably sent her back to Silver City where they had met. The legend Emmett birthed was that she had gone there originally for her health, and that after her fling with Bob it eventually became her last resting place.  But when “Eugenia” reportedly faded out and retired to New Mexico, supposedly to die, so did the fortunes of the Dalton gang. Then fourteen years after the gang was exterminated at Coffeyville, Julia Johnson, her sister was still holding her gang membership card. She cleared all the clutter in her life and found Emmett, and they lived a life of celebrity and dark glamour, seeing the gang immortalized more than once in the cinema, and reinforcing much that never happened. It was "happily NEVER after."

Writers and researchers have since illuminated the lives of these two Texas girls from Grayson County who had arrived in northeast Oklahoma about the same time that the Daltons began their crime spree. Both of them had been born in Kentucky, but Emmett referred to the family as the "Texas Johnsons." Lucy was the prettiest, and supposedly the wildest, and there has been some speculation that it was she who had fallen in love with Bob Dalton and served the gang so faithfully. In Harold Preece's book called The Dalton Gang, Eugenia Moore is conflated with another outlaw woman, a cross-dressing prostitute named Flora Quick, and known as “Tom King,” who made a name for herself stealing horses and escaping several western jails, frustrating many of the lawmen in the Indian Territory.  But the one known photograph of Flora Quick does not jive with images which have surfaced in recent years of the Johnson girls. But Preece also noted that there was a Dalton “cousin” named “Minnie” Johnson who lived with the Daltons after their relocation to Coffeyville, and in fact, then Deputy U.S. Marshal Bob Dalton became jealous when she began to date a local moonshiner- and killed him! With shallow pretense. Supposedly acting on a warrant for his arrest, Bob tracked him down and shot him dead... and according to Emmett, even paid his funeral expenses. 

Emmett freely admitted his brother Bob's bad temper and capacity for murderous hate. But it was his other, true blue and loving side which won Emmett's allegiance, even to death, and perhaps "Eugenia's" as well.

Emmett said he met black-eyed Julia in 1887 when they were both sixteen, near Vinita. Although madly in love with her, he immediately left for California... on a lark. But it seems this would have been about the same time that Bob must have, if he ever did, fathered little Jenny Mae. Passed around like an unwanted yard ornament, Jenny Mae lived with several Oklahoma families who may not have had any blood kinship, but rather severed marital ties which leaned heavily on human decency.

One little, Two little, Three little Indians...

We KNOW that Emmett later married middle-aged Julia Johnson, who did not wait for him, not a second, but had been married a number of times while “waiting” for him to get out of prison. We know she had a sister named Lucy, who either died or skipped out and left Julia to raise her child... The child's name was Jenny Mae, (b. Nov, 1889) officially changed to Jenny Mae Gilstrap, when Julia married a Cherokee outlaw named Robert Gilstrap, some time (perhaps only eight months) after a Cherokee marriage in 1886 with a fellow named Albert (or Simon) White Turkey, who divorced her the Cherokee way when he became displeased with her. (He left her) It has been supposed that these marriages were to establish Julia's and Jenny's legal residency in the Indian Nations. Like all of Julia's lovers, Gilstrap was an outlaw and was gunned down on Christmas Eve, by another admirer of Julia's, a Delaware Indian named Frank Leno in Bartlesville in 1889.

Young, dumb and surrounded by bums, Emmett Dalton was hiding out at the Riley ranch in far west Oklahoma at the time, and far from the marrying kind. He was occasionally serving on his brother's posse, that of Deputy Marshal Grat Dalton. Brothers Bob and Grat had organized a lucrative horse stealing operation in the Osage Nation, where they were assigned as deputy marshal and posse man, respectively. They had worn out their luck and their reputations and were relieved of duty by 1890. Soon they were united with Emmett and his cowboy buddies and headed to Silver City, New Mexico, where they began their depredations. 

 

This was where Bob supposedly “met” “Eugenia Moore” and struck a romance... Eugenia was supposedly just 22 years old (Lucy would have been only 18) and there in New Mexico for her “health.” It was strictly a “chance” meeting. Supposedly she had no family. And there was no baby in tow. Records show that the parents of Lucy and Julia Johnson, freshly relocated from Texas, had indeed died in Bartlesville, OK within seven months of each other in 1891. Emmett seems never to have been aware that this old family friend “from Missouri” might have been the mother of Bob's child and sister of his sweetheart tucked away in Vinita... who by that time had been married at least twice, and cavorting with Indian outlaws. Emmett was either dumber than a dufflebag of hammers or a bold liar, or both.

If Eugenia Moore was just a creation of Emmett's, then he obviously salted her background information with several lies to hide her true identity. And if so, this ruse worked for over one hundred years.  No matter who she was, it would certainly follow a familiar pattern in Old West lore.  

Etta Place, "Rose of Cimarron," and other outlaw women, especially attractive ones, enjoyed fierce protection from both sides of the law, and permanent anonymity in the public record, for whatever roles they played in frontier crimes. This seems to have been considered the gentlemanly thing to do.  

Julia Johnson Gilstrap, still an outlaw, later married Robert Ernest Lewis, a saloon owner, who tried to market near-beer in the Osage Territory when alcohol was illegal. Once again one of her husbands gets shot to death, this time defying U.S. Marshals who were enforcing the prohibition of alcohol just days before Oklahoma is transformed from Indian land to the Indian Territory, subject to U.S. law. Indignant and inconvenienced, he killed one and one killed him. Julia continued to run the Saloon... but when alcohol was legal. It would be safe to say that Julia Johnson was attracted to danger and lawless types and that their sorry lives were sold cheap. And this last killing was just in time, because thanks to her efforts, Emmett was about to be released from prison. It was all so convenient!

Still, Emmett described her as the sweet, faithful beauty who waited for him, when she could have done so much better. Whether it was waiting or killing time, Julia was there when Emmett was ready for her. Neither of them ever admitted to who Eugenia Moore was... although it seems possible that the name was borrowed from the wife of a fellow gang member...

Richard L.“Dick” Broadwell of Hutchinson, Kansas was one of the desperadoes killed at the Coffeyville debacle. He met up with the Daltons while working on the Bar X Bar Ranch, after a romance fiasco where his “fiance” had absconded with all of his savings, a betrayal probably justified because he was a two-bit outlaw. He was known variously as “Texas Jack,” and John Moore. John Moore was to have met his new wife and new life in Ft Worth, but ended up broke and destined for infamy. I would bet his AWOL lover's name was Eugenia. That way every mention of this woman only extended the smear of someone who had betrayed the Dalton criminal network. The name was invented to tell an incredible story, if not the heart of the Dalton story, without casting any shadow on the real persons, now moved on, gone straight, but never having answered for their crimes.

One Internet writer contends that Lucy Johnson did not die as suggested by the Dalton legend, but found refuge in Canada until the coast was long considered clear and then she moved back to die of old age in Oklahoma. There are photographs to prove it, which have helped me identify my tintype of one of the Johnson girls... I believe to be Lucy, who took her wild story and dark secrets to the grave... and oblivion.

 Bob Dalton and "Eugenia Moore." One of several 

known photos of Bob...About 1889

It may have been shame. But it may have been an undying love. The kind of faithfulness that Emmett could only pretend about. But the kind of devotion that, along with the rest of his written adulation for his almost sister-in-law- outlaw Lucy, he knew to be true in someone's life- someone very close to him...

And no amount of money- or curiosity- seems to be sufficient to loosen up Dalton descendant's lips who might be able to verify ANY OF THIS!

A Series of "Coincidences"?

This is a website that believes in miracles. If you read and explore it, you will quickly see why. Over a year ago I began to acquire an extraordinary antique image collection... from an Internet auction, one at a time, which should wind up as a collection in the Smithsonian some day.

In the meantime, I am trying to research the images and figure out what I have. I have read scores of books... and sometimes they have explained what I have, as illustrated in this blog. Seemingly ordinary things and events described in biographies about the subjects have become historical proof of the images themselves. With no provenance, these “coincidences” have become the only evidence I have that this whole incredible project is what I think it is. Many images are explained in blog articles below... but for now here is the big picture of what I think you are looking at.

 

I BELIEVE, these images were once resting in the archives of Mark Twain, and later his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, who eventually had custody of all things Twain. Sam Clemens was a naturally curious man, and had many varied interests, and especially in human nature and current events, and no less Paine, his personal biographer and confidant. He opened doors for Paine, who wrote some very important biographies of the most important creative personalities of their time. I think, I THINK, that these two, separately and then collectively amassed a vast photo archive which eventually fell into “temporary” storage upon their deaths and sadly, into irrelevance and obscurity.

Authors are often sought out and courted to write important and not-so important biographies of the important and the self-important. They often consider these projects, and during the earliest stages of developing these biographies, many unrealistic ideas and goals are negotiated... and often the authors themselves start out with grandiose schemes... and probably the frills most often dreamed of- and just as often the most often dashed are the ideas, pipe dreams, of profuse illustrations in the proposed book. Everybody loves pictures.... except publishers, who hate paying for them, and thin them out mercilessly. Thus every manuscript for that matter, whether or not it ever gets published, is often accompanied with scores of pictures for illustration that will never be used; Pictures that have been promised by the authors to be returned to their sentimental owners... some day.

And that often never happens... for many reasons. Mostly because books take a long time to produce, and authors hold on to the loaned pictures hoping the publishers will change their minds, realize the value of the illustrations, and ask for them. By the time all hope for using the images has been dashed, the authors are working on new books, the image owners have gotten old and even died, and the images are forgotten about and sit waiting to be returned- indefinitely. They cannot be thrown away... or sold... and they sit in dark corners until the authors get old or die, and then are sold off at some estate sale, or hailed off, along with a mountain of unwanted books and papers and artifacts that are common in an author's personal archives. I am sure it is a story often repeated.

 Deeply personal and rare tintypes of famous families... in this case neighbors of the Clemens... I thought these (1 & 2) were of Mary Cassatt's mother... and was not surprised by the name of the book  in her lap when enlarged: The Practical Painter.

Now imagine what kinds of things MIGHT have been lurking in the neglected corners of the likes of Mark Twain or Albert Bigelow Paine, his biographer. Both men were world travelers, who were the first to be asked to consider the most exciting and prestigious projects in the country. And for every project they completed, scores went unfinished, saved for a “rainy day.” Both men knew the “Who's Who” of upper society, and the Counts and no counts... and either of them could easily have stashed the stunningly important image collection seen here.

Here is the wonderful part, for most of the people pictured in this Victorian image collection, there is a direct link or at least a possible link, to one or both of these men. I believe that the best intentions they had about returning this mountain of borrowed images evolved over decades into a truckload of dusty boxes which were disposed of, and thankfully, somebody looked at them and saw their value... probably a hundred years later. That is where I come in.

A lifelong history lover, I am an instinctive detective, and an artist with a brain for recognizing likenesses. It has been an exciting year, and after many hundreds of hours of research, this blog is finally starting to make sense. These are important images, I believe from personal collections of many famous people, once entrusted to two of the most important writers of the Nineteenth Century. But they had never been published. Not then, not until now, and right here.

You are looking into the secrets and riddles of our history, some deliberately, some by happenstance, and all once intended to illustrate American and some European biographies never written, or at least never published. Lawmen, outlaws, entertainers, politicians, writers, artists, and many more. There are many photographs, merely collected, for the visual delight they inspired. AND, I BELIEVE, some of them may have been the work of Albert Paine who was also a photographer.

Dive in!

Welcome to Albert's Secret Legacy Chest

You have surfed into a deep stream of mystery and creativity that will take both of us years to understand. 

 You could be an English Lit. Major and still never have heard of this author, who wrote the first biographies of America's creative brain trust, and much more...

So welcome- if you can take this first step into artistic and historical oblivion, I will take the lead the rest of the way. My mission is to bring obscure and yet important and fascinating objects to the surface, and perhaps add some nuances to history.

This whole blog is a wayward planet whose sun is a creative genius and mysterious player during the Victorian age... a man who for good reasons chose to live and die in relative secrecy, but who amassed a large legacy of American literature; Biographies of the premier creative giants of his age, Twain, Gish and Nast, scores of children's books, novels, and stories that could have inspired the Twilight Zone. And if I am correct in my theories... a mountain of photography of all the news makers of the day, some collected and some he photographed himself. 

I stumbled onto the photographs, seen here for the first time, and they have led me to one of the greatest untold networks of creative minds ever formed. Artists, detectives, writers, models, prostitutes, outlaws, spies... all providing the critical mass of an unseen Rolodex of the right-brained talents and iconoclasts of the Industrial Revolution. 

 His name was Albert Bigelow Paine, and after you get through with this blog you will never forget him. Because here we have thrown back the veil and uncovered his monument, which has been sleeping where he buried it, right under our deadened American noses.

Albert Bigelow Paine had many reasons for ducking behind his colossal literary monument, his unequaled diversity, his uncanny success, and instead trusting to time and saturation to place his flag at the peak of American cultural achievement.  But his unexpected death and poor planning, and perhaps poorer politicking, left his flag stuck in a bottomless chasm instead. 

Paine was at the very least a great talent, a passionate writer, but also a ruthless literary appropriator... even a thief, and a bigamist and a con-man... and probably a forger and well, we still don't know what all. He was the perfect example of the fine line between crime and art, of the creativity within man that can be used for either good or evil, and especially a prime example of right-brained abilities and how they have always run amuck without much understanding or appreciation, and way too much trust in this left-brained world.

His vapor trail left so much jealousy and resentment and suspicion that he had worn out any goodwill that might have preserved his legacy. A.B. Paine was the worst and the best of artistic genius, and after his star had fizzled, it had used up all the oxygen in its time slot. So you and I have never heard of this person.

And this is so strange, given that he was personally responsible for establishing the halls of fame for some of our greatest cultural icons... He may have been one of the first to understand fame and the art of managing it, of public relations, of creating and protecting a public image. But Paine had no one to do for him what he had done for others.  

Thus he planted essential flags of immortality on the Olympus of Americana, and then perished, his own considerable contributions to be forgotten, no museums, no magazine articles, not even a biography... 

Nothing but the same superficial bio, a paragraph, barely modified, repeated in footnotes in scores of publications and websites, too uninterested to investigate further.

We should have been asking hundreds of good questions, when someone could have answered them. What happened to Paine's early career of photography? The photographs? How did he manage to skirt prosecution of all of his crimes? How did he, an unknown writer from the Midwest, manage to ingratiate himself with the most famous people in the United States, in order to write their biographies? Operating in New York under an assumed name, hiding from his wife, and hiding his second family from his first wife... yet writing cutting edge manuscripts which gained the confidence of America's most popular bard, Samuel Clemens, and through him attracting the most enviable commissions in the country. How? How did he maintain and profit from that relationship long after Clemens was dead, continuing his magic with Clemens's only surviving daughter, who was convinced that he was the only person who ever "understood her father."

How did he continue to release previously unknown, unpublished works of Clemens, squeezing the last drop of blood from the dustbin of the Twain archive? Even finishing uncompleted works, combining, rearranging others... all while editing or writing sequel biographies of Twain, and award-winning books of his own? It was a magnificent whirlwind of commercial literary success not often experienced by any author of any age. And acknowledging all this, how could we then not know of him?

THAT is what this blog seeks to answer... and it will take some doing. The answers will come, not by reading something on the Internet, but from research and a good deal of creative deduction. It will take a writer and and photographer and a right-brained person like Paine to unlock the mysteries... and that... 

would be me.

Young People Those Days!

Here is a bizarre story of "family values"... Sung about so ably, by no less than the Eagles on their second album, called Desperado... 

Perhaps the sorriest and most devoted criminal family in the "Old West" was the Dalton clan.  FOUR out of ten brothers became legendary outlaws. One sister was believed to have harbored them between jobs. So 5 out of 15 children in one family were involved in a crime ring. All children of a vagabond horse trader, you have to wonder who shaped their family values, which were very strong...

And who shaped their moral values, and sense of right and wrong?

Mine are the four larger images... others have been provided for comparison.

Related to the Youngers of the James-Younger gang, these fellows went bad after a bad family experience in law enforcement, when their older brother Frank was killed in a gun battle in the line of duty as a U.S. deputy marshal. Grat and Bob had tried to follow in Frank's footsteps, but some kind of resentment inspired them to blend law enforcement with whiskey smuggling and stealing horses. This evolved into a crime spree which stretched from Kansas to California. It has never been clear what triggered the reversal, and in fact their story has never really been well told. I believe the mastermind, if you could call him that, was the more genteel Bill Dalton, who always seemed to be around- but at an arms length to their crimes. As the map above illustrates, Bill was stationed in Bartlesville, which turned out to be in the very center of Dalton depredations. It is believed that he planned the robberies, and Flora Quick, aka "Tom King" was the messenger to his brothers.

 Note that top hat! And the postmortem photo... Often the outlaws sported facial hair when on the warpath... and this how they were often "captured" for posterity.

It was believed but never proven that the Daltons sometimes found refuge at their sister Eva's home in Meade, Kansas, which was later discovered to be equipped with a secret passageway and an underground hide-out. Interestingly, one of these tintypes (above) features Eva Mae and Bill together... almost as if they were illustrating some kind of invisible alliance. Bill had presented a dignified profile while living in California... where the railroads had made themselves a popular target for social justice radicals. As their outspoken enemy, he had become a tempting political target. And all hell broke loose when his brothers came out to visit, and a train was robbed, thus drawing suspicions and ruining his image.

After the band was totally wiped out, and Eva was exposed, she moved away from Meade, and depleted of outlaw siblings, she moved to Kingfisher, Oklahoma and supposedly went straight.

Grat was the heavy lifter in the gang, and the slowest. He was apprehended in California for a robbery attributed to the Daltons but managed to escape. One legend has him leaping out of a train window which was crossing a trellis... a la D. B. Cooper, never to be seen again... but his actual escape was not so dramatic. This left Bill, "the smart one" to face the law and the railroad, but in fact they had no evidence with which to prosecute him.

Eventually all of the outlaw Daltons moved back to familiar ground... The Oklahoma Territory, where they devoted themselves to making a name for themselves even bigger than the Younger gang- their cousins... and that led to the wildest scheme of all, of robbing TWO  banks at once... in their old hometown, Coffeyville, Kansas.

Their crimes were fairly well coordinated and expedited,  and included daring bank and train robberies, led by Bob Dalton, who depended a great deal on younger Emmett as a dependable man in a tight spot. Always posing as an innocent businessman, with firm alibis, Bill did not emerge as an outlaw until his brothers were either killed or captured. And that was the result at Coffeyville, which was a classic case of criminal over-confidence and the old saying "loose lips sink ships."  Four of the gang were killed in a few minutes, and only Emmett survived, to face a lengthy prison sentence.

The Coffeyville disaster seems to have brought out the hurt pride of Bill, who was seemingly determined to avenge his brothers, and the family outlaw reputation. When he did finally emerge, after the Dalton brain trust had led to death and disaster, he was allied with another infamous outlaw, who had been associated with the Daltons... Bill Doolin. Together they started an outlaw network famously known as the "Wild Bunch."

Bill Doolin

For some reason, in this collection there were three, very rare tintypes of Bill Doolin, who always considered himself a higher grade of highwayman. Pictured in two of them are an attractive brunette, perhaps his wife, Edith, and even one of their children. The photo of him without a hat may be with a different, prettier woman, who could certainly be a sister of the later one... who looks a little hardened. Another loving, family man.

 

Emmett Dalton

The only one of the "bad" brothers to survive was Emmett, the youngest and perhaps the wildest,  who got out of prison and like many rehabilitated outlaws, (Frank James, Bob Ford, Al Jennings) became something a celebrity. He married his old sweetheart, Julia Johnson, a veritable outlaw queen, and moved to Hollywood, where he played himself in an early Western movie.

So comprehensive was this collection, it even had tintypes of the women who followed the Dalton men.  One, Flora Quick Mundis, was even thought by some to have continued to plan and execute train robberies after the Daltons had been wiped out. Jailed numerous times, and always "escaping," she dressed like a man and was known among outlaws at "Tom King." Researchers have connected her to both Bill and Bob Dalton. Legend has her dying from gunshot wounds in Arizona. Historians have conflated her with a prostitute called "China Dot," who was a favorite among Chinese railroad workers, and who was killed in a murder-suicide in Clifton Arizona. Her lover was the former mayor, who did not explain their unhappy demise, other than four well placed bullets in the aging courtesan. She was almost immediately identified as the legendary Tom King, once an Indian Territory terror, known to all the famous lawmen of that region.

Flora Quick Mundis

 

The photo on horseback is the only known photo of one of the Wild West's wildest women.

Said to have been a spoiled brat from Missouri, she hated school and sought the company of the fast crowd, marrying a man twice her age and then squandering her inheritance. Teaming up with a local madam, she went into wholesale horse-stealing and eventually prostitution, and according to some western writers, hooked up with the Doolin-Dalton gang. These outlaw love relationships were hardly ever made official or known to the outside world. But given enough time, they sometimes revealed themselves..

Julia was Emmett's long lost & found love, Lucy may have been the mysterious Minnie, alias "Eugenia Moore" in the famous photo of Bob Dalton. (below)

Not from my collection, provided for illustration.

Semi-faithful Julia Johnson went through a couple of relationships while she waited for Emmett to get out of prison. Then she goaded her second husband into a deadly gunfight which left her free and ready- conveniently when Emmett was released after 14 years.  This was an early release she reportedly campaigned for. Her sister Lucy Johnson was supposedly one of Bob Dalton's main groupies, and may also have been known as "Eugenia Moore"... The woman on the far right (above) with Bob Dalton has never been identified... but I think she and my tintype (center) are probably Julia's sister Lucy, pictured on the left touching heads with Julia. (It is just as possible the unidentified young woman is Julia.)

There were many, many secrets... kept successfully till now. Many an outlaw romance went unannounced and forever undocumented. Rumors were the best leads that writers were going to get. But when Emmett came back for Julia, he verified the Dalton-Johnson connection... and bolstered the rumors of the Bob Dalton - Lucy Johnson (her sister) affair, which may well have been the epicenter of the Dalton crime wave. Bob had killed his law enforcement career when he abused his badge and killed a boy friend- of his female interest... who was probably Lucy, with whom he later fathered a child. She was actually his cousin, known to the family as "Minnie" and raised in his own home by his mother. Minnie may have used several aliases while she served as the Dalton advance team, setting up food, transportation and shelter for them on their "jobs." But not long afterward Lucy/"Minnie" died, and her sister Julia took custody of her child, and kept the familial fires burning.

And they will always burn with so many tragic mysteries obscuring this counter-cultural clan. Today the Internet is rich with wanna-be Dalton kin, arguing the validity of their various blood relationships... so many folks that find significance in familial attachment to these long dead robbers and killers.

One gentleman went to great lengths and outrageous expense, placing tombstones, publishing bogus histories, just to establish his own clan's claims of daring Dalton due, only to be smeared with even greater zeal by those determined to protect the sanctity of Daltondom. The arguments by Daltondom are that the old interviews and official records do not support the Phillips family claim of direct kinship. The question seems to rotate around a spurious daughter known as "Bea," or Elizabeth Dalton, who supposedly married into the Phillips and lost contact with her outlaw brothers. Well, you couldn't blame her for that!

It was an outrageous invasion of Dalton family heritage... a crime against decency and American history, and in its own way, a fitting and criminal tribute to the greatest outlaw family in the Old West. But it is stunning what some people might do, to forever establish themselves as a wart on a bump on a footnote in history!

William Bonney or... BILLY the KID!

No Old West picture collection could claim to be complete without these guys. If you are a lover of Western lore and legend, they need no introductions.

Billy Bonney was just a shrimpy dead-end kid raised on the streets and made mean by saloon bullies until he became a master at getting even. Many of his killings were nothing but the last say in a running battle with over-bearing drunks, pompous lawmen and ruthless range barons. Billy was a big believer in the Colt revolver as EQUALIZER. Known as likable and even lovable to New Mexicans, Billy had no trouble gathering a dangerous entourage which varied between a half dozen to dozens of rustlers and gunmen who raided and partied all over North Texas and New Mexico... leaving scores of angry victims, especially Panhandle cattlemen.

There were a score of lawmen tracking Billy when Pat Garrett and his posse finally caught up to him, and by that time, most of the fellows shown here were already dead. It is some kind of tribute to the Kid that so many misguided youths were willing to go down fighting with him, and so many senoritas risked their reputations to adore and comfort him. 

There was something strangely attractive about him, something mystical, which inspired some ranchers to help him, protect and expedite his gang, and feed his mischief until he was dead. And then they made a folk hero out of him.

These images, mostly tintypes, all came down the pipeline just like the rest, one at a time, unnamed, but almost in a wave among thousands of images sold online by one dealer. The first face I recognized was Charley Bowdre's... when I ID'd the fellow next to him as Fred Waite, I sat up and took notice, because these images usually came in clusters of related individuals. What unfolded was next to extraordinary... all the main characters in the Saga of Billy the Kid.

Ranch owner Tunstall was the British reformer who almost rehabilitated Billy, and then his murder was the straw that broke the camel's back. But Billy got his revenge. If this is him, it was obviously when just arriving in America.

A young, dapper Pat Garrett, whose legendary career was rife with frustrations after he assassinated Bonney. He was murdered during a buggy ride by hired assassins, probably led by "Killin'" Jim Miller.

UNRESOLVED

Sadly for me, a proud Texan, there were very few images in this project representing Texans. But towards the end of the acquisition I finally recognized a famous Texan,  famous for being an Oklahoman!

 Finally! A Texan! Temple Houston was an Oklahoma

lawyer, gunslinger, and sometime politician.  He was

 Sam Houston's youngest and most genetically similar 

son... even though he never really knew his father. 

 

 Due to difficulty, I waited as long as possible before unveiling this portion of the Russell Cushman Historical Image Collection. This was a challenging puzzle, with four brothers who shared a strong family resemblance. 

First the flamboyant and idiosyncratic Temple Houston, fourth son of Sam Houston, showed up on a CDV in one of the auctions where I had been snagging historical images for almost a year. As usual, the seller could not provide identification or provenance. Still, I knew it was him, and eventually found several more of his brothers...

There are very few images of the Houston children, which in itself is something of a mystery. Their father was an extroverted politician of great importance in American history, and certainly was painted, sculpted and photographed to the saturation level. But it is as if the children and Mrs. Houston were sequestered all of their lives, with scant and dimly lit peeks of them made available through limited family channels. Now my photographs prove that there were some... but perhaps they were loaned out for publishing purposes and never returned. Until NOW!

Considering the context of the rest of the collection, I believe that if I keep digging, will find somewhere that Albert Bigelow Paine, one of America's leading biographers, and the central culprit in this whole blog, at one time considered doing a biography of either Sam Houston or Temple Houston. And as I have displayed here, if my theories are correct, he was something of an image hoarder.

 #1, Andrew Jackson Houston, named after Sam Houston's

 close friend and commander and President of the United States.

Andrew was the second oldest, but was not old enough to 

serve in the Confederacy, but served later in the National Guard.

 Just some of the photos, nicely arranged,  which guided 

my identifications of three of the Houston boys, numbered

1 - 4. Ironically, the larger portion of them was of Andrew, 

a man my father knew well and interviewed for his book.

 

First Temple and then several tintypes emerged with boys that looked very Houstonesque.  They looked very much akin, but it would take me a long time to make this final graphic, organizing them, and hopefully correctly identifying them, using every photograph I could find for comparison.  I never did see a photograph of Sam Jr., who was the oldest and less likely to have been photographed as a child, since he was born before photography had even come to frontier Texas. 

But certainly after the Civil War, photography had come of age, and was available to the upper middle class in the larger population centers. The problem was the younger children were usually kept at home, which was probably Independence, Texas for most of them, and rarely seen in the political circles where Sam spent most of his time. The CDV (#4) of Temple in a suit was probably made when he served as a page in Washington D.C. when he was 15 or 16. By then he had already driven cattle all the way to the Dakotas, worked as a night clerk on a riverboat on the Mississippi, learned the "ways of the world," and then negotiated an appointment as a Washington page by a U.S. Senator.

 #2, Andrew Jackson Houston in his late twenties. This one

 well illustrates the Houston ferocity.  Andrew was not as 

handsome as the others, but was actually appointed to

 the U. S. Senate from Texas, right before he died.

I will admit that the photos, numbering 1-4, are not the most flattering, but because they were grouped relatively close in an Internet auction march of thousands, I felt then and still feel strongly that they were related. And they certainly do look like Houstons. There is that intense scowl... with powerful lips, but basic good looks that ties them together. The toughest thing was to tell them apart, with no clues. The ears were the only way to differentiate one from another.

#3, Little William and Andrew Jackson Houston, 

about 6 & 10, around the end of the Civil War-

perhaps dressed for their father's untimely funeral.

Here are some of the most acknowledged sons of Texas,  all of which grew up in public shame after their father refused to lead Texas in Secession and joining the Confederacy, and was forced out of the Governor's office. They had to find their own way while time would eventually prove the Houstons were on the right side of history.  All of them would have made Sam proud at one time or another, but some of them, especially Temple, would have frustrated the hell out of him. Sam Houston died during the Civil War, leaving the children to be raised without him. His devoted wife passed away soon after, and Temple and William were raised by their sister. The military and political legacy of his father, combined with the frustrations of defeat during the Civil War and the ostracism of his family because of his father's stance forged Temple Houston into a fierce young man with something to prove. And he soon chose someplace else to do it.

Temple Houston's life story included a law degree, political appointments, and a scandalous legal career which included shooting his pistols during a trial in his adopted state, Oklahoma. It is too much to cover here, but he would have been an intriguing western character to inspire a popular biography, but if anything, even Albert Bigelow Paine, the original spin doctor, might have hesitated. 

There were at least two biographies written about him in the late Twentieth Century, the better one by Glenn Shirley; Temple Houston- Lawyer With A Gun. 

A Picture of Mother's Love... or something

Look past the softness. Ignore the beauty. Probably copied from an earlier ambrotype, this is the face that launched a thousand nightmares...

 

 Mona Lisa had nothing on this portrait, which I believe

 is the Mother of THE most famous Outlaws.

 This old image could be controversial. Only because of what I think and there is almost NOTHING TO COMPARE TO. Many of the other images here can be compared to historic images of similar age to derive how correct my guesses are. But not this one.


I believe this is Zerelda James Samuel, "Mother of  Battles- post-Civil War," the infamous matriarch of the James clan, who provided the nurturing which shaped two killers, Jesse and Frank James, who invented bank robbing and perfected train robbing in Victorian America. She aided and abetted their campaigns, harbored them between crimes, and gave up at least two other children to their cause... if our theories are correct.

According to history, Zerelda was as tall as most men, commanding, and defiant of most authority, and some accounts say that she was quite beautiful in her early life. An outlaw queen. But up until now, we could only imagine.

 Here brightened and reversed for comparison, showing the 

same open stare, and the exact triangulation between 

the eyes and nose, of a known likeness of 
Zerelda Samuel. The hand-colored image 

in the upper right is like mine, 

only a proposed image

 of Zerelda.

She is said to have had fiery relationships with a stepfather she barely endured, and her first two husbands who died young... one (James) supposedly in the California gold fields, the other (Simms) was fortuitously killed by a horse- right after Zerelda decided that she wanted to divorce him. A tough survivor of frontier rural life, she owned and bossed slaves with imperial callousness, yet maintained their devotion. She managed the family farm and brought fives sons and three daughters into a harsh world, and raised most of them to maturity.

During the Civil War, her third husband, Dr. Reuben Samuel, was repeatedly hung from a tree and dropped before asphyixiation, until he was permanently brain damaged, and left for dead by Union investigators. Still, they managed to produce one more child, Archie, in 1866. In the end, she had lost at least two of her children to violence, and her right arm in a law enforcement raid. She never seemed to react as others would expect. When the Pinkertons threw a flare into her home to illuminate the interior, she knocked it into the fireplace, causing it to explode and rip off her arm and kill little Archie, her youngest.

Needless to say, after showing so much pluck, many Southerners sympathized with her, and Missourians united to support the James Gang in their battle against a relentless foe; the North.

This half-plate tintype was acquired near the end of the gathering of this whole collection. As the collection increased, I noticed that the larger tintypes were almost always of supremely important people to American History. There were not that many, but among them were Winslow Homer and Libby Custer. They were either prestigious gifts or cherished loans by the subjects. Either way, when this tintype became available, I snatched it immediately and thought about it later. I was not sure who it was, only that the woman was pretty and had a disturbing deadpan stare.

Later it hit me, and still it was such a long shot. It was not the first time I had purchased a tintype, only later to become convinced that it was perhaps the only image of a historic person at a certain age with nothing to compare to. Understand, that I would never have fancied such a possibility, had I not just purchased a dozen or so James-related images. In fact it took me awhile to believe all of this and imagine that the swelling collection was as historically significant and comprehensive as it was. Several times I thought to seek- and then found important tintypes, only after I had acquired images of their friends and children. I realized that if I had snagged all of these lesser characters, then perhaps I was overlooking the main ones! And often I was. My recognition skill was limited to images that I had seen and grown up with. People change so much from childhood to old age, nobody would recognize some of these people without help.

Sometimes, imagination is the best kind of help you can get. And I have spent a lifetime calling upon mine.

So after I imagined that this might be Zerelda, and made comparisons, only then it became very exciting that I had made a very important discovery in history. 

But at first the only thing I focused on was her eyes. Zerelda's eyes were... blank, somewhat mismatched like a doll's eyes. Her perpetually raised eyebrows forbid interpretation. She looked almost stupid or ambivalent. Yet her reputation of personal prowess contradict her empty countenance. Zerelda had the lifeless eyes of someone who had endured so much that she was impervious to almost anything. Almost what you would imagine the eyes of a sociopath might look like. But that was just the beginning of my primitive facial recognition test.

Later I recognized how much Zerelda and her oldest son Frank James favored one another, in their advanced years. I had always considered Frank the long-faced and unattractive child in her brood... almost appearing to be from a different father than handsome Jesse. But in old age, they grew to look more and more like one another; The flattened nose, long ears, empty eyes, and the apparent loss of teeth.

Take off Frank's mustache, and put a wig on him... and you pretty much have Zerelda.  

No arguments there. So then it hit me... the large tintype that might be Zerelda, if she looked like Frank James in his youth... THAT would certainly be something. A familial similarity that defied coincidence. And she does... and in fact her resemblance to little Archie is absolutely stunning. Somehow it is coming through to me, as these faces stare back, the fierce mother's love which united all of them. But then I am an artist...

So here is a proposal of mine. Unlike others where there are similar photos to compare, this one requires some suspension of disbelief and some imagination... and an open mind. And a large dose of benefit of the doubt. But I think, given the strength of the others, it is a wonderful proposition.

Mark Twain and JESSE JAMES! Do YOU believe?

It is a scientific truth that things do not fall together. Nobody can explain the Universe or a single atom, or how or why they came together. Or how or why they stay together. Things never fall together, and given any opportunity, they will always try to fall apart. So when they do fall together, it is something like the Creative Force of the universe willing it so... 

 Upon meeting, Jesse supposedly said to Mark Twain, " I suppose we are the greatest in our line."  [Image is totally photo-shopped.]

At the heart of my theory on this blog - is the shear number of images which have an uncanny resemblance to famous people who were in some way related to one another, all discovered from ONE SOURCE.  HUNDREDS.  Over two hundred interrelated people who can be tied to Mark Twain or his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine.

But when I started this project, I had no idea just how related they would turn out to be. My first major clues were provided by GOOGLE Search which effortlessly showed me who to look for.   After I recognized someone pictured in an auction, GOOGLE would find me pictures to compare to, and more importantly, would also (unsolicited) show me the faces of persons which were associated with the person I was researching. That is the mind of a search engine... ANYTHING related. It would teach me and familiarize me as I dug into a particular person's “image community.” That way when a familiar face (because of my endless surfing on GOOGLE) popped up in an auction, I may not have known who they were, but I recognized that they were known historically as a family member or associate to somebody I already researched.

In some cases, the relationships suggested by GOOGLE were absolutely correct, although shocking to me. I had a lot of reading to do!

There was a lot of back and forth. And this research has also led to many dead-ends and false alarms and disappointments. There were seemingly scores of certain individuals who had too many look-alikes. Sometimes I wondered whether I was delving into a collection of carefully assembled look-alikes. In fact Mark Twain and A. B. Paine were actually obsessed with the prospects of look-alikes, and used the concept in several books. 

 An example of the acceptable likenesses of outlaws of the time.

And then there were the unexpected historical inconsistencies. Before 1880, many famous people, especially those “out west,” were poorly or rarely photographed, or in some cases popular, historically accepted images of them were not them at all. For many recognizable western personalities, the best image we have today is a picture of a picture of a picture. So desperate were the early writers to get published, they often used poor quality or bogus photographs to strengthen their chances of publication and improve on subsequent sales. Most people, including law enforcement, had never seen a clear photo of the most famous outlaws until they were propped up, stiff and grimacing, outside some frontier morgue after they had been eliminated from the Most Wanted list.

And there was lots of monkey business with the criminal corpses as frontier photographers seized the opportunity to make a buck off of these grisly images of bullet-riddled badmen-made-good. But actually, there were practical reasons for obtaining good photographs of the most famous outlaws, even dead. Besides the fact that the public wanted to see and the papers wanted to show them, law enforcement agencies all over needed them to clear look-alikes, satisfy ID confusion between outlaw siblings, and to be sure sought-after criminals with large rewards were actually dead. The public release of these photos also helped promote the idea that crime did not pay.

Still every mother's son loved to read cheap western publications which sported sensational images of American criminals, dead or alive. Dead, wild-eyed outlaws with their guns laid artistically across their perforated chests were a bonus!

 In this collection was only one such photo which I acquired for soon-to-be obvious reasons. Once again the seller had no idea what it was, and to me it looked a lot like Jesse James. Since I had already acquired around a dozen James family related tintypes, from the same seller, I could not pass on it, even if there were some “problems” with it.

I have thought about it a lot, even talked with an undertaker, trying to satisfy myself about the anomalies. In the meantime it got a lot more complicated with the reading of JESSE: A Novel of the Outlaw Jesse James, by Max McCoy. I had missed it completely, when McCoy released this captivating book in 1999, which did not make a huge splash in history. And it's a good thing it didn't. Because McCoy made the whole thing up and led many of us, who trusted him astray.

IF you are interested in Jesse James, or the supposed (original) author of this book, Mark Twain, or just want to read the most convincing guerrilla soldier's account of the Civil War (that I have encountered) then this book is sure to grab you as it did me.

In a nutshell, according to McCoy's story, Jesse James approached Mark Twain long after his supposed demise, and gave his personal account of his life to be written and published by Mark Twain... “when the coast was clear,” we assume. It is a very convincing account, and given the shameless, well received lies Mark Twain published, McCoy should damned proud of himself.

It was a killer. In every respect. The condition and the circumstances surrounding McCoy's incredible "find" suggest a possible legal entanglement, and even a fire, and a rescue from it, and certainly damage and a loss of pages in the manuscript.But of course, much later he came out and admitted the whole thing was a hoax created when  he was suffering from a a sort of writer's slump. In fact Max McCoy claims he doesn't even remember writing the story.

You will have to read the book to answer your multiple questions about how all this transpired, because I need to get to the meat of my part of the story. According to McCoy's tease, which he admits was a hoax, Jesse James successfully faked his death with the help of his wife and the Ford brothers, (James's cousins) who had been offered a generous reward to deliver him dead. Very handily, John Thomas Samuel, a younger half-brother of the most Wanted Man in America, just happened to die from an old gunshot wound and was conveniently laid in his place. The rest was fake history.

John Thomas Samuel even favored Jesse in appearance and general description, and since very few people had ever seen the outlaw, and only one somewhat recent photo of him was in circulation, and (like Jesse) the corpse sported a full beard which helped to disguise him for any skeptics, it was a smooth deception. Never questioned, the switch miraculously gave Jesse James a chance for a new start in life. According to the story, it required Jesse's wife and family to move away and start their own life without him- in Kansas City. This was an acceptable option compared to the life they had.

To add to the illusion, the book is damn well written, although seemingly not Victorian enough to be from Twain's pen. Expletives and other profane situations in JESSE seem to be major exceptions to Twain's otherwise fairly Midwestern propriety.  And up till now, nobody knew what Jesse James might say if he had the chance. But I propose that even Jesse would not have formed some of these thoughts and words... in many ways he was more chivalrous than Mark Twain... and it would take a day to make all those points, so I would rather make my argument for what the wonderful manuscript that McCoy published was.

Max McCoy readily connected the manuscript with Twain's biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, establishing what everyone now calls plausible deniability. In other words, Paine, the bad guy of Twain lore, wrote it. Kind of like the Devil made me do it.  IF Twain had somehow met with Jesse James, he would have handwritten the notes and even the final manuscript, to then be transcribed. The fact that McCoy claimed that he worked from a badly damaged, typed manuscript brings a third chef into the stew. (But there only ONE!) The book was written to make every impression that it was a joint effort, if not somewhat contentious, between Mark Twain and Jesse James, but that could have been only part of the evolution of this manuscript. 

Then it laid fallow for almost one hundred years. 

Many details are related by James (or whomever) which are little known facts, and almost impossible to have been recorded by any other than a James family member. It seems unlikely and almost impossible for this detailed, introspective confessional to have been a product of some Twentieth Century researcher. The age of the typed story, mildly edited by McCoy, placed its origins long before this kind of exhaustive research had become a standard in historical biography. And frankly few writers then (or now) could have conjured up the stink of war and the smell of black powder which reeks from this unpretentious account.

Too bad it was all a lie. It is a masterful work that reads believably as the forging of these two American legends... “the greatest in their lines” as James supposedly remarked at their first meeting.  Since it is NOT them, and not a legitimate collaboration, then the creator of this ruse is to be adored and congratulated. One HELL of a storyteller. It is a work of genius on several levels, and stands on its own.

 

Still, I am hard-headed, and McCoy turned me on to something valuable here, a very intriguing theory about Jesse James's faked death.. let's go back to the last time we saw Jesse. In the coffin. There must have been dozens of photographs made of Jesse during that famous session after his assassination. Supposedly Bob Ford killed Jesse with a .44 caliber pistol, sending a large projectile, at almost point blank. It is hard to image the small amount of damage done to the forehead of the deceased. The baby face of the bearded man looks to be in his twenties. Jesse was a hardened 35. Think 50 in human terms. And Jesse had very high, very prominent cheekbones, totally missing after death! Jesse also had a long turned up nose, with a substantial bulb on the end, totally missing after death! Jesse had thin hair, and a receding hairline, conveniently covered by a beautiful head of hair, after death.

 An authentic photograph, known in antique circles as a "CDV" of Jesse James.

But that is not all. Not only was his face either obscured by facial hair or just not right, those who prepared his body for burial were careful to arrange his hands in each photo so the missing digit on his left hand could not be seen. Because it was not missing! They did however rip his shirt open to display “old” Civil War wounds... which were right where... brother John Thomas had been shot as well. 

 All images of James are accepted as authentic, 

except mine in the middle, which is relatively unknown.

You can't make this stuff up. Look for yourself... And then there is my photo. I bought this because it looked like a dead guy... who could be mistaken for Jesse James. Propped up in his burial suit, hair mashed from being crammed into a casket that was too short, (or later into a body bag for transport) his ill fitting clothes look like somebody struggled to dress him and then gave up... and took the photos in a rush, but why? Better photos had been taken, when he had first been brought in, his shirt “still bloody” from the shooting. 

 It looks like somebody wiped a bloody hand on his left shoulder, as if trying to create the impression of violence. But the individual finger prints are easily observed. Someone, probably a relative had cleaned him up and prepared him to be photographed for posterity. But a large caliber bullet from behind should have left considerable damage at the exit hole. Pleasant faced “Jesse” sports a moderate gash above his left eye. In more probability, it was a much smaller bullet, and according to the book, applied after death. The whole family was in it up to their lawless eyeballs, or at least up to their cunning smirks.

If in fact they were part of a body-switch plan to release Jesse from his tortured life, they would have known how important it was to deceive and not raise suspicions. And getting convincing photos was important to satisfy the authorities. Many a Pinkerton man would want to inspect them. They craftily provided a body with a bullet that could pass for the Southern folk hero. It was every bit as outlandish as attacking the Northfield bank.

Notice how Jesse's head is bent slightly to make
 him fit into a casket which was almost too small.

Meanwhile the differences between my dead Jesse and theirs are explainable. Only the dead man's ears keep the two likenesses from being the exact same man.

It is apparent from the first and most famous postmortem photos and illustrations of James that they had trouble getting John Thomas/Jesse's eyes to stay closed. This was not unusual. After the body was put on ice, to retard deterioration, the skin became even less flexible and whatever expression was achieved would become fixed until professional techniques could be applied (And probably never were).

In other words, a dead body sometimes has a life of its own. 

"Jesse" was taken by train to his home church in Clay County to be viewed by friends and family before burial. I propose that my photo was taken by law enforcement on the other end of the train ride, not for posterity but to finally provide a face for their files. They may have been unaware or distrustful of the first series of photos. He had probably been shipped in a bag and laid on his ear and so his ear appears to stick to his head... rather than angle out like it should when thawed out. They sat him up, now hunched over and stiff from being shipped in a iced down box, and put on his burial clothes. He looked far from natural. A frontier photographer would not care whether his eyes were closed or staring him in the face... as my Jesse sleepily tries to do. They just wanted proof... that the most wanted outlaw in history was permanently retired.

I'm sure some lawmen later studied the photographs and were still not satisfied. Nor should they have been. But there was no way they were going to pursue their suspicions. And how could they? The evidence was buried, they still had no likeness of Jesse James to compare to, and John Thomas Samuel was unavailable for comment.

Very few people knew about Jesse's half-brother who had been struggling for life at home. He had been wounded at a party, almost died, went into a coma, then recovered, then, according to the book, (and unknown to the outside world) he suddenly died after some time passed. And here opportunity presented itself, to a desperate and devious clan. The Samuels had always been a very remote, private network of counterculture. There was a network of deadly protection surrounding the Samuel household. Several detectives had gone there never to be seen alive again. When the body was interred on the property near the house, that would have been the appropriate and least accessible thing (for inquiry) they could have done. And if John Thomas got up and walked out, nobody would know or care.

 So far, I have found only one photo of "John Thomas Samuel" 

(upper right).  Compare! None of these faces look like
 the authentic Jesse James (right-center & bottom right). If the
 old man is Jesse, his nose grew some (plausible) but he
 appears to have the expected triangular face and those
 high cheek bones.

 The only known photo of John Thomas was taken with

 Jesse's son (left), born in 1975, who appears to be in his

 mid-forties. This would make John Thomas 59.

 Jesse James would be 73.

According to McCoy's book, It is John Thomas Samuel buried in Jesse's grave... or was, as he was exhumed and moved to be buried next to Zee, Jesse's wife, after she passed away. Then exhumed again much later to compare his DNA to descendants. The DNA tests were positive, only proving that the remains were a match to the James family... but it could have been Jesse or John Thomas, or any male offspring of Zerelda Cole James Simms Samuel.

Could it be that even though McCoy told a whopper, part of his account about James is true? Even the truth about Jesse James? If not, whatever happened to John Thomas Samuel? If he lived until 1932 as his family claimed, how is it that there are so few photographs of him?

 You have to wonder, how these discrepancies have been ignored so long...

 William Pinkerton, the detective blamed for the tragic explosion at the James/Samuels home, where little Archie Samuels was killed. He later confided that he intended to burn the house down.

McCoy's elaborate tale really hit the spot, for Twain and Jesse James enthusiasts. Although Samuel Clemens had spent most of his time in  Missouri across the state in Marion County, he had a lot in common with the outlaw. They had both grown up in Missouri river towns, he on the Mississippi, James on the Missouri. Raised in a slave-holding state, they both enlisted in local Confederate militias during the Civil War. Both claimed the discomfort of having killed men during the war and had trouble with wartime atrocities they witnessed. 

 The X's are Confederate guerilla engagements by either Quantrill or Bloody Bill Anderson. The money signs represent bank or train robberies by the James-Younger Gang.

Most of the engagements and atrocities committed by Bloody Bill Anderson and his guerillas, which included Jesse, were right between the two men's hometowns.  Half a dozen of the guerilla attacks were just a days ride from Hannibal, where Mark Twain based many of his writings. Twain openly described himself as a "border ruffian from the state of Missouri."  Thus both men hated the Pinkertons, politicians, and neither had much use for preachers.  All through JESSE, one can read Mark Twain's sentiments about war, slavery and the human race through Jesse's dialogue.

IF Twain met Jesse James as an old man and agreed to write his story, IF he wrote it or at least started it, IF Paine finished and typed it, then what Max McCoy published as a curiosity was in fact one of the most significant manuscripts of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. But alas, it was just out of McCoy's devious mind. And as wonderful as it is, it is bound to generate a whole knew generation of Jesse James mythology. I totally enjoyed the novel and it drove me crazy about six months until learned the truth about it. McCoy really created a stinker.

And deep down, I think he knew it.

By the way, Max McCoy is the creator of Indiana Jones and the author of several novels about him... and has written many books himself. After that kind of success, he might understandably have let a dead dog lie. But it was too tempting... a story, that if it had been true, would have been the story of the 20th century.

Later he has published groundbreaking information about Albert Bigelow Paine, and his astounding indiscretions, which you can read about below.