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.