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!

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.