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. 

Connecting the Monolithic Dots- with no help!

 Son of the legendary Allan Pinkerton, it was William who relentlessly pursued Jesse James, and was blamed for the explosion which blew off the arm of the outlaw's mother. My photo of him is a full length portrait on a cabinet card, in the center, closer detail of his face on the left.

It was about a year ago when I became engrossed in the purchase of a lifetime... actually purchases of a lifetime, what you now peruse as “The Stubborn Flame,” which took almost a year to complete. During that time I became so excited and confident about my acquisitions that I began to reach out to some of those whom I presumed were the acknowledged “experts” in the field of American history, some local and some regional, to try to get some verification.

I soon found out how hard it was to get anyone to even look at my finds, much less agree about their importance. So many frauds were floating around in the stream of historical imagery that everyone I contacted reacted with ambivalence or skepticism. I have to add, that my earliest guess was that these tintypes were the remnants of some kind of law enforcement rogues gallery, probably of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Over time I learned that the images were formal portraits, and thus not the correct type to be “rogues.” Sadly, this incorrect assumption alone was enough of a red flag to distance my skeptics.

 Courageous and cunning Robert McParland, the undercover Pinkerton detective who ensnared a whole gang of terrorists in Pennsylvania. Mine is the tintype in the center.

I contacted some of the history authors whom I had met during my career as an artist, those whom I knew at least respected me as competent in my chosen field of historical illustration. Surely one of them could use some the images in their various projects... but again, aloofness and disbelief. I would have become discouraged, except the images just kept coming. There was no time to let my feelings interfere with the amazing collection gathering on my living room table. Soon I transported them to a safety deposit box, so sure was I about their value.

One of the authors I contacted was Max McCoy, by email. Mr. McCoy's name may not ring a bell, but his most famous creation will: Indiana Jones. I was not acquainted enough with him at the time to even know that! I approached him because he had published an article about Albert Bigelow Paine (Mark Twain's biographer) in The New Territory magazine, perhaps the first of its kind, which shed light into Paine's darker personal and literary secrets. Through the historical persons appearing in my collection, I had begun to deduct that my collection was possibly the combination of Paine's and Twain's life stories. It seemed unlikely at the time that either of the men might have known all of the famous individuals whose images were piling up each week. And I suspected that McCoy could help orient me to what I had discovered so far.

IF I am right, a very rare tintype, (center) probably made from

 an earlier Ambrotype, of the beautiful mother of outlaws

 Jesse and Frank James.

McCoy was fairly underwhelmed with my project, did not see what I saw, and our correspondence went no further. It kind of disappointed me, because Max McCoy was a treasure trove of knowledge about the pond I was wading in, and could have saved me a lot of time...and since his recusal I have learned just how much. There were several families or groups which the tintypes seemed to be representing, the Samuel Clemenses, the Pinkerton Detectives, and bizarrely, the Jesse Jameses... whom McCoy would have recognized immediately- what I have just recently figured out, that they were all ASSOCIATED in someway.

A tintype and a carte de visit of Jesse James
(numbered) as a boy and as an adolescent.
His ears made his visage unique.

It turns out Max McCoy had also written a book based on papers probably typed by Albert Bigelow Paine, which suggested that Mark Twain and Jesse James were actually known to one another, and Twain had considered writing the life story of the famous outlaw. This was not known to me until recently. McCoy took a charred and tattered old manuscript and finished what Twain or Paine had started. According to his account, rumors of Jesse James's death had also been greatly exaggerated, and he tracked down Mark Twain as an old man... long after he was supposedly dead, and proposed that the beloved folklorist interview him and tell the true story of his life and crimes.

Frank James and (Half) Sisters

The tintype on the far right (enlarged in the middle) is mine, 

now digitally restored- as are most of the images you see.

 They were so dingy that it took some enhancement for the 

average viewer to even consider the similarities that I saw. 

Three of the four individuals in the photo are very 

believably members of the James family.  These were such 

rare and personal photos, it means whoever was given 

custody had paramount access to the Jameses. They are 

evidence of a more than casual acquaintance with the 

most clandestine of clans.

Knowing this fact, that even Max McCoy thought that Twain and James were solidly connected, sure would have lit a fire under my dampened ashes... but I had to relocate to Bell County and other more urgent distractions, and the find of the century and the facts to substantiate it would have to wait for almost a year. 

Not only could McCoy have told me that Mark Twain was very interested in Jesse James, even invested in him, and might easily have compiled a stash of James family photographs, but that he also was a huge fan of detective stories, and wrote at least two lampoons of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The dots were begging to be connected.

It is also easy to imagine that the Pinkertons gladly submitted materials for Twain's books, after their patriarch Allan Pinkerton had passed away and no longer published his detective mysteries... at least until they saw with great angst that he had aimed his merciless sword of satire at them and their reputation. 

Jim Younger, the bruiser of the James-Younger gang. He was wounded but survived the "Great Northfield Raid" and was captured.
 

Now, after all of this time, I am connecting the dots. The major groups I had randomly purchased were all legitimately associated through Mark Twain! The rare if not impossible discovery that McCoy and others would not, could not believe, has grown geometrically, in size and importance. And even they would have to wonder, if I was going to imagine or fabricate a find of antique tintypes, that I would find, little by little, images of individuals who were not only related, but groups of people which were amazingly associated with one another... so much so that history has provided me the unmistakable provenance of the whole collection.

 

 Of "Dr. Livingston, I presume" fame, Sir Henry Stanley

 and his wife were often guests at the Clemens home.

The odds of finding so many related people, most of which I had never seen or heard of before, is actually less than the minute odds of finding hundreds of amazing and convincing look-alikes of the same people, all from one source, and all in a fairly short period of time. The odds of reality are slim, the odds of a parallel universe are much less.

 A very young Albert Einstein.

So I concede, this is a mountain of suggestive material... so I will no doubt be wrong about some of my identifications. But I will be right about hundreds of them... and so I propose to you that this collection is the most exciting, the most rare and probably the most revealing Victorian image gallery offered in modern times. Many of the persons you will see here, as famous as they are, may have never been photographed but a few times... In some case the photos here of them are better than any extant. I know that is a mouthful, and it sounds arrogant to me.. but after checking and re-checking, (because I hate rejection and I hate embarrassment even worse), I am sure they are what they are. I welcome your assessments and reactions. Just be courteous in your observations!

The REST of the Story!

When I started this blog (actually a book! See the chapters over on  the right) four months ago, I had waited until I had scrounged up a little perspective on the photographs featured here. Some chance purchases evolved into an adventure, and I was sharing it play-by-play with my readers. I had no idea it was only just beginning. I thought I understood what was unfolding in front of me... if you read the entries below you will see that a zillion things were swimming in my head...

 This RARE antique image kept showing up in a collection where I had been purchasing tintypes... I wondered if they might be Pinkerton Detectives, as the elderly man in the middle on the front row looked hauntingly like an elderly Charlie Siringo, the famous "Cowboy Detective."

About the time that I was kicking back and getting mentally (and financially!) fatigued with this whole saga, hoping it was winding down... I turned another page into THE REAL STORY.  A single tintype was SCREAMING, trying to tell me what it was all about... and I was dubious... but I am now convinced that this entire collection of extraordinary antique images was originally in the files of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. What I have here, now over a hundred tintypes, are the remnants of their HUGE, famous rogues gallery. And that explains why I had found so many images of Civil War spies early on ...

 I have managed to identify, to my satisfaction, four of the six Pinkerton men in the photo.

Perhaps the most famous of all Pinkerton detectives, Charlie Siringo was ready to leap out of the pile and ride right into my collection!  Back in the day, the obsolete Pinkerton photo-files were occasionally cleared out to make room, and they disposed of many decades of images, unscrupulously collected in the worlds largest criminal file... No doubt somebody made a haul around a half-century ago, when such things were only dark curiosities... and acquired this huge image file, or at least part of it, and then they failed to provide an index to the present owner...

I had been pondering one tintype of a group of derby'd men-  and thought one was very possibly a famous Pinkerton agent from Texas. I did not buy it, as I could not identify any of the others, and it would have been hard to authenticate... The Pinkertons were not that high-profile, in fact they forbade any literary profiteering by agents, (except by the owners) retired or otherwise, from writing their memoirs. Few photographs of their active agents were ever put into circulation, for obvious reasons.  The tintype above of Charlie Siringo (known well only because he disregarded the Pinkerton's rule!) and his associates, was quite possibly the rarest of them all, but there was no way to compare it to try and validate it. 

THEN, I encountered another intriguing tintype in this same collection, this time with Siringo and one of his bosses, probably Robert Pinkerton, and then another, and another... I have since acquired perhaps a dozen Pinkerton images, including one of Allan Pinkerton, William Pinkerton, James McParland, "the Great Detective," and Robert Linden.

 James McParland, "the Great Detective" who exposed the "Mollie Maguires."

 

 Three of my Pinkerton images...

Then came a shower of images of the true rogues, outlaws and gunslingers and a few more lawmen came marching by, and THIS was my favorite subject... and I just quit blogging for awhile and concentrated on the find of lifetime! 

My image of "Black Bart" (on the left) is perhaps the only known image of him as a 

mid-aged man when he committed his robberies. Before now we have only seen him after his prison term.

Nuff said... mine is the large sepia-toned one in the middle... incredible find.

 Actually Henry Starr was far more successful than most other train robbers...

What I have acquired, among all the various suspicious and nefarious characters, is an astonishing collection, unpublished, never-before seen images of the men and some women who were the most wanted criminals in the world... and a few "lawmen" who may have worked on both sides of the law... Here are just a smattering of my purchases with comparisons offered of known likenesses of them.  OMG!

 Before "Wild Bill" went Hollywood...

One of the very first Train robbers

VERY RARE! Bob Dalton's paramour and accomplice...

O. Henry- My favorite short story writer... started out as a convicted embezzler... Three images!

Just two of twenty Irishmen hung for a rash murders in the Pennsylvania coal region.

 Once a lawyer, Jennings turned to a life of crime and after being paroled from prison by President Roosevelt, tried preaching and acting in western movies...

Oliver Perry was a cunning and daring train robber... His mistake was committing his crimes in the east... so he never got much attention and died in prison...

There are a bunch more...