“Three children, they were brave,” the song has it. Though Jesse’s last words were “That picture’s awful dusty,” editorial cartoons featured him adjusting a needlepoint of “Home Sweet Home,” and other framed images in the movies generally avoided what the picture actually was: a watercolor of the owner’s favorite racehorse, Skyrocket. Howard” and “laid poor Jesse in his grave.” And when Robert Ford was introduced at all it was usually late in the film, as a sly, slinking, serpentine traitor, or as the song has it, “that dirty little coward that shot Mr. Often the outlaw was presented as a Robin Hood who stole from the rich to give to the poor, or as a good and honorable man forced into crime by an unforgiving Union Army, ruthless and carnivorous railroads and banks, or the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a forerunner of the Secret Service and the FBI. His own son, Jesse Jr., and Tyrone Power, Roy Rogers, Audie Murphy, Robert Wagner, Robert Duvall, Kris Kristofferson, James Keach, Rob Lowe, and Colin Farrell are just some of the actors who have portrayed Jesse James over the years. So until I began researching Desperadoes, my sole information on Jesse James was dependent either on hand-me-down legend or on some of the 30 or more movie portrayals of him. The haggard men spoke kindly to him, he claimed, and then, hearing hooves on the road, hurriedly galloped away. My grandfather would have been 13 and handling chores on a farm in Iowa when Jesse James was killed in 1882, so it’s entirely possible that as a little boy he did indeed once find the James Gang genially watering their horses at his family’s stable trough. We’d sit in that cave as boys and just imagine for a while. Emmett Dalton, the sole survivor, served 14 years in a Kansas penitentiary before his release, at age 35, and he illustrated his rehabilitation by marrying his childhood sweetheart and moving to Los Angeles, where he was an evangelist against what he called “the evils of outlawry” and became, as he puts it in the novel, “a real-estate broker, a building contractor, a scriptwriter for Western movies a church man, a Rotarian, a member of Moose Lodge 29.” The citizens there successfully defended their institutions, just as those in Northfield, Minnesota, had done against the James-Younger Gang, and four of the five outlaws were killed in the gun battle. Warrants for their arrest confirmed them as criminals, and they soon were imitating the earlier James-Younger Gang with a daring series of train robberies and bank holdups until October 1892, when their leader, Bob Dalton, decided to try to outdo Jesse James by robbing two banks at the same time in their hometown of Coffeyville, Kansas. In it I presented the history of the notorious Dalton Gang-three brothers and assorted miscreants who supplemented their miserable paychecks as lawmen in what was not yet Oklahoma by exacting tolls on pioneers, selling liquor to Indians, and then cattle and horse rustling, a hanging offense. My first published novel was Desperadoes, a fiction informed by fact. The author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford on getting beyond coloring book heroes and villains to understanding a charming psychopath and his killer.
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