The Fate of Cowards

The world is full of cowards. Now of days they hide behind Facebook accounts. Advanced technology enables owners of various sites to see who visit and it shows what they are looking for. For example cowards working at a hospital in Liberty, Missouri or going to school near Branson, Missouri can be seen snooping around a website. The new security system I have on my website will not allow cowards to leave anymore threats unless they post their name and email address. That they will not do. I believe if Bob Ford were alive today he would be a Facebook user who blocks his account so Jesse James couldn’t contact him. Ford however would be reading James’s website entries every chance he got. That’s because Ford was a coward, knew he had done wrong and just wanted to know when life as he knew it would come to an end. I’m not a fan of Jesse James, but I like this analogy. Jesse James is perhaps the most beloved murderer in American history. He and his gang shot bank clerks in cold blood, killed passersby who looked the wrong way, and derailed trains and robbed the passengers as they lay injured. But none of that mattered. To many alive at the time James was a post-Civil War hero, satisfying the thirst of many defeated Confederates to get in a few last shots after the war. James, a handsome bearded man with blue eyes and a narrow face, was fashioned as a modern-day Robin Hood, though later historians were at a loss to find any evidence of charitableness. As a Confederate guerrilla and later as a bank robber, James came close to a violent death several times. But as long as he had his own guns, he always seemed to survive. During the war he was badly wounded in the leg and his horse was shot out from under him. Just after the war federal soldiers shot James in the lung and left him for dead. He lay on the ground for two days until a farmer aided him. When he was ambushed robbing the Northfield, Minnesota, bank in 1876, three of his gang were killed, three were shot and captured, and only Jesse and his brother, Frank, escaped. His luck ended in 1882, after a local sheriff got 21- year-old Robert Ford, a less notorious outlaw, to join James’s gang to try to capture him. Ford and his brother easily joined up and were staying with James and his wife in St. Joseph, Missouri, that April, planning their next bank robbery. Early on the morning of the third, James, who had just come inside from feeding the horses, took off his jacket and, because he trusted his friends, his gun belt. He had climbed up on a chair to pull some cobwebs from a picture when he heard the cock of a pistol. As he turned unarmed, Robert Ford shot James in the head with a .44-caliber pistol that James had given him as a present. James body was put in a $260 casket – paid for by the sheriff who had recruited Ford – and sent by train the few miles to his hometown of Kearney, in Clay County, Missouri. His open casket at the Kearney Hotel drew thousands, jamming the small town with their horses, and even passengers from trains that made unscheduled stops on their way through. A collection to benefit James’s wife and two children gathered less than $10, but that was only the beginning. Personal effects of the house were sold for about $250. The owner of the house, a St. Joseph city councilman who thought he had rented it to Thomas Howard (an alias of James’s), sold bloody floor splinters for 25 cents apiece. A year later James’ mother opened her home to visitors, also for a quarter. Of the more than twenty movies made about Jesse James, the first was financed by his descendants in 1920. Meanwhile Bob Ford was pardoned by the governor. Ford toured Eastern cities reenacting the shooting, but the show was booed in the Midwest. Later, in a mining camp in Colorado, Ford was shot in the neck and killed by a man with a sawed-off shotgun seeking revenge for the death of Jesse James. What a fitting end to a coward.