J.A. Darcus
Frank James and Jesse James, from "The Illustrated Lives and Adventures of Frank and Jesse James, and the Younger Brothers: the Noted Western Outlaws" (1882), by J.A. Darcus.
There is an old enduring legend that says sometime in the late 1870s, the outlaw Jesse James ventured into one of the deepest corners of south Mississippi, robbed two stores near Natchez, and was being pursued through the Louisiana Delta when—poof—he vanished again into the wilderness.
Academic and amateur historians have circulated this story for years, and last year it made the social media rounds a couple of times. It even appears on James’s Wikipedia page.
But is it true? Did Jesse James, the Wild West’s wildest outlaw, whose nineteenth-century exploits are most often associated with the dusty Midwest, commit a series of robberies in the Reconstruction-era Gulf South?
I began a search for the answer by reaching out to two of James’s biographers. Marley Brant, author of the 1998 biography, Jesse James: The Man and The Myth, responded: “I have no knowledge of Jesse James being involved in a robbery near Natchez.” T.J. Stiles, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote the 2002 biography, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, replied: “I have no idea if he robbed the stores or not.”
It was when Stiles added, “No comprehensive catalog of his crimes exists,” that I came to the realization that no one will ever know, for sure, what all robberies James committed. As Stiles wrote in his book’s foreword, James was “a shadow, a man who lived underground eternally and was literally a legend—formed of rumors and stories, bearing an unknown relationship to fact.” This tracked directly into something Brant had said: “He has been accused of nearly every robbery that occurred during the time he was active. Most of those accusations are baseless and false.”
So, early in my quest, the question changed from, “Did Jesse James rob those south Mississippi stores?” to the frankly much more intriguing, “Could Jesse James have robbed those south Mississippi stores?”
I began that search by seeking out contemporaneous newspaper accounts of the alleged robberies near Natchez, only to find exactly nothing—except for what could possibly be the legend’s origin point. The story, published in the April 15, 1938 edition of The Times-Picayune newspaper, centered around a Louisiana politician and jurist named Jefferson B. Snyder. Eighty years old at the time of the interview and recovering from a broken leg, Snyder told the reporter he had been a Tensas Parish deputy sheriff in 1879, when he took part in a local manhunt for Jesse James.
According to Snyder, James and his posse had robbed “the store of Grover and Whitcomb” in Washington, an unincorporated community near Natchez, before traveling twenty-five miles north to Fayette, where they stole $2,000 from “the Johnson store.” The James bunch then crossed the Mississippi River into Louisiana and took refuge “on the Kemp Plantation,” south of St. Joseph. Soon discovered, the posse fled, with Snyder and others giving chase and killing two of its members. The rest, including James, escaped.
The piece in which this James story appears is not actually about the famous outlaw at all, but a profile on Snyder’s long, interesting life. In fact, the James anecdote only occupies two of the story’s eighteen paragraphs. More importantly, every detail in the article appears to have been based entirely on this single, extensive interview with Snyder. To determine the credibility of his story, I had to consider his reliability as a narrator. In short, could we take his word for it?
Early in my quest, the question changed from, “Did Jesse James rob those south Mississippi stores?” to the frankly much more intriguing, “Could Jesse James have robbed those south Mississippi stores?”
Snyder certainly lived a life that would have required a degree of public trust. In addition to being a district attorney for thirty years, he served a stint in the Louisiana House of Representatives. His family was apparently of good stock; his brother, Robert, served as Louisiana lieutenant governor from 1896 to 1900. But being politically active (especially in Louisiana) hardly equates to an honest man.
There is something else to consider, too. The brief section of The Times-Picayune piece dealing with the James story ends with a description of Snyder by the journalist, who writes of his telling as follows: “with [a] wonderful capacity for embellishment, he makes a real ‘thriller’ of it.” The line appears to suggest, diplomatically, that the writer does not necessarily believe everything about the story in question. I will add, as well, that Snyder was interviewed at his Lake Bruin cabin, which, the writer mentions, was a place not without jugs of “well-aged” corn liquor.
What this leaves us with is the realization that the apparent sole source of the James legend is the telling of an eighty-year-old raconteur, who was sitting in his cabin, probably within arm’s reach of bootleg whiskey, recounting the exploits of his youth, sixty years prior, to a newspaper reporter looking for a story.
It’s hardly a recipe for veracity.
In the spirit of a good story, though, I choose to, for now, take Snyder at his word.
The next step is to consider what we know of James’s physical whereabouts during 1879—a relatively easy task, as he was, in Stiles’s words, “a figure as publicized as the president”—to determine if it was even possible that he was in south Mississippi that year.
But to answer that question, I found myself turning back to the beginning. Born in Missouri in 1847, James’s life of crime began with the bushwhacking violence between pro-Confederate and pro-Union citizens in that state during the Civil War. Having grown up in a slave-owning family, James took up the Confederate cause. After the war, when Lincoln Republicans came into political power across the South, was when James began his famed life as a crook. Newspapers across the South were soon portraying his crimes in such a way that he became a sort of stand-in for the frustrations of defeated Confederates during Reconstruction. James did not mind. In fact, Stiles notes in his biography that the racketeer worked to enhance the image, pulling stunts like robbing a train while dressed in Ku Klux Klan garb. By the late 1870s, though, Reconstruction had ended, Lincoln Republicans had lost their power down South, and James had reportedly retired from crime.
He was living in Nashville by early 1879, when the itch to rob resurfaced. Stiles suggests that James, who had committed his most infamous crimes primarily in the Midwest, had reason at this time to begin “working” in Dixie, where his public image—that of a pro-Confederate, pro-slavery outlaw—would have played better.
“He was upset that he was not seen locally as a Confederate avenger,” Stiles told me regarding James’s time in Nashville, “so he wrote letters to the newspapers.”
Regardless of the reason, James is known to have committed robberies in Alabama and Kentucky after coming out of retirement.
Still, from what we know of his physical whereabouts in 1879, it would have been hard for him to squeeze in a Natchez run. According to the late Ted P. Yeatman’s 2000 biography, Frank and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend, James was diagnosed with malaria in Nashville on March 17, 1879, and “was laid up for quite a while.” Stiles writes that James was likely in Nashville in July for the birth of his daughter. By August or September, he was back in Missouri, and robbed a train there in October. In November he was back in Nashville, more than 400 miles northeast of Natchez. There just does not seem to have been much time for him to make the trip.
Unless there was.
While Stiles places James in Nashville in July of 1879, Yeatman suggests that he “very likely” traveled to New Mexico that month. If so, he may have traveled via Natchez. Here’s where it gets interesting: Yeatman writes that while in New Mexico, James met Henry McCarty, who went by the alias “William H. Bonney”—better known by history as “Billy The Kid.”
Might we then add to the legend the probability that that Jesse James robbed two stores near Natchez in 1879, while he was passing through on his way out West, to meet up with Billy The Kid?
At least that’s the way Jefferson B. Snyder would probably tell it.
.jpg)
