Legends of the Old West - JESSE JAMES Ep. 3 | "Burn It Down"

Episode Date: November 25, 2018

The Pinkerton Detective Agency attacks the James family farm, but the ambush has terrible consequences and Jesse vows revenge. Jesse and Frank marry their longtime sweethearts and move out of Missouri for the first time, but they return to rob a train at Rocky Cut. The blowback from the robbery forces them out of their safe zone and leads directly to their fateful trip to Minnesota. Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Fortnite created to give players of all ages, including kids and families, a safe digital space to play in. Download Fortnite on consoles, PC, cloud services, or Android and play Lego Fortnite for free. Rated ESRB E10+. The James Family Farmhouse had been busy on the evening of January 25th, 1875.

Frank, Jesse, and Clell Miller had eaten dinner at the home and then left under the cover of darkness. Frank and Jesse's mother, Zerelda, and her third husband, Reuben Samuel, put their three children to bed and then settled into a deep sleep themselves. Three former slaves who still served the family bedded down in the kitchen, their work finally done for the day. In the dead of night, no one heard the squad of men approaching outside. Eighteen-year-old Ambrose, one of the servants, was the first to awaken. A noise outside the kitchen wall jolted him out of bed. He looked around and saw a light through a panel in the door.

As he strained to listen, he heard voices outside. He stood up to look out the window. He saw two men right outside the house. One of them had something in his hand, something round like a ball, but it was glowing red. As Ambrose watched, the man threw the ball through the window.

It shattered the glass and crashed onto the kitchen floor. The ball knocked him down, and then it started leaking an oily liquid onto the floor. Ambrose's mother and brother jumped out of their beds. In the family room, Ruben and Zerelda heard the crash and ran into the kitchen. The outside walls of the kitchen were on fire. One of the quilts on the kitchen floor had caught fire, and an object was on fire in the middle of the kitchen floor. Ruben grabbed a shovel and threw the object into the fireplace. Zerelda hurled the burning quilt out the front door. The commotion brought the rest of the children into the room. John, Fanny, and little Archie. The family clustered around the fireplace, staring at the object that looked like an iron ball. They'd never seen anything like it.

Few people had. It was a special device from a federal arsenal that was almost certainly intended to set the house on fire. The full extent of the device isn't known, but we can be sure it was not meant to be thrown into a roaring fire. Without warning, the device exploded. Iron shards flew through the air and tore into the family members. Outside, the men who had attacked the farm jumped on their horses and galloped away. They fired shots to frighten neighbors who were running to help. Many turned away, but Daniel Askew did not. He ran into the house and began caring for the wounded. At the time, no one in the James family knew that Daniel Askew had secretly worked with the Pinkertons to set up the attack.

Nor did Daniel know he only had four months to live after his actions. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. After his actions. grow at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere. They have an all-in-one e-commerce platform and in-person POS system, so wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With the internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms, Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify has allowed us to share something tangible

with the podcast community we've built here, selling our beanies, sweatshirts, and mugs to fans of our shows without taking up too much time from all the other work we do to bring you even more great content. And it's not just us. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. Thank you. grow grow with Shopify sign up for a one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com slash realm all lowercase go to shopify.com slash r-e-a-l-m now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash realm From Black Barrel Media, this is Season 3 of the Legends of the Old West podcast. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this is the third episode of a

six-part series on Jesse James. For the first half of 1874, the James Younger gang was on a roll. They robbed at will, eluded the Pinkertons, and became famous thanks to the efforts of John Newman Edwards. 1874 finished on a high note, but things turned dark in 1875, and the outlaw life was not as easy or as glamorous as it had been in previous years. And now, here's Jesse James, Episode 3, Burn It Down. When Alan Pinkerton received news of the murders of two of the three detectives he sent to infiltrate the James Gang, he made it his personal mission to bring down the outlaws. He had learned hard lessons in his two attempts to capture the brothers. The most important was that they had a network of steadfast supporters

in Missouri. If he was going to penetrate the network, he would have to move much more slowly and subtly than in his previous attempts. So that's what he did. He devoted the final eight months of 1874 to the quiet and slow, but diligent, intelligence-gathering process that would finally allow him to creep up on the James boys undetected. Despite the James Younger gang's supporters in Missouri, Pinkerton also knew there were people who wanted to wipe them out. He found his first resource in a lawyer from Clay County named Samuel Hardwick. Shortly thereafter, he met his second resource, Daniel Askew.

Askew was the most critical piece of the puzzle. He owned a 210-acre farm directly adjacent to the James homestead, and he was a radical Republican. Pinkerton began to work with Hardwick and Askew to smuggle agents into Clay County. It was a long, cautious process, but Pinkerton was a patient man. Meanwhile, Hardwick sent Pinkerton coded telegrams about the movements of the James Brothers. The boys were about to celebrate big milestones, and they'd be leaving Missouri for a while. and they'd be leaving Missouri for a while. On April 24, 1874, Jesse James married his first cousin, Zerelda Mims.

The happy couple headed to Texas for their honeymoon, and John Newman Edwards marked the event by splashing a huge headline across the pages of the St. Louis Dispatch that read, Captured! The dashing outlaw had been taken at last by a beautiful, accomplished young woman. Mixed in with the sappy, over-the-top devotional passages was another attempt at a tactic tried by Jesse and Edwards the previous year. At that time, they tried to convince the public

that Jesse was in Montana before he went on a crime spree in early 1874. No one bought it. But now Edwards tried again. He told his readers that Jesse and Zee were going to settle in Mexico. Of course, the closest they ever got to Mexico was North Texas, where they were met by Frank and his new wife Anna. Frank James and Anna Ralston had eloped because they knew her father would never approve of the marriage. They spent the summer with Jesse and Zee in North Texas before returning to Missouri

in August. On the second-to-last day of the month, Jesse, Frank, and one of the youngers, probably Jim, robbed a stagecoach near Lexington. It was a brazen daylight robbery, and they wore bandanas to cover their faces, but their target was worth it. They'd heard a local man would be traveling with $5,000, but when the three bandits stopped the stage in a clearing below town, the man wasn't on it. He'd come home a day early. As they worked, a crowd gathered on the streets of Lexington, early. As they worked, a crowd gathered on the streets of Lexington, which sat on a bluff above the clearing. Hundreds of witnesses watched the gang in action. The gang's blatant disregard for authority provoked quick action from the governor's office. There was an election in two months, and this kind of crime was bad for business. The lieutenant governor wired the St. Louis

Police Department with instructions to send someone to catch the James boys. The police put Officer Yancey on the case, and he went to Lexington to learn the details of the robbery. He spent a week following the trio through their old stomping grounds, and then he learned that Frank had split off and gone to Jackson County. Along the way, Jesse and Jim Younger learned from one of their confidants that a lawman was on their trail. On September 7th, they spotted Yancey 300 yards behind them. As they rode forward, they found a place to set up an ambush.

The road dipped down slightly and then rose up at a steep angle. Yancey would lose sight of them at that spot. They hurried past the dip and set up 40 yards down the road. As Yancey crested the hill, Jesse shouted, halt, and he and Jim fired. Yancey returned fire. He hit Jesse and knocked him off his horse. Jesse crashed to the ground, but the wound wasn't severe. He pulled his other pistol and kept firing. Yancey and Jim Younger kept up a quick but furious barrage, until Yancey's horse went wild at the intense noise. It galloped away, taking Yancey with it, and the latest attempt to catch the James Younger gang.

While Jesse and Frank were getting married and holding up stages and getting in gunfights with police officers, Alan Pinkerton was quietly weaving a web in the background. A Pinkerton agent arrived at Daniel Askew's farm posing as a poor farm worker, just like J.W. Witcher had several months earlier. The agent was the advance man for the team that would eventually try to catch the James Boys. Pinkerton moved his pieces into place throughout the fall of 1874. There was still more work to do, but he'd built a good network, and as far as he knew, the James boys had no idea he was coming. Pinkerton was right. The James boys did not know of his plans because they were busy making plans of their own.

They were going to end the year the same way they began it, with a train robbery. They didn't quite know it yet, but this one was going to be big. It was also going to be their last major job for quite a while. Frank, Jesse, one of the youngers, and two more men rode west out of Kansas City in early December. They were headed for the hinterlands of Kansas, a speck of almost nothing in the middle of nowhere called Muncie. It was a remote flag station for the Kansas Pacific Railroad that comprised a few houses and exactly one commercial business, a general store. There was also the post office and the blacksmith shop. Railroad workers were

busy near the tracks, and three of the bandits got the drop on them and forced them to change their labors. The outlaws made the men pile railroad ties on the track to block the train. The other two robbers ran into the general store and grabbed the owner. They forced him outside and made him flag down the train when it came in sight. Two men jumped into the baggage car and discovered the Wells Fargo Express messenger, the man who was guarding the money. The messenger opened the safe, and the robbers emptied it of $18,000 in cash, $5,000 in gold, and assorted valuables. But they refused to take anything from the messenger himself, and they made no attempt

to rob the passengers. They hopped out with their loot, mounted up, and waved goodbye to the train crew. Goodbye boys, they said, no hard feelings. And they rode away. After the robbery, numerous rewards were posted. The governor of Kansas offered $2,500 for each man. The railroad offered $5,000. And Wells Fargo, which had actually taken the hit in the heist, offered $5,000 for the return of the property and $1,000 for each outlaw. A few days later, a rare thing happened. One of the bandits got caught. One of the two robbers not named James or Younger turned out

to be William Budd McDaniel. He was arrested by a Kansas City police officer, and even though it was purely on accident, it was still an arrest. McDaniel was found with four pistols, a handful of jewelry, and more than $1,000. It was a small victory for law enforcement, but the real prizes were still at large. Alan Pinkerton hoped to change that in about four weeks. The plan was coming together. He sent a letter to his point man in Clay County, Samuel Hardwick, that outlined the final steps. Pinkerton coordinated with the railroads to get safe and secret passage for a small squad of men and their ammunition. They would have to get into western Missouri, complete their mission overnight,

and then make it to a special train that was being held for them until 6 a.m. When they hit the ground in Missouri, they would be guided to the farm of Daniel Askew, neighbor of the James family. They would meet the advance man there, the agent who had been posing as a farm worker for weeks. When the mission was complete,

the advance man would guide them back to the train that would take them home. Pinkerton's letter to Hardwick contained one more instruction, and also a concern. They were going to attack the James farm, but how could they be sure that Jesse and Frank were there? This was obviously the most vital part of the plan, but from the letter, it didn't seem like Pinkerton had an answer to the question. This was especially foreboding given the last instruction, which was this. Above everything, he wrote, destroy the house. Blot it from the face of the earth. To that end, he sent his right-hand man to the Federal Arsenal in Rock Island, Illinois to get a device he referred to as Greek Fire.

Robert Linden arrived at the Arsenal with a letter of introduction from Union General Phil Sheridan. The letter allowed him to meet the ordnance officer and secure some kind of incendiary device. General Sheridan made himself famous during the Civil War by destroying everything in the Shenandoah Valley that could help the Confederates, and a lot that couldn't. It became known simply as the Burning.

His philosophy was that if you ruined the support network of the enemy, you made him surrender more quickly. By 1874, Sheridan was the commander of the military district that included Missouri. His headquarters were in Chicago, just two blocks from the offices of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. And then Pinkerton decided not only to arrest the James brothers, but to burn their farm down too. He sent his hand-picked leader to the arsenal to pick up a special weapon,

and events were set in motion that would have terrible and unexpected consequences. Robert Linden and a squad of six men traveled from Illinois to Missouri. Linden was one of Pinkerton's most trusted agents, but he also had a personal connection to this case. He had been the man to take Louis Lull's statement after the detective had been shot by John Younger. When Lull died, Linden escorted his body home to Chicago. Now he was headed back to Missouri with a team of men,

a stockpile of guns, tons of ammunition, and the secret device from the arsenal. Even to Pinkerton, this kind of force seemed a little excessive. They were only trying to catch two or three men, but at the same time, it had proved impossible to everyone because the James boys were so heavily insulated and protected. Lyndon and his team arrived in Missouri and awaited further instructions. In late January, he received the order to strike. January 25, 1874, Clay County, Missouri. At 5 p.m., word reached the Pinkerton office that Frank and Jesse were at the family farm.

Pinkerton wired Robert Linden to say they were a go. Linden and his men boarded a train that delivered them to Kearney, the closest town to the James homestead. Frank, Jesse, and Clell Miller sat down to dinner in the crowded farmhouse. Zerelda and her husband Ruben allowed their older children, John and Fanny, to go to a party at a nearby farm, but eight-year-old Archie had to stay behind. The youngster was disappointed, but at least he could hang out with his famous half-brothers. The servants busied themselves with the food. Fifty-four-. The servants busied themselves with the food. Fifty-four-year-old Charlotte had been with the family most of her life, and now her kids, eighteen-year-old Ambrose and six-year-old Perry, helped out too.

The Pinkertons unloaded their weapons and equipment in Kearney and began the trek to the farm. It was 7.30 p.m. For the next four hours, they were off the grid as they traveled through the woods. They were provided with food by the wife of Daniel Askew, the James' neighbor. After nightfall, William Fox, a known lookout for the James brothers, led three horses into the pasture behind the farmhouse. When it was full dark, Frank, Jesse, and Clell Miller slipped out of the house, saddled up, and disappeared into the woods. John and Fanny returned from the party,

and now the five members of the Samuel family and the three servants bedded down for the night. At 12.30 a.m., a group of eight or nine men approached the farm on horseback. Most of the men stayed on the perimeter, acting as guards or lookouts. Two or three men dismounted and moved quietly to the house.

They pulled the weatherboarding off the outside of the structure, revealing the log walls underneath. They wedged tubes filled with flammable liquid between the siding and the logs and lit them on fire. Inside, the noise aroused Ambrose, who was asleep in the kitchen. He stood up and saw a flickering light through a crack in the door panel. He heard voices. He moved toward a window and saw two men outside. One of them had some kind of ball in his hand. The agent outside the window held an iron ball about seven and a half inches around. Inside the ball, flammable liquid drained through a hole onto a cotton cover. The agent lit the ball on fire and threw it through the window. The ball smashed the glass and knocked Ambrose to the ground. Everyone in the house woke up.

Ruben jumped out of bed and ran to the front door. The outside of the kitchen was on fire. He tore off the flaming weatherboards and threw them on the ground. Zerelda ran to the kitchen and saw something that looked like a flaming bowl on the floor. She tried to kick it over to stop the fire, but it didn't work. Now a quilt was on fire, and she dragged it outside. Ruben hurried into the kitchen with a shovel and pushed the flaming ball into the fireplace. It seemed like the best option at the time, but it would turn out to be disastrous. Everyone in the house was now awake and clustered

around the fireplace. The iron ball was growing superheated in the roaring fire. The boiling liquid inside built up pressure and then erupted. The ball shattered. Cast iron shrapnel flew through the air like missiles. Reuben staggered backward as a small piece hit the side of his head. A chunk slammed into Ambrose's head and knocked him through the front door. A fragment smashed Zerelda's right arm above her wrist. A shard sliced through Archie's chest, tearing through his insides. Ruben and Ambrose got back to their feet and helped Zerelda to her bed. Her right arm lay limp at her side, broken below the elbow. Ruben ran outside and shouted for help.

He heard horses tramping through the underbrush, and then he heard gunshots. Whatever their intent, the shots kept most of his neighbors from running to his aid. Daniel Askew, the closest neighbor, rushed to the farmhouse and started the process of sending messages to every doctor in the area. Ruben gathered eight-year-old Archie. It was clear the child would not last long, even if a doctor could get there. Ruben laid his youngest child next to the boy's mother. Zerelda was one of the strongest women around and had survived years of hardship before, during, and after the Civil War, but she now trembled with emotion. She had pictured all kinds of things happening to Frank or Jesse, and she had steeled herself

against their prospects, but she was not prepared for something like this. Before sunrise, Archie died. In the early morning hours after the attack, doctors amputated Zerelda's arm below the elbow, without anesthetic. She remained alert during the process, and that evening, she and the other family members participated in a coroner's inquest about the death of Archie. They relayed the events of the previous night for a justice of the peace and a jury of five men, one of whom was Daniel Askew. Word of the attack and the explosion crisscrossed the countryside. People in Clay County could talk of nothing else. And, as always, the early rumors were wildly inaccurate. A reporter in Kansas City was stopped by a man on the street who said the James brothers had been captured and their mother had been killed. The press printed every bit of speculation,

and the story spread like wildfire. In hours, it was all over Missouri. By the next day, it was all over the country. Newspapers quickly latched on to the Pinkertons as the culprits. A loaded gun that had been found at the farm had the initials P.G.G. carved into it. The papers first reported that these stood for Pinkerton Grand Guard. Then they stood for Pinkerton Government Guard. The agency had never used either of those names. But the theory was more exciting than just admitting that the initials probably stood for the owner's name.

John Newman Edwards launched fiery editorials in support of the James family. Other newspapers called out Edwards for his combative rhetoric. Whatever was said in the papers, the public was genuinely outraged by the attack. Edwards had left his own paper, the Kansas City Times, the previous year and had been writing for the St. Louis Dispatch ever since. The owner of the dispatch was also a member of the Missouri legislature. He and Edwards seized the moment to do more than just blast their enemies through the press. They crafted a bill that would grant amnesty to the James Younger gang. The bill named Frank, Jesse, Cole, and Bob Younger, and just said, and others, as a catch-all for the rest of the members.

The resolution granting amnesty to the most famous gang of outlaws in America failed, The resolution granting amnesty to the most famous gang of outlaws in America failed, but just barely. The failure didn't really matter, though. The James boys now had the sympathy of martyrs. In Chicago, Pinkerton received frantic telegrams from his two primary resources in Clay County. Samuel Hardwick and Daniel Askew were scared and appalled. They agreed that the James boys needed to be stopped, but they had not signed up for this. Pinkerton was safe in his cocoon of bigwigs in Chicago, but Hardwick and Askew were down in Clay County on the front lines. They testified in front

of a grand jury, and their involvement came to light. Ultimately, they weren't charged with crimes, came to light. Ultimately, they weren't charged with crimes, but that didn't matter to Jesse James. On the night of April 12th, 1875, Daniel Askew walked out of his house to draw a bucket of water from his well. On his way back, a figure stepped out from behind the woodpile. They talked for five to ten minutes, and then the figure shot Askew in the head three times. The killer was almost certainly Jesse James. In the wake of the murder, Samuel Hardwick fled to St. Paul, Minnesota, and Alan Pinkerton gave up his vendetta against the James boys. He admitted defeat. Jesse had won.

But the victory wasn't all that sweet. Jesse was sinking into a darker place. A few weeks after the murder of Daniel Askew, Jesse wrote a letter that was published in the papers. In addition to his typical rants, he was now showing signs of recklessness. He actually named men who were on the fringes of his group as robbers of the train in Muncie, Kansas. One of the men he named

was his longtime friend, Clell Miller, who had eaten dinner with him at his mother's house on the night of the attack. Another was Tom McDaniel, the brother of William McDaniel, who had been arrested after the Muncie robbery. William had been arrested but hadn't said a word about his accomplices. He would be shot and killed the very next month, though not by Jesse. No later than 1874, Jesse's correspondence with the papers and love of the spotlight began to annoy, if not anger, Cole Younger. He complained to a friend that his name never would have been associated with the Kansas City Fair robbery if Jesse hadn't written a letter about it. Where he got his authority, I don't know, but one thing I do know, he had none

from me, Cole said. In June of 1875, Jesse began the process of moving his family around the country and living under false identities. He and Z moved to Edgefield, Tennessee, across the Cumberland River from Nashville. But even there, he was not totally isolated. His uncle, George Height, was only 40 miles away. Jesse and Z lived as John David Howard and Josie Howard. He claimed to be a wheat speculator, though he disappeared for weeks at a time. When he returned, he had rolls of money and handfuls of jewelry for his wife. He had two fine horses, which seemed too much for a wheat speculator, but not enough to draw official suspicions. Throughout the summer,

Jesse engaged in a war of words in the Nashville newspaper with Alan Pinkerton's son, William. Jesse used many of the same arguments he had used through John Newman Edwards back in Missouri, but now he went far beyond defending himself. He openly threatened Alan Pinkerton and said he hoped God would deliver the detective into his hands for vengeance. And on September 6th, the day after he turned 28 years old, the Bank of Huntington was robbed. Huntington, West Virginia was founded by and named after railroad tycoon Collis Huntington. Huntington was one of the big four who owned the Central Pacific Railroad. It met the Union Pacific in Utah in 1869 to complete the Transcontinental Railroad.

Around 2 p.m. on September 6th, four men rode into town based on information that the Adams Express Messenger Company was delivering a package containing $100,000. One of the bandits matched the description of Cole Younger. Two of the other three were Tom Webb and Tom McDaniel. Tom Webb sometimes used the alias Jack Keane, which was one of the names listed by Jesse in the newspaper in connection with the Muncie train robbery. Tom McDaniel was the brother of William McDaniel, who was the only man arrested for the Muncie job. The fourth bandit has never been identified,

though most of the speculation centers on Frank James. Jesse likely sat this one out because his wife Z had just given birth to their first child, a boy they named Jesse Edwards James, after both Jesse and John Newman Edwards. The robbers took $15,000 from the Huntington Bank and then raced into Kentucky, but the luck of the James gang was running thin. First, the $100,000 package they had come for had been sent to Ohio the previous day, so they had to settle for stealing the cash on hand. Second, Tom McDaniel,

whose brother had been killed just three months earlier, was fatally wounded during the long, winding escape through Kentucky. He died five days after he was shot. Third, Tom Webb was caught one week after McDaniel died. Huntington had been the toughest escape and the most costly, and it would be quite a while before the gang struck again. A month after the heat from the robbery finally died down, Jesse and Z moved again. Their child was only two months old, but now they headed northeast to Baltimore.

They were joined by Frank and Anna, as was often the case. And it was likely during this time that Jesse may have had a mythical encounter. Louisville detective D.G. Bly had been waiting for four years to catch Cole Younger. He was positive that Younger had been involved in the Russellville stick-up in 1871, and he knew Jesse and Frank had been in a hotel in town at the same time. He had actually caught one of the men who had been responsible for the robbery, but he had never cornered Frank, Jesse, or Cole. The Huntington job had brought Cole, and possibly Frank, back into Bly's orbit.

The lawnman hadn't been part of the chase, but a letter appeared in the Nashville newspaper attributed to Jesse that called him incompetent anyway. So Bly was surprised and cautious when he met a bearded man on a train in Louisville who asked suspicious questions. The man wanted to know if Bly was still hunting Jesse James. By one account, Bly responded that he was indeed. By another, he said he wanted to catch up to the outlaw before he died. A few days later, Bly received a postcard. The author expressed regret in not revealing his identity on the train, but he said Bly could die now because he'd met Jesse James. Very little is known about the James family's time in Baltimore, but by the spring of

1876, they had returned home to Missouri, and Jesse was red-hot, according to one source, to do a job. That source was a young man named Hobbs Carey. He desperately wanted to work with the gang and spent long hours badgering two men on the edge of the gang to get him a pitch meeting with the brothers. Frank was always cautious, and it took some convincing to get him to agree. Hobbs explained his robbery idea, and the brothers said no. It was too small. Jesse had something much bigger in mind. But to Hobbs' delight, they let him come along anyway. And now, eight men prepared to rob the

Missouri Pacific Railroad in a spot called Rocky Cut. Five members were stalwarts of the gang, Frank and Jesse, Cole and Bob Younger, and Clell Miller. The other three were Hobbs Carey and the two men who had introduced him in the first place, Charlie Pitts and Bill Chadwell.

The robbery itself was not really unique. On July 7, 1876, they flagged down the train, forced it to stop, fired a bunch of shots, made the express messenger give them the packages containing money, and then disappeared into the wilderness. And a problem after the robbery wasn't unique either. One of the men got caught. The eager young pupil, Hobbs Carey. Instead of laying low, he'd flashed his money around like the inexperienced bandit he was. But now here was the unique part. For the first time, a gang member talked. Hobbs spilled his guts. He talked about the robbery in detail and named

names. On August 13th, five weeks after the robbery, the full details of the job and the arrest and the confession were printed in the newspaper, along with the names of all the other men involved. The gang was on the run, and now they were being hunted by the militia commander whose unit had killed Archie Clement in Lexington ten years earlier. Jesse wrote two letters to newspapers proclaiming his innocence and attacking the credibility of Hobbs' carry. For the first time in a long time, these were unfiltered words from Jesse, because John Newman Edwards was out of the game. Edwards had fought a duel, a very rare thing by this time, right before the Huntington robbery, a very rare thing by this time, right before the Huntington robbery, and then resigned from the newspaper. He was holed up in his father-in-law's farm working on his masterwork, Noted Gorillas,

about the history of Missouri bushwhackers. Edwards could have suggested several changes to the erratic letters by Jesse, but his thoughts might have been irrelevant. The second letter was dated August 23rd, the same day Jesse arrived in Minnesota. The Northfield Raid is truly the stuff of legend. The highs of 1874 and the lows of 1875 all lead to this. This is where it all changed. Northfield, Part 1, is next time on the Legends of the Old West podcast.

If you enjoyed the show, please give it a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening. You can check out our website at blackbarrelmedia.com and follow us on social media. Our Facebook page is Legends of the Old West Podcast and our handles on Twitter and Instagram are at Old West Podcast. Thanks again. We'll voit la semaine prochaine. frissons d'obtenir le meilleur deal? Les membres de Rakuten, eux, oui. Ils magasinent les marques qu'ils aiment et font d'importantes économies, en plus des remises en argent. Et vous pouvez aussi commencer à gagner des remises en argent dans vos magasins préférés, comme Old Navy,

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