Cover of my copy of Stiles’s researched book, “Jesse James, Last Rebel of the Civil War”
Sisters Susie James (me) and Judy Ellen James now Moore, mid-1970s in Greenwood, Miss. Great-granddaughters of Monroe James, daughters of David Franklin James, the Marine.
Cousin Brinley Cole Young shares hugs with her aunt, Jessica James, at 4K in North Carrollton, Miss., after Christmas; Brin got a blue bike. She’ll be 4 on January 18. Kin to the Last Rebel of the Civil War?
Daddy’s brother, Henry Clay James, scoured the cousinly neighborhoods decades ago and found this photo of his paternal grandfather, Monroe James.
IT WAS A CHAP A FEW DAYS AGO INSISTING THAT THE OUTLAW JESSE JAMES’s killer had committed suicide — must be true, he’d seen this on a documentary — and my thinking otherwise: after all, I dimly recalled the Coward Bob Ford had been himself shot to death in a saloon in Colorado, that prompted me to “cherchez l’homme”, or find my copy of T. J. Stiles’ book, “Jesse James, Last Rebel of the Civil War”, which was published in 2002. A hurried search of the index didn’t reveal the name, “Edward Capehart O’Kelley”, however. Buried in Fairlawn Cemetery, Oklahoma City, with the epitaph “The man who killed the man who killed Jessie James”, O’Kelley has more memorials, provided by a distant relative at some point, and some history of the dastardly, violent times and men states that O’Kelley, shot to death January 1904 on the streets of Oklahoma City by “lawmen” after being released from prison in Colorado, where he’d been sent after shotgunning Bob Ford to death in 1892, entered that saloon, said, “Hello, Bob”, whose back had been rather poetically, turned, and gave him a fatal blast to the neck. Charlie Ford committed suicide May 4, 1884, in his hometown of Richmond, Mo. The Fords had made friends with Jesse James, or should we say, were false positives for same, before Bob, apparently faster on the trigger, shot Jesse in the back of the head as he turned to tend to a picture his mother had made, up there in St. Joseph, Mo., April 3, 1882. I was trying, some years ago, to touch base with various members of the older generations of my own James family in Mississippi, and an aunt had scribbled down a few things. One being the death year of a grandfather, “1882”. Oh, yes, there had been the longstanding legend among some of my late father’s kin that some how, some way, MY paternal grandfather Monroe James and his brother Andrew James (born 1849) were kin to the famed Jesse and Frank James. I have logged many hours by now in my own piteous research. Monroe’s own story is tragic enough. My father (the late David Franklin James, born in 1915) had a cousin, now the late Ruben James, some years Daddy’s elder, who told me quite a few anecdotes, among them being that from what own Poppa had said, we were “pretty close” kin to Frank and Jesse and he believed off the Rev. Robert Sallee James, the outlaws’ father, said to have (definitely) died while off evangelizing in the California gold fields. I scoured T. J. Stiles’ writings — and did find room for doubt that this story is true. Maybe so. Maybe not…
susiejames99 