NDG/JJ R: Day One
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The white farmhouse is cosily nestled into the rolling hills around it like an egg in a lady’s skirts. The guide told me I was lucky to be seeing it with just a few other people in my group. “From May to August, it’s a whole different picture. And then his birthday was just a couple weeks ago, and we get mobbed.”
It was hard to imagine. When I finished their tour and stepped outside, it was so quiet you could hear the sound of the soft rain and the nearby creek. Spying a rusty plow stuck into the ground, I went up to look at the sign. “Jesse was plowing his mother’s field at the age of 15 when he was surrounded by Union soldiers …” Oh. The abandoned plow suddenly carried a chilling meaning. The events of 1863 probably did quite a bit to make Jesse James into Jesse James.
August 21, 1863 – William Clark Quantrill led a massacre of Lawrence, Kansas in the early morning hours . His raiders tore through the Free-State town, robbing two banks, looting other buildings before setting them on fire, and killed more than 180 men, women, and children. Frank was a member of the Raiders and was part of the barbaric attack. There is some doubt as to whether Jesse was involved; however, he was said to have bragged about it later.
Late 1863 – A party of Union soldiers invaded the farm looking for information about the location of Quantrill’s camp. Jesse, who was just fifteen at the time, was questioned, then horse-whipped when he refused to answer the soldiers’ questions. [Jesse's stepfather] Dr. Samuel, who also denied knowing where the raider’s camp was located, was dragged from his house and was repeatedly hanged from a tree in the yard. Somehow, the doctor managed to survive the interrogation, but his physical and mental state were so affected by the ordeal that he was placed in an asylum in St. Joseph, Missouri where he remained until his death in 1908.
My soundtrack on the way to the James farm had been an album by a local artist named Rob Nold, the kind of simple tunes done on guitar, banjo, harmonica and fiddle that you associate with a Ken Burn historical video. But after awhile, it started to make me fill less cocky, less silly. Those simple, plaintive songs seem to tell you stories from these farms and little towns that are too sad to hear. The second song was called “Down on the Farm”:
If I could return to those boyhood days,
To those boyhood days of mine,
I’d turn back the hands that have carried me away,
From my life down on the farm.I wonder if Jesse James ever felt like that. Living in violent times, he grew up into a violent man. But you’d never know it all started at this quaint white farm with its handmade quilts and large fireplaces. It was a pretty little place, but the peace and quiet were too fragile. It was time to go.
Interlude
The wistfulness started to ebb away as I left Kearney and headed west. The rain had settled into a steady downpour and the two-lane road was a shiny white ribbon laid out straight to a white sky. I had an apple orchard in mind that had just opened for the season. With a bag of crunchy little Jonathan apples and a diet root beer, I fished out the reading I’d brought: a local effort of Jesse lore called “The Many Faces of Jesse James” by two local historians. The cover page sports a rather bad poem to kick things off:
As faceted as a fly’s eye,
He would laugh and then would cry.
Could go to church with brother Frank,
The next day rob a savings bank.As faceted as a fly’s eye? Whatever. But I’d need whatever laughs I could muster to get me through my next stop. I made it halfway through the apples and finished my root beer. The rain came on strong and let up a little, and I figured it was time to try to go find the next big factor that shaped James’ personality.
The Civil War in Missouri
From the Vaughn Orchard (“We sell sorghum!”), I made my way home. I had done some internet research looking for a good place to find a battleground locally, but had the same curious problem I always encounter when I try to look into Civil War sightseeing in this area. At first you think you don’t have enough to choose from — there were only a few big battles fought in Missouri, and none of them are close. Then you think you have too much to choose from — more specific searches turn up skirmishes in town after town. This site lists 905 Missouri battles. Even my little hometown supposedly had two battles fought here, one in 1861 and one in 1864.
And yet, I know nothing about them. I’ve never heard them mentioned. They’ve got statues and signs for David Rice Atchison — the man who was president of the United States for one day — but nothing to tell you where the Civil War was fought. I decided to just head back home and take my chances in the local cemetery. The sun emerged from the clouds fitfully as I started trekking amongst the headstones, without much of an idea what it was that I was looking for.I was a mite discomfited to see another person roaming the small graveyard with a camera. I’m used to the idea that when I do things like this, I might be establishing myself as the neighborhood weirdo — I’m not necessarily prepared to find out there are others out there as well. But he said something friendly and I responded in kind. He told me his name was Lee and that he was with the town’s historical society.
Lee was, in fact, a perfect godsend. Here I had been, prepared to leave this place as woefully ignorant as when I came, and I had bumped into an absolute font of knowledge. I sketched out for him the nature of my search — leaving out both the blogging road-trip thing and the Jesse James angle (no need to cement that Town Weirdo rep) — and after the briefest of pauses he said, “I know where to find what you’re looking for.”
There had indeed been battles in the town. Lee led me to the gravestone of the only casualty of the 1864 battle — a Union captain aged 26 — and then before he could finish filling me in on the details, said, “But you have to see this!” and hiked 25 feet further along.“What does that look like?” he asked.
I looked at the wobbly blackened stone hoping it could enlighten me. “I can’t even read it.”
“This is for a Confederate soldier who died in the Battle of Wilson’s Creek.”Thank goodness my meager internet research had equipped me with some facts. “That’s one of the really big battles of the war, right?”
“Yes! You know your history.” (Thank you, Google. The check’s in the mail.) “And that battle was fought far to the south of us in the dead of August. Yet somebody thought enough of this soldier to carry his body on a two-day trip through dangerous territory in the August heat just to bury him here.”
I looked at the stone again. “He was only 19 years old?” Lee nodded. “I can’t even make out the name. They didn’t use very good quality stone.”
Lee ran his hand over the broken top of it critically. “This is handcarved. It was probably quarried locally.”
I decided to get brave and ask the big question. “Why is it I can’t find out anything about the battles in Plattsburg? I would think the town would want to promote it.”
“No, just the opposite. People here don’t want to talk about it.” He looked as if he was thinking over his words carefully. “A lot of bad things happened here in the Civil War.”
He seemed unsure how to proceed, so I decided to wade in with my best guess. “It seems to me,” I said, “that this whole area fought the war not so much with major battles like in the east and south but skirmishes and raids. Not so many casualties, but ongoing, constant and … nasty.”
He nodded, looking at the ground. “Yes. The way things happened here in town … at first this was a little island. The area down south where the James boys were [I felt a little jolt — I’d almost forgotten about them], that was hard fighting, brutal stuff, but people up here thought that because they were gentrified they could all get along. There were a lot of plantation owners, so most of them owned slaves, but there were also some abolitionists. And for a while, no one cared. But then when things started to heat up in the war, it all changed. There were assassinations that happened here. It didn’t get covered in the papers, but people knew. This one graveyard’s got more stories than you could believe. Take this for example …”
He strode off a few more paces and pointed to a chunky old marker in pieces. “Take a look at that.”Doing my best to make out the worn lettering, I made a try at a name. “Westphalia?”
“Westfall,” he corrected.
I squinted up at the line lower down. “Does this say he was killed by train robbers?”
“Yep. Poor old Westfall was killed by Jesse James when he robbed a train. He spotted him — I think he was the engineer — and Westfall was somebody he knew and didn’t like.”
No way. I found a James connection and I didn’t even know what the heck I was doing. Historians everywhere, beware my power.
“I thought Jesse James was supposed to be friendly to old buddies of his.”
He looked very skeptical. “Where’d you hear that?”
“In the movie they showed at the James farm,” I said, with an apologetic grin.
“Huh. Well …” he looked like he was going to find fault, but then changed his mind. “Well, James is a big legend — that’s for sure. Look, y’know, a guy goes through everything that he went through — all that stuff that happened with his stepfather — you know that’s going to do something to you. And he and his brother, they were great fighters in the war. They were supposed to be excellent soldiers. But the stuff that happened after the war — (he motioned down to the headstone) — there’s just no excuse for that.”
The clouds that had parted were starting to close up again, and Lee and I made our way back to his truck with him filling me in on the local historical society. “I’ve wanted to do re-enactments and things,” he said, “but it’s some of the old original families that run things and … they just don’t want to talk about it.”
I decided to go for it. “I’ll go ahead and be rude. It sounds a little cliquish.”
He didn’t look up. “Yeaaaah,” he said slowly. “Yes.”
I looked back at the darkened graveyard. “So there really was a Battle of Plattsburg.”He smiled. “There were two. One in 1861 and one in 1864. And in 1863, Jesse James came into town and stole about $50,000 worth of bonds.”
I didn’t have to fake my response. My internet research had told me that the average take for the James-Younger gang’s holdups had been around $3.000. “Fifty thousand dollars?! That’s huge!”
“I know,” he said. “And no one ever talks about it.”
Home again
Flush from my graveyard success (now really, how many times do those two words go together?), I wobbled into my happy kitchen loaded down with all the junk like the Boss Lady cinnamon gum from the James Farm gift shop. Dumb reminders of my day of fun.Well … fun? Whatever. But it had been a long day, and somehow it felt like a success. What the heck, it’s just interesting finding things out, even when you’re not even sure why you want to know.
But what of Wild Grace Hickock? What of my quest to find my inner bad girl?
Well, I was at a bit of a loss for time, but I had figured out that if I was going to be traveling with the wild west sorts, I would have to do some hard drinking. My problem was that all that stuff has always seemed nasty to me. But I had resolved my dilemma with a little resourceful recipe-hunting.
Dinner: Whiskey Chicken (which actually has both whiskey and brandy in it, so extra gold stars for me). It was served up over a green-apple dressing that was quite tasty (recipe’s here, BTW, if anyone wants it), and I added in an ear of a local bi-color sweet corn called Andy’s Candy. Also a St. Louis pale ale called Schlafly.
Movie choice: I had thought this one through as well. Westerns would have made some sense, but Missouri isn’t really part of the West. “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” maybe? Too contemporary. In the end, I went with the Coen Brothers’ “The Ladykillers” — sort of a Mississippi “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” with lots of that wonderful regional ambiance that those guys do so well. This movie didn’t do well at the box office, but I’m not sure why. It turned out to be just right.
Dessert: Pillsbury Slice ‘n Bake Chocolate Chip, Chocolate Chunk cookies. With a glass of milk, followed by another pale ale. Maybe the movie wasn’t as good as I thought, but it sure seemed like it at the time.Leave a Reply
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[…] Boyhood and wartime — I take in the James farm where Jesse got off to a very bad start. And I happen to meet up with a historian at our local graveyard who educates me on the uncelebrated local history of the Civil War. […]