Jesse James Is Just ‘Grandpa’ at One Address in County

For 14 years, the boots and spurs of America’s most famous outlaw were stashed in a cupboard of a mobile home in Huntington Harbour. His guns, scarf and even his wallet were hidden in the closets and shelves.

Now that those artifacts have finally been given away, the home’s owner is able to clue her neighbors in on a secret: She is the last surviving granddaughter of Jesse James.

“When I first moved here, I wanted to see how long it took for people to find out who I was,” 80-year-old Ethel Rose Owens said at her home Thursday.

Owens had another reason for wishing to remain anonymous: She was worried that someone might try to break into her home and steal the artifacts from her grandfather’s life that she has safeguarded for the family.

She had kept the outlaw’s guns--a Winchester rifle, a London-made shotgun and Colt revolver--in an artificial fireplace in her home. The handmade, newly bought boots that James wore at the time of his death were stashed in a cardboard box and shoved under a cupboard along with the canned goods. She also concealed his wallet, coin purse, horse bridle and boot-polishing brush.

Her nephew, Orange County Superior Court Judge James R. Ross, persuaded Owens last week to donate all those artifacts to the Jesse James Museum at the James Farm Historic Site near Kearney, Mo. The museum and family farm, now owned by Clay County, are about 30 miles northeast of Kansas City.

Ross is a great-grandson of Jesse Woodson James, who lived from 1847 to 1882. Ross takes his first name

from the outlaw’s surname. Ross said he is often asked why James became an outlaw when the bandit’s father was a minister, his son was a lawyer and his great-grandson is a judge.

“I tell them it was just the turmoil of the times,” Ross said. “If it had been another time, he would have been a minister like his father.”

James and his older brother, Frank, embraced a life of crime after fighting with Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War, according to historical accounts. Joined by eight other men, the James brothers staged their first daylight bank robbery in Liberty, Mo., on Feb. 13, 1866. Over the ensuing 16 years, the gang committed about 25 robberies of trains, banks and stagecoaches from Iowa to Alabama to Texas. Some people were killed in the robberies, how many no one knows.

Their ability to elude pursuing posses elevated the James gang to folk heroes. To many contemporaries, James was a romantic figure who they believed had been hounded into a life of crime by Northern officials who never forgave his allegiance to the South.

On April 3, 1882--as he was hanging a picture in a house in St. Joseph, Mo., where he was living under an assumed name--James was shot in the back of the head by a newcomer to the gang, Robert Ford. There was a $5,000 reward for either James brother.

Owens’ father, Jesse James Jr., was 7 at the time and later told Owens he heard the shots from another room.

“He rushed in to find his father covered with blood on the floor,” Owens said. “That was an awful experience for a young boy. I don’t think he ever got over that.”

News of James’ death spread throughout post-Civil War America. A torrent of books, then movies further transformed the outlaw into a legend.

But Owens said the public accounts of James have been mostly wrong. She said the movies, for example, are constantly portraying Jesse and Frank as wearing cowboy clothes. But they almost always wore formal business attire, she said, which in large measure accounted for them being able to mingle unnoticed in crowds.

Another misconception, she said, is that James died leaving behind a treasure trove of buried riches. The outlaw’s widow was left with about $250, so the family had to struggle, Owens said.

Despite her financial straits, the widow spurned repeated offers to sell any of her husband’s belongings. After she died in 1900, the family continued to horde the outlaw’s possessions.

“Mom and dad were very opposed to selling them and having them used in a sideshow,” Owens said. “All the years we had them, we just stuck them around the house like old furniture. We didn’t take too much care of them.”

Ross said he was approached by officials in Clay County about donating the artifacts six years ago. After receiving assurances that the artifacts would never be sold and that they would be well guarded, Ross said he and his aunt decided to turn them over so the public could enjoy them. On their first day of display last week, 1,000 people lined up to view the artifacts.

Ross said it was particularly ironic that Pinkerton detectives were hired to guard the artifacts, as it was the Pinkerton agency that had tried in vain to catch the James brothers for so long.

“I told them jokingly that I hope they do a better job of guarding the artifacts than finding Jesse James,” he said.

Despite James’ notoriety, his family remembers him as a gentle, loving man who took time out to accompany children on horseback rides. Although she was born too late to meet him, Owens believes she would have liked the man she refers to simply as “grandpa.”

“My whole family was friendly, so why shouldn’t I think my grandpa was all right too?” Owens said.

Owens, the youngest of four sisters, met surviving members of the James Gang as a young child. Frank James, before his death in 1915, left the impression of a man who had no patience for children.

“We had to be quiet around him,” Owens said. “He was strained, not relaxed too much.”

And there was Cole Younger, a retired gang member who happily bounced Owens on his knee before he too died shortly after the turn of the century.

“He was a lovely person,” Owens said. “I was in his lap all the time.”

Growing up, Owens said it was “no big deal” that she was related to James. In the western Missouri area where she lived, she said, everyone already knew about her family and gave them no problems.

James was so popular, in fact, that his son was moved to write a local newspaper in 1899: “There were lovable and noble traits in the character of my father, else why was it that for 16 years, when there was a price on his head that would have made the betrayer rich, not one could be found who would betray him?”

Just one member of the family that she knows of ever suffered serious repercussions from being related to Jesse James, Owens said. One of her sisters was blackballed from a college sorority in Columbia, Mo., because of her grandfather’s name.

Owens felt some repercussions herself, although in a lighter vein. Working as a bank secretary in Los Angeles, where she moved from Missouri in 1926, Owens found herself confronted by a man with a handkerchief over his mouth and brandishing a toy gun.

“He smiled and said, ‘I’m your granddaddy,’ ” Owens said, chuckling at the memory.

She added that other bank employees had put the man up to the trick.

Ross, who has presided over criminal and civil cases in the county for the past five years, said he has made the most of his relation. As a schoolboy, he said, “I won a lot of nickels.”

“I’d bet I was related to Jesse James, and then I’d go home and prove it,” he said, by introducing classmates to his grandfather, Jesse James Jr.

Ross said he has also just written a soon-to-be published book about his great-grandfather, entitled: “I, Jesse James.”

James’ only son was, likewise, proud to carry on the family name. In fact, Ross said, Jesse James Jr. did a booming legal defense business because criminals were constantly seeking him out for help.

Jesse James Jr.’s one big regret, though, was that he did not sire a son to carry on his father’s name, Owens said. So he did the next best thing: He named one of his daughters Jessie Estelle James.

“She just went by Estelle,” Owens said.

Jesse James Sr. also had a daughter, who produced three grandsons. They have all died, though, as have all of Owens’ sisters and all other members of her generation who learned firsthand about the outlaw.

Owens is left alone now with yellowed newspaper clippings and faded photographs of her grandfather and his cronies. Just recently, she found stowed away in a family safe a letter penned by a frantic Frank James just a few months after his brother’s death. He was asking for clemency from Gov. T.T. Crittenden of Missouri.

“Today and for years, the one disire (sic) of my life is, and has been to regain the citizenship which I lost in the dark days when in western Missouri every man’s hand was against his neighbor,” Frank James wrote.

“Having for mostly 20 years proved my ability to evade all attempts to capture me, (I want) to take my little family and go to some remote section where I can live a quiet life, free of apprehinsion” (sic).

The surviving James brother was pardoned and retired to a quiet life on the family’s farm, where he died in the room in which he was born.

JESSE W. JAMES

Birthplace: Centerville, Clay County, Mo., 1847.

Civil War: Joined guerrilla band led by William Clarke Quantrill.

After War: Formed gang noted for bank and train robberies for 16 years.

Pursuit: Banking officials hired Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1871 to capture James.

Death: Gang member shot James in head in St. Joseph, Mo., 1882.