U.S. Plot to Bomb Jesse James’ Kin Told

A letter long buried in federal archives indicates the U.S. government helped bomb the home of notorious bandit Jesse James, killing his half-brother and maiming his mother, a historian claims.

“This is the smoking gun,” said Ted Yeatman, who for two decades has studied the James gang, which robbed banks, trains and stagecoaches in the Midwest more than a century ago.

“If this thing had come out in the 1870s, it would have been like some new revelation in the Iran-Contra case,” he said.

James was well-known as a criminal, although some saw him as a Robin Hood who robbed unregulated railroads and banks suspected of overcharging common people trying to make a living on the Western frontier.

People began pitying James after an explosion Jan. 26, 1875, at the family’s log farmhouse outside Kearney, Mo. James was miles away at the time and the blast killed his 8-year-old half-brother and caused his mother to lose her right forearm.

The explosion shocked the region. The Missouri legislature hired an investigator to look into the blast, but he gave up, saying he could not get anyone to testify under oath.

The cause of the blast has been debated ever since.

Initially, historians thought lawmen threw flares inside the house just to illuminate it, and one exploded.

They suspected Allan Pinkerton, director of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and founder of the Secret Service, was a key player in the attack.

Yeatman said he found a letter last year at the Library of Congress in Washington that proves Pinkerton indeed was involved.

In the letter, Pinkerton wrote to P. H. Woodward, a special agent for the U.S. Post Office in Washington, to keep the postal service abreast of his efforts to apprehend James.

Yeatman said Pinkerton was working for the postal service because the James gang was believed to have looted mail during a train robbery in Gads Hill, Mo.

Then, with fellow researcher Fred Egloff of Chicago, Yeatman found another letter in the National Archives in Chicago that he says shows a Pinkerton agent got a bomb from the U.S. Arsenal in Rock Island, Ill.

“What’s the U.S. Army doing handing out explosives to be used against civilians?” Yeatman asks.

In that letter, Civil War Gen. Philip H. Sheridan wrote to the arsenal on Dec. 24, 1874--a month before the explosion rocked the James’ home--to introduce the arsenal commander to a Pinkerton agent named R. J. Linden.

Sheridan wrote that Linden was seeking materials from the arsenal to “aid him in arresting certain railroad robbers.”

“Linden’s visit to the Rock Island Arsenal puts new perspective on the incendiary device used at the James’ house,” Egloff wrote in a special October issue of True West, a Western history magazine. “If Pinkerton agents intended to use just a flare, or some basic flammable material, they would have had no need of help from government munitions experts.”

That the government might have supplied the bomb “does not surprise me at all,” California Superior Court Judge James R. Ross, James’ oldest living descendant. “It’s a logical connection. The Pinkertons were so tied in with the government.”

Pinkerton never caught up with James, who was killed by a fellow gang member in April, 1882, in St. Joseph, Mo.

Jesse James’ brother, Frank, surrendered the following October, but after several trials walked away a free man.