HISTORY : Jesse James May Prove Dead Men Do Tell Tales : Up from the grave, out of the coffin, the old bones may give clues on murder and identity. DNA experts meet an outlaw from the last century.

If an outlaw has any dignity, Jesse James might have died of a lack of it--were he not so dead already.

On a hilly Missouri burial ground, a group of scientists--Yankee scientists at that--dug into the sunbaked earth on Monday to exhume the Western legend’s bones to determine how he died and if the remains are really his. More than 113 years after the death of the post-Civil War era’s most prolific train robber, a team of historical sleuths had come to pare away the encrustation of myth around his 1882 killing by fellow gang member Robert Ford.

The forensic experts who dug up his worn metal coffin were alien enough. But their presence, on the first day of a painstaking examination process expected to take months, brought more interlopers. There were stone-faced strangers from Oklahoma and Texas--all insistent, with well-rehearsed outrage, that they were James’ descendants. There were prying reporters and pesky T-shirt salesmen. And in the bitterest affront, there were blue-uniformed Pinkerton men roving around the grave--hirelings from the same hated company whose operatives hunted James more than a century ago, now assigned to guard his body.

“If you listen close, you’ll probably hear those bones turning over,” said Emmett Hoctor, an amateur historian from Nebraska, one of more than 200 people who stood by the James family plot at Mt. Olivet Cemetery to watch the daylong disinterment of one of America’s most notorious bad men.

The exhumation was a laborious process, starting with a chugging Bobcat loader that dug carefully into the earth over James’ grave to make sure that soil subsidence did not catapult his mother’s coffin over on his. Then came the scientists, who poked into the pit with shovels until they reached the coffin, so decomposed that the retrieval of the bones may not be done for several days.

“They sure bury them deep in Missouri, especially the outlaws,” said James E. Starrs, the project’s sweating, white-bearded leader after a long morning of spadework.

The man Starrs came to unbury lived 34 hard years, saw his father hanged by Union troops and rode with Confederate guerrillas from Texas to Kansas. After the war, he turned to robbery, leading the James-Younger gang, said to have emptied nine banks and eight trains and killed as many as 32 people--none in cold blood, his partisans insist. On April 3, 1882, James reportedly was fatally shot in the back of the head by Ford. His gravestone read: “Killed by a coward whose name isn’t worthy to appear here.”

Despite his violent life, James is practically a patron saint in Kearney--where his family farm now stands as a museum--and in the small towns that range around the hills of western Missouri. Myths die hard here, especially when they bring a little attention to people whose lives would otherwise pass with anonymity.

“Jesse James is a part of my family’s history,” said Doris Brown, who insists, like so many, that the outlaw stopped by her family’s homestead one night for supper. “My grandmother wouldn’t tell a fib.”

Brown had come well-equipped for the long day of digging, perched on a lawn chair under a parasol. Around her crowded wide-eyed history buffs, lugging old family tintypes and framed Civil War-era newspapers, all eager to share their knowledge and outlandish claims with others bearing their own tall tales.

“Everyone wants a piece of Jesse James because he’s a common man’s hero. And in an age when people are angry, here was a man whose attitude of rebellion fits in perfectly,” said Starrs, who has headed up exhumations of the victims of alleged Colorado cannibal Alferd E. Packer and the assassin of Louisiana pol Huey Long.

For James’ known descendants, Monday’s dig raised a ray of hope that they might finally have the scientific ammunition to debunk impostors who have plagued family gatherings and clouded bloodlines for generations. As part of the sleuthing, three known James descendants have volunteered to provide genetic material to the forensic scientists to provide a definitive DNA link to the bank robber’s bones.

“I’d give up a gallon of my blood if it would silence these people, once and for all,” said Oklahoma City defense lawyer Robert Jackson, a Jesse James descendant who went to court recently to win permission for the exhumation.

There was not much silence around the grave site. Instead, there was a cacophony of claims that grew bolder as the scientists dug--voiced by men like Waggoner Carr, a former Texas attorney general who says he represents Jesse James IV, and John Tatum, a rock-chinned Oklahoman who growled that he grew up “the James way.”

“Don’t matter what the doubters say, and it don’t matter what the men in white suits do,” Tatum said. “My blood comes from Jesse James, and that’s that.”