J. Frank Dalton
Fact or Fiction????
Left: Colonel James R.
Davis, claiming to be a former US Marshal for the Cherokee Nation and 109 years
old
Center: Brushy Bill Roberts, who claimed to be Billy the Kid (his story will be
added later)
Right: J. Frank Dalton, who claimed to be 102 years old and Jesse James.
Ever since the death of Tom Howard in St. Joseph, Missouri, in April 1882, rumors have run rampant that someone other than Jesse had been killed by Bob Ford. No matter how hard the James family maintained their outlaw son lay in his grave, skeptics still believed that Jesse was alive. Things had just about faded from the public hue and cry when headlines from Oklahoma rekindled the flames of controversy once again.
On 5 September 1947, J. Frank Dalton of Lawton, Oklahoma, came forth with the astonishing claim that he was the notorious bandit, that he had engineered his own death in order to live a peaceful existence, and that he wanted to set the record straight once and for all before he died. It set tongues wagging all over the world.
To compound matters, Dalton really did tell a convincing tale. Although his claim was confusing, and the fact that he made it at 100-years-of-age may account for the missing or conflicting details in his evidence, he had enough of everything right to convince an awful lot of people. He also had enough of everything wrong to incur skepticism from all quarters.
According to J. Frank Dalton, he (as Jesse James) engineered his own death so he could escape justice and live a peaceful life. Large cash awards had been offered for the capture of Jesse James, alive or dead, and Dalton said he had conceived the idea to get an imposter killed, collect the money, and with the help of a few close friends and family, get away to live out his life in obscurity. The man he thought most resembled him was an outlaw named Charlie Bigelow.
Charlie was from Bigelow, Missouri…the little town being named in honor of his father…and he had ridden with the James gang until he acquired the James technique of planning and robbing. It was easy for him to impersonate Jesse, as he did bear a physical resemblance and was raised on the same border war field as the James family, and when he began calling himself Jesse James, Dalton began to formulate a way to get Bigelow killed in his place. Dalton did not like Bigelow, and since several of Bigelow’s men truly thought their boss was the wanted bandit, Dalton thought it would be easy to pass Bigelow off on the unsuspecting public, too.
According to Dalton, it was Charlie Bigelow that Bob Ford knew as Jesse James, and Ford was then commissioned to kill Bigelow. The plan called for several bankers to come forth to identify the body as the man who had robbed their banks as "Jesse James," and thus, the real Jesse would be able to escape. According to Dalton, this is exactly what happened. The body was duly claimed by the James family and laid to rest in the southwest corner of the yard, where the grave could be watched from the kitchen window. The body was not put into a lead-lined, sealed coffin, but was, instead, buried in a simple wooden coffin, which deteriorated over the next twenty years, making any positive exhumation identification impossible. The real Jesse was then free to ride into obscurity for the next sixty years, where he eventually surfaced as J. Frank Dalton.
In 1949, Henry J. Walker met with J. Frank Dalton in Meramec Caverns, Missouri, and conducted a series of interviews, later writing a book in 1961, which he titled Jesse James "The Outlaw." In this book, he does chronicle the story of Jesse James, as known by researchers, but he also makes the claim that J. Frank Dalton and Jesse James were one and the same person. One glaring idiosyncrasy is on the second page of his narrative, where he makes the statement that Jesse James, the bandit, and Frank James, the bandit, were cousins and not brothers, that Jesse James, the brother, had brown eyes. Confusing? One might say so.
It is Walker and Dalton's assertion that Jesse and Frank James, the brothers, had the same mother, but different fathers, and this is why Jesse James, the brother, had brown eyes. They are both also saying that the blue-eyed Jesse James was Frank's cousin, and that both men named Jesse James, the brown-eyed brother and the blue-eyed leader of the James Gang, rode with Frank James. Hmmmmm, this theory did set scholars to thinking.
Walker bases these two claims on things he learned from J. Frank Dalton and his own research, which included interviews with people who knew the James family. So which theory would Walker have the reader accept? The cousin theory? The same mother, different fathers theory? The book is so confusing on this issue as to make no real sense. About the time the reader forms an opinion on the cousin theory, Walker shifts gears into the "same mother, different fathers" theory.
Walker, in the brother theory, says that Robert James left for California because he could no longer stand the embarrassment of Zerelda bearing a child that was not his. Walker also says that Robert James did not die in California, and this is why Frank and Jesse could never find the grave when they went searching for it. Instead, Robert James changed his name, fought in the Civil War, and ran into son Frank on one of the battlefields. This would explain why the brothers could not locate the grave, but it also seems somewhat preposterous, since if Frank had met his father on a Civil War battlefield, why would Frank go looking for the gravesite after the war?
Walker further says that both men named Jesse James --- Jesse, the brother, and Jesse, the cousin --- rode with Quantrill’s Rangers, and one was called "Jesse Dingus" and the other "Jesse Woodson" to keep from confusing the two. His claim, based on J. Frank Dalton and his own research, shows it was "Jesse Woodson" who achieved notoriety as the legendary outlaw of western lore, and that this "Jesse Woodson" was the cousin, and "Jesse Dingus" was the brother to Frank James. Confusing? No...not if you buy into the two-men-named-Jesse James-theory, which could very well be fact, since "Jesse James" was a common enough name back then. Scholars were very interested in Dalton's story!
We now have a cousin and a brother to place into the legend. Jesse Woodson had an injured index finger on his left hand, not an injured middle finger of his left hand, which was reported to have happened to Jesse Dingus' left hand. Both men were said to wear gloves to conceal this injury. It is also interesting to note that back in the 1860’s, many people, in referring to the five fingers of the hand, call the thumb the first finger, which would then make the index finder the second finger. All that is really reported about Jesse James, the outlaw, about his finger accident is that he injured his second finger. So, which finger was his second finger…the index finger or the middle finger? History does not say, and it makes this deformity useless as a distinguishing mark for the real Jesse James.
Walker next claims that Jesse Woodson James, the cousin, was born on 8 March 1848, making him only a few months younger than Jesse "Dingus," the brother. He was a cousin of Frank James and not Jesse Dingus by virtue of the fact that the two brothers known as Jesse and Frank James were, in reality, only half-brothers. Walker never says what happened to this brother named Jesse Dingus, only that all three men rode in the James Gang, and Jesse Woodson, the cousin, was the acknowledged leader.
Everyone who studies the two-Jesse James theory tends to label it tommyrot, but if true, this does appear to answer one puzzling question which has nagged researchers for years. Frank James was the older, and he was no slouch. He was bright and intelligent, despite reports that he was bookish and dull. He had shown his courage and mettle all through the Civil War, and he received many battle scars to prove it. How then was his younger brother able to achieve such power over him? If one believes J. Frank Dalton, the answer is obviously that Jesse James, the legendary outlaw, was not Frank’s younger brother, but was, instead, his cousin.
Throughout the book, Walker gives example after example of Jesse’s story with Dalton’s commentary to embellish it. He ends with the statement that ‘I, the author, will pay $5,000 to any one who can prove that Jesse James, the ex-outlaw, and the aged J. Frank Dalton, I met in 1949, are other than the same person.’ It’s a nice story, and Walker weaves a fantastic tale, but right after his book was published, historians began to pick J. Frank Dalton apart.
Since Dalton claimed an outlaw named Charlie Bigelow was killed in place of Jesse James in St. Joseph, Missouri, historians attempted to prove Bigelow existed. Dalton had associated Bigelow as being a police spy, yet there is no record of him anywhere in the history of St. Joseph or with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. It is possible there was a police spy operating under the assumed name of Bigelow, but where are the records to prove it, and was he ever riding as a member of the James Gang? Bigelow, Missouri was named after the Bigelow family, and they did have a son named Charlie, but what happened to him? According to a letter in the back of Walker’s book, "Charles Bigelow, Jim Howard, and Jesse James were all the same person. As far as the people of Missouri are concerned, he is buried near Kearney, Missouri." Hunh???
J. Frank Dalton was known to tell fantastic lies. At one time, he claimed he was Frank Dalton, the United States Marshal working out of the Western District of Arkansas under District Judge Isaac C. Parker of Fort Smith. Marshal Frank Dalton was a well-respected lawman, who just coincidentally was also the older brother of the notorious Dalton Brothers, who rode into history in October 1889 with their botched raid on Coffeyville, Kansas. J. Frank Dalton claimed he, as Marshal Frank Dalton, engineered his own "death" so he could step into the role of outlaw to act as spy. The only problem with this claim is that Marshal Frank Dalton died in a shootout with whiskey runners in November 1887, and it was well-documented and witnessed, with the full account of his death being chronicled to the Attorney General on 30 November 1887, requesting an offer of a reward for $1,000 for the arrest of one William Towerly, the alleged murderer. Such a reward was offered, and the Dalton family buried their favorite son in the Coffeyville Cemetery.
Another problem with J. Frank Dalton lies in his recollections from childhood. In all fairness to the real Jesse, he did have to lie and use an alias since he was a teenager, and this constant string of lies and aliases could have confused a lot of issues later in life, but he clearly knew that his father had died when he was about four years old. So why, when J. Frank Dalton was asked who taught him to ride, did he respond that his "father" did? This is clearly impossible. It is not impossible if the real Jesse James called Dr. Rueben Samuel his "father," only records also indicate that it was William Sallee who gave Jesse his first horse when he was thirteen-years-old. He would have remembered this because the horse was an unridden stallion, and Jesse spent many hours taming and training the animal. He took the horse with him into the Civil War, and everyone knew it…everyone, apparently, except J. Frank Dalton!
Furthermore, when Dalton was asked after whom he was given the middle name of Woodson, he said he did not know. The real Jesse may not have known, either, but since he visited his Uncle Drury Woodson James in California after the Civil War, it seems likely that he would have known he was named in honor of his uncle, who in turn, had been named in honor of Silas Woodson, an old family friend. Be that as it may, when Dalton further said he did not know the full name of Frank James, skeptics everywhere cried foul. Alexander Franklin James was named in honor of two great Americans, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin, but he was commonly called Frank or Buck by the James family. The real Jesse James would have known his brother’s full name. Of course, if one buys into the cousin theory postulated in Henry J. Walker’s book, then it is entirely possible for the Cousin Jesse not to know the full name of Cousin Frank James.
What’s really interesting is the claim Dalton filed to receive a Confederate pension. He stated he had served with Quantrill, but it was never really proved, which is not unusual considering they were guerrilla fighters. However, he was finally placed on the Texas Confederate rolls when he gave his place of birth as being Goliad, Texas, 8 March 1848. It was only later that he signed a sworn statement that he was born in Clay County, Missouri in 1847. After all, if he was going to claim to be Jesse the Outlaw, he had better claim to be born in Missouri, not Texas. He was living in Austin at the time he was placed on the Confederate pension rolls, and perhaps he did have to come up with a Texas birthright, but it sure casts suspicions on all his later claims to being Jesse James, the outlaw. To add to the doubt, census records showed no "Frank J. Dalton or J. Frank Dalton " in the 1850-1860 Census of Goliad County, Texas. This came from the State Archivist of Texas.
In 1971, Carl W. Breihan, an author of several western biographies, one of them on Jesse James, undertook the challenge of proving J. Frank Dalton’s claim. It took him more than ten years to investigate many of the stories Dalton told before he died in 1951, and accounting for disparities in dates, which many people suffer, most of what Dalton told of the days of Quantrill and the war was acceptable. On the other hand, nearly everything Dalton told of the James family had flaws. For instance, when asked if Jesse’s mother Zerelda Cole married Reverend Robert James in Kentucky, Dalton replied that his mother was from Dalton, Georgia, and her maiden name was Mollie Dalton and his father was Major George S. James. Another birth date for J. Frank Dalton turned up as 17 April 1844 in Jefferson County, Kentucky, and when Breihan interviewed Charles Mason in St. Joseph, Missouri, Mason said he had a relative born on 17 April 1844 in Jefferson County, Kentucky, named Jesse W. James. In point of fact, there were several men named Jesse James, but only one Missouri Jesse Woodson James.
J. Frank Dalton could be telling a version of the truth. He really might be Jesse W. James, but if so, evidence would suggest he was more likely to have been the Kentucky Jesse James and definitely not the Missouri one. Further, an examination of a photograph with the fingers of his left hand partially exposed shows only an aberration in the fingernail area of his index finger. It is not possible to determine if the tip of the finger is, in fact, missing, as legend claims.
In 1951, Hood County Sheriff Oran C. Baker was summoned to identify a blind Granbury man who had just lost a bout with pneumonia. One look at the body left Baker certain the man was 103-year-old Jesse James. The man had been known around Granbury as J. Frank Dalton, but Baker had long suspected that name to be nothing more than an alias. He noted several sure-fire identifying marks, including 33 scars left by bullet wounds. There was also a conspicuous scar on Dalton's neck. Baker claims it's the same type scar that would have been left by the rope that a 16-year-old Jesse James had briefly hung from before making a miraculous escape. Last but not least, the 103-year-old Dalton had several burn marks on his feet, which would corroborate stories that Yankees had charred Jesse James' soles in a torturous effort to have him reveal where his brother Frank might be hiding. With Sheriff Baker providing the final word on identification, the court house filed a certificate listing the deceased as Jesse Woodson James.
As to Frank and Jesse being half-brothers, this is unsupported by the evidence, but remains a possibility. The stones would turn over once again in 1995 with the exhumation of the grave in Kearney, Missouri. With the exhumation proving by DNA testing to be 97 percent certain that the body in Kearney was that of the famous outlaw, and unwilling to accept those exhumation findings, Dalton's proponents got a court order in May 2000 to exhume and test Dalton's body to solve the mystery "once and for all." Unfortunately, the wrong body was exhumed, and Dalton's remains have yet to be tested.
The James L. Courtney chapter is the third leg of the Jesse James triangle, with some very interesting information.