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Widow of Frank James, Blind, 86, Still Living on the Old Missouri FarmBY HAROLD STREETER.KEARNEY, Mo. UPK A gentle little blind woman is living out her years, now 86, on a 117 year old log cabin farm near Kearney, with the true, blood pulsing story of Frank and Jesse James locked tightly in her heart.Fortunes have been offered her for the story. Unhesitatingly she has turned them down. She vows the story will go with her to the grave. The woman is Mrs. Annie Ralston James.The story which she alone could tell is of her breath taking romance and married life with Frank James, one of the two most talked about outlaws who ever drew a gun from the hip or galloped at breakneck speed on horseback across the prairie. The other was his brother, Jesse James.So quietly has this little woman remained in self imposed seclusion that many persons did not even know she was alive until the news leaked out recently that she had recovered from an illness of bronchial pneumonia.Took Cue From Husband.She took her cue from Frank James.“The only direct reference I ever heard him make to the stories about Jesse and himself,’* avers Frank’s son, Robert, now 61, who lives on the old farm with his mother, “was when he said: ‘I told all about that at the trials and they must have believed me for they acquitted me, and that was all the telling I pare to make.’ ”“My mother, Robert relates, never has said anything about them (the James boys) except to ridicule some of the wild stories she has read at times, such as about Jesse once being a singing teacher when he couldn’t sing a note.The farm where she lives is teeming with James history. There the minister father of the James boys, the Rev. Robert James, brought his bride in 1845. On that farm Jesse James was born.Thru a window of that farm in January, 1875, detectives seeking the James brothers tossed the bomb which killed an 8 year old half brother, Archie, and tore an arm off the mother of the outlaws.Once the Grave of Jesse.For 20 years after Jesse James was slain, his grave was there. Then the present burial site at Kearney was selected. On that farm in 1915 Frank James died of a heart attack in the arms of his faithful wife who sobbed: No better husband ever lived.To that farm now come the curious.They come to see the big walnut bed in which Bob Ford and Jesse James slept together for three nights before going to St. Joseph, Mo., where Bob shot Jesse as the outlaw leader stood, unarmed, his back an open target They come to see the framed preachers’ license of the James brothers’ father. They come to gape at the circled target drawn on tablet paper which was perforated by James’ bullets during target practice.But all who come never see Mr. Frank James. If she is walking in the yard when visitors approach, she disappears inside the house and shuts herself in her room. Until her eyes failed read- j ing was her greatest comfort. Then her son read to her. Until recent years, she refused to have any stories of crime brought to her attention. Then the work of the federal agents fascinated her.Asked Reading of Crime Stories.She asked that her son and his wife read to her every word of the career of Dillinger and the kidnapers, Bailey, Karpis, Campbell, Mahon, Robinson and the rest of them, Robert James said.The serenity of her kind face, as she rocks in her chair, at peace with her memories, gives pause to the thought that here sits a woman whose life was crowded with daring.She dared defy the wishes of her parents to elope with Frank James in July, 1875, only six j months after the detectives tossed 1 the bomb into the James farm- ] house and at a time when a price of $10,000 was on Frank’s head.A few days after her parents had consented to her going to Kansas City to “visit her brother-in-law, a note arrived, reading:Dear mother: I am marriedWe Move to (TwoOFrare
Newspaper Details
Lincoln Evening State Journal
Lincoln, Nebraska, US
Thu, Apr 13, 1939
Page 10
Full Page
Clipped by
Joplin P.
MO, USA 01 Aug 2024
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