Incensed at the step-father’s silence, they were hammering at the door with the butts of their muskets and calling out to Jesse to come down stairs, swearing that they knew he was in the house, and that they would have him out, dead or alive.
He went down stairs softly, having first dressed himself, crept close up to the front door and listened until from the talk of the men he thought he was able to get a fairly accurate pistol range. Then he put a heavy dragoon pistol to within three inches of the upper panel of the door and fired. A man cried out and fell. Before the surprise was off he threw the door wide open, and with a pistol in each hand began a rapid fusillade. A second man was killed as he ran, two men were wounded severely, and surrendered, while the fifth marauder, terrified, yet unhurt, rushed swiftly to his horse and escaped in the darkness.
What else could Jesse James have done? In those evil days bad men in bands were doing bad things continually in the name of the law, order and vigilance committees.
He had been a desperate Guerrilla; he had fought under a black flag, he had made a name for terrible prowess along the border; he had survived dreadful wounds; it was known that he would fight at any hour or in any way; he could not be frightened out from his native county; he could be neither intimidated nor robbed, and hence the wanton war waged upon Jesse and Frank James, and this is the reason they became outlaws, and hence the reason also that—outlaws as they were and proscribed in county, or state or territory—they had more friends than the officers who hunted them, and more defenders than the armed men who sought to secure their bodies, dead or alive.
The future of the Youngers after the war was similar to the Jameses. Cole was in California when the surrender came, and he immediately accepted the situation. He returned to Missouri, determined to forget the past, and fixed in his purpose to reunite the scattered members of his once prosperous and happy family, and prepare and make comfortable a home for his stricken and suffering mother.
Despite everything that has been said and written of this man, he was, during all the border warfare, a generous and merciful man. Others killed and that in any form or guise or fashion; he alone in open and honorable battle. His heart was always kind, and his sympathies always easily aroused. He not only took prisoners himself, but he treated them afterwards as prisoners, and released them to rejoin commands that spared nothing alive of Guerrilla associations that fell into their hands.
He was the oldest son, and all the family looked up to him. His mother had been driven out of Cass County into Jackson, out of Jackson into Lafayette, and out of Lafayette into Jackson again. Not content with butchering the father in cold blood, the ravenous cut-throats and thieves followed the mother with a malignity unparalleled. Every house she owned or inhabited was burnt, every outbuilding, every rail, every straw stack, every corn pen, every pound of food and every store of forage. Her stock was stolen. Her household goods were even appropriated. She had no place to lay her head that could be called her own, and but for the kindness and Christianity of her devoted neighbors, she must have suffered greatly.
At this time Coleman and James returned to Missouri and went hopefully and bravely to work. Their father’s land remained to them. That at least had neither been set fire to nor hauled away in wagons, nor driven into Kansas.
Western Missouri was then full of disbanded Federal soldiers, organized squads of predatory Redlegs and Jayhawkers, horse thieves disguised as vigilance committees, and highway robbers known as law and order men.
In addition, Drake’s constitution disfranchised every property owner along the border. An honest man could not officially stand between the helpless of his community and the imported lazzaroni who preyed upon them; a decent man’s voice could not be heard above the clamor of the beggars quarreling over stolen plunder; and a just man’s expostulations penetrated never into the councils of the chief scoundrels who planned the murders and the robberies.