Jesse James As A Suicide 1 By Michelle Pollard
Jesse James was shot twice in the chest during the Civil War, the first while attempting to steal a saddle from the home of George Heisinger in the fall of 1864, and the second while contemplating surrender just outside Lexington on 15 May 1865.2 Found by a local farmer, Jesse was taken into Lexington and lodged at the Virginia Hotel before being taken to the home of his uncle, John W. Mimms, owner of a boarding house in Harlem, later part of Kansas City.3 Once there, Jesse was attended by Drs Lykins and Wood, the latter recalling that Jesse “lay in an upstairs room, and had two bullet wounds in his right breast, and through these the air and blood and matter came every time he breathed.” When asked how Jesse was as a patient, Dr. Wood replied, “He did not seem to care much about the wounds, although they were very serious ones. He was quite a boy then, but he had plenty of grit.”4
Despite his resilience, the wounds refused to heal and, by 1867, Jesse was travelling to Nashville with his brother, Frank James, who had received a nasty gunshot wound to the hip during a fight at Brandenburg, Kentucky, in 1866, and Fletch Taylor, a Civil War friend who had suffered an arm amputation. Dr. Paul Fitzsimmons Eve, a well-known Confederate surgeon, told Jesse his lung “was so badly decayed that I was bound to die, and that the best thing I could do was to go home and die among my own people.” Jesse subsequently travelled first to Kentucky, then, briefly, home to Missouri, where a young Leonidas W. Leavell Jnr. recalled Jesse coming to his home and needing to drain the wound after dinner.5 Returning to Kentucky, Jesse continued to suffer until, at 7 o’clock one “early January” morning in 1868, Dr. Demarcus Green Simmons was called to the home of Maj. George Hite, uncle of the James brothers by marriage. “I found [Jesse] apparently in the embrace of death,” he recalled, “in a profound stupor, insensible to his surroundings, except under the influence of the strongest excitement; pulse slow, full and very forcible, and respiration of that heavy, slow and stertorous nature, characteristic of opium poisoning.” The doctor observed that Jesse was, at that time, “suffering from the effects of a gunshot wound in his right breast and from the long continued discharge was rather thin and in feeble health.” He concluded that “there had been some degree of tolerance to the drug [morphine] acquired by a resort to it some weeks previously, to mitigate the violence of the sufferings incident to the wound.” The doctor “found willing and very capable assistants in Frank and Susie,” he said, who all continued through the night until Jesse finally failed to respond to “appeals and circumambulatory stimulants”. Still needing his patient to remain alert, Dr. Simmons called on Frank to keep his brother awake. “I shall never forget the powerful excitement he evinced,” the doctor recalled, “and the prompt response he continued to make when Frank would whisper certain warning words to him, as if certain persons who were very obnoxious to him were coming and it was very necessary to escape or defend to the death.”6
Frank’s words of warning worked until 4am, at which point “all efforts to keep him awake proved futile. His pulse had reduced in volume to a mere thread, his breathing was feeble and very slow and it seemed the death angel was hovering over him.” The doctor suggested Jesse be left to rest and prepared the family for the worst. “I sat with my finger on the pulse for perhaps half an hour,” he said and in that time the doctor noticed improvement. “Within an hour he was sleeping a natural and refreshing sleep” and at 6am he woke and ate breakfast.7
Although it was entirely possible that Jesse had accidentally overdosed on morphine, as the headline suggested there were more sinister suggestions as to his motivation. “In a fit of despondency,” the doctor offered, “produced partly by his low state of health, and partly, as I afterward learned, by his bitter opposition to the prospective marriage of his sister, Susan, to Allen Parmer, Jesse determined to [die by] suicide. For this purpose,” the doctor continued, “he rode to town and procured sixteen grains of morphine, which he took at one dose immediately on his arrival at his uncle’s.”8 As Susan did not marry until 1870, it appears the doctor may have been mistaken, with the Governess of the Hite household, recorded only as Jennie, providing an alternate version during an interview published some years later. “I discovered that [Jesse] was desperately in love with his cousin, Mary,” the Governess recalled. Although “she was ever with him, watching and tending him with true cousinly devotion,” it seems Jesse’s feelings were not returned. In fact, unlike Susan, Mary was preparing to marry in a matter of weeks. One evening before her marriage, Mary confided to Jennie that, “I have often spoken of the unreasonable love [Jesse] has for me. Last night he told that if I did not consent to break my engagement and marry him he would die, if it had to be by his own hand.”9 Whether or not Jesse deliberately overdosed on morphine, either due to the persistent pain resulting from gunshot wounds, despondency over a failed love, or both, Jennie testified it was Mary Hite who assisted the doctor that night at Maj. Hite’s home, not Susan James. And on 21 January 1868, Mary married local farmer, Rufus Tully.10
1. The Kansas City Journal, Missouri, 6 May 1882.
2. “Judge T. R. Shouse, After 56 Years, Explains Why Jesse James Was Killed”, Richmond Observer, Missouri, 9, 16, and 23 January 1939. Contains extracts from the manuscript – ‘My Father and Jesse James’; A Terrible Quintette, St. Louis Dispatch, Missouri, 22 November 1873.
3. A Terrible Quintette, op. cit.; correspondence with Mark Lichte.
4. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Missouri, 6 April 1882. Jesse mentioned these two doctors and their care of him in A Terrible Quintette, op. cit.
5. Samuel Anderson Pence, I Knew Frank, I Wish I Had Known Jesse, Two Trails Publishing, 2007, pp122-3.
6. The Kansas City Journal, Missouri, 6 May 1882. The Louisville Courier, Kentucky, 24 March 1883, quoted Dr. R. P. Townsend as saying that "he did not attend Jesse James at Mr Hite's house when he had a gunshot wound, but thought that Dr. Simmons had attended him as he had heard the doctor speak of Jesse James having taken an overdose of morphine."
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. The Kentucky Observer, August 1992 – quoting the recollection of Jennie, Governess to the Hite House, 1885.
10. Ibid; Kentucky County Marriages, 1797-1954.
With many thanks to Paul Saeli and Linda Gay Mathis.
For more information on Dr. Demarcus Green Simmons see Jesse James’ Physicians by Michelle Pollard, available from lulu.com.
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