For the record, the Rock Island Express the boys hit that night was eight cars long--four coaches, two sleepers, and two baggage and express cars. It had left Council Bluffs late afternoon, at five, on a run to Chicago. Oddly enough, the last sleeper was full of Chinese students on their way to colleges out east. It was July 21, 1873.
The thing is, no one had ever even imagined the idea that a bunch of tough guys would stop a train, stop it in its tracks, shoot up a storm with the guns in their hands, get on board, and go from seat to seat demanding people's cash and whatever else they spotted. What happened that night, 65 miles east of Des Moines, was the very first train robbery in American history; and it happened just outside of Adair, Iowa, at a spot you can visit yet today, a place where an immense railroad engine wheel is set in the earth in memory of a wild and nasty thing that happened right there that night.
The sun's going down at 8:30, but there's plenty enough light for an engineer with his wits about him to spot a line of track that's bent out of shape by someone or something. When John Rafferty saw trouble coming, he threw that monster into reverse and stopped all that tonnage as fast as he could, thereby playing into the hands of the James boys.
Just one word explains a scrapbook full of wild west 19th century behavior. It's four letters long, and names a bright and shiny object that stole a nation's attention--gold. Frank and Jesse James got the word that the Rock Island was carrying lots of it from Colorado. Gold is what they were after that night.
But it was coming later. Wrong time. Wrong train.
No matter. That heist, right down the road, stunned locals and shocked a nation. Who would have believed "six large, athletic men dressed in KuKlux style" could bring a monster railroad to a stop, rob it blind, and kill good men? It happened. Engineer Rafferty died that night, thrown out when the engine ran into a bank and flipped.
There was no gold, but when the James gang tallied the loot, they'd still grabbed a couple thousand and change, not bad for more fifteen minutes of violent crime. And they'd made history, put "the James Gang," all caps, across the covers of a dozen dime novels. Stopping that Rock Island Express put them on a fast track to mythic glory, Robin Hood and a prairie band of merry men.
There's more to the story. Jesse James was a kid still learning to shave when Bloody Bill Anderson's gang of Confederate guerrillas committed unspeakable atrocities in western Missouri. Jesse was of one of 'em. He was in it when Bloody Bill slaughtered Union soldiers and sliced them up like butchers do. Little Jesse James a bushwhacker who carried out unspeakable atrocities in a place where the Civil War created conflicts that were always neighbor against neighbor.
The greatly fabled Jesse James was raised bloody, sired in conflict, reared by war. He'd learned to rob trains long before even he had the idea. When he should have been in Sunday School, he was scalping the enemy.
For years Jesse James got more ink than almost anyone out west, but people rarely read the whole story.
When Robert E. Lee handed his sword to General Grant at Appomattox, the war ended, but not all the violence did. Some washed up here, outside of Adair, in July of 1883, when a gang of thugs stopped the Rock Island Express.
No one could have guessed.
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