If the place sounds cliche-ish, you can't blame Garretson, SD, because--doggone it, not every Siouxland burg has a regular tourist trap built in. Seriously, Gerretson has a brand--Jesse James was there. He was. Not some lousy impersonator. The. Real. Jesse James. And there lies the tale.
"Devil's Gulch," someone called it long ago, like something out of John Wayne--"the dust that day in Devil's Gulch was thick as the fur on a buffalo hump." You know.
But Garretson's not only got a star, they've also got a story, and the story's not moving any time soon. It'll be there tomorrow yet, if you've never checked it out, because it's carved treacherously into the landscape of the region; in this case, a 20-foot-wide gash in the gorgeous pink quartzite all around--Blue Mound, Palisades. It seems our hero, Jesse James, running from the biggest posse in American history, once took a look at Devil's Gulch, spurred his sweaty mount, and took a flying leap over that chasm and made it. Escaped to rob more banks and trains.
That's the mighty jump Gerritson celebrates. Go look for yourself--only a legend could make that leap, someone bigger than life. Maybe only Jesse James.
Can't help ask yourself, however, what the Sam Hell was Jesse James doing in Minnesota? It was the September, 1876. The Vikings were likely out of town, deer opener months away, and I'm guessing the walleyes weren't biting either.
What drew him was a bank in Northfield, 500 miles north from his Missouri home. He and his brother, along the Youngers and a couple other bad boys, figured to knock off the Northfield Bank, split the loot, and high-tail it back south. Just that easy.
But why--why that far away? Why that far north?
The answer is a better story than Devil's Gulch. Jesse wanted a piece of man with the namby-pamby name of Adelbert, Adelbert Ames, a Yankee Civil War hero, who'd left his home in the east and taken up residence in Northfield, where his father owned a mill.
It would be difficult to line up two men as different as Jesse James and Adelbert Ames. Jesse was a criminal, even a murderer. Adelbert had served in his country in war and during that horrible time we call "Reconstruction." Adelbert Ames, the Yankee, served as Governor of the State of Louisiana. He was, by Southern standards, one of the most god-awful carpetbaggers of them all, trying to impose a Yankee justice on Rebs who'd just coughed up a surrender at Appomattox.
Adelbert won the war but lost just about ever battle thereafter. When Adelbert Ames left Louisiana, he stumbled back north, burned out mentally and emotionally because he'd taken on a task no one could have accomplished. With malice towards none, he'd defended the poor black folks of Louisiana against the KKK, who had a penchant for lynching. What he'd discovered in reconstruction years was that plain moral courage took a whipping from viscous brutality. What Adelbert Ames had in mind was a peculiar abolitionist mission: "to buckle on my armor anew," he said, "that I may better fight the battle of the poor and oppressed colored man."
And he'd lost. He'd lost big time.
And Jesse knew all of that. He was well-read criminal. He wanted to take Adelbert Ames' money. It was that simple. To Jesse, Ames's money was worth a trip up north to Northfield. It wasn't just some ordinary bank heist. The whole deal, from conception on, was political.
And it went bust, bloody bust. Jesse might have been well-read, but when he and gang came into town, they looked like absolutely no one else on the street. The story goes, the townspeople knew they were bank robbers long before they'd walked up to the bank--they looked like trouble.
So when they hit the bank, it wasn't news, and what happened inside and out wasn't pretty. People were shot and people were killed. Even Governor Pillsbury weighed when he proclaimed a $5000 reward for the James gang members, dead or alive.
That ticket created what may well have been the biggest posse in American history, and that posse was chasing Jesse James way down into a little town named Gerretson, where Jesse, on his horse, came up to a chasm named Devil's Gulch, turned around a few steps, then spurred that mount on to jump 20 feet and escape the crowd that was after him and the five grand that came with his scalp.
You can visit Devil's Gulch. You can judge for yourself whether any man and beast could ever make that mammoth leap. The jury is still out on whether or not the whole saga even happened. We create myths where we'd like to believe things true.
There's a shop there, where you can read up 0n the story and buy a up or a pen or a Devil's Gulch t-shirt.
But there's no mention of Adelbert Ames, and I think that's a crime. I know I'm speaking as a Yankee, but I can't help thinking Adelbert's the real hero here, not the thug, Jesse. Adelbert served his country in war and peace. Jesse blew a robbery, left blood over the streets of Northfield, and slithered back to Missouri, his gang pretty much destroyed.
Who knows?--maybe he never leaped over Devil's Gulch. Maybe the whole thing is just another tall tale, right?
Visit sometime. It's a heckuva leap. It is. Make your own guess.
But pick up a t-shirt because you'll want to remember the place. It just seems to me there's so much good stuff we've forgotten.
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