Taking Aim at Jesse James & History

The fiction Hansen created around the facts provided for him the cowboy music and nuance and rhythm of the times. "The way I try to write scenes is to be as authentic to history as is known," he says. "I say, 'This is Jesse as I imagined him, though.' I'm trying to convey the psychology and spirit of the situation." Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of Arizona-based True West magazine, a big admirer of Hansen's book, says: "His work sets the stage for historical drama. My impression after reading it is that he only enhanced the gaps where we didn't know what exactly happened."

To get the facts of James's life, Hansen strolled into the Stanford University Library a couple of decades ago to begin his research. The collection of Western books in the library -- about cowboys, frontier towns, crime, railway robberies -- dazzled him. "I read books by people who knew Jesse James," says Hansen, speaking from a California vacation spot on the eve of traveling East for the movie's New York premiere. "For instance, someone by the name of Homer Croy wrote a book called 'Jesse James Was My Neighbor.' It told of what picture Jesse was actually dusting as he was killed. It was a picture of his favorite racehorse, Skyrocket. And it told of the intimate details of what the house was like in which he was killed."

Hansen pored over other books: "The Man Who Shot Jesse James," by Carl W. Breihan, and "Jesse James Was His Name," by William A. Settle, among them. He says a powerful resource were the Kansas and Missouri newspapers from the Reconstruction era, the period following the Civil War, when Jesse James began his marauding. "From reading the newspaper, I knew what jokes were being told. I knew how much hats cost," says Hansen.

He says he found the Kansas City Star from the 1870s and 1880s among the most useful of the periodicals. That newspaper -- among others -- wrote constantly about the movements and holdups of the James gang.

The criminal rise of James paralleled the backlash against Reconstruction, that period when there was an attempt to grant blacks equal rights in the South. Blacks were given political powers, but that experiment was swiftly met with bloodshed as nightriders attacked them. There were bodies hanging from trees; there was spilled blood in the woods. Blacks found themselves living in a kind of twilight existence -- holders of power but walking about with a bone-crunching fear.

James, raised in a slaveholding family, let it be known how heartbroken he was with slavery's end. His robbing escapades were shrouded in his Southern allegiance and anti-Reconstruction pronouncements. (James's powerful anti-black sentiments and ravings were hardly mentioned during his criminal reign -- and are not addressed in the upcoming film -- but they are amply covered in T.J. Stiles's 2002 biography, "Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War.")

On a visit to a James museum in St. Joseph, a man who worked there whispered to Hansen. "He said, 'A lot of people come in here saying they are followers of Jesse James.' "

Hansen could tell the man wasn't referring to grad students doing research, either.

"There are nuts out there who still feel bound to Jesse James," he says. "I guess the milder form of it is the people who name their kids Jesse James."

After Hansen's Jesse James-Robert Ford novel came out and received the fine reviews it did (The Washington Post called it "electrifyingly good," and the Christian Science Monitor said Hansen "has broadened our perception of the West in much the same way as the best historians"), he was gratified. He got a teaching job, then another. He wrote other novels.

Then, out of the clear gray-green-black-red-blue -- whatever color makes up the day of a novelist who lives with his wife, novelist Bo Caldwell, and teaches and plays golf now and then -- his phone rang.

Something about Brad Pitt.