OPINION — It was unusually warm in St. Joseph, Missouri, that early spring morning.
“Mr. Howard,” the man who rented the little wooden-frame house at 1318 Lafayette St., had just finished breakfast when he noticed that a print on the wall was hanging crooked. He stretched out his hands to straighten it, unaware that one simple act was about to set in motion a string of unintended consequences.
“Mr. Howard” was, in fact, the outlaw Jesse James (an alias he had used before), and it wasn’t just the temperature that had him and his family lying low in that spring of 1882. The James Gang had fallen on hard times, and Jesse was trying to (in modern terms) “put the band back together” for a criminal comeback. With many old members dead or in prison, it was time for new blood.
