Jesse James Was One Of His Names

"Almost immediately after James' 'death' in 1882, rumors began surfacing that he was still alive."

"In assuming 72 identities, did Jesse go romping about the country in invisible, astral form keeping his eye on the post-Civil War Confederate Underground and his own vast financial empire?"

The above rhetorical question is asked in the introduction to a most unusual book, sent to me by a reader of Conspiracy Nation. (Jesse James Was One Of His Names by Del Schrader, with Jesse James III. Arcadia, California: Santa Anita Press, 1975. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-33962.)

Yes, I know that the grave of Jesse James was recently dug open and that the body therein had DNA tests run on it. And yes, I know that the DNA tests prove that it was "really" Jesse James buried in Jesse James' grave. But maybe they are lying to us, or a further hoax was put in operation against the scientists doing the DNA tests. (The original alleged hoax is that Jesse James faked his death in St. Joseph, Missouri on April 3rd, 1882.)

Here is the story, as alleged in the book. It is left to the reader to determine -- Who is hoaxing who?

Right after the Civil War, Jesse James supposedly got in a knife fight with a Mexican. Before James stabbed him dead, the Mexican bit off part of his finger. This becomes important later on, as an identifier.

Jesse James was reportedly part of a secret society, "The Knights of the Golden Circle." According to Norma Cox, in her book, The New Spoilers, Jesse James is also linked with the notorious Albert Pike. Cox has the 12 charter members of the Golden Circle as including Jefferson Davis, Bedford Forrest, Jesse James, and William Quantrill. Some say Albert Pike was the creator of the Knights of the Golden Circle, but Cox doubts it. "Important to remember about such secret organizations is the fact that only the men at the top know the truth..." (Cox, 5)

Because James and his gang were being hotly pursued by lawmen (and the heat was increasing due to copycat crimes being routinely attributed to the James gang), Jesse James allegedly arranged to fake his death. But one of his gang, an illiterate black named John Trammell, decided he'd leave a coded message hinting at the truth. Trammell, according to Schrader's book, got some wet bricks, and a friend helped him scratch some messages into them before they dried. One brick "contained an image of a Spanish dagger, the numerals 777, KGC [Knights of the Golden Circle] and JJ [Jesse James]..." Trammell reportedly buried the bricks in St. Joseph, Missouri, and later exclaimed, "Just wait 'til they find them St. Joe bricks!" (The alleged bricks were discovered in 1966.)

It is known (Come Retribution by William A. Tidwell; ISBN: 0-7607-0381-7) that the Confederacy had a sophisticated covert intelligence apparatus, a sort of "secret service." The uninformed bias might be that the Confederate spy agency could not possibly be as sophisticated as, for example, the "modern" CIA. In some ways that's true, for example in the area of electronics. But in other ways -- like cunning, common sense, and a limited but superior level of classical education (of deep-down learning) -- don't be so sure that we "moderns" are smarter than our forebears. Yes, our ancestors did not have the "advantages" we have, like television and a state-controlled "education" apparatus. But it is our own conceit that unreflectingly assumes we "moderns" must be "so much smarter" than those who came before.

So maybe some things have been slipped by us.

Almost immediately after James' "death" in 1882, rumors began surfacing that he was still alive. Eleven days after the supposed event, the Liberty Tribune reported:

Certain parties still aver that Jesse James is not dead, and intimate that the man killed and buried was not Jesse, but someone inveigled into Jesse's house and killed, to get the reward [of $10,000]. Such a conclusion would implicate Mrs. James, Mrs. Samuels, Governor Crittenden, Sheriff Timberlake, Police Commissioner Craig and others in a scheme of fraud and perjury. We believe nothing of the kind and have no doubt of Jesse's death. (qtd. in Schrader)

But Governor Crittenden, according to Schrader, was a good friend of Jesse James, and "Mrs. James" was not really Mrs. James, but a Mrs. Bigelow. She was of questionable repute, and was bribed to give out a fake story. The whole "identification" of the corpse and subsequent hasty burial was rigged, says Schrader.

The real Jesse James is supposed to have finally emerged in Lawton, Oklahoma on May 19, 1948. An array of witness testimony is marshalled purporting to prove that "Colonel J. Frank Dalton" was in fact a quite aged Jesse James. Knowledgeable readers will recognize the name Ray Palmer; Palmer looked into the story and felt there was something to it. In the September 1968 issue of Search Magazine, Palmer writes:

I signed a contract with Jesse to write his life story, and he handed me a shoe box containing ten-thousand dollars in fives, tens and twenties to cover the cost of publication. I never published the book, for a reason I will explain. I still have the cancelled check I sent back to Meremac, Missouri, when the contract was broken. (qtd. in Schrader)

(Palmer says he discovered that "Jesse" had signed contracts with three other parties to publish the same book. Palmer writes, however, that he is convinced that "Jesse was really Jesse, that he had repented for his life of crime...")

But hold on, the story gets stranger . . . .

Great Britain, frustrated in her colonial designs upon the United States, after the War of 1812 ceased her machinations for awhile. She was occupied elsewhere, for example in the Crimean War. But by about 1856, the eyes of the British imperialists turned once more toward America. "A close business relationship had grown up between the cotton-growing aristocracy of the southern states and cotton manufacturing England, and the southern states were swarming with British agents." (The Empire of "The City", by E.C. Knuth) Stirred up by these British agents, the South chose to secede from the united States.

And why couldn't the southern states secede? They had joined into the Union voluntarily, so why couldn't they later choose to withdraw from that union? The south wanted a divorce, and it had never promised "until death do us part." An article sent to Conspiracy Nation by a reader ("How Lincoln Destroyed the Jeffersonian Ideal," by Thomas J. DiLorenzo) asks the same question. Secession "was the very principle upon which the American Revolution was based." During Thomas Jefferson's presidency, New England Federalists, upset at rule from the agrarian Virginian, Jefferson, plotted secession themselves. "During this time there was no debate among the New Englanders over the right of secession, only over its wisdom as a political strategy." (DiLorenzo)

Why was Abraham Lincoln so fixated on preserving the Union? We are told in "history" books that he felt strongly that "the Union must be preserved." But why must it? Apparently Lincoln never explained the "why" of it. Two possible "whys" are (1) a strong Union deters European designs on North America, and (2) Lincoln was the servant of East Coast capitalists, with their own imperialist designs on the continent. Perhaps the two reasons suggested are not mutually exclusive.

As his "reward" for helping save the Union for the greater wealth and glory of East Coast capitalists, these same capitalists had Lincoln murdered when he threatened to get in the way of their plan to rape the South via "Reconstruction."

During the Civil War, with U.S. energies concentrated within, the European imperialists tipped their hand. "In December, 1861, a large British, French and Spanish expeditionary force was landed at Vera Cruz [Mexico] in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine." (Knuth) The Archduke Maximilian of Austria was installed as Emperor of Mexico.

The American Civil War "officially" ended at about the time General Robert Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April of 1865, but according to Del Schrader (Jesse James Was One Of His Names by Del Schrader, with Jesse James III. Arcadia, California: Santa Anita Press, 1975. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-33962), Nashville, Tennessee continued on as the underground capital of the Confederacy for nineteen more years. And as for the secret society known as "The Knights of the Golden Circle", it did not apparently disband until 1916.

After Lee's surrender, a force of 2,000 Missouri cavalry and "a full regiment of Confederate-led Red Bone Indians from East Texas," led by General J.O. Shelby, headed south, into Mexico. (Schrader) They naturally went to join with their ally, the European puppet Emperor Maximilian. This force became threatened by Mexican patriots, followers of Benito Juarez. Sent to rescue Shelby's troops, says Schrader, was an elite force led by Colonels Quantrill and Jesse James.

While in Mexico, Jesse James reportedly was introduced to Emperor Maximilian. James was enlisted to help the dictator smuggle a huge treasure out of his tottering empire. Included in the treasure were jewels and heirlooms of the House of Hapsburg, Aztec gold hidden, long ago, from the Conquistadores by servants of Montezuma, and a great quantity of other gold on loan to the emperor from the House of Rothschild.

James and his band began moving the treasure northward. Shortly thereafter, they learned that Emperor Maximilian had apparently been executed by Juarez's patriots. But the emperor, says Schrader, had not been killed. Shot, with others, by firing squad, the bodies were loaded onto carts and hauled away for burial. At the gravesites, a group of Red Bone indians had infiltrated the burial ceremony. When they noticed signs of life in the emperor, the indians finagled the Mexicans into allowing them to give the "dead" dictator a separate burial. Maximilian was nursed back to health, and made his way to East Texas, where he was met by Jesse James.

Grateful for the help James had given him, Maximilian gave him $5 million in gold. The Knights of the Golden Circle received an additional contribution of $12.5 million, says Schrader.

Reportedly, Jesse James persuaded Maximilian to change his name to John Maxi and live undercover in America. James also reportedly went to Europe, found a look-alike of Maximilian's wife, Charlotta, and then smuggled the real Charlotta back to the U.S. There, she became re-united with her husband. Now buried in Maximilian's grave in Vienna, says Schrader, is a German seaman who had died in a gunfight in Vera Cruz. "Switching bodies is a subterfuge as old as mankind, and the Golden Circle certainly had no monopoly on this practice." (Schrader)

The question arises: If Jesse James got $5 million from Emperor Maximilian, then why did he bother to rob trains? Supposedly, the answer is that James was working for the Confederate underground, adding to their treasury.

The question lingers: Who is "HH?" The anonymous author (CN 11.32) tells of the mysterious "88" and "88, Jr.," with those numbers said to signify the eighth letter of the alphabet, "H." The anonymous author claims that a Felix Monroe Hughes raped and impregnated an illegitimate daughter of Abraham Lincoln. The child therefrom was named "88." Shedding possible light on the mystery, one Conspiracy Nation reader states:

  Felix Monroe Hughes... the father of 88.
  88 is HH is of course Howard Hughes...
  Howard Robard Hughes, Sr. 1869-1924
  Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. 1905-1976

In his book (Jesse James Was One Of His Names by Del Schrader, with Jesse James III. Arcadia, California: Santa Anita Press, 1975. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-33962), Schrader claims that Jesse James took the $5 million (see above) and parlayed it into a huge fortune, partly through investments in the Texas oil boom. Schrader adds that "with capital to burn, Jesse was a backer of the Hughes Tool Company, which was founded by Howard Hughes' father."

As already noted, the Confederate government went underground in 1865, and was headquartered in Nashville until about 1884. The South's spy network was very good. How did the Confederacy stave off defeat during "The War of Northern Aggression," four long years, 1861-1865? The answer in part, says Schrader, is that the South had a better spy network. And that spy network did not just go away in 1865.

Feeling in the South still simmered and boiled against the "damnyankees" after 1865. When those "damnyankees" increased their war upon the indian nations of the American West, many southerners strongly sympathized with the indians. To Jesse James, "Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and other chiefs were Confederate allies..." (Schrader) The underground Confederacy began smuggling guns to the indians. Furthermore, says Schrader, military training was provided. The indians "were trained to fight like Morgan's Raiders and Quantrill's Missouri guerrillas -- to split up on command, hit with force and devastation and then fade away before the enemy could recover." (ibid.)

Jesse James eventually rose to the position of "chief of the Inner Sanctum of The Knights of the Golden Circle." He was "one of the most powerful men in America. The Golden Circle had industrial as well as military spies on both sides of the Atlantic." (ibid.)

Unfortunately for our tale, The Knights of the Golden Circle are linked to the infamous Ku Klux Klan, an organization responsible for many hateful acts over the years. Schrader does consistently point out that James himself was not a racist. In fact, according to Schrader, some of James' gang were themselves blacks, including chief James lieutenant John Trammell, "the black cobra."

Reportedly belonging to a lesser-ranked Confederate secret society, The Knights of the White Camellias, was John Wilkes Booth. Booth worked for Confederate Intelligence, smuggling messages and contraband between North and South. In the final year of the Civil War, Booth reported that "a representative of the European Rothschilds called on President Lincoln and offered him money at 27.5 percent interest, but was thrown out of his office." (qtd. in Schrader) After Booth shot Lincoln, the Knights of the Golden Circle began to suspect that Booth had been recruited into the Rothschild organization. Booth had not been ordered by the South to kill Lincoln, so on whose orders had he acted? However, whatever the circumstances, Booth knew too many secrets and had to be smuggled to safety. The Confederate underground eventually moved him to the Free State of Van Zandt, Texas. (Schrader)

But Booth slowly developed a drinking problem and his tongue began to wag. Schrader notes that Booth, by about 1890, had hired a lawyer "to write a book about his secret life and how and why he shot President Lincoln." (This book may have been, Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth by Finis L. Bates.) It was decided, according to Schrader, that Booth had to be found and silenced. He was eventually tracked to Enid, Oklahoma. One of Booth's assassins, reportedly, was William S. (Wild Bill) Lincoln, a distant cousin of Abraham Lincoln.

According to a sworn statement by "Wild Bill" Lincoln:

Our branch of the Lincoln family was never satisfied with what really happened to Booth, and I spent fourteen years of my life running down the true story. Strangely enough, I learned it from Jesse W. James, head of the Confederate underground. I was present at Booth's real death. (qtd. in Schrader)

Jesse James and "Wild Bill" Lincoln allegedly crept into Booth's room at the Grand Avenue Hotel in Enid, Oklahoma, then tricked the hungover Booth into drinking arsenic-laced lemonade. Booth is said to have died in their presence. Although commonly reported that Booth's corpse was mummified by direction of his lawyer, Finis Bates, Schrader claims it was the massive arsenic in Booth's system which caused the mummification. James reportedly arranged for Booth's body to be exhibited on tour, throughout the United States. According to Schrader, Booth's mummified remains eventually passed into the ownership of a Minnesota jeweler named Jay Gould, relative of the notorious banker. Today, the whereabouts of the Booth mummy are unknown.

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