My Great-Great Grandfather and Jesse James

[Ol Smoke]

My GG Grandfather was Patrick Henry Bean and he lived in a small place called Possum Hollow, Arkansas in the 1870's.

He was a Baptist Minister and married to a Choctaw Indian woman and also road shotgun on a stagecoach line that went from DeQueen, Arkansas up to Missouri.

One day he was on the stage, as the guard, when a group of 7 men stopped the coach and robbed it.  They took the strongbox

and then robbed the passengers of all their belongings.  They took 5 dollars and 25 cents off of my GGGF.  Doesn't sound like much

but that was all he had for wages for a week of work.  Now he had less money for his family.

During the robbery he was hit twice by a man later identified as Cole Younger.  One man on the stage was accosted by three of the

gunmen because he was a northern businessman selling household items in the area.  When the robbers rode away, one of them killed one of the horses.

 

I heard this story from my grandfather on my mother's side of the family.  I got to hold the 10 gauge double barrel shotgun that my GGGF

used during that time.  It was a semi-short cut with a barrel about 20" long.  It would cut a  10" tree in half at about 30 feet.

 

My GGGF had no respect or love for the James-Younger gang of outlaws.  One day he came into the house, with a local newspaper in his

hand.  He was excited that the outlaws had been arrested up in Minnesota.  But later found out that Jesse and Frank wasn't part of them.

He always said that he couldn't believe they was church going people, by the way they behaved.

 

The shotgun and several of my GGM house things were taken by a woman who claimed to be a relative.  But she wasn't.  We never got the

stuff back from her.  But one day she and her husband and oldest boy were killed in car wreck outside Little Rock, Arkansas.  So what goes

around...comes around.

 

I went to school in Dierks, Arkansas for about a year and met up with one of the James family boys who was a cousin to Jesse and Frank.

I don't know the exact relationship he was, but it was true.  I never liked him and when he turned about 30 years old, he tried to rob a store.

He got 12 years in the prison for it.  Some families are just a bunch of dumb asses.

 

 

By the way...a fictional account of this robbery was in a movie called "The Long Riders".  It didn't happen that way.  They were just a bunch

of no good trash...beating up on simple folks.

 

Smoke