Another place to visit
Meramac Caverns, Exit 230, Stanton, Missouri.
Beneath the fertile rolling hills of the Meramec Valley, lies a complex of mineral formations and color as rare and unique as they are beautiful. These jewels of nature which took thousands of years to grow, are preserved in the spectacular sights of Meramec Caverns....
Meramec Caverns is the largest commercial cave in the state of Missouri. Missouri is also known as the Cave state, hosting home to more than 6,000 surveyed caves. Meramec Caverns is open year round and offers a fun, affordable vacation for all its visitors. The well-trained rangers can accommodate groups of any size.
For example, I am over 6 feet tall and weigh over 200 pounds. Shaq might have a little trouble in the place where everyone over 5' 7" has to duck.
The history of Meramec Caverns is rich with the treasures of time. Going back through the centuries, local tribes of Indians used the cave as shelter. Later in the 1700's, a French miner, Jacques Renault, founded one of the Cavern's greatest natural resources, saltpeter. This substance was used exclusively for the manufacture of gunpowder.
During the Civil War, a Federal powder mill in the cave was blown up by Confederate guerrillas of whom Jesse James was a member. Local legend also says that the cave was used as a station on the "Underground Railroad" to hide escaping slaves. In the early 1870's, Jesse James and his band returned to the Cavern on numerous occasions because it afforded a complete hideout for men and horses after train and bank robberies.
Speaking of which, here's the truth behind another Stanton attraction:
In 1995, George Washington University law professor James E. Starrs used DNA to show that the body in a Kearney, Mo., grave could be outlaw Jesse James. It could also be a James family member, so Bud Hardcastle, an amateur historian and used car dealer in Purcell, Okla., got a court order to dig up the Granbury, Texas, grave of J. Frank Dalton, who he thinks is the real Jesse. But when he unearthed the body last month, the grave held not Dalton but Henry Holland, a solid Granbury citizen. A chagrined Hardcastle blames erroneous grave markers. He's going back for another court order to dig again. "We're not done. I'm not gonna quit."
And other means were tried:
Many imposters appeared later, claiming to be Jesse James and rumors abounded that Jesse staged his death in order to obtain complete freedom from the law. Most of the imposters where quickly proven as such, except for one man who went by the name of J. Frank Dalton. Researchers today, claim that J. Frank Dalton was actually the real Jesse James and photo comparisons strongly suggest the possibility. J. Frank Dalton died in Grandbury, Texas in 1951 the name Jesse Woodson James was placed on his tombstone.
On July 15, 1995, a group of scientists exhumed the body buried under the name of Jesse James from Mt Olivet Cemetery and preformed DNA testing, comparing the results of those tests with DNA tests taken from known descendants. According to the information they released, the body buried in Mt Olivet Cemetery is that of the real Jesse James. Jesse was reburied with a Confederate service and honors. Some skeptics still dispute the results of the DNA testing and believe that the real Jesse is the one buried in Grandbury, Texas. So the legend continues??..
Activity continued in Texas:
A misplaced headstone in a Granbury, Texas, cemetery that shifted through the years fooled researchers looking for the remains of the outlaw, Southwest Texas State forensic anthropologist David Glassman said Friday.
Instead of exhuming the skeleton of J. Frank Dalton, who claimed until his death in 1951 to be Jesse James, researchers unearthed the body Henry Holland, who died in 1927.
Although the mistake was apparent shortly after the coffin was exhumed May 30 and opened shortly afterward, researchers waited to notify Holland's family before announcing the error, Glassman said.
Now, researchers are awaiting another court order to exhume a second coffin. An adjacent coffin partially exposed during the exhumation is the one researchers want to open, Glassman said.
I never did find out whether the second grave was opened, but I found a series of articles in which Hardcastle supposedly maintained that Dalton WAS James...and that John Wilkes Booth didn't die in 1865 (and the Civil War didn't end in 1865, either):
Jesse James reportedly belonged to a secret society, The Knights of the Golden Circle. Other members included Jefferson Davis, Bedford Forrest, and William Quantrill (leader of the Confederate guerilla outfit Quantrill's Raiders, with whom James rode). Some believe the society was created by the notorious Albert Pike, the subject of many a Masonic conspiracy theory.
According to the book Jesse James Was One of His Names (written by Del Schrader, with Jesse James III), the American Civil War did not really end in 1865, but continued to be fought "underground" for 19 more years. Its highly sophisticated spy network, operated by the Knights of the Golden Circle, continued for even longer and was involved in many subversive activities. One of these was train robbery, a specialty of the James Gang, the purpose being to enrich the coffers of the Confederate underground....
According to Bud Hardcastle (a Jesse James historian), the man who was killed and identified as James was Charlie Bigelow. "Bigelow was robbing things and using Jesse's name, and that's one of the reasons they probably identified him as Jesse . . . and Bigelow was buried as Jesse James."
Supposedly, Mrs. Jesse James was in reality Mrs. Bigelow--a prostitute who had been bribed to identify the corpse as that of James.
Hardcastle states that others who identified the dead body in 1882 had ulterior motives as relatives or members of Quantrill's Raiders. These men had all ridden with Jesse and taken an oath to protect each other. By identifying the body as Jesse James, they were setting Jesse free.
However, one member of the James gang, an illiterate black man by the name of John Trammell, left a coded message revealing the hoax.
Acording to Schrader, Trammell scratched some messages into some wet bricks. One brick "contained an image of a Spanish dagger, the numerals 777, KGC [Knights of the Golden Circle] and JJ [Jesse James]. . . ." The bricks, which were buried in St. Joseph Missouri, were discovered in 1966.
Jesse James began living under the name J. Frank Dalton. (The name "Dalton" was his mother's maiden name. The initial "J" stood for "Jesse," and "Frank" was his brother's name.) As Chief of the Inner Sanctum of the Knights of the Golden Circle, James was one of the most powerful men in America....
After assassinating President Abraham Lincoln, Booth was smuggled by the Confederate underground to Texas, where he began living under the name John St. Helen. In the 1870s he worked as a bartender in a saloon in Granbury, Texas, and began telling people about his past. When the Knights of the Golden Circle found out, the decision was made to silence him. Booth fled Granbury.
Jesse James, along with William "Wild Bill" Lincoln (a distant cousin of President Lincoln), tracked Booth to Enid, Oklahoma, where he had assumed the name David George....
According to Lincoln, he and James crept into Booth's room and tricked him into drinking a glass of arsenic-laced lemonade. The massive amount of arsenic consumed by Booth caused his body to mummify. James arranged for the body to be exhibited on a national carnival tour. The mummy's present whereabouts are unknown.
As "J. Frank Dalton," Jesse James turned his $5 million reward from Maximilian into an even greater fortune. He invested in the Texas oil boom, and was also a backer of the Hughes Tool Company (founded by Howard Hughes' father). He was also one of Henry Ford's early investors.
James/Dalton died at the age of 103 in Granbury, Texas. Many people who had known the outlaw in life swore that Dalton was the real Jesse James.
My brain is now fried, and I never even made it to Bud Hardcastle Kar Korner - (405) 527-2276 - 1724 S Green Ave, Purcell, OK 73080 during my recent trip. (Map)
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