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Jesse and Frank James were household names long before ...)
Jesse and Frank James were household names long before images of America's most wanted were televised. For several decades after the Civil War, they were hunted by hundreds who supposed them to be involved in every bank and train robbery in the Midwest. Trained as guerrilla fighters in the border conflict between Kansas and Missouri, they joined with the Younger brothers in February 1866 to rob a bank in Liberty, Missouri. That was the beginning of a criminal confederation that seemed beyond the reach of the law until the Northfield, Minnesota, raid killed three of them and sent the James brothers into hiding. But they were the objects of posted rewards that proved too tempting in Jesse's case: in 1882 he was shot in the back by Robert Ford of his own gang.
The Rise and Fall of Jesse James, by Robertus Love, a newspaperman who knew Frank James, is a pioneering work that plumbs the personalities of the outlaws, looks at their domestic lives, cites many stories about them, and attempts to separate fact from legend in tracking their violent operations.
Michael Fellman assesses Love's 1926 book in his introduction to this Bison Books edition.
(Excerpt from Poems All the Way From Pike
Being a Piker h...)
Excerpt from Poems All the Way From Pike
Being a Piker himself the author of Poems All the Way from Pike feels that he possesses license both poetic and proprietary to draw upon the celebrated ballad for the title of his book.
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Robertus Donnell Love was an American journalist and author. His career included virtually every duty connected with the writing side of newspapers, and took him into cities of varying sizes, scattered from coast to coast.
Background
Robertus Donnell Love was born on January 6, 1867 in Irondale, Missouri, United States, the second son among five children of the Reverend Dr. Thomas Shelby and Nancy Eveline (McFarland) Love. His grandfather, William Calhoun Love, was a Cumberland Presbyterian minister in eastern Tennessee and his father, taken as a child into Kentucky, was ordained in the same denomination, after which he assumed a charge at Irondale, in the Missouri Ozark foothill. In 1882 his father was called to another pastorate and the family moved to Louisiana, Missouri.
Education
Love received the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1884 and later studied at Lincoln University, Illinois.
Career
At nineteen Love became a local editor of the Louisiana Press, with wages of five dollars a week. Ten months later he was city editor of the Daily Journal, Wichita, Kansas, and his forty-three years of itinerant journalism had begun. He was editor of the Press, at Asbury Park, New Jersey, 1892-1895; coast correspondent of the New York Sun, 1895; and founder of the Asbury Park Daily Star, 1896. He also established Seashore Life at Asbury Park, the first of several periodicals of which he was, as he said, "both founder and funeral director. "
From 1896 to 1899 he was managing editor of the Day, New London, Connecticut; and he was reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1900-1903. An early assignment on the Post-Dispatch was the Galveston hurricane (September 1900). When Mark Twain made his last visit to Missouri in 1902, Love accompanied him, and was fondly introduced as "my son. " Another warm friendship he enjoyed was with Joaquin Miller. He had charge of press bureaus at the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark, and Jamestown expositions, in 1905 was editorial writer on the Portland Oregonian and columnist for the Los Angeles Times; and from 1906 to 1911 wrote and edited material for the American Press Association's "boiler plate. "
He returned to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as feature writer, 1911-1913; then wrote "Rhymes Along the Road" for the St. Louis Republic, 1913-1916. He went to Oklahoma as Sunday editor of the Tulsa Democrat, 1917-1918, and editor of the Ardmore Ardmoreite, 1918-1920. After a period in Kansas City, Missouri, 1921, on the editorial staff of the Kansas City Post, he returned to St. Louis where he was Sunday magazine writer, 1922-1925, and literary editor, 1925-1926, of the Post-Dispatch; then Sunday magazine writer, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 1926-1928, and literary editor thereafter until his death.
Love's topical newspaper verse found its way into many a Mississippi Valley scrapbook and his rhymes about the Ozarks attracted attention to the beauties of that then little appreciated region. He was the author of two books, Poems All the Way from Pike (1904), homely pieces on the Missouri meerschaum, old spellers, and the like, and The Rise and Fall of Jesse James (1926), first printed in the Post-Dispatch. This latter work, a running story of Missouri banditry, resulted from a life-long interest in Middle-western outlaws.
Love's yearning to break away from journalism and devote himself entirely to other writing went unrealized. He died of pneumonia following an operation, leaving unpublished "The Joy-Log of a Journalist, " a ramblingly repertorial autobiography, befitting his roving and light-hearted life.
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Jesse and Frank James were household names long before ...)
Connections
On December 31, 1901, Love married Catherine Heck of Ruma, Illinois, who was unable to walk for the last seventeen years of her life. She died in 1926, the union childless.