103-Year-Old Jesse James' Grave - Granbury, TX
N 32° 27.162 W 097° 47.086
14S E 614221 N 3591266
The grave of outlaw "Jesse Woodson James", who claimed he wasn't the man shot by Bob Ford in 1882, is at the east side of historic Granbury Cemetery, Granbury, TX.
Waymark Code: WMYBB7
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 05/24/2018
Views: 7
The headstone has a Confederate battle flag at the top, with "C.S.A." The inscription is:
Jesse Woodson
James
Sept. 5, 1847
Aug. 15, 1951
Supposedly Killed in 1882
-----
There are signs in the Granbury Cemetery pointing towards the grave site, which is in view of the Harris Mausoleum at the east side of the cemetery. The presence of those signs indicates that someone is really playing this up, but whether folks in Granbury really believe this or whether they just play along is best left to them. There is also a tale around town that John Wilkes Booth wasn't the guy in the barn who was shot by Boston Corbett, and that he came here afterwards to spend the rest of his life, but that's another strange tale. "St. Helen's" on the courthouse square in Granbury is a nod to that story.
The long and short is that, in the last years of his life, an area resident by the name of J. Frank Dalton came forward and publicly claimed that he was outlaw Jesse James. Dalton indicated that the man in the grave in St. Joseph, MO was Charlie Bigelow, a James lookalike who had run afoul of Jesse James by carrying out robberies and claiming to be Jesse James, thus putting the blame on James himself (much like members of the Barrow Gang were blamed for crimes they could not possibly have committed). The response was to murder Bigelow, let him -- as Jesse James, six feet under -- take the blame for James's crimes, and then allow the "real" Jesse James to walk off to start a new life.
A little problem in this story is that "J. Frank Dalton" was also an alias, possibly for a man by the name of Orvus Lee Howk. "Dalton' had spent some time in Arkansas, where he alternately claimed to be Jesse James or lawman, John Franklin Dalton. When he was exposed for not being the real Dalton, who had died in 1887, he settled on taking up the mantle of Jesse James instead. While Dalton had some scars and injuries similar to those of Jesse James, and he knew some things that "only" Jesse Jones would have known, one need but look at the long, convoluted story of Anna Anderson, who was exposed as not being Anastasia Romanova by some DNA she left behind after her death.
In 1995, in an attempt to discredit Dalton's story, the body of Jesse James, murdered by Bob Ford in 1882, was exhumed in Missouri, and its DNA was compared with that of known James descendants. The mitochondrial DNA matched, thus ruling out that Charlie Bigelow was in the grave. The Dalton camp, which included some of James's own family members, still argue that the wrong DNA was used, and they were involved with an exhumation of Dalton's remains in 2000. Unfortunately, the remains of William Henry Holland, whose headstone is next to that of "Jesse Woodson James", were exhumed: Holland had one arm -- it is buried with his family elsewhere in Granbury Cemetery for yet another strange tale -- and it was known that Dalton had both. Since then, interest in further digging has waned, as it's unlikely that the Dalton camp would get permission to dig up the entire area, but this particular legend lives on.