Highways and Byways: Granbury

By Maik Strosahl

While returning from last week’s adventure in Nebraska (see “German Settlement Road”), my trainee and I had to make a pit stop at the rest area just south of Rockport, Missouri, on I-29.
    At an interstate rest area, you will usually find many brochures intended to bring you to all the action and adventure our great country has to offer.

    I found one that advertised a Jesse James wax museum in Stanton, Missouri—a town southwest of St. Louis along where old Route 66 roamed before I-44 was built.
    The brochure claimed that some people believe Jesse faked his death and lived to be 103.
    I have previously found myself writing about the outlaw Jesse James: in “Here Lies Officer Bennett,” January 11, 2023, and in a poem titled “Jesse’s Guts,” not yet published.
    I did some research into the story of this rare, long-lived member of the James Gang, discovering that a man named John Frank Dalton announced he was Jesse James on his 100^th birthday (March 8, 1948), after previously having also claimed to be the famed Marshall Frank Dalton. Both Jesse James and Marshall Frank Dalton died violently, in 1882 and 1887, respectively, according to accepted history, but John had enough evidence to convince at least some—including the state of Texas—that he had a valid claim to at least one of these storied lives. Texas paid John Dalton the Confederate pension back pay that would have been due Jesse James.
    According to the accounts, Jesse had another of his outlaws who looked similar to him assassinated by Robert Ford, and then lived under various aliases, living as the lawman Marshall Frank Dalton and serving in several wars, including for the Canadian forces in World War I.
    John Dalton finally died in 1951 and is buried in Granbury, Texas. As farfetched as his stories got, there are those who believe and he is buried under a tombstone that proclaims him Jesse James.
    I had some fun with this, resulting in the poem below.

Granbury

As a centurion,
Jesse came back,
reclaimed his stories,
told many more
we found hard to believe.

He faked his death,
laid low and even attended
the funeral for a bastard
whose own wife helped
cover the secret,
accepting payment and
running off herself
for a new life in California.

The lawless became the law,
invented into Marshall Dalton
until that life also extinguished
along the Arkansas.

Then there were the wars,
guns borne by ghosts,
bullets blowing them away—
you can take the fight
but the fighter goes on
and on

Telling his stories,
living his lives
in the Texas heaven
he found in Granbury,
bones finally stilled
near the river Brazos.

But to those who believe,
those who paid him
his past-due
Confederate pension,
counted his hunert-three years
as Jesse’s,
he had a second life,
a third stolen
by the outlaw
always working on a plan.

And the man who was
no one at ninety-nine
lived his last few years,
spent the decades since
held down dead
by the heft of a tombstone,
now is a someone
we somehow find fascinating,
spreading the legends,
telling his stories for him.

Copyright © 2023 by Michael E. (Maik) Strosahl Maik has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.