Jesse James never came: the pass-through legends, tested as a class

THE CLASS, AND THIS GROUND'S EMPTY FILE

The telling, as a form: somewhere in almost every Indiana county there is a house Jesse James slept in, a barn his gang hid in, a rock that marks his buried money. The state's own folklore archive — the Indiana State University Folklore Archives, gathered on Indiana Memory — holds the form by the dozen: the bullet holes in a house where Jesse stayed; the shack a farmer refuses to tear down because Jesse used it once to hide in; Jesse shot at Shoals; Jesse hiding near Raccoon Lake at Rockville; and at Medora, "a rock… that says Jesse James 10 miles West and there was supposedly money buried at the rock." The form is Indiana's, a century deep, and its seats in the archive are the southern and central counties — the gang's plausible country, along the roads from Missouri.

Tested against this ground, the class is empty. No tale in the folklore archive's file, and none in the web record reached, attaches Jesse James, the Youngers, or any buried outlaw cache to Clay or Harris township; John Dillinger — Indiana's own outlaw of the next century, whose legend industry is larger than James's in this state — likewise has no carrier seated on this ground in any record reached. The reason is not mysterious and prints as the verdict's second half: the form follows the roads and the war, and this ground in the gang years was a farm township off the through routes, whose documented lawlessness of the era stands in this build's Crime file at its true size — the Odle gang's counterfeiting and the daylight jail escape of the county's first years, and the Terre Coupee Anti-Horse-Thief Association the farmers organized in 1853–54 against the theft that actually plagued them. The real record is better than the borrowed one, and it is already banked.

Verdict: the pass-through legend is a statewide folk form with an EMPTY file for this ground — tested, negative, printed whole. No treasure is buried here on any testimony the record keeps.

Sources:

1. Indiana State University Folklore Archives, as gathered on Indiana Memory (Indiana State Library): the Jesse James interview file quoted — the Shoals, Rockville/Raccoon Lake, and Medora tellings and their tellers' forms.
3. This build's Crime file: the Odle gang and the anti-horse-thief association, whole — pointed to.