Did legendary outlaw Jesse James ever call Malad his home? The story has been part of the Palmer family folklore for over a century. They say the 19th century bank robber from Missouri married one of their relatives in 1869 and lived in a cabin that once stood on their ranch property four miles west of Malad.
The story begins around 1869 in Utah. A woman named Susan Palmer Dubuque loses her husband to a drowning and is widowed. She relocated to Malad, where she caught the eye of a young farmhand named William Cole. The two are married on May 20, 1869 and lived together in a cabin on the Palmer family ranch. However, within a few months, Cole abandoned his new wife and disappeared.
Ernest Palmer, who grew up on the ranch and is Dubuque’s great-great nephew, has a photocopy of their 1869 marriage license, along with another document, a signed affidavit from local Justice of the Peace R.G. Evans, dated exactly three months later on Aug. 20, 1869, which states “that William Cole is actually Jesse Woodson James,” Palmer said, pointing to the affidavit. “William Cole was one of the aliases Jesse James would use.”
For years, the Palmers have dug through books and historical documents to find what they could about Jesse James’ life during this period, and they found a large gap. James and his brother Frank robbed a bank in Richmond, Missouri on May 23, 1867. Palmer says the next verified sighting of Jesse was on Dec. 7, 1869, when he robbed a bank in Gallatin, Missouri and killed a cashier he believed was a Union Army officer. It was this robbery that made him famous.
What James was doing and where he was during the two-and-a-half year gap between the two robberies is a mystery. “It is plausible he could have been in Idaho during that time,” Palmer said. “There’s no way to prove it definitively, but Jesse James’ great-grandson swore he was in Idaho at this time.”
The rare 1975 book “Jesse James Was One of His Names,” which collaborates the Palmers’ claims, even has a picture of William Cole and Susan Palmer Dubuque. The man is wearing a hat and sporting what appears to be a beard, making a photo identification difficult.
In the early 1970s, James’ descendants visited the Palmer Ranch to take a look at the one-room cabin, which had been used for decades to store horse tack. The Palmers hope to rebuild the cabin and turn it into a historical site at its original location on the family’s ranch.
Source: David Ashby idahostatejournal.com Dec 21, 2014
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