Allan Pinkerton was furious when he got the news. Joseph Whicher, a trusted agent of Pinkerton's National Detective agency, had been discovered in the Missouri woods, bound, tortured and shot dead—yet another victim of Jesse James, the outlaw whose gang Whicher had been assigned to track down. Not only outraged but humiliated by the failure, Pinkerton vowed to get James, declaring, "When we meet it must be the death of one or both of us."

After Whicher's murder, Pinkerton sent more agents after the James gang. In January 1875, a group of Pinkerton men and a local posse, responding to a tip, rushed to James' mother's Missouri farm. The mother, Zerelda Samuel, was mean, ugly and strong-willed, as well as a dedicated slaveholder and secessionist. Still angry about the way the war had turned out, Samuel saw Jesse and Frank, the sons by her first marriage, as freedom fighters for the downtrodden southern states, rather than mere bandits and murderers. When the Pinkerton-led raiders appeared on her farm late one night, she refused to surrender.

A standoff ensued, and someone threw a lantern into the darkened house, purportedly to aid visibility. There was an explosion, and the posse ran in to find Zerelda Samuel's right arm blown off. Reuben Samuel, her third husband, and their three young children had also been inside. To the detectives' horror, 8-year-old Archie, Jesse James' half brother, lay fatally wounded on the floor.

The death of Archie Samuel was a public relations nightmare for Pinkerton's Detective Agency. Not only had the Pinkerton agency again failed to capture Jesse and Frank James (the brothers had been tipped off and weren't at the house that night), but a little boy had been blown up and Zerelda Samuel was calling for blood. Public opinion, which until then had mostly supported the Pinkertons, shifted. One sensational biography of James, published a few years after his death, ruled that the explosion was "a dastardly piece of business … a cowardly act, thoroughly inexcusable." Though Pinkerton insisted it was one of locals, not one of his men, who threw the bomb, the tragedy did much to build Jesse James' legend and stain the Pinkerton agency's reputation.

Joseph W Whicher