Calamity James

Book 1: Calamity James

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Westerns; Action & Adventure Romance; Thrillers

Synopsis

The unbelievable, untold story of Jesse James’s other brother…

In this rollicking stand-alone novel from the bestselling Johnstones, fact and fiction collide in the jaw-dropping story of Jesse James’ little-known, disaster-prone brother. They call him Calamity—for a reason.

Calvin Amadeus James, aka Calamity, isn’t an outlaw like his notorious brothers Jesse and Frank. He’s worse—due to the bad luck that follows him everywhere he goes. Every job he takes—from army scout to gambler to cowboy and rail worker—ends in catastrophe. No matter what he does, Calamity James always seems to be on the wrong side of history . . .

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871? Calamity placed the lantern next to the cow that kicked it over. The gunfight at O.K. Corral? Calamity stirred up trouble in Tombstone right before it all went down. The fateful saloon shooting of Wild Bill Hickcock? Blame it on Calamity James. Some folks say he’s even responsible for Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn—but Calamity swears it ain’t true. He’s just a magnet for bad luck who’s trying to find his good luck charm—a pretty little dancehall girl known as Clumsy Catherine. But somehere along the way, he foolishly joins the James-Younger Gang with his outlaw brothers. And that’s when Calamity’s infamous bad luck gets a whole lot worse . . .

Release date: July 1, 2025

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

He was born in the cabin his father’s congregation built. It burned down that night.

At least his mother was used to hard luck. Anyone who came to this earth in Kentucky, even those born into money and good stock, knows all too much about misfortune. As a child, Zerelda Cole’s father broke his neck in a riding accident, her brother would kill himself in 1895, and between her birth and her brother’s demise, she would witness more torment and tragedy, more brutality and beastliness, than a writer of myriad penny dreadfuls could dream up. Giving birth to an illegitimate child fathered by a soon-to-be minister just continued Zerelda’s string of foul luck.

This is not to say that Calvin Amadeus James was born out of wedlock. Even those who could not fill a flush at a table or bet on the right horse to win at Kansas City’s agricultural fair eventually will see something work out. No, Cal was born on January 28, 1842, one month after Robert James married Zerelda, whose daddy had been dead since she was two years old, and her mama, after remarrying, had left that young but tough girl with her grandpa Cole. And even though the fire that left the new cabin in ashes and just about everything the newlyweds owned was consumed in the blaze, one of the blessings was that Robert James’s family Bible was lost, too. The parents of Cal, a pink lad of five pounds, seven ounces, would not realize this at first—indeed, there were many tears and questions to the Lord of why, why, why?—but well before Cal reached the age for schooling, both Robert and Zee—Zee being what most folks called Cal’s mama—realized that the loss of the cabin, and the family Bible, was a blessing from the Almighty.

That Bible was the only written documentation to prove that Calvin James was ever born into this family. Zee didn’t even call for a midwife to birth her first baby. That was all left to Zee and her praying husband, and the baby entered the world bawling and pink and healthy.

Yes, sympathy should be given to Cal, for his father and mother decided, since Robert was about to graduate from Georgetown College and enter the ministry—though he was already practicing his sermoning but not his baptisms at the cabin those settlers had put up—that they would be better off giving up the infant. Robert paid a young couple to take the newborn as their own. It would work out for the best, all parties agreed, because the woman, Charity Marmaduke, just lost her own infant child to an outbreak of diphtheria, and, more important, she and her husband, Obadiah, were headed west.

Robert wiped his eyes and did some serious praying and begging for forgiveness as the Marmadukes rolled down the pike with the sleeping infant in his new mama’s lap, but Zerelda was of sterner stock, and she just spit the juice from her snuff into the grass. As fate would have it, Zerelda would get in the family way again and give birth to a strapping young fellow. By then, the Reverend Robert James was preaching the gospel. They named the new baby Alexander Franklin James, who entered this world, on January 10, 1843, on their farm near Centerville, Missouri—which eventually changed its name, as towns were fond of doing in those times (especially when it came time to get a post office), to Kearney.

But we shall come back to the James family in due time.

Obadiah and Charity Marmaduke were, like Cal’s true parents, natives of Kentucky. Bluegrass ran through their veins. Their grandparents, if you believe the stories Obadiah told in the taverns and after barn raisings, had traveled to Kentucky with Daniel Boone. And even if the closest the Marmadukes ever got to Daniel Boone was following the trails he had blazed, Obadiah did have a case of the wanderlust that afflicted Dan’l and other explorers of our wondrous western frontier.

The Marmadukes settled in Iowa, and, oh, how Charity doted on that baby boy, even though he had a habit of crying and keeping both new mother and new father awake all night. Charity once confided to a friend that she hardly slept a wink on the journey by wagon from Kentucky. But she was a young woman with a baby boy to hold and she was not one to complain. At least, for the first couple of years.

They kept his name, at least Calvin, which, as most Calvins will tell you, got shortened to Cal. They even told the Jameses they would keep his middle name, Amadeus, and it was penciled into their Bible, too, but the lead faded, and worsened after the roof leaked and soaked that Good Book.

We should point out that by the time the boy was five years old, calamity followed young Cal with such frequency that not only friends of the Marmadukes but the Marmadukes themselves thought there might be some truth to the rumor quickly spreading that a Kickapoo woman had put a curse on the newborn—despite the fact that it’s hard to find a Kickapoo in Kentucky. Or Iowa. In fact, after years of investigation, we have never found proof that any Kickapoo ever set foot in the state that has given us Daniel Boone, Jim Bowie, and Kit Carson.

And certainly not Iowa.

Folks started calling young Cal, a tall, good-looking, and fairly smart lad, “Calamity,” because bad luck just seemed to follow him, though, more often than not, bystanders—and not that strapping youngster—seemed to get the worse of things.

Like the horseshoe-pitching contest on the Fourth of July when Cal was five or six years old when all the boy had to do was come close and he would have won the fat sow for a prize. Instead, he busted out the windowpane at the Market House—which was behind Cal. The owner of the Market House, a generous sort, shrugged it off, even though glass was right scarce around Flint Hill.

Iowa on the Mississippi River was a fine place to be in the 1840s. The pig market was sound, and cholera was kept in check, at least more than it was down south in St. Louis and New Orleans, where folks boarded steamboats all the time to escape that infernal plague. There were tanners and hunters, coopers and grocers, merchants dealing in dry goods, queensware, boots, nails, iron, stone, steel, nails, Jewett’s Patent Carey Ploughs, medicines, dyes, putty, saddles, tin. There were more lawyers than one could shake a stick at. There was a congregational church on Columbia Street, but Partridge often opened up the hall above his store for other religious services. And the Burlington HawkEye came out at least once a week, most times. In fact, Mr. Marmaduke read about the war against Mexico in that newspaper, and considered going, but decided against it.

There wasn’t a dentist, the nearest one being a steamboat ride down to St. Louis, but you could get a tooth pulled by just about anyone who had a keg of whiskey and a pair of pliers.

“Maybe I should have gone to Mexico,” Obadiah was heard to say at Van Dien’s groggery in the dreary winter of 1846–47, when Iowa was still celebrating its admittance into the Union. “I could have died a hero at the Alamo.”

“That wasn’t the Mexican war, feller,” the man next to him said.

“Sure, it was,” Obadiah said. “Mexicans slaughtered Crockett and Bowie and all them others.”

“That was the war for Texas,” the stranger said. “Then Mexico and Santee Annie got riled and that’s why we marched to Mexico. To free Texas agin and get all the rest of ’em places. Like Californie.”

“You don’t know nothin’, mister. So quit yer brayin’.”

That resulted in Obadiah having to work his way to St. Louis and back as a stevedore to get a busted tooth pulled.

Obadiah could have kept on stevedoring but complained that the work was too hard and that the Mississippi River was a right frightening place to be traveling. And sometimes the river stunk worser than a pig farm.

In short, the Marmadukes had landed in a place that was full of opportunities, for this was the West (at least at that time), and a fellow could make his mark in this wild, new, free country.

Unless your name happened to be Obadiah Marmaduke.

Especially after Obadiah gave up on being a stevedore. Well, that job did require a willingness to sweat for hours, and you ought to be able to carry a fifty-pound keg down the plank and up the bank without dropping it three times.

Speaking of dropping, a pail of nails slipped out of Obadiah’s hand and fell on the construction boss’s right foot, and so Obadiah was unemployed as soon as Mr. Clavean stopped hopping around and cussing up a storm. The nails didn’t weigh anywhere near fifty pounds, but five pounds on your big toe when you’re not expecting it hurts just the same.

Old Fullerton gave him a chance at selling dry goods, but Obadiah was color-blind and couldn’t tell a bolt of blue gingham from the pink one, and he broke two silk parasols trying to show Mrs. Bettie McDowell how to open one. Those were the five-dollar parasols, mind you, not the fifty-cent ones.

He tried selling bottles of Wistar’s Balsam of Wild Cherry, which, he said, reading from the slip of paper he was given and twenty-seven cents in advance, could prevent the consumption killing fifty thousand folks a year and also remedy any liver affections, and asthma and bronchitis, not to mention things like chronic coughs and weak lungs, or even bleeding lungs. Problem was, Obadiah realized he liked the taste of the wild cherry and drunk up three bottles without selling a one. Chillicothe George, who was running that deal, broke one of the empty bottles over Obadiah’s head.

Thing was, Obadiah Marmaduke had been quite successful back in Kentucky. That’s how come he could afford a wagon and mules to take his family all the way to the Mississippi and cross it into Iowa Territory, which entered the Union on December 28, 1846.

So poor Obadiah took to drink and then, as so often can be the case, he took to cards.

Glory be, for a while he thought his luck had changed.

Obadiah Marmaduke won a sternwheeler in a poker game, and everyone said that the Marmadukes had it made now, for the Hawkeye was one of the finest vessels on the Mississippi, a double-engine mastered by the able and fine Christian captain, Silas S. Throckmorton. Two nights later, bound for Oquawka, New Boston, Bloomington, Rock Island, Davenport, Galena, Dubuque, and Potosi, the Hawkeye went up in flames just like the James’s cabin. Some folks said they had seen young Cal poking at a fire near the boat landings—though he might have just been warming himself, as it was February and the temperature was well below zero—but most just chalked it up to a stevedore who had been careless with pipe or cigar.

This was about the time that Obadiah began to think about his son who really wasn’t his son, and began to believe that the Almighty had turned His back on a poor struggling, kindhearted, and hardworking (at least in his own mind) soul who had had a lovely wife, who had been distraught over losing a young son, then thrived at first with Cal, but now was disheveled, dismayed, and disillusioned.

Once, after Cal had been playing with a dog and one, either canine or kid, had torn up half the butter bean plants, Obadiah had sighed, found the jug of Carmichael’s corn liquor, and said, “I swan, Charity, but that boy is a jinx or a curse.”

“Hush your mouth, Husband!” Charity barked back, and Obadiah obeyed.

But later—after Charity stepped on a nail and had to find the Indian woman who could cure such injuries, and the Indian woman (who was not Kickapoo, but Otoe) would not treat Charity unless that boy of hers was out of sight, so Charity told Cal to go to the river and fish, and after the nail wound was treated, and though no fish were caught, Grover Denton drowned in the Mississippi that day, albeit his boat capsized a good two hundred yards downstream from where Cal was wetting his line—“Maybe,” Charity suggested to Obadiah, “’taint Cal who’s causin’ us this mess of bad luck. Maybe it’s just Iowa is a curse to us.”

Which got them to thinking.

After all, it wasn’t like Burlington, Iowa, was some sort of paradise, not after struggling to survive for nigh a dozen years. Charity conceded that she missed Kentucky. She even told her husband she might could settle for Missouri.

Little did she know that Missouri was about to come to their home.

Charity Marmaduke was putting out the fire when, over the towering flames and popping of grease in the skillet in the chimney, she heard a man’s voice call out, “Halloooo, the cabin.”

She had just screamed at young Cal, because when the skillet got all blazing, she asked for the flour, and the young lad, about eight years old, handed her the sugar by mistake. Fire, in case you are not much at cooking, reacts to sugar a whole lot differently than it does to flour. Much shrieking and some profanity followed as flames leaped toward the roof and smoke caused both mother and child to cough a bit and shriek in alarm a lot more. Charity found the flour herself, thus tragedy was averted.

Strangers were uncommon at the Marmaduke cabin—a little ways out of town—but not unheard of. Still, Charity, fanning herself with a smoky-smelling towel, left the fireplace, which served as the winter and summer kitchen, since the summer setup had been destroyed by an angry cow Cal had been trying to milk.

“Don’t open that door, boy!” Charity snapped, when she realized what her son, her adopted son, was about to do. She dunked the towel into a bucket of water—which Cal had brought in to throw on the fire in the skillet before his mother had screamed, “No!” and later would teach him that oil fires and water do not mix well at all, same as oil fires and sugar, and such an act might could have burned down the entire cabin and, possibly, mother and son, with it.

A muzzle-loading rifle leaned in the corner near the door, but Charity did not go for it. She simply looked through the peephole in the door, pulled back, rubbed her eyes, then tried for a better view.

Recognition was slow to come, but come it did, and Charity stepped back.

“Who is it, Mama?” Cal asked, then coughed, because smoke remained heavy. The fireplace had never drawn worth a fig, even when it was burning oak, not grease.

Well, she needed to open the door anyway to let that rancid smoke out of their home. Rubbing her eyes, she looked at Cal, then peered through the hole again. Maybe she had been seeing things.

She hadn’t.

“Stay—” No, she couldn’t let the boy stay inside this smoky cabin that stunk of burned grease and scorched bacon.

So she opened the door.

“Come along, Cal,” she said. “Leave the door open so the smoke’ll go out. And”—she stepped outside—“company’s here.”

The man held the reins to a good horse. He removed his black hat and bowed slightly. The wind blew the linen duster.

“Preacher,” she said softly. “How are things in—?” She almost said Kentucky, but Robert James had written every Christmas. The letters were always signed by him, not his wife. They were short, simple, usually with a verse or two of Scripture.

“Missouri?” Charity finished.

The Reverend Robert Sallee James bowed, and put his flat black hat atop his head.

“Fine, Missus Marmaduke,” the preacher said. His eyes quickly moved from the woman to the boy.

God was good, he thought with a smile. The kid looked more like his daddy than he did his ma. The preacher’s wife was a good woman, a fine mother, worked harder in gardens than anyone the preacher had known, and could milk a cow without complaint. And was fat and mean and ugly.

“Cal,” Charity said, turning to the tall, strapping handsome kid. “This is—This is . . . a preacher we knew back in Kentucky. The Reverend James.”

“Preacher.” Cal nodded.

“Calvin,” the preacher said. He must have gotten some smoke in his eyes, the boy thought, because he brought a knuckle to his right eye, then his left, and sniffed a bit before his Adam’s apple went up and down.

“Why don’t you bring your horse to the corral?” Charity suggested. “Cal, go fill a bucket with water from the well, and then get some grain for the preacher’s hoss.”

Cal did as he was told, and with the horse drinking and snorting up some grain, he walked over to the stump that served as a thinking chair in the front yard. The preacher was sitting, but Cal, without even being ordered, drug the rocking chair off the porch and brought it so that his mother could rest. Then he put his hands behind his back and just stood there like that knot on a log folks was always talking about.

The stranger, Cal learned, was the minister at New Hope Baptist Church in Clay County, Missouri. He had two sons, Frank being the oldest, seven years old, “just about a year younger than you, Calvin.” The man’s clear eyes smiled at young Cal, who thought this preacher was a real preacher and knowed things better than anyone who didn’t know the gospel from cover to cover, because most folks thought Cal was a good year or two older than he actually was.

“A young son—Jesse—he’ll be three when September comes along. And a precious little girl, Susan Lavenia. She’s just a couple of months old now.” He looked around. “Is this strapping young lad your only child?”

“Yes, Reverend,” was all Cal’s mama said, and she changed the subject. “What brings you so far from your congregation—and your family?”

The preacher sipped water Cal had brung him.

“I’m called to preach,” he said. “We have a fine new church at New Hope—made of brick—but I ride the circuit for the Lord.”

He preached on and on about all he had done in Missouri. Luring some Baptist college to the nearby town of Liberty; it had just opened its doors this year of 1850. He had married many young couples, saved hundreds of souls, preached far too many funerals, and shown the unenlightened the Light.

“And my family has a fine cabin on a creek in Clay County. We have a fine farm. Growing hemp for cash. And food to eat. They’ll be fine without me. The Lord called me to Missouri, and I’ve preached and saved many souls. But now,”—he pointed west—“now there is a great migration to California. Gold fever is luring many folks westward. Gold can bring deviltry with it, and I must fight the devil with all my might. So I am bound for California. For how long, I do not know.”

“How far away is Californie?” Cal asked.

The preacher smiled. “As far as it takes us to get there.”

“You goin’ alone?” Charity asked.

“I go with the Lord.” Smiling, he pointed south and west. “I’m to join a party in Independence, Missouri.”

Charity stared at the reverend for a long while. After glancing at her son, she looked Preacher James in his sparkling clear eyes.

“Ain’t this a fer piece out of your way?”

This time, the preacher did not answer.

“Cal,” Charity said, “go get that skillet, and take it to the crick and wash it good. We don’t want the preacher to think we’ll serve him burnt bacon on his journey west to save souls and such.”

The boy didn’t want to go, but he did.

“Scrub that skillet good,” she told him, and then waited for the Reverend James to speak his piece.

Which Charity related to her husband when the worthless oaf came home that evening.

Obadiah Marmaduke’s mouth stayed open.

He was sober, bringing home all of his twelve and a half cents he had earned doing a few odd jobs in town. He scratched the stubble on his cheeks. He was sure he was sober. He didn’t recall going into any saloon, and besides, most of the grog shops wouldn’t let him inside, anyway.

“Say that agin,” he requested of his wife.

“The preacher wants to take Cal with him.”

That’s what it had sounded like the first time.

The man’s sore head shook slowly. He found the cup of coffee, which wasn’t really coffee but was all they could afford, and drank about a quarter of it down.

“There’s a train—wagon train—they are to join in Independence. A number of Missourians are going.”

“We ought to go!” Obadiah sang out.

“We’re not going to California,” she told him. “I’m too far from Kentucky as it is, and there are wild Indians between here and that gold—if there’s any gold left by the time we could get there—and California is full of Mexicans, I hear, who don’t speak a word of English.”

“Like Kentuckians do!” Laughing at his joke, Obadiah slapped his knee.

Charity’s eyes stifled his hilarity and left him groveling and staring at his worn-out boots.

“What’s the preacher want with Cal?”

The woman sighed. “Forgiveness,” she whispered.

“Huh?”

“He feels he committed a sin. Which”—she shrugged— “I guess he did. I guess we all did. And he wants to get to know his son. That’s the best I could get out of what he was saying. He’d say this, then bawl for thirty or forty seconds, then spout out some Scripture, then cry some more, and then he would talk about that woman he married.”

Obadiah leaned forward. This might be something worth hearing.

“Well, between tears and torment,” Charity said, “what I taken from his talkin’ is that this Zerelda James ain’t the most forgivin’ and kindly Christian woman you’d expect to be a preacher’s wife. She yells and threatens. She don’t even like for him to go runnin’ off here and there all the time to preach—even if that’s what a preacher does.”

“Maybe he just wants gold,” Obadiah suggested. “I heard on the riverfront that the newspapers say that the gold won’t never run out. That it’s like pickin’ apples off an apple tree. That there’s more gold than there is ants in California, and a body can’t help but get rich there. Maybe we should—”

“We’re not going anywhere,” she told him. “Till they run you out of town.”

He pouted. She sighed after two minutes and leaned over and patted his hand.

Looking into his wife’s eyes, Obadiah whispered, “Do you think he’ll tell Cal the truth?”

“Do you think he should?”

He studied his feet, then looked around the cabin, then stared at his wife again. “He’s handy to have around, ain’t he?”

Charity sighed and shook her head.

“We were young and foolish and heartbroke.” Her head bowed, and she sniffled. “But he is a good boy. Handsome. He’s just . . .”

“Unlucky.”

Her head shook. “To us.” Her eyes met his again. “He almost burned down the cabin this morn.”

“Did the preacher mention, ummmm . . . you know—maybe offering . . . some money—for getting his son back?”

She would have slapped him, but she recalled the Reverend James’s words about forgiveness and charity and love.

The hard part, of course, was telling Cal the truth.

Which is why they lied: California was the land of dreams and gold, and the future—their future—lay in that wondrous place. It would be an adventure. Riding—though from what Charity had heard, it was a whole lot more walking than riding to get to California—across the great West, seeing those never-ending plains and then the greatest spectacles in all of America—the mountains, the glorious Rockies and Sierras, so high they touched the clouds. Waterfalls and rapids. Sunsets with every color on the palette stretching across a never-ending sky. And the Pacific Ocean, blue and calm and wondrous.

Cal’s eyes brightened at his future. In California, no one would know how much bad luck he brought with him. He would have friends. And maybe he would keep friends. Maybe his luck would change in California. He probably could find some gold, too. He’d be helpful, for once.

“When do we leave?” he shouted.

“Well,”—his mother reached out and patted his hand—“you’re going out with the Reverend James.” She waved her hand around the cabin. “We have to sell our place, you see.”

He saw—he saw his mother’s eyes. He said, “I see.”

But he told himself that California would be an adventure. And there was something about the preacher that he liked and respected. Cal’s ma had taken him to services, maybe not every Sunday, but lots of times, and he had enjoyed the singing. He could belt out “Rock of Ages” like everyone else, and there was much satisfaction in saying amen. And he sure liked that concept of forgiveness.

So he forgave his mother, silently, and asked the Almighty to do the same. Then he climbed up to his bed to pack up his clothes and such, and get ready for the trip west.

Let us take time to dispel those vicious rumors that young Cal traveled west with the unfortunate Donner Party. The Donners, and their fellow travelers, hit the trail in the year 1846—four years before young Cal and the Reverend James departed for that wonderous, glorious gold country—and the Donner tragedy occurred during the winter of 1846–47 in the frigid Sierra Nevada.

That is not to say that the Fernsby–Nuttal party, which departed Independence in the late spring of 1850, crossed our great country without misfortune. Kaynes-ville on the bluffs in Iowa was closer, but the Reverend James said he wanted to travel west with men from his country, Missouri, so they rode and walked down the Missouri River’s banks past St. Joseph in Missouri. It was there that yo. . .