12/26/1961 - The bizarre, yarn spinning life of Alphonso Jackson "Al" Jennings, Oklahoma politician, lawyer, writer, actor, traveling evangelist, and bumbling outlaw finally reaches its conclusion in Tarzana, California on the first Tuesday after Christmas, when he dies of old age at 98.
Leavenworth Mugshot - 1902
The America Civil War is in it's bloody third year (the year contains the major battles of Stones River, Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, Champion Hill, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Fort Wagner II, Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge) when Jennings is born in battleground state of Virginia (Tazewell County) in 1863 (the father is said to own a plantation in Tennessee. Caught between the warring Northern and Southern armies, the birth takes place in an abandoned schoolhouse At the age of eleven (though another tale has the whole family moving to the Oklahoma Territory after the old man's law practice is destroyed by the war and there are reports of the Jennings clan being located in Marion, Illinois where Al's father will be a professional doctor, preacher, lawyer, fiddler, and libertine ... and flees town with $927 of the county's money in his pocket), Jennings departs the Old Dominion state and makes his way southwest (or he leaves home after his father kills his pet squirrel, stowing away on a steamer headed to Cincinnati, then heads to St. Louis, Kansas City, and Trinidad, Colorado by the summer of 1875 and after his mother passes before entering her forties, at 16 he reads law in West Virginia before attending the University of West Virginia for two years, then moving to Coldwater, Kansas to reunite with his family). Aligned with his brother Frank, Al and his sibling will make a stop in the Las Animas County, Colorado town of Boston where they run a store, real estate office, and set up shop as lawyers. By 1889, the brothers are in Oklahoma, where Al also learns the arts of cowboying and gunslinging, though in his stocking feet, he barely reached 5'1" in height (during this period Al will claim to make the acquaintance of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, claiming to witness Masterson kill an actor when a bullet meant for the man's bowler hat goes astray and hits the thespian in the forehead ... the death never appears on any of the official resumes of Masterson life). From 1892 to 1894, Al is the prosecuting attorney for the Canadian County of the Oklahoma Territory. In 1895, he joins the law practice of his brothers (Ed and John), in the town of Woodward, while their father is the judge of the local court of the town of El Reno. The life of the Jennings family takes a crazy turn when Ed Jennings and his brother John try a case against the son of Texas legend Sam Houston, lawyer-gunslinger Temple Lea Houston (called the "best shot in the west, the 35-year-old attorney stands ovr six feet tall, has gray eyes and wears his auburn hair at shoulder length though he usually covers his head with a wide-brim Mexican sombrero bearing a silver eagle, with his favored attire being a buckskin suit with an ornate vest, and when in public, always has a Colt revolver strapped to his waist that he calls "old Betsy"). Trouble comes a week after Houston loses a case in which Ed Jennings represents the plaintiff when Ed and Al defend some cowboys from charges that they stole a keg of beer from a boxcar on Woodward's tracks and find Houston this time working for the prosecution. During the trial the brothers clash over and over with Houston and eventually things turn personal Houston stating that Ed was "grossly ignorant of the law" and Ed in turn calling Houston "a liar" in open court, words that cause both men to start to reach for their guns before things before things cool off enough for the judge to adjourn the proceedings for the day. The animosity however continues, and that night as fate would have it, Houston, with a friend former sheriff Jack Love, and Ed and John Jennings all find themselves at Woodward's Cabinet Saloon where shortly after 10:00 in the evening, booze added to the day's insults cause the men to slap leather and in the ensuing gunfight, Ed is killed, while other Houston bullets wound John in the arm and body. Not scratched, Houston and Love will be arrested, go on trial, and be acquitted by a local jury ... a decision that drives Al Jennings nuts to a degree where he claims his brothers were ambushed and murdered, vows to kill Houston (though he never even makes an attempt in that direction), and decides that if the law can't be counted on to provide justice, he will show his contempt for it by becoming an outlaw (in his biography he claims that he becomes an outlaw after tracking down and killing the three murderers of his brother, and then blood still boiling, just because he can, robbing the store the shootout takes place in). He makes an absolutely horrible desperado though.
Woodward
Houston
Despite being joined by two proven members of the Bill Doolin led Oklahombres outlaw gang, 36-year-old Richard "Little Dick" West and 31-year-old Dan "Dynamite Dick" Clifton (both out of work with the death of Doolin earlier in the year), after becoming a ranch hand near Bixby, Oklahoma, in 1896, Jennings puts together one of the most inept bandit gangs of all-time ... a bumbling group that includes the two Doolin men, Al and his brother Frank, and the O'Malley boys, rambunctious Irish brothers, Morris and Pat. Shortly after the patriarch of the Jennings Family passes away, the gang launches their first raid on the citizens of Oklahoma, robbing a store a store in the Pottawatomie County town of Violet Springs. then follow that crime up by hitting another small country store, robbing a group of freighters on the road, and sticking up a saloon. Though the crimes gain little money ($27 or $700 depending on who is telling the story), the cash they ride off with and couple bottles of whiskey beguile the bandits into believing they can easily best the authorities, but they have already made a major mistake, in robbing a small post office outside of the town of Claremore, the gang has broken Federal laws and now has the weight of the United States' Marshal Department chasing them, the chief trackers being Deputy U.S. Marshals Paden Tolbert (27-years-old) and James Franklin "Bud Ledbetter" (34-years-old).
Tolbert & Ledbetter
Deciding to move up to robbing trains, Al displays what a bumbler he is by trying to halt a train by standing on the tracks and trying to wave it down with a pistol, actions that almost get the novice bandit run over and killed. Optimistic that the group will be successful the next time it goes robbing, on August 16, 1897, Al and the O'Malley's board a south bound Santa Fe train that has stopped for water north of Oklahoma City, near the town of Edmond, where the rest of the gang, an outlaw associate Sam Baker also joins the raiders,. This time the plan is to open the train's safe with dynamite, but the Wells Fargo box proves resistant to destruction (the boxcar containing it however does not and is basically destroyed by the men dynamiting it twice) and the men are forced to ride away with only a few pennies they manage to wrangle from the passengers on board. The results remain the same when days later, the gang tries to flag down a passing train and has the engineer merely wave at them as he blows past the frustrated outlaws. A couple of weeks later the group is willing to try again at a location named Bond Switch, a short distance outside the town of Muskogee. This time, the outlaws spend hours stacking railroad ties the tracks as a roadblock, but the engineer simply opens up the throttle and smashes right through the obstacle as once again the desperadoes have netted zero dollars despite putting much energy into the endeavor. With the law closing in, the bandits decide to replenish their dwindling funds by robbing the Santa Fe depot at Purcell, Oklahoma, a town to the south of Norman. This time the robbery ends before the gang even gets aboard the train they have targeted as the men are thwarted when a watchman sees a suspicious group of men gathering at the station, alerts the city marshal, and the marshal shows up with a posse. Barely beating it out of town, Al decides to throw off the pursuit of the authorities by going after a bank in the town of Minco, but this heist is thwarted too when the citizens of the town somehow learn of Jennings' plans and put a 24-hour guard on the local institution. Too much, not use to being led by a fool, Little Dick and Dynamite Dick slip away, quitting the gang (Little Dick is tracked down and killed by Deputy U.S. Marshal Chris Madison on April 13, 1898 in the town of Guthrie, while Dynamite Dick only makes it to December 4, 1896, when he is shot down by Deputy U.S. Marshal Alford Lund on a farm outside of Newkirk, Oklahoma. At the same time, Jennings claims he and his brother decide to hideout in the Honduras, where they become friends with William Sydney Porter, the writer who will become known to posterity as O. Henry, on the run from authorities in Texas on embezzlement charges (Jennings will also describe in his "fictional" biography how he meets the writer in prison and it is O. Henry who plants the seed in Jennings head that the outlaw's exploits might make a great book). Bored after a time, the Jennings, by way of Mexico City and San Francisco make their way back to the states and by October of 1897, reunited with the O'Malleys, believe they are ready to try train robbing again. They are wrong in this assumption!
Dynamite Dick & Little Dick West
Jennings
After the failed train robbery, the gang circles back to a farm near El Reno that is owned by a friend of Jennings that allows the outlaws to use his place as a hideout. After resting up for a few days, the gang heads east over frozen fields, toward the town of Cushing. There, seeking respite from the cold and some funds for their pockets, the band stages it's last raid ... this time robbing the store of a local merchant named Lee Nutter by breaking into their victim's home, waking him from his sleep with guns pointed in his place and demanding he open his store and give them all the money he has. Not a well planned robbery at all, just like their other heists, there is only fifteen dollars in the place (which the gang pockets), so the bandits steal a jug of whiskey, a selection of cold-weather coats, and some food, including a rare item for Oklahoma, a bunch of bananas. The robbery of course signals the authorities that the Jennings Gang is in the area. Readying for their next job, on November 29, 1897, the outlaw are holed up in the ranch house of a Mrs. Harless, with Morris O'Malley in a wagon near the farm's barn serving as a lookout ... again an outlaw skill that the gang fails to pull off as O'Malley falls asleep and a posse of five men, led by U.S. Deputy Marshals Tolbert and Ledbetter, is able to surround the ranch house. The next morning, after briefly making Mrs. Harless their captive, the marshals send the woman back into her home with a message for Jennings that if he and his gang don't surrender, the lawmen will happily shoot them to pieces. After a fiery debate about what the outlaws should do next (and verbal criticisms over Morris O'Malley's lack of eyesight in keeping watch), Al opens fire on the lawmen and a general gunbattle breaks out ... a gunbattle in which it quickly becomes evident that they are dealing with gunmen that know their business. Decision made that flight is to be preferred over getting shot to pieces, the gang braves the aim of two possemen (one officer's rifle jams and the other manages to wound Frank Jennings) and bursts out of the back of the home, heading for a nearby orchard. Every one of the bandits by now wounded (Al Jennings has been hit three times, including a slug in his left thigh) but still capable of running and shooting, the gang makes it to the orchard, wades a nearby creek and vanishes, while after losing the trail of the outlaws, the posse goes back to Muskogee for reinforcements and supplies with Morris O'Malley and the gang's horses in tow. In flight, the fleeing gang commandeers a wagon from two Indian boys it encounters and spends the next day wandering aimless about the countryside looking for a way out of their predicament ... but there is no way.
Jennings
Discovering where the gang is when the posse captures the man (a famer the gang has kidnapped named Willis Brooks) the outlaws have sent into town to find a doctor to tend to Pat O'Malley's and Al Jennings wounds, Ledbetter, Tolbert, and two possemen set up an ambush in a ravine near Brooks' property with high banks at its sides that leads into town (the lawmen also improve on their trap by dropping a tree across the road as a barricade). After waiting for hours, the wagon containing the outlaws (Frank Jennings is driving with Al Jennings and Pat O'Malley in back nursing their wounds) eventually shows up, and when what is left of the gang is suddenly confronted by four lawmen training rifles its way, Al Jennings and company decide it would be wise of them to surrender. Lucky to be alive, Al's outlaw career has lasted all of 109 days. Put on trial, Frank Jennings will be sentenced to five years at Leavenworth prison (after he serves his time and is released, Frank will head home before vanishing from history after he and his wife move to New Mexico), as will the two O'Malley boys, while Al Jennings as the gang's ringleader and someone that should have known better gets the book thrown at him and is sentenced to life behind bars (another oddball story that can't be proved one way or another ... it is said that Temple Houston offers to defend Al for no fee, but Al, still upset over the death of his brother, turns him down),a sentence that will be later reduced to five years too (thanks to the legal work of Al's brother, John). Outlawing days over, Al is out of prison by 1902, and five years later, he gains a full pardon from the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (a former friend of Al's father, John).
Leavenworth Penitentiary
Released from the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary (Jennings will also spend some time at the the federal prison in Columbus, Ohio) and pardoned, Al begins practicing law again in Lawton, Oklahoma, living in a room over his brother John's law office with his nephew, John Jr. While living there, he meets and marries Maude Deaton (she is six inches taller than her husband, but for the balance of their time together Al will refer to her as "The Little Woman") and manages to put his life back together again, and in 1908, even recreates one of his train heists for the silent screen, starring in the one-reeler, "The Bank Robbery," a film produced by the Oklahoma Natural Mutoscene Company and directed by lawman Bill Tilghman with James Bennie Kent in charge of the camera (the film also stars Heck Thomas playing himself and has Comanche leader, Quanah Parker, in a bit role ... filmed on location in the town of Cache, Oklahoma and in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, during the short's bank robbery, a bystander thinks the bank is actually being robbed and jumps out of a window to let the police know!). It is a film that gets Al an invite to the White House where the film becomes the first movie to be screened there (though most folks think it is 1915's "Birth of a Nation") and he meets the man that pardoned him. In 1911, the couple moves to Oklahoma City and Al comes in contact again with his brother Frank, who is also practicing law once more while married to Nellie Bunyan, the society editor of the Guthrie Leader newspaper.
Al & Maude
"The Bank Robbery"
Things going well with his law practice (he also dabbles in being a circuit evangelist), Al fairly quickly puts his sights on something bigger and after winning the Democratic Party's nomination as the attorney for Oklahoma County (he loses the general election), two years later he runs for Oklahoma governor using the popularity he has generated by writing his 1913 fictional biography, "Beating Back" (a tome rife with fabrications of which one would be Jennings claiming to have bested Jesse James in a shooting contest even though the bandit was already dead by the time the match takes place, it will also contain the fibs that he robbed between fifteen to twenty Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and Arkansas trains of over $90,000 during his career, and that he killed eighteen men during his outlaw career by shooting them in the throat "so they couldn't talk back"), and then filming a movie version of the book starring himself, as a springboard into the office of governor (not surprisingly as he gives speeches in which he states, "If elected, I promise to be honest for a year, if I can hold out that long," and he loses this election too, finishing third out of six Democrat contestants, later stating that, "There's more honesty among train robbers than among some public officials). Catching Hollywood fever after his initial foray into film making, and enjoying being a celebrity, Jennings moves to Los Angeles in the early 1920s and becomes a member of the film community starting to grow there, and as such, he will work as a technical consultant, screenwriter, director, and character actor in over a hundred silent movies and early talkies, and even plays a pirate in the original screen version of "The Sea Hawk," and he even has a small role in the Warner Brothers' 1939 western, "The Oklahoma Kid," starring James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and actress rosemary Lane. In 1921, he will also write a second book called "Through the Shadows with O. Henry" about various adventures he claims to have had with the writer (and its pages contain at least one true story of how the two men collaborated on the short story, "Holding Up a Train." Using the money he makes in the movie business, Al and his wife eventually retire to a chicken farm they buy in the Tarzana region of the San Fernando Valley, but by 1945, although 82-years-old, Jennings is back in the news when he sues the makers of the "Lone Ranger" show for defamation of character for producing a radio program in which the lawman shoots a gun out of the hand of a fictional Jennings ("Nobody could ever shoot the gun out of Al Jennings' hand!" he will bellow at the radio. For his hurt, Al wants $100,000, but after hearing a passel of tale tales of his days as an outlaw, the jury in the case decides Jennings deserves the big ouch of nothing!
Jennings In 1924
Jennings As Jennings In The 1918 Western
"The Lady Of The Dugout"
In 1951, Al's life itself gets the glitzy Hollywood treatment, and "Al Jennings of Oklahoma" is released by Columbia Pictures starring tough guy actor Dan Duryea as Jennings and actress Gail Storm as his love interest, Margo St. Claire. Coming in at 79-minutes, the film win no prizes with audiences or at the 1952 Academy Awards. In his 90s, Jennings will once again become a thorn in the side of the authorities, this time getting into hooting scrapes in which Southern California police are called to his home when he fires his pistol at a shadow moving near his chicken coop, and instead of damaging a trespasser, he kills his prize rooster, and after an incident in which he accidentally shoots a neighbor in the elbow while cleaning a revolver he forgot to take the bullet out of, and police will be called to the ranch when Al and actor Hugh O'Brien (the actor playing Wyatt Earp on ABC television's "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp") engage in a loud gunfight in which the men empty their guns at each other, guns filled with blanks. In November of 1961, Al's beloved wife will pass away and the heart-broken former outlaw takes to his bed, where he passes away the day after Christmas from loneliness and old age. He is buried in the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery's Vale of Memory section, Lot 29, Grave 2 ... whether he is resting in peace there, like the rest of his life, is certainly up for debate.
Chicken Killer
Gravesite
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