I REMEMBER JESSIE JAMES
Bernard Pyron

I can remember when working cowboys would
come to town on Saturdays and some would hang out in
Will Kenney's store. Many kept their chaps and spurs on and I remember
the jingle of their spurs. Billy Kenney, son of Will Kenney and the oldest grandchild of A.M. Pyron, dressed like a working cowboy, which he was along with
other things, when he worked cattle. He bought cattle in the area and
took them to the San Antonio stock yards to sell in a large truck. He wore a huge western hat, boots and chaps. No six shooter though. However, Patricia, his daughter, said that he used his six shooter once when robbers tried to rob his father, and she said he took it with him when he went out to see the robbery of the
Somerset bank in 1933. So, Ol Billy had one, but didn't wear it like
Jessie James did.

I remember sitting in the Model A with my Mother parked along the sidewalk in front of the Kenney store and Daddy was in front of the store talking to Jessie
James, who did have his six shooter on.

This was Jessie Garfield James.  Jessie, was the cousin of Luther James, and he was connected to those with roots in the settlement of Old Bexar, in southwest Bexar country, Texas.  Luther James was an area "Wolf Hunter," who ran packs of hounds after coyotes and my older brother wrote in his Journal of Wolf Races that once on February 14, 1935 he and Daddy "Went to John Caruthers camp and heard Luther's dogs running. Followed them and turned loose in White's pasture, Jack, Pep, Queen, Smut and Beulah. Ran up to Lytle and crossed highway." They heard a pack of hounds running a coyote in the Black Jacks and could identity the pack because they knew the voices of Luther's hounds.

The James Family were one of several  clans of Southwest Bexar county in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some locals used to claim that Jessie stole a few cattle.. My mother told us the story of how she had her one room country school class in the Old Bexar community or in the Wildman School on Somerset Road north of what became the town to write an essay in about 1914 on what they wanted to be when they grew up. Jessie James wrote that he wanted tobecome a notorious desperado.

On September 14, 1942 Jesse Garfield James was shot dead, most believe by George Leonard, in the coal mine just north of Old Bexar. George Leonard, a Kansan, lived just across Somerset Road from our family. I was always told never to go on his place. Patricia Kenney Anderson said her father, Billy, or Pyron Kenney, used to take food to Jessie's wife, Clara McCoy James, Billy's cousin through the McCoys,, when Jessie was in jail. This Jessie James was born in 1897 in South Bexar