As the tune goes..."That dirty little coward, who shot Mr. Howard, and laid poor Jesse in his grave". It's sorta like, "Lizzie Bordon took an ax..." But who could blame the little coward? Notorious old west outlaw and gunman, Jesse James was Mr. Howard, an alias he was using at the time. Besides the fact that Jesse was idolized as a gentleman and a kind of Robin Hood, he was not. He was a deranged man who would shoot you for the smallest infraction. Bob Ford, the "dirty little coward" wanted the $10,000 reward that had been posted on Jesse's head by the governor of Missouri. It was posted for "dead or Alive". But there was no taking Jesse alive. So the next best thing was to take him dead. As Jesse stood on a chair in his parlor straightening a crooked picture frame, And at one of the only times that he was not wearing his guns, Ford shot him in the back of the head, thus, giving him the "little coward" title.

No one knew the dangers of confronting Jesse better than Bob Ford and his brother, Charlie. They had come to know Jesse pretty well. So, James bites the dust and Bob and Charlie Ford go on to perform the killing over and over on the stage for the next several years. The Ford boys were losers who, at first, wanted to join the James Gang. But after weeks of seeing just how dangerous Jesse James was, they settled on killing him and getting rich from the reward instead.

But Bob and Charlie's lives would never get any better. After Charlie became ill and found there was no cure, he shot himself a few years later. Bob operated a few cheap saloons and would finally get his when a man named Ed O'Kelly blew him away with a shotgun at the bar of Bob's last tent saloon in Creek, Colorado in 1892, ten years after Bob had killed Jesse James. Ten years after that, O'Kelly would be shot and killed by a policeman. So it simply went on and on.

Bob Ford was a little punk. He never amounted to anything but, because he murdered the most famous man of the times, he would always be remembered in the annals of old west history.