When the Civil War broke out his father, John D.F. Jennings had a plantation in Tennessee. He enlisted in a Virginia Regiment of the Confederate Army. In 1863, fearing a clash near his plantation, he advised his wife to take the slaves and livestock and go to her mother’s in Virginia. On the night of the battle, he used his own home as a hospital.
His mother Mary was forced to stop along the way and Al was born in an abandoned schoolhouse in Taswell County, Virginia. The two armies closed in on them and travel was unsafe, therefore the family stayed in the schoolhouse awaiting the end of the war. There being no mail in the south, it was a year and a half before his mother knew if her husband was alive or dead. She had a brother killed in a duel with a fellow officer after the war was over.
AI further stated that his family moved north to Marion, Ohio. This is, without a doubt, a thinly disguised account of their stay in Marion, Illinois, because he mentions the Goodall boys who were his northern cousins, the Cornell boys and the Lowe and Pulley boys, all Williamson County names. He also mentions the cholera epidemic and mentions that two of the doctor’s children died in it. There was a cholera epidemic in 1866 In Marion. There is a Richard E. Jennings, age 1 year and 1 day, who died January 25, 1867 and is buried in the Old Marion Cemetery (Aikman Cemetery).
The presence of the Jennings family in Marion is, in fact, confirmed in an 1870 federal census as living in or near Marion when the census was taken. Family members listed were John D.F. Jennings 40 and his wife Mary 36. Children present were John 13, Edward 11, Francis 9 and Alphonso aged 7. The father, John Jennings was listed as a physician.
It was the father, John D.F. and the son, Alphonso who made the most history. John D.F. Jennings was States Attorney in Williamson County at the time of the events of the Bloody Vendetta which helped give the name Bloody Williamson to our county.
Milo Erwin, author of the first history of Williamson County, had plenty to say about him, though it is safe to say he was probably biased. However, John D.F. Jennings did leave the county owing over $900.
Milo Erwin wrote, “He was a professional doctor, lawyer, preacher, fiddler, horn blower and libertine. When he made music on the square, a crowd would swell around him. When he preached, they all went to hear him, from the talented aristocracy down to the bootblack. He was a rowdy among the rowdies, pious among the pious, Godless among the Godless and a spooney among the women….”
The local newspaper announced in June 1867 that he would preach at the courthouse the following Sabbath. In September 1875, the newspaper carried the County Commissioners Record stating John D.F. Jennings was indebted to the school fund in this county for $927 and again in October 1877, it carried the announcement that he was living in Rome, Ohio.
Al stated in his book that when he was 11 years old, his mother, Mary, got sick and the family left for her home state of Virginia. This would be about the time that the father fled with over $900 of the county’s money. His mother died along the way, leaving a daughter and sons, John, Ed, Frank and Al. He says the year after her death they were living in Ohio.
After a quarrel with his father, AI left home and stowed away on a steamer bound for Cincinnati, then went to St. Louis, Kansas City and then Trinidad, Colorado, arriving there in the summer of 1875. He said he ran away because, “Pa killed my pet squirrel.”
At the age of 16, he went to West Virginia to read law and attended the University of West Virginia for two years. By this time his father and brothers had gone west and he decided to join them in Coldwater, Kansas, where he and Frank were both admitted to the bar. On his first case, his father John represented the plaintiff and Al the defendant.
Al and his brother Frank then went to Boston, Las Animas County, Colorado where they had a store and real estate office. In 1889, Al went to Oklahoma Territory and hung out his shingle in El Reno. His sister had married a farmer and lived there and this might have influenced him to move there.
Frank stayed in Colorado and served as Deputy County Clerk in Denver. Al served as County Attorney of Canadian County, Oklahoma Territory, then moved on to Woodward, Oklahoma Territory, where his father and brothers, Ed and John, lived, and where his father served as County Judge.
It was here in Woodward a drama was about to unfold; one that would bring grief to the Jennings family. Temple Houston, son of General Sam Houston, practiced law here. He lost a case in which Ed Jennings represented the plaintiff. A week later, Al assisted his brother in defending some boys accused of stealing from a box car, Temple Houston assisted in the prosecution. During the trial, Al lost his temper and called Mr. Houston a liar, which caused Temple to jump toward him. Ed then slapped Temple’s face and the court adjourned in great confusion.
That night Temple, Ed and his brother John were all in Garvey’s Saloon. A fight erupted and Temple shot the Jennings men, killing Ed and breaking John’s arm.
The Leader, printed at Marion, Illinois, carried a curious item on October 22, 1896. It reported that Judge Jennings had been killed by the same man in the same saloon and called it chapter two of a sad story. The older newspapers often carry reports of deaths which they retracted later, the reason being rumors were often picked up and printed. In any event, Al says his father died in Slater, Missouri of an illness at the age of 75. The newspaper article read in part “The sad story of the killing of Ed Jennings by Temple Houston in a saloon in Woodward, Oklahoma Territory some months ago is followed by chapter #2, reciting the death of the father, Judge Jennings, by the same man in the same saloon on Monday of last week.”
Al Jennings left Woodward following Houston’s acquittal in 1896 and wandered before gaining employment as a ranch hand in the Creek Nation. While working near present Bixby in Creek County, Jennings joined an outlaw band.
During the summer and fall of 1897 the desperados, often referred to as the “Jennings Gang,” robbed trains, general stores, and a post office, with little monetary success. Jennings was wounded by law officers on November 30, 1897, and captured one week later on Carr Creek near Onapa in McIntosh County, Oklahoma.
In 1899 Jennings was sentenced to life in prison, but, due to the legal efforts of his brother John, his sentence was reduced to five years. He was freed on technicalities from Leavenworth Kansas Prison in 1902 and received a presidential pardon in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt.
He later served time at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, on unrelated charges, where he became acquainted with William Sidney Porter, better known as O. Henry, writer of short stories. After his release, he received a full pardon from President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907.
He entered law practice in Lawton, Comanche County, Oklahoma and lived in a room over the law office of his brother John. His nephew, John Jennings, son of Ed, roomed with him. While living here, Al married Maude Deaton. After a year of partnership, John moved to Oklahoma City. His brother, Frank, was living there where he had married Nellie Bunyan, society editor of the Guthrie Leader newspaper. Frank was a lawyer and later moved to New Mexico.
Al re-created one of his bank robberies in the 1908 film “The Bank Robbery”. Heck Thomas assembled a posse, chased and captured the bank robbers, while the one-reel movie was directed Bill Tilghman, James Bennie Kent was the cinema-photographer, and it was produced by the Oklahoma Natural Mutoscene Company. The film was shot in Cache, Oklahoma and at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, with Quanah Parker having a bit part. A bystander thought that the bank was really being robbed and jumped out a window to run for the police.
In 1911, Al Jennings closed his law practice in Lawton and moved to Oklahoma City where he was a partner in the firm of Jennings and Ross. He was a small, red haired man, standing five feet four inches tall, and wore a size four shoe.
In 1912 he won the Democratic nomination for Oklahoma County attorney, but he lost the general election. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of Oklahoma in 1913 and was mayor of Crescent City, California at some time. He was a writer and an evangelist, traveling around the country as a speaker and at one time he spoke at Herrin, Illinois. 1913, was also the year he published his autobiographical book “Beating Back”.
Jennings wrote another book, “Through the Shadows with O. Henry”, which was published in 1921 by N.Y. Burt. It details his friendship with the short story writer, then known only as William Sydney Porter, from a few years before when they were sent to the Ohio State Penitentiary (on charges arising from separate incidents), until sometime after their release from prison within a few years of each other, and a subsequent meeting in New York.
We next hear from Al in 1945, when he was 82. On one of the Lone Ranger radio programs, the script writers had the Lone Ranger shooting a gun from the hand of a make believe Al Jennings. Al was indignant, probably not so much at being labeled a desperado, but at being an ineffective one (which was true). He sued for defamation of character, demanding $100,000.
He used the witness stand as a means of telling some tall tales of his past life. He talked of riding thousands of miles to avenge the death of his friend, “Colorado” Jim Stanton. He also stated that a group of men had come to arrest him for a bank robbery in 1895 and he had killed three of them. Jack Dalton, who had been in that group later took the witness stand to refute this story, saying they took Al and two or three of his pals without firing a shot.
The jury decided against Al. Evidently, the tall stories he told from the witness stand was a factor in their deciding it was impossible to do damage to the former outlaw’s reputation.
Retiring from law and politics, Jennings moved to California and worked in the motion picture industry making Westerns. He acted, wrote and produced in more than twenty silent films.
A movie bio was made featuring his escapades in 1951 called, “Al Jennings of Oklahoma”, with Dan Duryea in the title role, but Al said he had never seen the movie because it was too noisy for him.
He died in Tarzana, California, on December 26, 1961 and is interred in the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California.
(Data extracted from “Beating Back” by Al Jennings and Will Erwin, 1915; extracts from Glimpses of the Past, written by Pearl Roberts and printed in the Johnston City Progress, 1978; Federal Census Records; Wikipedia; research by Helen Lind; compiled by Sam Lattuca on 09/16/2013)