Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1847–April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw in the state of Missouri and the most famous member of the James-Younger Gang. After his death, he became a legendary figure of the Wild West, although his robberies benefited only him and his band. Recent scholarship places him in the context of regional insurgencies of ex-Confederates following the American Civil War rather than a manifestation of the frontier.
Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County,Missouri, at the site of present day Kearney on September 5, 1847. His father, Robert S.James, was a commercial hemp farmer and Baptist minister in Kentucky who migrated to Missouri after marriage and helped found Liberty College in Liberty,Missouri. Robert James travelled to California during the Gold Rush and died there when Jesse was three years old.
After Robert's death, Jesse's mother Zerelda remarried, first Benjamin Simms and then a doctor named Reuben Samuel .After their marriage in 1855, Samuel moved into the James home. James had two full siblings: his older brother,Alexander Franklin "Frank" James, and a younger sister, Susan Lavenia James. In addition, Reuben Samuel and Zerelda eventually had four children: Sarah Louisa Samuel (aka Sarah Ellen), John Thomas Samuel, Fannie Quantrell Samuel, and Archie Peyton Samuel.
The approach of the American Civil War overshadowed the James-Samuel household. Missouri was a border state between the North and South, but Clay County lay in a region of Missouri later dubbed "Little Dixie", where slaveholding and Southern identity were stronger than in other areas. It had been settled chiefly by migrants from the Upper South who brought their cultural practices, including slaveholding, with them. Robert James owned six slaves; after his death, Zerelda and Reuben Samuel acquired a total of seven slaves who raised tobacco on the farm. Clay County became the scene of great turmoil after the passage of the Kansas -Nebraska Act in 1854, when the question of whether slavery would be expanded into the neighboring Kansas Territory dominated public life. Much of the tension that led up to the American Civil War centered on the violence that erupted in nearby Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery militias.
The Civil War ripped Missouri apart, and shaped the life of Jesse James.Guerrilla warfare gripped the state after a series of campaigns and battles between conventional armies in 1861, waged between secessionist "bushwhackers" and Union forces, which largely consisted of local militia organizations. A bitter conflict ensued, bringing an escalating cycle of atrocities by both sides. Guerrillas murdered civilian Unionists, executed prisoners and scalped the dead. Union forces enforced martial law with raids on homes, arrests of civilians, summary executions and banishment of Confederate sympathizers.
The James-Samuel family took the Confederate side at the outset of the war. Frank James joined a local company recruited for the secessionist Missouri State Guard, and fought at the battle of Wilson's Creek, though he fell ill and returned home soon afterward. In 1863, he was identified as a member of a guerrilla squad that operated in Clay County. In May of that year, a Union militia company raided the James-Samuel farm, looking for Frank's group. They tortured Reuben Samuel by briefly hanging him from a tree and, according to legend, beat young Jesse. Frank escaped. He is believed to have joined the guerrilla organization led by William C,Quantrill, and to have taken part in the notorious massacre of some 200 men and boys in Lawrence, Kansas. Contrary to legend, there is no evidence that Jesse ever rode with Quantrill's Raiders, as they would later be known.
Frank followed Quantrill to Texas over the winter of 1863–4, and returned in the spring in a squad commanded by Fletch Taylor. When they arrived in Clay County, 16-year-old Jesse joined them. In the summer of 1864, Taylor was severely wounded, losing his right arm to a shotgun blast. Frank and Jesse joined the bushwhacker group led by Bloody Bill Anderson. Jesse suffered a serious wound to the chest that summer, but the Clay County provost marshal reported that both Frank and Jesse took part in the Centralia Massacre in September, in which some 22 unarmed Union troops were killed or injured, scalping and dismembering some of the dead. The guerrillas ambushed and defeated a pursuing regiment of Union troops, killing all who tried to surrender. As a result of the James brothers' activities, their family was exiled from the state of Missouri by the Union military authorities. Anderson was killed in an ambush in October. Frank followed Quantrill into Kentucky; Jesse went to Texas under the command of one of Anderson's lieutenants, Archie Clement, and returned to Missouri in the spring. Contrary to legend, Jesse James was not shot while trying to surrender, rather, he and Clement were still trying to decide on what course to follow after the Confederate surrender when they ran into a Union cavalry patrol near Lexington,Missouri, and Jesse suffered a life-threatening chest wound.
The end of the Civil War left Missouri in shambles. The conflict split the population into three bitterly opposed factions: antislavery radical Unionists, who became the Republican Party; the proslavery conservative Unionists, who became the Democratic Party; and the secessionists. The radicals had pushed through a new state constitution that freed Missouri's slaves but temporarily excluded the former Confederates from voting, serving on juries, becoming corporate officers, or preaching from church pulpits. The atmosphere was volatile, with widespread violence between individuals, armed gangs of radicals, and those bushwhackers who remained under arms.
Jesse, bedridden with his chest wound, was tended to by his first cousin, Zerelda "Zee" Mimms, named after Jesse's mother, who remained in exile in Nebraska until August 1865. Jesse and Zee began a prolonged courtship, leading to their marriage nine years later. Meanwhile, Jesse's commander, Archie Clement, kept his bushwhacker gang together, and began to harass radical authorities. These men were the likely culprits in the first armed bank robbery in the United States in peacetime, holding up the Clay County Savings Association in the town of Liberty,Missouri, on February 13, 1866. This bank was owned by Republican former militia officers, who had recently conducted the first Republican Party rally in Clay County's history. One innocent bystander, a student of William Jewell College, was shot dead on the street during the gang's escape. It remains unclear whether Jesse and Frank James took part; it has been argued that Jesse remained bedridden with his wound, and no concrete evidence has surfaced to connect either brother to the crime. Archie Clement, however, continued his career of crime and harassment of the Republican government, to the extent of occupying the town of Lexington,Missouri, on election day in 1866. The state militia shot Clement dead shortly afterward, an event that Jesse wrote about with bitterness a decade later.
The survivors of Clement's gang continued to conduct bank robberies over the next two years, though their numbers dwindled through arrests,gunfights, and lynchings. On May 23, 1867, for example, they robbed a bank in Richmond,Missouri in which they killed the town's mayor and two others. It remains uncertain whether either of the James brothers took part. In 1868, Frank and Jesse James allegedly joined Cole Younger in robbing a bank at Russellville,Kentucky. Jesse James did not become famous, however, until December 1869, when he and (most likely) Frank robbed the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin,Missouri. The robbery netted little, but Jesse (it appears) shot and killed the cashier, mistakenly believing the man to be Samuel P. Cox, the militia officer who killed "Bloody Bill" Anderson during the Civil War. James's self-proclaimed attempt at revenge, and the daring escape he and Frank made through the middle of a posse shortly afterward, put his name in the newspapers for the first time.
The robbery marked Jesse James's emergence as the most famous of the former guerrillas turned outlaw. It started an alliance with John Newman Edwards, a Kansas City Times editor who was campaigning to return former Confederates to power in Missouri. Edwards published Jesse's letters and made him into a symbol of Confederate defiance of Reconstruction through his elaborate editorials and favorable reporting. He also reported false information to throw law enforcement off the bandits' trail. Jesse James's own role in creating his rising public profile is debated by historians and biographers, though politics certainly surrounded his outlaw career and enhanced his notoriety.
Meanwhile, the James brothers, along with Cole Younger and his brothers John, Jim, and Bob; Clell Miller, and other former Confederates, now constituting the James-Younger Gang, continued a remarkable string of robberies from Iowa to Texas, and from Kansas to West Virginia. They robbed banks, stagecoaches, and a fair in Kansas City, often in front of large crowds, even hamming it up for the bystanders. On July 21, 1873, they turned to train robbery, derailing the Rock Island train in Adair,Iowa and stole approximately $3,000 ($51,000 in 2007). Their later train robberies had a lighter touch—in fact only twice in all of Jesse James's train hold-ups did he rob passengers, because he typically limited himself to the express safe in the baggage car. Such techniques fostered the Robin Hood image that Edwards was creating in his newspapers.
The Adams Express Company turned to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1874 to stop the James-Younger Gang. The Chicago-based agency worked primarily against urban professional criminals, and provided industrial security and broke strikes. The former guerrillas were supported by many former Confederates in Missouri and proved to be too much for them. One agent, Joseph Whicher, was dispatched to infiltrate Zerelda Samuel's farm and turned up dead shortly afterwards. Two others, Louis J. Lull and John Boyle, were sent after the Youngers; Lull was killed by two of the Youngers in a roadside gunfight on March 17, 1874, though he killed John Younger before he died. A deputy sheriff named Edwin Daniels was also killed in the skirmish.
Allan Pinkerton, the agency's founder and leader, took on the case as a personal vendetta, working with former Unionists who lived near the James' family farm. He staged a raid on the homestead on the night of January 25, 1875. An incendiary device was thrown inside by the detectives; it exploded, killing James's young half-brother Archie (named for Archie Clement) and blowing off one of the arms of mother Zerelda Samuel. Afterward, Pinkerton denied that the raid's intent was arson, though biographer Ted Yeatman located a letter by Pinkerton in the Library of Congress, in which Pinkerton declared his intention to "burn the house down."
The bloody fiasco did more than all of Edwards's columns to turn Jesse James into a sympathetic figure for much of the public. A bill that lavishly praised the James and Younger brothers and offered them amnesty was only narrowly defeated in the state legislature. Former Confederates, allowed to vote and hold office again, voted a limit on reward offers that the governor could make for fugitives, extending a measure of protection over the James-Younger gang. (Only Frank and Jesse James previously had been singled out for rewards larger than the new limit.)
Jesse and his cousin Zee married on April 24, 1874, and had two children who survived to adulthood: Jesse James,Jr (b. 1875) and Mary Susan James (b. 1879). Twins Gould and Montgomery James (b. 1878) died in infancy. His surviving son, Jesse, Jr., became a lawyer and spent his career as a respected member of the bar in Kansas City, Missouri.
On September 7, 1876, the James-Younger gang attempted their most daring raid to date, on the First National Bank of Northfield,Minnesota. Cole and Bob Younger later stated that they selected the bank because of its connection to two Union generals and Republican politicians: Adelbert Ames, the governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, and Benjamin Butler, Ames's father-in-law and the Union commander of occupied New Orleans. As it turns out, Ames was a stockholder in the bank, but Butler had no direct connection to it.
The gang divided into two groups. Three men entered the bank, two guarded the door outside, and three remained near a bridge across an adjacent square. The robbers inside the bank were thwarted when acting cashier Joseph Lee Heywood refused to open the safe, falsely claiming that it was secured by a time lock even as they held a bowie knife to his throat and cracked his skull with a pistol butt. Assistant cashier Alonzo Enos Bunker was wounded in the shoulder as he fled out the back door of the bank. Meanwhile, the citizens of Northfield grew suspicious of the men guarding the door and raised the alarm. The five bandits outside fired in the air to clear the streets, which merely drove the townspeople to take cover and fire back from protected positions. Two bandits were shot dead and the rest were wounded in the barrage. Inside, the outlaws turned to flee. As they left, one shot the unarmed Heywood in the head. The identity of the shooter has been the subject of extensive speculation and debate, but remains uncertain.
The gang barely escaped Northfield, leaving their two dead companions behind, along with two innocent victims (Heywood and a Swedish immigrant from the Millersburg community west of Northfield named Nicholas Gustafson). A massive manhunt ensued. The James brothers eventually split from the others and escaped to Missouri. The Youngers and one other bandit, Charlie Pitts, were soon discovered. A brisk gunfight left Pitts dead and the Youngers all prisoners. The James-Younger Gang was destroyed, except for Frank and Jesse James.
In 1876, Jesse and Frank James surfaced in the Nashville,Tennessee area, where they went by the names of Thomas Howard and B. J. Woodson, respectively. Frank seemed to settle down, but Jesse remained restless. He recruited a new gang in 1879 and returned to crime, holding up a train at Glendale,Missouri, on October 8, 1879. The robbery began a spree of crimes, including the hold-up of the federal paymaster of a canal project in Muscle Shoals,Alabama, and two more train robberies. But the new gang did not consist of old, battle-hardened guerrillas; they soon turned against each other or were captured, while James grew paranoid, killing one gang member and frightening away another. The authorities grew suspicious, and by 1881 the brothers were forced to return to Missouri. In December, Jesse rented a house in Saint Joseph,Missouri, not far from where he had been born and raised. Frank, however, decided to move to safer territory, heading east to Virginia.
(Some sources seem to indicate the "Glendale, Missouri" link above is incorrect. The robbery may have occurred in Jackson County, MO. between Independence and Blue Springs near the Little Blue River. The Glendale, Missouri linked above was founded years after the robbery occurred.)
With his gang depleted by arrests, deaths, and defections, Jesse James thought that he had only two men left whom he could trust: brothers Robert and Charley Ford. Charley had been out on raids with Jesse before, but Bob was an eager new recruit. To better protect himself, Jesse asked the Ford brothers to move in with him and his family. Little did he know that Bob Ford had been conducting secret negotiations with Thomas T.Crittenden, the Missouri governor, to bring in the famous outlaw. Crittenden had made capture of the James brothers his top priority; in his inaugural address he declared that no political motives could be allowed to keep them from justice. Barred by law from offering a sufficiently large reward, he had turned to the railroad and express corporations to put up a $5,000 bounty for each of them.
On April 3, 1882, after eating breakfast, the Fords and James prepared for departure for another robbery, going in and out of the house to ready the horses. It was an unusually hot day. James removed his coat, then declared that he should remove his fire arms as well, lest he look suspicious. James noticed a dusty picture on the wall and stood on a chair to clean it. Robert Ford took advantage of the opportunity, and shot James in the back of the head.
The murder of Jesse James was a national sensation. The Fords made no attempt to hide their role. Indeed, Robert Ford wired the governor to claim his reward. Crowds pressed into the little house in St. Joseph to see the dead bandit, even while the Ford brothers surrendered to the authorities—but they were dismayed to find that they were charged with first degree murder. The Ford brothers were later tried and convicted. They were sentenced to death by hanging, but, two hours later were granted a full pardon by Governor Crittenden.
The governor's quick pardon suggested that he may have been aware that the brothers intended to kill, rather than capture, Jesse James. (The Ford brothers, like many who knew James, never believed it was practical to try to capture such a dangerous man.) The implication that the chief executive of Missouri conspired to kill a private citizen startled the public and helped to create a new legend around James.
The Fords received a small portion of the reward and fled Missouri. (Some of the bounty went to law enforcement officials who were active in the plan.)
Charley Ford committed suicide on May 6, 1884 in Richmond, Missouri.Bob Ford was killed by a shotgun blast to the throat in his tent saloon in Creede,Colordo, on June 8, 1892. His killer,Edward Capehart O'Kelley, was sentenced to life in prison. O'Kelley's sentence was commuted because of a medical condition, and he was released on October 3, 1902.
Zerelda Samuel selected an epitaph for Jesse James that stated: In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here.
Rumors of Jesse James's survival proliferated almost as soon as the newspapers announced his death. Some said that Robert Ford killed someone other than James, in an elaborate plot to allow him to escape justice. These tales received little credence, then or now.
None of James's biographers has accepted them as plausible. James's widow Zee died alone and in poverty. The body buried in Kearney, Missouri as Jesse James was exhumed in 1995 and tested for DNA. The report, prepared by Anne C. Stone, Ph.D., James E. Starrs, L.L.M., and Mark Stoneking, Ph.D., stated the remains were consistent with the DNA of Jesse James's relatives.
During his lifetime, Jesse James was celebrated chiefly by former Confederates, to whom he appealed directly in his letters to the press. Indeed, some historians credit his contributing to the rise of Confederates to dominance in Missouri politics (in the 1880s, for example, both U.S. Senators from the state were identified with the Confederate cause). James' turn to crime after the end of Reconstruction helped cement his place in American memory as a simple but remarkably effective bandit.
During the populist and progressive eras, James became a symbol as America's Robin Hood, standing up against corporations in defense of the small farmer, although his robberies benefited only him and his band. This "heroic outlaw" image is still portrayed in films, as well as songs and folklore. He remains a controversial symbol in the cultural battles over the place of the Civil War in American history. Historians place him among the insurgent guerrillas and vigilantes following the Civil War. The neo-confederate movement regards him as a hero.
The Defeat of Jesse James Days in Northfield,Minnesota is among the largest outdoor celebrations in the state. Thousands of visitors can watch reenactments of the robbery, championship rodeo, a carnival, and parade.
During the Jersey County (Illinois) Victorian Festival at the 1866 Col. William H. Fulkerson estate Hazel Dell, Jesse James' history is told in stories and by reenactments of stage coach holdups. Over the three-day event, thousands of spectators learn of the documented James Gang's stopping point at Hazel Dell, and of the connection between ex-Confederates Fulkerson and Jesse James. Historical Civil War reenactments, arts and crafts, and music all compose this family-oriented event, one of the largest historical festivals in the Midwest, held every Labor Day Weekend in Jerseyville,Illinois.
Jesse James's boyhood home of Kearney, Missouri, celebrates the life of its most famous resident. Each year during the third weekend in September, the Jesse James Festival is held there at the festival grounds. A carnival, parade, rodeo, historic re-enactments, teen dance, and barbecue cook-off provide activities for all ages.
Russellville,Kentucky, the site of the robbery of the Southern Bank in 1868, holds the Jesse James International Arts and Film Festival. The JJIAFF completed its second annual event in April 2008 and the third annual is planned for April 25, 2009. The festival has featured a bluegrass band from San Francisco, experimental bands from southern Kentucky, as well as painters, sculptors, photographers and comic artists. Children's activities are a mainstay of the festival. A highlight for adults is the film festival held at the Logan County Public Library in Russellville. Past entrants have included films from Norway and northwestern Kentucky, modern silent film projects, nature studies and fan films.
The annual Tobacco and Heritage Festival in Russellville features a reenactment of the James-Younger Gang's robbery of the Southern Bank. Today used as a residence, the historic structure on South Main Street has been preserved by the town and county.
The small town of Oak Grove, Louisiana, also hosts a town wide Jesse James Trade Days every year, usually in the early to mid fall. This is supposedly a reference to a short time James spent near this area.
In 1969, artist Morris and writer Rene Goscinny (co-creator of Asterix) had Lucky Luke confronting Jesse James, his brother Frank and Cole Younger. The adventure poked fun at the image of Jesse as a new Robin Hood. Although he passes himself off as such and does indeed steal from the rich (who are, logically, the only ones worth stealing from), he and his gang take turns being "poor", thus keeping the loot for themselves. Frank quotes from Shakespeare, and Younger is portrayed as a fun-loving joker, full of good humour. One critic has likened this version of the James brothers as "intellectuals bandits, who won't stop theorising their outlaw activities and hear themselves talk". In the end, the at-first-cowered people of a town actually fight back against the James gang and send them packing in tar and feathers.
Another Belgian comic series,Les Tuniques Bleues ("The Blue Coats"), is set during the American Civil War. Again the emphasis is on humour, though there is also a good deal of drama. An adventure published in 1994 had the main protagonists, Sergeant Cornelius Chesterfield and Corporal Blutch of the Union Army, confronting the infamous William Quantrill and his henchmen Jesse and Frank James.
James has been the subject of many songs, books, articles and movies throughout the years. Jesse James is often used as a fictional character in many Western novels, including some that were published while he was alive. For instance, in Willa Cather's My Antonia, the narrator reads a book entitled 'Life of Jesse James' - probably a dime novel.
In Charles Portis's 1968 novel, True Grit, the U.S. Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, describes fighting with Cole Younger and Frank James for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Long after his adventure with Mattie Ross, Rooster Cogburn ends his days in a traveling road show with the aged Cole Younger and Frank James.
In his worshipful adaptation of the traditional song "Jesse James",Woody Gutherie magnified James's hero status. Guthrie borrowed the tune for his outlaw hero ballad "Jesus Christ". "Jesse James" was later covered by the Irish band The Pogues on their 1985 album Rum and the Lash, and by Bruce Springsteen on his 2006 tribute toPete Seeger,We Shall Overcome:The Seeger Sessions.
A somewhat different song titled "Jesse James," referring to Jesse's "wife to mourn for his life; three children, they were brave," and calling Robert Ford "the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard," was also the first track recorded by the "Stewart Years" version of the Kingston Trio at their initial recording session in 1961 (and included on that year's release "Close-Up").
Echoing the Confederate hero aspect, Hank Williams,Jr's 1983 Southern anthem "Whole Lot Of Hank" has the lyrics "Frank and Jesse James knowed how to rob them trains, they always took it from the rich and gave it to the poor, they might have had a bad name but they sure had a heart of gold."
Warren Zevon's 1976 self-titled album Warren Zevon includes the song "Frank and Jesse James", a romantic tribute to the James Gang's exploits, expressing much sympathy with their "cause". Its lyrics encapsulate the many legends that grew up around the life and death of Jesse James. The album contains a second reference to Jesse James in the song "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" with the lyric "Well, I met a girl in West Hollywood, I ain't naming names. She really worked me over good, she was just like Jesse James." Linda Ronstadt covered the song a year later with slightly altered lyrics, but still containing the Jesse James reference, and it became a minor hit for her.
In her album Heart of Stone (1989),Cher included a song titled "Just Like Jesse James", written by Diane Warren. This single, which was released in 1990, achieved high positions in the charts and sold 1,500,000 copies worldwide.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's album Uncle Charlie and His Dog Teddy features the song "Jesse James," ostensibly recorded on a wire recorder.
Jon Chandler has also written a song about Jesse and Frank James entitled "He Was No Hero," written from the perspective of Joe Hayward's widow cursing Bob Ford for cheating her out of killing Jesse James.
Around 1980 a concept album titled The Legend of Jesse James was released. It was written by Paul Kennerley and starred Levon Helm (The Band) as Jesse James,Johnny Cash as Frank James, Emmylou Harris as Zee James,Charlie Daniels as Cole Younger and Albert Lee as Jim Younger. There are also appearances by Rodney Crowell,Jody Payne, and Roseanne Cash. The album highlights Jesse's life from 1863 to his death in 1882. In 1999 a double CD was released containing The Legend Of Jesse James and White Mansions, another concept album by Kennerley about life in the Confederate States of America between 1861-1865. Interestingly, Kennerley was an Englishman
Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County,Missouri, at the site of present day Kearney on September 5, 1847. His father, Robert S.James, was a commercial hemp farmer and Baptist minister in Kentucky who migrated to Missouri after marriage and helped found Liberty College in Liberty,Missouri. Robert James travelled to California during the Gold Rush and died there when Jesse was three years old.
After Robert's death, Jesse's mother Zerelda remarried, first Benjamin Simms and then a doctor named Reuben Samuel .After their marriage in 1855, Samuel moved into the James home. James had two full siblings: his older brother,Alexander Franklin "Frank" James, and a younger sister, Susan Lavenia James. In addition, Reuben Samuel and Zerelda eventually had four children: Sarah Louisa Samuel (aka Sarah Ellen), John Thomas Samuel, Fannie Quantrell Samuel, and Archie Peyton Samuel.
The approach of the American Civil War overshadowed the James-Samuel household. Missouri was a border state between the North and South, but Clay County lay in a region of Missouri later dubbed "Little Dixie", where slaveholding and Southern identity were stronger than in other areas. It had been settled chiefly by migrants from the Upper South who brought their cultural practices, including slaveholding, with them. Robert James owned six slaves; after his death, Zerelda and Reuben Samuel acquired a total of seven slaves who raised tobacco on the farm. Clay County became the scene of great turmoil after the passage of the Kansas -Nebraska Act in 1854, when the question of whether slavery would be expanded into the neighboring Kansas Territory dominated public life. Much of the tension that led up to the American Civil War centered on the violence that erupted in nearby Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery militias.
The Civil War ripped Missouri apart, and shaped the life of Jesse James.Guerrilla warfare gripped the state after a series of campaigns and battles between conventional armies in 1861, waged between secessionist "bushwhackers" and Union forces, which largely consisted of local militia organizations. A bitter conflict ensued, bringing an escalating cycle of atrocities by both sides. Guerrillas murdered civilian Unionists, executed prisoners and scalped the dead. Union forces enforced martial law with raids on homes, arrests of civilians, summary executions and banishment of Confederate sympathizers.
The James-Samuel family took the Confederate side at the outset of the war. Frank James joined a local company recruited for the secessionist Missouri State Guard, and fought at the battle of Wilson's Creek, though he fell ill and returned home soon afterward. In 1863, he was identified as a member of a guerrilla squad that operated in Clay County. In May of that year, a Union militia company raided the James-Samuel farm, looking for Frank's group. They tortured Reuben Samuel by briefly hanging him from a tree and, according to legend, beat young Jesse. Frank escaped. He is believed to have joined the guerrilla organization led by William C,Quantrill, and to have taken part in the notorious massacre of some 200 men and boys in Lawrence, Kansas. Contrary to legend, there is no evidence that Jesse ever rode with Quantrill's Raiders, as they would later be known.
Frank followed Quantrill to Texas over the winter of 1863–4, and returned in the spring in a squad commanded by Fletch Taylor. When they arrived in Clay County, 16-year-old Jesse joined them. In the summer of 1864, Taylor was severely wounded, losing his right arm to a shotgun blast. Frank and Jesse joined the bushwhacker group led by Bloody Bill Anderson. Jesse suffered a serious wound to the chest that summer, but the Clay County provost marshal reported that both Frank and Jesse took part in the Centralia Massacre in September, in which some 22 unarmed Union troops were killed or injured, scalping and dismembering some of the dead. The guerrillas ambushed and defeated a pursuing regiment of Union troops, killing all who tried to surrender. As a result of the James brothers' activities, their family was exiled from the state of Missouri by the Union military authorities. Anderson was killed in an ambush in October. Frank followed Quantrill into Kentucky; Jesse went to Texas under the command of one of Anderson's lieutenants, Archie Clement, and returned to Missouri in the spring. Contrary to legend, Jesse James was not shot while trying to surrender, rather, he and Clement were still trying to decide on what course to follow after the Confederate surrender when they ran into a Union cavalry patrol near Lexington,Missouri, and Jesse suffered a life-threatening chest wound.
The end of the Civil War left Missouri in shambles. The conflict split the population into three bitterly opposed factions: antislavery radical Unionists, who became the Republican Party; the proslavery conservative Unionists, who became the Democratic Party; and the secessionists. The radicals had pushed through a new state constitution that freed Missouri's slaves but temporarily excluded the former Confederates from voting, serving on juries, becoming corporate officers, or preaching from church pulpits. The atmosphere was volatile, with widespread violence between individuals, armed gangs of radicals, and those bushwhackers who remained under arms.
Jesse, bedridden with his chest wound, was tended to by his first cousin, Zerelda "Zee" Mimms, named after Jesse's mother, who remained in exile in Nebraska until August 1865. Jesse and Zee began a prolonged courtship, leading to their marriage nine years later. Meanwhile, Jesse's commander, Archie Clement, kept his bushwhacker gang together, and began to harass radical authorities. These men were the likely culprits in the first armed bank robbery in the United States in peacetime, holding up the Clay County Savings Association in the town of Liberty,Missouri, on February 13, 1866. This bank was owned by Republican former militia officers, who had recently conducted the first Republican Party rally in Clay County's history. One innocent bystander, a student of William Jewell College, was shot dead on the street during the gang's escape. It remains unclear whether Jesse and Frank James took part; it has been argued that Jesse remained bedridden with his wound, and no concrete evidence has surfaced to connect either brother to the crime. Archie Clement, however, continued his career of crime and harassment of the Republican government, to the extent of occupying the town of Lexington,Missouri, on election day in 1866. The state militia shot Clement dead shortly afterward, an event that Jesse wrote about with bitterness a decade later.
The survivors of Clement's gang continued to conduct bank robberies over the next two years, though their numbers dwindled through arrests,gunfights, and lynchings. On May 23, 1867, for example, they robbed a bank in Richmond,Missouri in which they killed the town's mayor and two others. It remains uncertain whether either of the James brothers took part. In 1868, Frank and Jesse James allegedly joined Cole Younger in robbing a bank at Russellville,Kentucky. Jesse James did not become famous, however, until December 1869, when he and (most likely) Frank robbed the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin,Missouri. The robbery netted little, but Jesse (it appears) shot and killed the cashier, mistakenly believing the man to be Samuel P. Cox, the militia officer who killed "Bloody Bill" Anderson during the Civil War. James's self-proclaimed attempt at revenge, and the daring escape he and Frank made through the middle of a posse shortly afterward, put his name in the newspapers for the first time.
The robbery marked Jesse James's emergence as the most famous of the former guerrillas turned outlaw. It started an alliance with John Newman Edwards, a Kansas City Times editor who was campaigning to return former Confederates to power in Missouri. Edwards published Jesse's letters and made him into a symbol of Confederate defiance of Reconstruction through his elaborate editorials and favorable reporting. He also reported false information to throw law enforcement off the bandits' trail. Jesse James's own role in creating his rising public profile is debated by historians and biographers, though politics certainly surrounded his outlaw career and enhanced his notoriety.
Meanwhile, the James brothers, along with Cole Younger and his brothers John, Jim, and Bob; Clell Miller, and other former Confederates, now constituting the James-Younger Gang, continued a remarkable string of robberies from Iowa to Texas, and from Kansas to West Virginia. They robbed banks, stagecoaches, and a fair in Kansas City, often in front of large crowds, even hamming it up for the bystanders. On July 21, 1873, they turned to train robbery, derailing the Rock Island train in Adair,Iowa and stole approximately $3,000 ($51,000 in 2007). Their later train robberies had a lighter touch—in fact only twice in all of Jesse James's train hold-ups did he rob passengers, because he typically limited himself to the express safe in the baggage car. Such techniques fostered the Robin Hood image that Edwards was creating in his newspapers.
The Adams Express Company turned to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1874 to stop the James-Younger Gang. The Chicago-based agency worked primarily against urban professional criminals, and provided industrial security and broke strikes. The former guerrillas were supported by many former Confederates in Missouri and proved to be too much for them. One agent, Joseph Whicher, was dispatched to infiltrate Zerelda Samuel's farm and turned up dead shortly afterwards. Two others, Louis J. Lull and John Boyle, were sent after the Youngers; Lull was killed by two of the Youngers in a roadside gunfight on March 17, 1874, though he killed John Younger before he died. A deputy sheriff named Edwin Daniels was also killed in the skirmish.
Allan Pinkerton, the agency's founder and leader, took on the case as a personal vendetta, working with former Unionists who lived near the James' family farm. He staged a raid on the homestead on the night of January 25, 1875. An incendiary device was thrown inside by the detectives; it exploded, killing James's young half-brother Archie (named for Archie Clement) and blowing off one of the arms of mother Zerelda Samuel. Afterward, Pinkerton denied that the raid's intent was arson, though biographer Ted Yeatman located a letter by Pinkerton in the Library of Congress, in which Pinkerton declared his intention to "burn the house down."
The bloody fiasco did more than all of Edwards's columns to turn Jesse James into a sympathetic figure for much of the public. A bill that lavishly praised the James and Younger brothers and offered them amnesty was only narrowly defeated in the state legislature. Former Confederates, allowed to vote and hold office again, voted a limit on reward offers that the governor could make for fugitives, extending a measure of protection over the James-Younger gang. (Only Frank and Jesse James previously had been singled out for rewards larger than the new limit.)
Jesse and his cousin Zee married on April 24, 1874, and had two children who survived to adulthood: Jesse James,Jr (b. 1875) and Mary Susan James (b. 1879). Twins Gould and Montgomery James (b. 1878) died in infancy. His surviving son, Jesse, Jr., became a lawyer and spent his career as a respected member of the bar in Kansas City, Missouri.
On September 7, 1876, the James-Younger gang attempted their most daring raid to date, on the First National Bank of Northfield,Minnesota. Cole and Bob Younger later stated that they selected the bank because of its connection to two Union generals and Republican politicians: Adelbert Ames, the governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, and Benjamin Butler, Ames's father-in-law and the Union commander of occupied New Orleans. As it turns out, Ames was a stockholder in the bank, but Butler had no direct connection to it.
The gang divided into two groups. Three men entered the bank, two guarded the door outside, and three remained near a bridge across an adjacent square. The robbers inside the bank were thwarted when acting cashier Joseph Lee Heywood refused to open the safe, falsely claiming that it was secured by a time lock even as they held a bowie knife to his throat and cracked his skull with a pistol butt. Assistant cashier Alonzo Enos Bunker was wounded in the shoulder as he fled out the back door of the bank. Meanwhile, the citizens of Northfield grew suspicious of the men guarding the door and raised the alarm. The five bandits outside fired in the air to clear the streets, which merely drove the townspeople to take cover and fire back from protected positions. Two bandits were shot dead and the rest were wounded in the barrage. Inside, the outlaws turned to flee. As they left, one shot the unarmed Heywood in the head. The identity of the shooter has been the subject of extensive speculation and debate, but remains uncertain.
The gang barely escaped Northfield, leaving their two dead companions behind, along with two innocent victims (Heywood and a Swedish immigrant from the Millersburg community west of Northfield named Nicholas Gustafson). A massive manhunt ensued. The James brothers eventually split from the others and escaped to Missouri. The Youngers and one other bandit, Charlie Pitts, were soon discovered. A brisk gunfight left Pitts dead and the Youngers all prisoners. The James-Younger Gang was destroyed, except for Frank and Jesse James.
In 1876, Jesse and Frank James surfaced in the Nashville,Tennessee area, where they went by the names of Thomas Howard and B. J. Woodson, respectively. Frank seemed to settle down, but Jesse remained restless. He recruited a new gang in 1879 and returned to crime, holding up a train at Glendale,Missouri, on October 8, 1879. The robbery began a spree of crimes, including the hold-up of the federal paymaster of a canal project in Muscle Shoals,Alabama, and two more train robberies. But the new gang did not consist of old, battle-hardened guerrillas; they soon turned against each other or were captured, while James grew paranoid, killing one gang member and frightening away another. The authorities grew suspicious, and by 1881 the brothers were forced to return to Missouri. In December, Jesse rented a house in Saint Joseph,Missouri, not far from where he had been born and raised. Frank, however, decided to move to safer territory, heading east to Virginia.
(Some sources seem to indicate the "Glendale, Missouri" link above is incorrect. The robbery may have occurred in Jackson County, MO. between Independence and Blue Springs near the Little Blue River. The Glendale, Missouri linked above was founded years after the robbery occurred.)
With his gang depleted by arrests, deaths, and defections, Jesse James thought that he had only two men left whom he could trust: brothers Robert and Charley Ford. Charley had been out on raids with Jesse before, but Bob was an eager new recruit. To better protect himself, Jesse asked the Ford brothers to move in with him and his family. Little did he know that Bob Ford had been conducting secret negotiations with Thomas T.Crittenden, the Missouri governor, to bring in the famous outlaw. Crittenden had made capture of the James brothers his top priority; in his inaugural address he declared that no political motives could be allowed to keep them from justice. Barred by law from offering a sufficiently large reward, he had turned to the railroad and express corporations to put up a $5,000 bounty for each of them.
On April 3, 1882, after eating breakfast, the Fords and James prepared for departure for another robbery, going in and out of the house to ready the horses. It was an unusually hot day. James removed his coat, then declared that he should remove his fire arms as well, lest he look suspicious. James noticed a dusty picture on the wall and stood on a chair to clean it. Robert Ford took advantage of the opportunity, and shot James in the back of the head.
The murder of Jesse James was a national sensation. The Fords made no attempt to hide their role. Indeed, Robert Ford wired the governor to claim his reward. Crowds pressed into the little house in St. Joseph to see the dead bandit, even while the Ford brothers surrendered to the authorities—but they were dismayed to find that they were charged with first degree murder. The Ford brothers were later tried and convicted. They were sentenced to death by hanging, but, two hours later were granted a full pardon by Governor Crittenden.
The governor's quick pardon suggested that he may have been aware that the brothers intended to kill, rather than capture, Jesse James. (The Ford brothers, like many who knew James, never believed it was practical to try to capture such a dangerous man.) The implication that the chief executive of Missouri conspired to kill a private citizen startled the public and helped to create a new legend around James.
The Fords received a small portion of the reward and fled Missouri. (Some of the bounty went to law enforcement officials who were active in the plan.)
Charley Ford committed suicide on May 6, 1884 in Richmond, Missouri.Bob Ford was killed by a shotgun blast to the throat in his tent saloon in Creede,Colordo, on June 8, 1892. His killer,Edward Capehart O'Kelley, was sentenced to life in prison. O'Kelley's sentence was commuted because of a medical condition, and he was released on October 3, 1902.
Zerelda Samuel selected an epitaph for Jesse James that stated: In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here.
Rumors of Jesse James's survival proliferated almost as soon as the newspapers announced his death. Some said that Robert Ford killed someone other than James, in an elaborate plot to allow him to escape justice. These tales received little credence, then or now.
None of James's biographers has accepted them as plausible. James's widow Zee died alone and in poverty. The body buried in Kearney, Missouri as Jesse James was exhumed in 1995 and tested for DNA. The report, prepared by Anne C. Stone, Ph.D., James E. Starrs, L.L.M., and Mark Stoneking, Ph.D., stated the remains were consistent with the DNA of Jesse James's relatives.
During his lifetime, Jesse James was celebrated chiefly by former Confederates, to whom he appealed directly in his letters to the press. Indeed, some historians credit his contributing to the rise of Confederates to dominance in Missouri politics (in the 1880s, for example, both U.S. Senators from the state were identified with the Confederate cause). James' turn to crime after the end of Reconstruction helped cement his place in American memory as a simple but remarkably effective bandit.
During the populist and progressive eras, James became a symbol as America's Robin Hood, standing up against corporations in defense of the small farmer, although his robberies benefited only him and his band. This "heroic outlaw" image is still portrayed in films, as well as songs and folklore. He remains a controversial symbol in the cultural battles over the place of the Civil War in American history. Historians place him among the insurgent guerrillas and vigilantes following the Civil War. The neo-confederate movement regards him as a hero.
The Defeat of Jesse James Days in Northfield,Minnesota is among the largest outdoor celebrations in the state. Thousands of visitors can watch reenactments of the robbery, championship rodeo, a carnival, and parade.
During the Jersey County (Illinois) Victorian Festival at the 1866 Col. William H. Fulkerson estate Hazel Dell, Jesse James' history is told in stories and by reenactments of stage coach holdups. Over the three-day event, thousands of spectators learn of the documented James Gang's stopping point at Hazel Dell, and of the connection between ex-Confederates Fulkerson and Jesse James. Historical Civil War reenactments, arts and crafts, and music all compose this family-oriented event, one of the largest historical festivals in the Midwest, held every Labor Day Weekend in Jerseyville,Illinois.
Jesse James's boyhood home of Kearney, Missouri, celebrates the life of its most famous resident. Each year during the third weekend in September, the Jesse James Festival is held there at the festival grounds. A carnival, parade, rodeo, historic re-enactments, teen dance, and barbecue cook-off provide activities for all ages.
Russellville,Kentucky, the site of the robbery of the Southern Bank in 1868, holds the Jesse James International Arts and Film Festival. The JJIAFF completed its second annual event in April 2008 and the third annual is planned for April 25, 2009. The festival has featured a bluegrass band from San Francisco, experimental bands from southern Kentucky, as well as painters, sculptors, photographers and comic artists. Children's activities are a mainstay of the festival. A highlight for adults is the film festival held at the Logan County Public Library in Russellville. Past entrants have included films from Norway and northwestern Kentucky, modern silent film projects, nature studies and fan films.
The annual Tobacco and Heritage Festival in Russellville features a reenactment of the James-Younger Gang's robbery of the Southern Bank. Today used as a residence, the historic structure on South Main Street has been preserved by the town and county.
The small town of Oak Grove, Louisiana, also hosts a town wide Jesse James Trade Days every year, usually in the early to mid fall. This is supposedly a reference to a short time James spent near this area.
In 1969, artist Morris and writer Rene Goscinny (co-creator of Asterix) had Lucky Luke confronting Jesse James, his brother Frank and Cole Younger. The adventure poked fun at the image of Jesse as a new Robin Hood. Although he passes himself off as such and does indeed steal from the rich (who are, logically, the only ones worth stealing from), he and his gang take turns being "poor", thus keeping the loot for themselves. Frank quotes from Shakespeare, and Younger is portrayed as a fun-loving joker, full of good humour. One critic has likened this version of the James brothers as "intellectuals bandits, who won't stop theorising their outlaw activities and hear themselves talk". In the end, the at-first-cowered people of a town actually fight back against the James gang and send them packing in tar and feathers.
Another Belgian comic series,Les Tuniques Bleues ("The Blue Coats"), is set during the American Civil War. Again the emphasis is on humour, though there is also a good deal of drama. An adventure published in 1994 had the main protagonists, Sergeant Cornelius Chesterfield and Corporal Blutch of the Union Army, confronting the infamous William Quantrill and his henchmen Jesse and Frank James.
James has been the subject of many songs, books, articles and movies throughout the years. Jesse James is often used as a fictional character in many Western novels, including some that were published while he was alive. For instance, in Willa Cather's My Antonia, the narrator reads a book entitled 'Life of Jesse James' - probably a dime novel.
In Charles Portis's 1968 novel, True Grit, the U.S. Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, describes fighting with Cole Younger and Frank James for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Long after his adventure with Mattie Ross, Rooster Cogburn ends his days in a traveling road show with the aged Cole Younger and Frank James.
In his worshipful adaptation of the traditional song "Jesse James",Woody Gutherie magnified James's hero status. Guthrie borrowed the tune for his outlaw hero ballad "Jesus Christ". "Jesse James" was later covered by the Irish band The Pogues on their 1985 album Rum and the Lash, and by Bruce Springsteen on his 2006 tribute toPete Seeger,We Shall Overcome:The Seeger Sessions.
A somewhat different song titled "Jesse James," referring to Jesse's "wife to mourn for his life; three children, they were brave," and calling Robert Ford "the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard," was also the first track recorded by the "Stewart Years" version of the Kingston Trio at their initial recording session in 1961 (and included on that year's release "Close-Up").
Echoing the Confederate hero aspect, Hank Williams,Jr's 1983 Southern anthem "Whole Lot Of Hank" has the lyrics "Frank and Jesse James knowed how to rob them trains, they always took it from the rich and gave it to the poor, they might have had a bad name but they sure had a heart of gold."
Warren Zevon's 1976 self-titled album Warren Zevon includes the song "Frank and Jesse James", a romantic tribute to the James Gang's exploits, expressing much sympathy with their "cause". Its lyrics encapsulate the many legends that grew up around the life and death of Jesse James. The album contains a second reference to Jesse James in the song "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" with the lyric "Well, I met a girl in West Hollywood, I ain't naming names. She really worked me over good, she was just like Jesse James." Linda Ronstadt covered the song a year later with slightly altered lyrics, but still containing the Jesse James reference, and it became a minor hit for her.
In her album Heart of Stone (1989),Cher included a song titled "Just Like Jesse James", written by Diane Warren. This single, which was released in 1990, achieved high positions in the charts and sold 1,500,000 copies worldwide.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's album Uncle Charlie and His Dog Teddy features the song "Jesse James," ostensibly recorded on a wire recorder.
Jon Chandler has also written a song about Jesse and Frank James entitled "He Was No Hero," written from the perspective of Joe Hayward's widow cursing Bob Ford for cheating her out of killing Jesse James.
Around 1980 a concept album titled The Legend of Jesse James was released. It was written by Paul Kennerley and starred Levon Helm (The Band) as Jesse James,Johnny Cash as Frank James, Emmylou Harris as Zee James,Charlie Daniels as Cole Younger and Albert Lee as Jim Younger. There are also appearances by Rodney Crowell,Jody Payne, and Roseanne Cash. The album highlights Jesse's life from 1863 to his death in 1882. In 1999 a double CD was released containing The Legend Of Jesse James and White Mansions, another concept album by Kennerley about life in the Confederate States of America between 1861-1865. Interestingly, Kennerley was an Englishman
