Jesse James

• 1. Introduction

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  Jesse James died on the 3rd of April 1882, standing on a chair in his own living room in St. Joseph, Missouri, wiping the dust from a picture above the mantel. Moments earlier he had walked across the room and laid his revolvers on a sofa. Robert Ford, a recruit to his gang, drew a weapon and shot him in the back of the head.

  The man who fell was already a celebrity. As a teenager he had ridden with pro-Confederate guerrillas. In peacetime he robbed banks and trains across the Midwest, and he wrote letters that newspapers printed.

  His killing raised awkward questions. Why would the governor of Missouri pardon the killer within a single day? How did a farm boy from Clay County become the most talked-about outlaw in the country? And why do so many people still picture him as a Robin Hood, when historians find no evidence for it? The answers begin in a corner of Missouri that locals nicknamed Little Dixie.

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• 2. Little Dixie

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  Clay County, Missouri, near the present-day town of Kearney, is where Jesse Woodson James was born on the 5th of September 1847. Settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee had filled the area, so people called it Little Dixie. Jesse had an older brother, Alexander Franklin, always called Frank, and a younger sister, Susan Lavenia. The family was of English and Scottish descent.

  Their father, Robert S. James, had farmed commercial hemp in Kentucky and served as a Baptist minister before moving to Missouri. There he helped found William Jewell College in Liberty. He held six slaves and farmed more than 100 acres. During the Gold Rush he traveled to California to minister to men searching for gold, and he died there when Jesse was three years old.

  Robert's widow, Zerelda, married twice more. In 1852 she wed Benjamin Simms, and in 1855 she wed Dr. Reuben Samuel, who moved into the James family home. She and Samuel had four children: Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fannie Quantrell, and Archie Peyton Samuel. Together the couple acquired seven slaves, who worked mostly as farmhands growing tobacco.

  Three out of every four Missourians came from the South or from other border states, and Clay County leaned even further south in its habits. Farmers raised the crops and livestock they had known in their old homes, and they brought enslaved people with them. Across Missouri, slaves made up 10 percent of the population. In Clay County they made up 25 percent.

  The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 turned the county into a place of turmoil. The question was whether slavery would spread into neighboring Kansas Territory. Many Missourians crossed the border to influence the answer, and pro-slavery and anti-slavery militias clashed there in the violence that built toward the Civil War.

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• 3. Guerrilla Years

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  In August 1861, Frank James fought at the Battle of Wilson's Creek with a company recruited for the secessionist Drew Lobbs Army. He fell ill and went home soon afterward. By then the regular armies had finished their first campaigns, and Missouri was sliding into guerrilla warfare between secessionist bushwhackers and Union forces, many of them local militias called jayhawkers.

  Each side answered atrocity with atrocity. Confederate guerrillas murdered civilian Unionists, executed prisoners, and scalped the dead. Union authorities imposed martial law, raiding homes, arresting civilians, carrying out summary executions, and banishing Confederate sympathizers from the state. The James-Samuel family sided with the Confederates. By 1863 Frank was identified as a member of a guerrilla squad in Clay County.

  In May 1863, a Union militia company raided the family farm looking for Frank's group. The soldiers tortured Reuben Samuel by briefly hanging him from a tree. According to legend, they also lashed young Jesse.

  Frank slipped away and was believed to have joined the guerrillas led by William C. Quantrill, known as Quantrill's Raiders. He is thought to have taken part in the massacre of some two hundred men and boys in Lawrence, Kansas, a center of abolitionists. Over the winter of 1863-1864 he followed Quantrill to Sherman, Texas. In the spring he came back to Clay County with a squad commanded by Fletch Taylor, and 16-year-old Jesse joined the group.

  Taylor lost his right arm to a shotgun blast in the summer of 1864. The James brothers then moved to the band led by William "Bloody Bill" Anderson. That summer Jesse suffered a serious chest wound.

  The Clay County provost marshal reported that both brothers took part in the Centralia Massacre in September. Guerrillas stopped a train carrying unarmed Union soldiers who were returning home, and they killed or wounded some 22 of them. They scalped and dismembered some of the dead. The guerrillas then ambushed a pursuing regiment under Major A. V. E. Johnson and killed every man who tried to surrender, more than 100 in all. Frank later named Jesse as one of the men who fatally shot Major Johnson.

  Union military authorities forced the family out of Clay County because of the brothers' activities. Ordered to move south beyond Union lines, they went north across the state border into Nebraska Territory instead. In October, Anderson was killed in an ambush, and the brothers parted ways. Frank followed Quantrill into Kentucky, while Jesse went to Texas under Archie Clement, one of Anderson's lieutenants.

  Jesse returned to Missouri in the spring. Near Lexington his group ran into a Union cavalry patrol, and he was shot while trying to surrender. At 17 he had now taken a second life-threatening chest wound. He was carried to his uncle's boardinghouse in Harlem, Missouri, to recover.

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• 4. Peacetime Robberies

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  The state Jesse rested in was divided three ways. Anti-slavery Unionists lined up with the Republican Party. Segregationist conservative Unionists lined up with the Democrats. Pro-slavery former secessionists, many of them also Democrats, were strongest in the south of the state.

  The Republican-dominated Reconstruction legislature wrote a new state constitution that freed Missouri's slaves. It also barred former Confederates from voting, serving on juries, becoming corporate officers, or preaching from church pulpits. Clashes between individuals and between armed gangs of veterans were common.

  At the boardinghouse, Jesse was nursed by his first cousin Zerelda Mimms, called Zee, who was named after his mother. Their friendship became a courtship lasting nine years. Meanwhile, his former commander Archie Clement kept his bushwhacker gang together and began harassing Republican authorities.

  On the 13th of February 1866, men likely from Clement's gang robbed the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri. It was the first armed bank robbery in daylight in the United States during peacetime. The bank belonged to former Republican militia officers who had just hosted the first Republican Party rally in the county's history. As the robbers fled, they shot dead a bystander, 17-year-old George C. "Jolly" Wymore, a student at William Jewell College.

  It is unclear whether Jesse and Frank took part. Once the brothers became legendary, some observers credited them with leading the raid. Others argue that Jesse was still bedridden from his wound. No evidence ties either brother to the crime, and none rules them out.

  On the 13th of June 1866, in Jackson County, the gang freed two jailed members of Quantrill's group and killed the jailer. Historians believe the James brothers were involved. Governor Thomas Clement Fletcher sent a militia company into Johnson County to suppress the guerrillas. Clement answered by occupying the town of Lexington on election day in 1866, and soon afterward state militia shot him dead. A decade later James wrote about that death with bitterness.

  The survivors kept robbing banks for two more years while arrests, gunfights, and lynchings thinned their numbers. Most targets were small local banks built on local money, so the robberies mainly hurt the same people the gang claimed to defend. On the 23rd of May 1867 they robbed a bank in Richmond, Missouri, and killed the mayor and two other men. A witness who knew the brothers told a newspaper seven years later "positively and emphatically that he recognized Jesse and Frank James... among the robbers." Whether either brother was truly there remains uncertain. In 1868, Frank and Jesse allegedly joined Cole Younger in a bank robbery at Russellville, Kentucky.

  Jesse did not become well known until the 7th of December 1869. That day he, and most likely Frank, robbed the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri. The haul was small. Jesse is believed to have shot the cashier, Captain John Sheets, because he mistook him for Samuel P. Cox, the militia officer who had killed Bloody Bill Anderson.

  James claimed the killing was revenge. The brothers then escaped through the middle of a posse, and the daring getaway earned them their first newspaper coverage. An 1882 history of Daviess County judged that the county "has no blacker crime in its pages than the murder of John W. Sheets."

  The only known civil case against the brothers was filed in 1870 in the Common Pleas Court of Daviess County. Daniel Smoote asked for $223.50 to replace a horse, saddle, and bridle stolen as the robbers fled Gallatin. The brothers denied the charge and said they were not in the county that day. They never appeared in court, and Smoote won, though he probably never collected.

  Gallatin made Jesse the most famous survivor of the Confederate bushwhackers, and it was the first time he was publicly called an outlaw. A reward was set for his capture. The robbery also began his alliance with John Newman Edwards, a former Confederate cavalryman who founded the Kansas City Times. Edwards was campaigning to return former secessionists to power in Missouri.

  Six months after Gallatin, Edwards printed the first of many letters from Jesse proclaiming his innocence. James also gave the paper a formal alibi: sworn affidavits from his mother Zerelda Samuel, his sister Susie L. James, and neighbors John S. Groom and James M. Gow. All placed him in Kearney on the evening of the robbery. As time passed, the letters turned political, denouncing Republicans and declaring pride in his Confederate loyalties. Together with Edwards' admiring editorials, they made Jesse a symbol of Confederate defiance toward federal Reconstruction. Historians and biographers still argue over how much of this publicity Jesse himself drove.

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• 5. The Gang and the Pinkertons

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  Cole Younger and his brothers John, Jim, and Bob joined the James brothers, along with Clell Miller and other former Confederates, to form the James-Younger Gang. Jesse was its public face, though the men likely shared operational leadership. Their robberies stretched from Iowa to Texas and from Kansas to West Virginia. They hit banks, stagecoaches, and even a fair in Kansas City, often in front of crowds, and they sometimes played to the bystanders.

  On the 21st of July 1873, the gang turned to trains. West of Adair, Iowa, they derailed a Rock Island Line train and stole about $3,000, wearing Ku Klux Klan masks. President Grant's use of the Enforcement Acts had already broken the Klan in the South. Former rebels, meanwhile, attacked the railroads as symbols of a threatening central power.

  Later train robberies showed a lighter touch. The gang robbed passengers only twice and otherwise took just the contents of the express safe in the baggage car. John Newman Edwards made sure readers noticed that restraint.

  Jesse married his cousin Zee on the 24th of April 1874. Two of their children lived to adulthood: Jesse Edward, born in 1875, and Mary Susan, born in 1879 and later known as Mary Barr. Twins named Gould and Montgomery, born in 1878, died in infancy. Jesse Jr. grew up to practice law in Kansas City, Missouri, and in Los Angeles.

  Also in 1874, the Adams Express Company hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to stop the gang. The Chicago firm mostly pursued urban professional criminals and provided industrial security, including strike breaking. Many former Confederate soldiers in Missouri supported the gang, so the detectives struggled. Agent Joseph Whicher, sent to infiltrate Zerelda Samuel's farm, was soon found killed.

  Two other agents, Captain Louis J. Lull and John Boyle, went after the Youngers. On the 17th of March 1874, Lull was killed in a roadside gunfight with two of the Youngers. Before he died, he fatally shot John Younger. A deputy sheriff named Edwin Daniels also died in the fight.

  Allan Pinkerton, the agency's founder, made the case a personal vendetta. On the night of the 25th of January 1875, his men raided the James homestead and threw an incendiary device into the house. It exploded, killing Jesse's young half-brother Archie and blowing off one of Zerelda Samuel's arms. Pinkerton later denied that the raid was meant as arson. Biographer Ted Yeatman, however, found a letter in the Library of Congress in which Pinkerton stated his intention to "burn the house down."

  Many residents were outraged. Across a creek and up a hill from the James house lived Daniel Askew, who is thought to have been killed by James or his gang on the 12th of April 1875, perhaps on suspicion of helping the Pinkertons. In the Missouri legislature, a bill praising the James and Younger brothers and offering them amnesty lost by a narrow margin. Former Confederates, now allowed to vote and hold office again, instead capped the rewards the governor could offer for fugitives. That cap shielded the gang by shrinking the incentive to capture them. The governor had offered rewards above the new limit only for Frank and Jesse James.

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• 6. Northfield and Aftermath

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  The 7th of September 1876 was the opening day of hunting season in Minnesota, and the gang chose it to raid the First National Bank of Northfield. Cole and Bob Younger later said they picked the bank because they believed it was tied to Adelbert Ames, a Republican who had been governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, and to Ames' father-in-law, Union general Benjamin Butler. Ames did hold stock in the bank. Butler had no direct connection to it.

  At about 2 p.m. the gang split into groups. Three men entered the bank, two guarded the door outside, and three waited near a bridge across an adjacent square. Inside, acting cashier Joseph Lee Heywood refused to open the safe. He falsely claimed it was secured by a time lock, even with a Bowie knife at his throat and a pistol butt cracking his skull. Assistant cashier Alonzo Enos Bunker was wounded in the shoulder as he ran out through the back door.

  Outside, townspeople grew suspicious of the men at the door and raised the alarm. The five outlaws there fired into the air to clear the streets, but residents took cover and shot back. Two bandits were killed and the rest wounded. As the robbers inside fled, one shot the unarmed Heywood in the head. Historians have speculated about who fired but have reached no consensus.

  The gang also killed Nicholas Gustafson, a Swedish immigrant from the Millersburg community west of town. They left two dead companions behind. A large manhunt followed, and the gang is believed to have burned 14 Rice County mills shortly after the robbery. The James brothers split from the others and escaped to Missouri. Militia soon found the Youngers and another bandit, Charlie Pitts. Pitts died in a gunfight, and the Youngers were taken prisoner. Only Frank and Jesse remained free.

  Later in 1876, the brothers turned up around Nashville, Tennessee, calling themselves Thomas Howard and B. J. Woodson. Frank seemed to settle down, but Jesse stayed restless. In 1879 he recruited a new gang and held up a train at Glendale, Missouri, on the 8th of October. A run of crimes followed, including the holdup of a federal paymaster for a canal project in Killen, Alabama, and two more train robberies.

  The new recruits were not battle-hardened guerrillas. They quarreled among themselves or were caught. Jesse grew suspicious of his men, scaring one away, and some believe he killed another.

  The gang also robbed two stores in far western Mississippi, at Washington and at Fayette, and left the second with $2,000 in cash. They sheltered in abandoned cabins on the Kemp Plantation south of St. Joseph, Louisiana. A posse attacked and killed two outlaws but did not catch the rest. One of the deputies, Jefferson B. Snyder, later served for many years as a district attorney in northeastern Louisiana.

  By 1881, local Tennessee authorities were growing suspicious, and the brothers returned to Missouri, where they felt safer. In November 1881 Jesse moved his family to St. Joseph, not far from where he was born. Frank headed east to settle in Virginia. Both meant to give up crime, and the once-large gang had shrunk to the two of them.

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• 7. Betrayal in St. Joseph

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  With his gang nearly gone, Jesse trusted only Charley and Robert Ford. Charley had ridden on raids with him, and Robert was an eager new recruit. For protection, James asked the brothers to move in with his family. He had often stayed with their sister Martha Bolton and, according to rumor, was "smitten" with her.

  Robert had already opened secret negotiations with Governor Thomas T. Crittenden. Crittenden had made capturing the James brothers his top priority, declaring in his inaugural address that no political motive could keep them from justice. Because the law barred him from offering a large reward, he asked railroad and express corporations for a $5,000 bounty for each brother delivered. They added $5,000 more for the conviction of either one.

  After breakfast on the fatal day, the Fords and the Jameses gathered in the living room before leaving for a robbery at Platte City. Jesse had just read in the newspaper that gang member Dick Liddil had confessed to taking part in the murder of Wood Hite. He suspected the Fords had kept the news from him. Robert Ford later said he believed James had realized they were there to betray him. James chose not to confront them.

  The dead man was identified by two earlier bullet wounds and a partly missing middle finger. His death became a national sensation. The Fords made no attempt to hide what they had done, and Robert wired the governor to claim the reward. Crowds pushed into the small house in St. Joseph to see the body.

  The coroner's jury met the next morning in a courtroom packed to suffocation. Its verdict read that "the deceased is Jesse James, and that he came to his death by a pistol shot in the hands of Robt. Ford." Zerelda Samuel testified and made a scene when she spotted a man near the door. She turned on him with the words "Traitor! traitor! traitor!" before being escorted out.

  The Fords surrendered and were dismayed to be charged with first-degree murder. In a single day they were indicted, pleaded guilty, were sentenced to hang, and received a full pardon from Governor Crittenden. The speed of the pardon suggested he knew they meant to kill James rather than capture him. The idea that Missouri's chief executive had conspired in the killing of a private citizen startled the public and added to James' notoriety.

  The Fords received only a small share of the reward before leaving Missouri. Sheriff James Timberlake and Marshal Henry H. Craig, who had helped plan the operation, were awarded most of the bounty. The Fords later starred in a touring stage show that reenacted the shooting. Public opinion split between those who despised them for murdering Jesse and those who thought it was time the outlaw was stopped.

  Charley Ford, suffering from tuberculosis and a morphine addiction, killed himself on the 6th of May 1884 in Richmond, Missouri. Robert ran a tent saloon in Creede, Colorado. On the 8th of June 1892, Edward O'Kelley walked in with a loaded double-barrel shotgun, said "Hello, Bob," and shot him in the throat, killing him instantly. O'Kelley was sentenced to life, but a petition with 7,000 signatures and a medical condition led to his sentence being commuted. The Governor of Colorado pardoned him on the 3rd of October 1902.

  James was first buried on his family's property and later moved to a cemetery in Kearney. The original footstone remains, though the family replaced the headstone. His mother wrote the epitaph: "In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here." His widow, Zee, died alone and in poverty.

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• 8. Legend and Memory

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  In 1995, the grave in Kearney marked as Jesse James was opened, and the remains were tested for mitochondrial DNA. A report by Anne C. Stone, James E. Starrs, and Mark Stoneking found the DNA consistent with that of one of James' relatives in the female line. The test answered rumors that had spread almost as soon as newspapers announced his death. One tale said Robert Ford had killed someone else so that James could escape justice. None of his biographers found the story plausible.

  Survival stories kept returning anyway. J. Frank Dalton claimed to be Jesse James and was allegedly 101 years old at his first public appearance in May 1948. He died on the 15th of August 1951 in Granbury, Texas. Hood County sheriff Oran Baker examined the body and counted thirty-two bullet wounds and a rope burn around the neck. Dalton is buried in Granbury Cemetery under a headstone reading "Jesse Woodson James," though James' surviving relatives disputed his story. A 2009 History Channel documentary, Jesse James' Hidden Treasure, revived the theme. Historian Nancy Samuelson dismissed it as pseudo history and pseudoscience in The James-Younger Gang Journal.

  The legend that did take hold in life was political. After 1873 the national media covered James as an example of social banditry, but his main admirers were former Confederates, whom he addressed directly in his letters. Frank Triplett described him as a "progressive neo-aristocrat" with "purity of race." Some historians credit the myth with helping ex-Confederates dominate Missouri politics. In the 1880s both of the state's U.S. Senators, Francis Cockrell and George Graham Vest, were identified with the Confederate cause.

  After his death, dime novels of the 1880s portrayed the gang as pre-industrial models of resistance. During the Populist and Progressive eras, James became America's Robin Hood, defending the small farmer against corporations by robbing the rich and giving to the poor. No evidence shows he shared loot with anyone beyond his own gang. Scholars see him as one of many criminals inspired by ex-Confederate insurgencies after the war, not as a figure of economic justice or frontier lawlessness.

  The 1950s brought a new James: a psychologically troubled man, often shown as a revenger whose motives were personal rather than social. Since the late 20th century, historians such as Stiles have called him a self-aware vigilante and terrorist who exploited local tensions to build his own myth. Some in the neo-Confederate movement still regard him as a hero. Renewed arguments about the place of the Civil War in American history have largely displaced the old image of a Western frontier hero.

  Several places keep his memory. Clay County bought the James Farm in Kearney in 1974 and runs it as a house museum; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. The house where he was killed was moved in 1939 to St. Joseph's Belt Highway to attract tourists, then in 1977 to its current site near Patee House, once the Pony Express headquarters. In Liberty, the Jesse James Bank Museum marks the first peacetime daylight bank robbery in the country. Northfield's historical society restored the First National Bank building. In St. Joseph, the Heaton Bowman Funeral Home keeps documents from his original autopsy and funeral.

  Some claims are shakier. A tavern in Asdee, County Kerry, Ireland, carries his name because of a story that his ancestors came from there, but the evidence shows his father's side was English and three generations American. The National Park Service notes a reported link to Mammoth Cave National Park, where he supposedly hid from the law. Local cave expert Katie Cielinski said, "If every cave that claims Jesse James had been there (was valid), Jesse James would never have been on the surface." The tales likely grew from the many outlaw camps the Kentucky cave system really sheltered.

  Festivals keep the story alive. Defeat of Jesse James Days in Northfield draws thousands each September for reenactments of the robbery, a rodeo, a carnival, and a parade. Kearney holds the Jesse James Festival on the third weekend of September. Russellville, Kentucky, restages its 1868 bank robbery each year. Oak Grove, Louisiana, hosts a Jesse James Outlaw Roundup Festival for a brief stay he supposedly made nearby.

  Pineville, Missouri, in McDonald County, hosted the 1939 film Jesse James, directed by Henry King and starring Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Nancy Kelly, and Randolph Scott. To turn back seventy years, crews covered the courthouse square with 400 truck loads of dirt and built fake facades onto the buildings. Locals were hired as extras, and the town still celebrates the shoot every fall with Jesse James Days.

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