Jesse James

Jesse James, famous outlaw, thief, and murderer. His is a name which most know, but how much of his story is myth, and how much is true?

Jesse Woodson James born to Robert and Zerelda James, on September 5, 1847. He was born in Clay County, Missouri. His older brother, Alexander Franklin 'Frank', and his younger sister, Susan Lavenia, were his only full siblings.

Robert James, Jesse's father, was a prosperous man, owning more than 100 acres of farmland. He died while in California, ministering to gold prospectors. Jesse was only 3 years old.

In 1852, Zerelda remarried to a man named Benjamin Simms, a wealthy farmer. Reportedly, the marriage was an unhappy one, as Simms didn't like Frank or Jesse, and was cruel to them. Zerelda left Simms, who died in 1854 anyway.

Zerelda married a third time, in 1855, to Dr. Reuben Samuel. Samuel was a much more passive and quiet man, and apparently their marriage worked out a lot better than the previous one, because they had four children together, Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fanny Quantrill, and Archie Peyton.

When the Civil War broke out, Jesse and his family were not untouched by it. Because of where they lived, they were on the border of the Confederate side of the war, so really, the family could have gone either way. They decided to go with the Confederates.

Frank joined a local company and fought at the Battle of Wilson's Creek. Later, in 1863, Frank was identified as a member of the guerrilla squad from Clay County.

The guerrillas often murdered innocent civilians of the opposing side of a war.

In May of 1863, a Union militia raided the farm that Jesse lived on, looking for Frank and his group. They apparently hung Reuben Samuel briefly in an attempt to torture information out of him. Legend also says that they lashed young Jesse.

Frank evaded capture, and supposedly joined another guerrilla operation led by William Qunatrill, and so possibly had a part in the Lawrence Massacre.

Frank went to Texas over the winter of 1863-64. When he returned home in the Spring, he was in a squad commanded by Fletch Taylor. Jesse, who was 16 at the time, joined Taylor's squad when they came through Clay County.

In summer 1864, Taylor had his arm blown off, so the James brothers joined another guerrilla led by Bloody Bill Anderson. The same summer, Jesse suffered a serious chest wound.

The brothers were reported to have been part of the Centralia Massacre, where innocent lives were taken, and all who tried to surrender were killed anyway. Jesse was one of the men in the group that shot Major Johnson, according to Frank.

Because of their actions, the Union military tried to make the brothers and their family leave Clay County and move down south, across Union lines and into Confederate territory, but the family just moved across the border into Nebraska.

After Bloody Bill Anderson was killed in October, the boys went their separate ways, Frank going to Kentucky, and Jesse going to Texas under Archie Clement, one of Anderson's lieutenants.

When he returned to Missouri the following Spring, Jesse was shot during an ambush, and given the second life-threatening chest wound of his life.

When the war was over, Missouri was not the same place it had been. All of the slaves were freed, to the dismay of some, and Confederate soldiers were forbidden to vote, serve in juries, preach from the pulpit, or become corporate officers for a while. Tension ran high, as the state was still split. Clashes between individuals rose up frequently, and armed gangs made up of ex-Confederate or Union soliders broke out in the streets.

Jesse stayed at his uncle's boarding house in Harlem, Missouri, where he recovered from his chest wound. His first cousin, Zerelda Mimms, nursed him back to health, and a romance broke out between the two, turning into a 9 year long courtship, and eventually, marriage.

Zerelda Mimms

 During this time, Archie Clement, Jesse's old commanding officer, kept his bushwhacker group together, and started stirring up trouble for Republican authorities.

Archie Clement's gang may have been the culprits behind the day-time bank robbery of Clay County Savings. An innocent bystander was killed during this robbery. Nobody is sure whether or not Jesse and Frank were part of this robbery, although many argue that Jesse was probably still bedridden with his wound at the time.

Archie Clement was shot and killed on election day in 1866, an event which left Jesse quite bitter. Archie's gang continued robbing banks, but their numbers quickly dwindled as arrests, gunfights, and hangings cut into their numbers. It's unclear if Jesse and Frank were part of any of these, although years later, an eyewitness to one of the robberies, who also happened to know the brothers, said that he was sure he had seen them at some point robbing a bank.

Jesse's reputation wasn't set in, however, until December 7, 1869, when he robbed the Davies County Savings Association. He didn't get much money from that, but he did shoot and kill the cashier, Captain John Sheets. Jesse had thought that the man was Samuel Cox, the man who had killed Bloody Bill.

Jesse's blatant and self-proclaimed attempt at revenge, coupled with the daring escape he and Frank made right afterwards set his name in history as the outlaw we know of today.

While Jesse's picture, and offer of a reward for him, was on the front page of the news, Jesse was forming an alliance with John Newman Edwards, a former Confederate soldier and founder and editor of the Kansas City Times.

John wanted Missouri to return to it's former self, before the war, and so, 6 months after the robbery, he published the first of many letters from Jesse to the public, telling of his innocence.

Over time, the letters became more political, putting down the Republicans and flaunting Jesse's pride in his Confederate loyalty.

Jesse became the symbol of the Confederate Defiance of Reconstruction. This added to his outlaw appearance.

Frank and Jesse allied themselves with Cole Younger and his brothers, John, Jim, and Bob, as well as Clell Miller and other former Confederates. They became known as the James-Younger gang, with Jesse being the face of the group.

They began a string of robberies from Iowa to Texas, and from Kansas to West Virginia. They robbed banks, armed coaches, and even a fair in Kansas City. They often did their work in front of crowds of people, and tended to start showing off when they knew people were watching.

July 21, 1873 saw the first of the gang's train robberies. Wearing masks stolen from the KKK, they derailed the Rock Island train in Adair, Iowa. Other rebels attacked railroads as well in an attempt to show that they were all together.

None of the rest of the train robberies were quite as dark and threatening as that one, and only twice did they ever rob passengers, as Jesse wanted to limit himself and the gang to the safety of robbing the baggage car instead. This added to the Robin Hood type image that John Edwards was trying to create for Jesse, although the gang never shared a dime with the poor.

In 1874, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was brought in to try and stop the gang. The Pinkerton agency was known to catch urban professional criminals, but because the gang had so much support from the former Confederate soldiers in Missouri, the gang continued to elude capture. Several of the agents sent in after the gang were killed, although during a gunfight, Captain Louis Lull was able to fatally shoot John Younger, before he himself died of gunshot wounds.

Allan Pinkerton, the founder of Pinkerton National Detective Agency, took it upon himself to capture the gang and set out for the farm and home of Zerelda Samuel, Jesse and Frank's mother.

During the night, on January 25, 1875, Pinkerton staged an attack on the farmstead. An explosive device was thrown into the house, and when it detonated, it killed Jesse's younger half brother, Archie (who was named after Archie Clement), and took off Zerelda's arm.

Pinkerton said that the raid was not intended as arson, but later, a letter was discovered where Pinkerton states that he intended to 'burn the house down'.

His plan backfired a bit, and the public became outraged. The attack on the farm only took Jesse to new heights of sympathy in the eyes of the public, after all, he had just lost his younger brother and his mother was now injured.

Zerelda Mimms with Jesse's children

During this time, the Confederates were allowed to vote again, and so they did. They voted to limit the amount of money that the governor could offer for the capture of fugitives, which gave some protection to the James-Young gang.

On April 24, 1874, Jesse and Zerelda Mimms finally got married, after 9 years together. They only had two children who survived into adulthood, Jesse Edward James, who was born in 1875, and Mary Susan James, who was born in 1879.

On September 7, 1876, around 2 pm, three men entered the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota. Two men stood suspiciously outside the door, and three other men stood right across the square near a bridge.

Inside, Joseph Lee Heywood, the acting cashier, stood in defiance, facing death at the hands of the James-Young Gang. The bank was being robbed.

Heywood refused to open the safe to the thieves.

Outside, the citizens of Northfield grew suspicious of the men outside the door, and so they raised the alarm. 

The thieves open-fired into the streets, forcing the citizens to take cover and shoot back from protected positions.

Two of the gang were shot and killed, and the rest were injured during the firefight.

Inside, the outlaws heard the commotion and turned tail to run, but not before one of them shot Joseph Heywood in the head. One other innocent was killed.

A massive manhunt followed right after. The gang left behind the two that had been killed, and eventually, Jesse and Frank split off from the rest of the gang, who were shortly afterwards caught, and one killed.

Jesse and Frank were the only two left of the James-Young Gang. 

Later in 1876, Jesse and Frank were hiding in Tennessee, using false names, Frank going by B.J. Woodson and Jesse going by Thomas Howard. 

Frank had calmed down after the last gun fight, but battle was still running through Jesse's veins. For a while, Jesse led a quiet life, but it didn't last long.

On October 8, 1879, Jesse emerged again, this time with a new gang, and robbed a train in Glendale, Missouri. It was the first of a string of more thefts.

This gang, however, were not battle-hardened, angry Confederate soldiers. They quickly turned to fighting with each other, or getting captured. Jesse grew more and more paranoid as time passed, afraid of being caught, to where it got so bad that his paranoia made him scare off one of his gang members, and allegedly, he killed another one.

After a robbery in 1879, where Jesse's gang made off with $2000, the police found the gang's hiding place and attacked, killing two, but failing to capture the whole gang.

In 1881, with the police growing ever suspicious of the brothers, who were still in hiding, Jesse and Frank decided to move to someplace that they felt safer. Jesse moved to a house in Saint Joseph, Missouri, very near were he had been born and raised, while Frank ended up settling in Virginia.

With his gang of rag-tag ruffians nearly destroyed, Jesse turned to the only people he trusted; the Ford Brothers, Charley and Robert. Charley had been out on raids with Jesse before, but Robert was new to the game, and eager to get his hands dirty.

The Ford brothers had a sister, Martha Bolton, who Jesse stayed with often, and apparently, he became more than a little fond of her, which was probably not good for his relationship with his wife.

For the sake of safety, Jesse asked the two brothers to move in with him and his family, unaware that Robert had made secret arrangements with Thomas Crittenden, the governor, to turn Jesse in.

On April 3, 1882, Jesse and the Ford boys prepared themselves for a robbery. It being a particularly warm day, Jesse left his coat in the house when he went to ready the horses, and, so he didn't look suspicious, he left his weapons in the house too.

The story goes that Jesse noticed a dusty picture on the wall. The dust apparently bothered him, because he decided to clean it. He dragged a chair to the wall and stood on it to clean the picture. While his back was turned, Robert Ford shot Jesse in the back of the head.

News of Jesse's death spread quickly, causing a national sensation. Before the body had even been removed from the house, crowds of people were pressing in, trying to catch a glimpse of the outlaw's body. The Ford brothers didn't try to hide their involvement in the case, they surrendered to the police, and were charged with 1st degree murder. In one day, their case went to trial, they pleaded guilty, were sentenced to be hung by the neck until dead, and then given a full pardon by the governor, who Robert had wired right after he had shot Jesse.

Because the govenor was so quick to pardon the Ford boys, he probably knew that they planned to kill instead of capture him, and had no problem with that. 

After Jesse's death, Zerelda, his mother, wrote him an epitaph, which read,

"In loving memory of my beloved son, murdered by a traitor and coward whose name is not worthy to appear here."

Zerelda's actions seem to indicate that she was not ashamed of Jesse and his thieving, murderous ways, but instead, was very accepting of it, and perhaps even condoned it. You must remember, she also was a Confederate, and believed in the Confederate ways.

Jesse's wife, now a widow, Zerelda Mimms James, died in poverty and alone.

As soon as the news hit the nation of Jesse's death, theories about his survival popped up everywhere. People thought that Robert Ford had killed someone else, since he shot him in the head, and that would make it hard to identify the body, giving Jesse a chance to escape the judicial system. 

These theories have absolutely no facts to back them up, and have been mostly dismissed by historians ever since. 

Hailed as a hero by the Confederates, and bashed as a villain by the every day people, Jesse James remains a controversial character to this day. Some say he was like a Robin Hood, stealing from the rich corporations and giving to the poor, small-time farmer, although there is and never has been any evidence suggesting that the money Jesse stole did anything more than line his own pockets. 

Jesse spent his young, impressionable years on a farm, bordering the Confederate states and the Union states during one of America's most gruesome, life-changing, and desperate wars. He ended up on the loosing side and because of that, spent the rest of his life clinging to something that was quickly decaying. The Civil war was a horrible time in America, due to the fact that most of it was fought with guerrilla war-fare from both Confederate and Union sides. I have no doubt that Jesse witnessed many horrible things before he was even 18 years old.

Perhaps one of the reasons that Jesse turned out the way he did was because he was so young when the war broke out, and so he spend a lot of his growing up years in the midst of war. The killing, the mayhem, the destruction, the horror, no doubt all of it worked it's way into his blood, and once it was over, and it was time to return to civilian life, he had a hard time giving it up. That was all he knew for a long time. 

I can't imagine what that would be like, to experience all of that and then have to return to a normal life, having been on the loosing side of a war, forced to give up some of the things that you fought for. I can't even watch all of Lord of the Rings without feeling weird and hollow when they return to the Shire at the end, and I'm only watching a movie.

Of course, none of that was an excuse for what he did. He took many innocent lives, and on top of all that, he was fighting to keep people in slavery. He was on the wrong side of History, certainly. I think that is the biggest reason why so many people are torn about who he was.

Jesse James, killer, thief, and outlaw?

 Or Jesse James, heroic Robin Hood, doomed to live a desperate life because of the way he grew up? 

I don't know. All I know is that he will go down in history as one of the most notorious and famous outlaws of all time.