Jesse James Biography
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Jesse Woodson James (September 5,
1847–April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw, the most famous member of
the James-Younger gang. Since his death, Jesse James has become a figure
of folklore.
****
Biography
Pre-Civil War
Jesse James was born in Centerville,
Missouri (later renamed Kearney). His father, Robert James, was a
slave-owning hemp farmer and Baptist minister from Kentucky who helped
found William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri and later died in
California. Robert's widow, Zerelda, married again, first to a wealthy
man who soon died, then to a timid doctor named Reuben Samuel, who moved
into the James home. In the tumultuous years leading up to the American
Civil War, Zerelda and Reuben acquired a total of seven slaves and grew
tobacco on their well-appointed farm.
Civil War
When the Civil War began, Union forces
quickly drove organized Confederate units out of Missouri. But the state
was badly divided between Unionists and Southern sympathizers (including
the James-Samuel family), and local tensions were exacerbated by raids
by abolitionist Union troops and simple bandits from Kansas. Jesse's
older brother, Frank James, fought with the regular Confederate army
until illness forced him to return home. In 1863, Frank joined the
Confederate bushwhackers, guerrillas who were battling Union forces in
western Missouri, in a savage war marked by atrocities by both sides;
the warfare was probably more intense because it was largely waged by
Missourians, with Unionist militia pitted against Confederate
insurgents, which often pitted neighbors against neighbors. Frank and
Jesse's own stepfather, Reuben Samuel, was tortured by local militiamen
hunting for Frank's band. Frank eventually linked up with Quantrill's
Raiders and took part in the bloody massacre of 200 men and boys in
Lawrence, Kansas.
In 1864, the sixteen-year-old Jesse joined
him as a "bushwhacker," killing Unionist sympathizers and fighting under
such commanders as "Bloody Bill" Anderson and Archie Clement. Jesse and
Frank took part in the notorious Centralia massacre in September 1864,
in which 22 unarmed Union soldiers returning home on leave were pulled
from a train and executed. In a battle against pursuing Union forces,
Jesse was credited with personally shooting down the Federal commander.
But the brothers' activities brought hardship on the family when Union
authorities banished Reuben and Zerelda Samuel from the state of
Missouri in January 1865.
Bandit Career
The end of the war left Missouri in
shambles, its people bitter and divided. A militant minority, the
Radicals, took control of the state government, barring former
Confederates from voting or holding public office. Jesse himself was
shot by Union cavalrymen a month after the war ended, leaving him badly
wounded. During Jesse's recovery, his first cousin Zerelda "Zee" Mimms
(she was named after his own mother), nursed him back to health, and he
started a nine-year courtship with her. Meanwhile, some of his old
guerrilla comrades, led by Archie Clement, refused to return to peaceful
life.
In 1866, this group (possibly including
Jesse, though he may still have been suffering from his wound) staged
the first armed robbery of a bank in peacetime, holding up the Clay
County Savings Association in the town of Liberty. The guerrillas staged
several more robberies over the next few years, though state authorities
(and local lynch mobs) decimated the ranks of the older bushwhackers.
By 1868, Frank and Jesse James had
definitively joined their old friends in outlawry, when they joined Cole
Younger in robbing a bank in Kentucky. But Jesse did not become famous
until December 1869, when he and Frank (most likely) robbed the Daviess
County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri. The robbery netted
little, but Jesse (it appears) shot the cashier, believing him to be
Samuel Cox, the militia officer who defeated and killed "Bloody Bill"
Anderson during the Civil War. Jesse's self-proclaimed attempt at
revenge for the Civil War, 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's emergence as the
most famous of the former guerrillas-turned-outlaws, and it started an
alliance with John Newman Edwards, a Kansas City Times editor who was
campaigning to return the old Confederates to power in Missouri. Edwards
published Jesse's letters, and made him into a symbol of rebel defiance
of Reconstruction through his elaborate editorials and praiseful
reporting. 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, Clell Miller, and other former
Confederates—now considered the James-Younger Gang—continued a
remarkable string of robberies from Iowa to Texas, 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 audience. In
1873, they turned to train robbery, derailing the Rock Island train in
Adair, Iowa. 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,
as he 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 express companies 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 such as counterfeiters, safe crackers, con men,
and sneak-thieves; the former guerrillas, supported by many old
Confederates in Missouri, proved to be too much for them. One agent
(Joseph Whicher) was dispatched to infiltrate Zerelda Samuel's farm and
turned up dead shortly afterward . 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). Allan Pinkerton, the Agency's founder and
leader, took on the case now as a personal vendetta. Working with old
Unionists around Jesse James's family's farm, he staged a raid on the
homestead on the night of January 25, 1875. An incendiary device thrown
inside by the detectives exploded, killing Jesse's half-brother Archie
and wounding his mother Zerelda, forcing the amputation of her lower
arm.
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, now allowed to vote and hold
office again, voted a limit on reward offers the governor could make for
fugitives (when the only reward offers higher than the new limit
previously made had been for the James brothers). But Frank and Jesse,
both now married (Jesse to his cousin Zee Mimms), moved to the Nashville
area, probably to save their mother from further assaults.
On September 7, 1876, the James-Younger
gang attempted their most daring raid to date, on the First National
Bank in Northfield, Minnesota. Cole and Bob Younger later stated that
they selected the bank because of its connection to two Union generals
and Radical Republican politicians: Adelbert Ames, the governor of
Mississippi during Reconstruction, and Benjamin Butler, Ames's
father-in-law and the stern Union commander in occupied New Orleans.
However, the robbery was thwarted when Joseph Lee Heywood refused to
open the safe. One of the gang members shot and killed Heywood. The
bandits who had entered the bank exited empty-handed, only to find the
men standing guard outside, including Cole, Bob, and Jim Younger, all
dead or wounded amid a hail of gunfire. Suspicious townsmen had
confronted the bandits, ran to get their arms, and opened up from under
the cover of windows and the corners of buildings. The gang barely
escaped, leaving two of their number and two unarmed townspeople
(including Heywood) dead in Northfield. A massive manhunt ensued. The
James brothers eventually split from the others, and escaped to Missouri
after a long and daring ride. The Youngers and one other bandit, Charlie
Pitts, were soon discovered; a brisk gunfight left Pitts dead and the
Youngers all prisoners. Except for Frank and Jesse James, the
James-Younger Gang was destroyed.
Jesse and Frank returned to the Nashville
area, where they went under the names of Thomas Howard and B.J. Woodson,
respectively. They tried to live peacefully, as Zee had four children:
Jesse Edwards, Mary, and twins who died soon after birth. 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 the old, battle-hardened guerrillas; they soon turned against each
other or were captured, while Jesse 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 St. Joseph, Missouri, not far from where he had
been born and raised. Frank, however, decided to move to safer
territory, heading east to Virginia.
Assassination
With his gang decimated by arrests, deaths,
and defections, Jesse thought he had only two men left whom he could
trust: brothers Bob 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 Jesse James. Crittenden had made the capture of the James brothers
his top priority; in his inaugural address, he had spoken directly to
the support they received from his fellow Democrats, declaring 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 $10,000 bounty for each of
them.
On April 3, 1882, as Jesse prepared for yet
another robbery, he climbed a chair to dust a picture. It was a rare
moment: He had his guns off, having removed them earlier when the
unusual heat forced him to remove his coat; as he moved in and out of
the house, he feared the pistols would attract attention from passersby.
Seizing the opportunity, the Fords drew their revolvers. Bob was the
fastest, firing a shot behind Jesse's ear that killed him immediately.
The assassination proved a national
sensation. The Fords made no attempt to hide their role; as crowds
pressed into the little house in St. Joseph to see the dead bandit, they
surrendered to the authorities, pleaded guilty, were sentenced to hang,
and were promptly pardoned by the governor. Indeed, the governor's quick
pardon suggested that he was well 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
create a new legend that would surround him in death.
The Fords received portion of the reward
(some of it also went to law enforcement officials active in the plan)
and fled Missouri, which now fully embraced the outlaw who had long
divided public opinion in the state. Zerelda, Jesse’s mother, appeared
at the coroner’s inquest, deeply anguished, and loudly denounced Dick
Liddil, a former gang member who was cooperating with state authorities.
Charley Ford was found dead two years later, apparently by suicide,
while Bob Ford was killed by shotgun blast at his saloon in Creede,
Colorado, in 1892. (His killer, Edward O'Kelly was sentenced to only two
years in prison for avenging the man whom even Theodore Roosevelt called
"America's Robin Hood.")
Rumors of survival
Rumors of Jesse James's survival
proliferated. Some said that Ford did not kill James, but someone else,
in an elaborate plot to allow him to escape justice. Some stories say he
lived in Guthrie, Oklahoma, as late as 1948, and a man named J. Frank
Dalton, who claimed to be Jesse James, died in Granbury, Texas, in 1951
at the age of 103. Some stories claim the real recipient of Ford's
bullet was a man named Charles Bigelow, reported to have been living
with James's wife at the time. Generally speaking, however, these tales
received little credence, then or now; Jesse's beloved wife, Zee, died
alone and in poverty. The body buried in Missouri as Jesse James was
exhumed in 1995 and gave a 99.7% match to Jesse James. A court order was
granted in 2000 to exhume and test Dalton's body, but the wrong body was
exhumed.
Legacy
Jesse James's legacy is a curious one.
During his lifetime, he was largely celebrated by former Confederates,
to whom he appealed directly in his letters to the press. Indeed, some
historians credit him with contributing to the rise of Confederates to
dominance in Missouri politics (by the 1880s, for example, both U.S.
senators from the state had been identified with the Confederate cause).
His return to crime after the fall of Reconstruction, however, was
devoid of political overtones, or allusions to Civil War divisions in
Missouri's population, and helped cement his place in American memory as
a simple but remarkably effective bandit. During the Populist and
Progressive eras, he emerged as America's Robin Hood, standing up
against corporations in defense of the small farmer (a role he never
played during his lifetime). This image is still seen in films, as well
as songs and folklore. Yet he remains a controversial symbol in the
cultural battles over the place of the Civil War in American memory, for
he is cherished as a hero by the neo-Confederate movement. James's life
clearly shows how the war divided the United States down to the grass
roots over great issues that had personal repercussions, with
consequences that last to this day
Jesse James in the movies
The life and times of Jesse James has been
depicted—with little regard for historical accuracy—in dozens of movies,
ranging from the 1921 silent film Jesse James Under the Black Flag
(starring James's own son, Jesse James, Jr., in the title role) to
1939's Jesse James (with Tyrone Power as James) to 1972's The Great
Northfield, Minnesota Raid (Robert Duvall) to 1980's The Long Riders
(James Keach) to 2001's American Outlaws (Colin Farrell). In 1966, there
was even a low-budget horror movie featuring James entitled Jesse James
Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (John Lupton).
Actors who have portrayed James include Roy
Rogers, George Reeves, Lawrence Tierney, Clayton Moore, Audie Murphy,
Macdonald Carey, Robert Wagner, Christopher Lloyd, Kris Kristofferson,
James Keach, Colin Farrell, and Rob Lowe. Brad Pitt will star in a
movie, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,
filmed mostly in Edmonton and Calgary, Alberta, and briefly in Winnipeg,
Manitoba, that is scheduled to be released in 2006.
In 2006, PBS released a documentary in the
American Experience series, dedicated to James.
****
Museums
Museums devoted to Jesse James are
scattered throughout the Midwest at many of the places where he robbed.
James Farm in Kearney, Missouri: The James
farm in Kearney, Missouri, remained in private hands until 1974 when
Clay County bought it and turned it into a museum.
House Where Jesse James Died in St. Joseph,
Missouri: The house where Jesse James was killed in south St. Joseph was
moved in 1939 to the Belt Highway on St. Joseph's east side to attract
tourists. In 1977 it was moved to its current location, near Patee
House, which was the headquarters of the Pony Express. At its current
location the house is two blocks from the home's original location and
is owned and operated by the Pony Express Historical Association.
First National Bank of Northfield: The
Northfield Historical Society in Northfield, Minnesota, has restored the
building that housed the First National Bank, the scene of the
disastrous 1876 raid.
References
There have been countless books about Jesse
James and his brother Frank, but few are well-researched and seriously
dedicated to sorting evidence from myth. A mere handful stand out in
that regard.
Settle, William A., Jr.: Jesse James Was
His Name, or, Fact and Fiction Concerning the Careers of the Notorious
James Brothers of Missouri, University of Nebraska Press, 1977
Yeatman, Ted P.: Frank and Jesse James: The
Story Behind the Legend, Cumberland House, 2001
Stiles, T.J.: Jesse James: Last Rebel of
the Civil War, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002
In addition to biographies, various
articles and books by historians, cultural scholars, and scientists
address Jesse James. A few of the most important:
Hobsbawm, Eric J.: Bandits, Pantheon, 1981
Slotkin, Richard: Gunfighter Nation: The
Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, Atheneum, 1985
Stone, A.C., Starrs, J.E., Stoneking, M.:
"Mitochondrial DNA analysis of the presumptive remains of Jesse James,"
Journal of Forensic Sciences 46, (2001): 173-176
Thelen, David, Paths of Resistance:
Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri, Oxford University
Press, 1986
White, Richard, "Outlaw Gangs of the Middle
Border: American Social Bandits," Western Historical Quarterly 12, no. 4
(October 1981): 387-408
****
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