American outlaw Jesse Woodson James was a colorful bandit whose escapades made him a legendary figure of the Wild W.
Background
Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County, Missouri, near the site of present-day Kearney, on September 5, 1847. Jesse James had two full siblings: his elder brother, Alexander Franklin "Frank" James, and a younger sister, Susan Lavenia James. Little is known about Jesse's childhood except that his father left the family in 1850 to minister to the gold prospectors in California and died soon after his arrival there. After Robert James's death, his widow Zerelda remarried twice, first to Benjamin Simms in 1852 and then in 1855 to Dr. Reuben Samuel, who moved into the James' home. Jesse's mother and Reuben Samuel had four children together: Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fannie Quantrell, and Archie Peyton Samuel. Zerelda and Reuben Samuel acquired a total of seven slaves, who served mainly as farmhands in tobacco cultivation.
Career
Reared on a Missouri farm, Jesse and Frank shared their family’s sympathy with the Southern cause when the American Civil War broke out in 1861. Frank joined William C. Quantrill’s Confederate guerrillas, becoming friends with Cole Younger, a fellow member. Jesse followed suit by joining “Bloody” Bill Anderson’s guerrilla band. At the end of the war, the bands surrendered, but Jesse was reportedly shot and severely wounded by Federal soldiers while under a flag of truce. He and Frank, joined by eight other men, then began their outlaw career by robbing a bank in Liberty, Missouri, on February 13, 1866. During the same year, Cole Younger joined the gang, with the other Younger brothers following his lead one by one during the next few years. The James gang robbed banks from Iowa to Alabama and Texas and began holding up trains in 1873. The bandits also preyed upon stagecoaches, stores, and individuals. Throughout their long career and afterward, their exploits were seized upon by writers who exaggerated and romanticized their deeds to meet the demands of Eastern readers for bloody Western tales of derring-do. To the Missouri Ozark people, Jesse emerged as a romantic figure, hounded into a life of crime by authorities who never forgave his allegiance to the South. Jesse and Frank did, in fact, always seek to justify their banditry on grounds of persecution.
On September 7, 1876, the James gang was nearly destroyed while trying to rob the First National Bank at Northfield, Minnesota. Of the eight bandits, only the James brothers escaped death or capture. After gathering a new gang in 1879, the James brothers resumed robbing, and in 1881 Missouri Gov. Thomas T. Crittenden offered a $10, 000 reward for their capture, dead or alive. Reputedly, Crittenden promised immunity for the murder of the James brothers to would-be assassin Robert Ford, whose brother Charles was a member of the new gang. (That immunity took the form of a gubernatorial pardon after Ford was convicted and sentenced to death for killing Jesse. ) In the event, Jesse, living at St. Joseph under the pseudonym of Thomas Howard, was unarmed and in his home adjusting a picture frame on the wall (containing the words “In God We Trust” in cross-stitch) when he was shot in the back of the head and instantly killed by Robert Ford. Later Ford would be popularly characterized as a Judas, a judgment that may have derived largely from his portrayal as a “dirty little coward” in the “Ballad of Jesse James, ” a traditional folk song, probably written in the immediate aftermath of James’s death, possibly by Billy Gashade. That song—recorded through the years by such performers as Vernon Dalhart, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen—also likely had much to do with the tradition that cast Jesse as an American Robin Hood. Ford himself was shot in Creede, Colorado, on June 8, 1892, by Edward Capehart O’Kelley, who was viewed by some as Jesse’s avenger and whose life sentence for Ford’s murder was commuted in 1901 by Colorado Gov. James Bradley Orman in response to pleas for executive clemency from at least two strident advocates for O’Kelley.
A few months after his brother’s death, Frank gave himself up. He was tried for murder in Missouri and found not guilty, tried for robbery in Alabama and found not guilty, and finally tried for armed robbery in Missouri and again released. A free man, he retired to a quiet life on his family’s farm, dying in 1915 in the room in which he was born.
Achievements
Scholars and historians have characterized James as one of many criminals inspired by the regional insurgencies of ex-Confederates following the Civil War, rather than as a manifestation of alleged economic justice or of frontier lawlessness. James continues to be one of the most iconic figures from the era, and his life has been dramatized and memorialized numerous times.
Religion
He was both popular in the community and outwardly religious.
Connections
On April 24, 1874, Jesse James married Zerelda Mimms. Together they had four children: a son Jesse, twin boys Gould and Montgomery who died in infancy, and Mary.
