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Robert James traveled to California to prospect for gold and died
there while Jesse was three years old.
After his father's death, his mother Zerelda remarried, first to
James Simms, and then to a doctor named Reuben Samuel. After their
marriage in 1855, Samuel moved into the James home.
In
the tumultuous years leading up to the Civil War, Zerelda and Reuben
acquired a total of seven slaves and grew tobacco on their well-appointed
farm. In addition to Jesse's older brother, Alexander Franklin “Frank”
James and younger sister Susan Lavenia James, Jesse gained four
half-siblings: Archie Peyton Samuel, John Thomas Samuel, Fannie Quantrell
Samuel, and Sarah Louisa Samuel (sometimes Sarah Ellen.) Sarah later
married a man named John C. Harmon.
Civil War
In
1863, at the age of sixteen, Jesse joined his brother Frank in Quantrill's
Raiders. Quantrill's Raiders were an irregular guerrilla group of the
Civil War that terrorized anti-slavery and pro-Union families and farms in
Missouri, most notably in the 1863 massacre of 150 unarmed people in
Lawrence, Kansas.
Bandit Career
The
end of the Civil War left Missouri in shambles.
The pro-Union Radical Republicans 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 (named
after his own mother), nursed him back to health and he started a
nine-year courtship with her. Meanwhile,
some of his old war 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. They 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 definitely joined their old friends in
outlawry, when they joined Cole Younger in robbing a bank in Russellville,
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 and killed the cashier,
mistakenly believing the man to be Samuel P. 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 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 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.
Pinkertons Go after the
gang
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 right 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.
The Beginning of the
End
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,
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. By this time, the citizens of Northfield had taken notice and
were arriving with guns. Before
leaving the bank, Frank shot the unarmed Heywood in the head. The bandits who had entered the bank exited with only a small
amount of money, only to find the men standing guard outside, 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 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.
With
his gang depleted 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.
Jesse
James Murdered
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 the several passers-by. Seizing the opportunity, the Fords
drew their revolvers. Bob was the fastest, firing a shot into Jesse's
back.
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 a 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 committed suicide in May 1884. Bob
Ford was killed, by shotgun blast, in his saloon in Creede, Colorado, on
June 8, 1892. (His killer, Edward Capehart O'Kelley, was sentenced to
eight years in prison for avenging the man whom even Theodore Roosevelt
called "America's Robin Hood".)
Jesse’s
epitaph, selected by his mother, reads: In Loving Memory of my Beloved
Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear
Here.
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