JESSE WOODSON JAMES, BEING AT OUTLAW IN THE 19TH

Jesse James

Saturday afternoon is usually a typical day to watch a western film on TV. Today, The Grandma has been watching The True Story of Jesse James (1957), a film performed by Robert Wagner. Hollywood versions of True Story are never accurate and in that case, any similarity to the true is purely accidental.

The Grandma has been thinking in how many films about far west stories are totally wrong and out of real events, especially those films with a broken and distorted point of view about Native American Tribes. The film explains its particular vision of Jesse James, the American outlaw, bank and train robber, guerrilla, and leader of the James–Younger Gang who become a myth in the 19th century.

The Grandma loves folk music and she has compared the film with Pete Seeger and The Ramblin' Riversiders' songs written about the figure of Jesse James, versions much more similar to the original and true story of this man, who is a legend of the American history currently and commited his first confirmed bank robbery on a day like today in 1869.

Before watching The True Story of Jesse James, The Grandma has been reading a new chapter of Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic while she has been listening to Bruce Springsteen with Session Band's Jesse James.

Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1847-April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw, bank and train robber, guerrilla, and leader of the James–Younger Gang.

Raised in the Little Dixie area of western Missouri, James and his family maintained strong Southern sympathies. He and his brother Frank James joined pro-Confederate guerrillas known as bushwhackers operating in Missouri and Kansas during the American Civil War. As followers of William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, they were accused of participating in atrocities against Union soldiers and civilian abolitionists, including the Centralia Massacre in 1864.

After the war, as members of various gangs of outlaws, Jesse and Frank robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains across the Midwest, gaining national fame and often popular sympathy despite the brutality of their crimes.

More information: Historic Missourians

The James brothers were most active as members of their own gang from about 1866 until 1876, when as a result of their attempted robbery of a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, several members of the gang were captured or killed. They continued in crime for several years afterward, recruiting new members, but came under increasing pressure from law enforcement seeking to bring them to justice.

Jesse James

On April 3, 1882, Jesse James was shot and killed by Robert Ford, a new recruit to the gang who hoped to collect a reward on James' head and a promised amnesty for his previous crimes. Already a celebrity in life, James became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death.

Despite popular portrayals of James as an embodiment of Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, there is no evidence that he and his gang shared any loot from their robberies with anyone outside their close kinship network. 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.

Jesse Woodson James was born on September 5, 1847, in Clay County, Missouri, near the site of present-day Kearney. This area of Missouri was largely settled by people from the Upper South, especially Kentucky and Tennessee, and became known as Little Dixie for this reason. James had two full siblings: his elder brother, Alexander Franklin "Frank" James, and a younger sister, Susan Lavenia James. His father, Robert S. James, farmed commercial hemp in Kentucky and was a Baptist minister before coming to Missouri. After he married, he migrated to Bradford, Missouri and helped found William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. He held six slaves and more than 0.40 km2 of farmland.

More information: National Geographic

Robert traveled to California during the Gold Rush to minister to those searching for gold; he died there when James was three years old. After Robert'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 family home. Jesse's mother and Samuel had four children together: Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fannie Quantrell, and Archie Peyton Samuel. Zerelda and Samuel acquired a total of seven slaves, who served mainly as farmhands in tobacco cultivation.

The approach of the American Civil War loomed large in the James–Samuel household. Missouri was a border state, sharing characteristics of both North and South, but 75% of the population was from the South or other border states.

Clay County in particular was strongly influenced by the Southern culture of its rural pioneer families.

Farmers raised the same crops and livestock as in the areas from which they had migrated. They brought slaves with them and purchased more according to their needs. The county counted more slaveholders and more slaves than most other regions of the state; in Missouri as a whole, slaves accounted for only 10 percent of the population, but in Clay County they constituted 25 percent.

Jesse & Frank James

Aside from slavery, the culture of Little Dixie was Southern in other ways as well. This influenced how the population acted during and for a period of time after the war.

After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, Clay County became the scene of great turmoil, as the question of whether slavery would be expanded into the neighboring Kansas Territory bred tension and hostility. Many people from Missouri migrated to Kansas to try to influence its future. Much of the dramatic build-up to the Civil War centered on the violence that erupted on the Kansas–Missouri border between pro- and anti-slavery militias.

After a series of campaigns and battles between conventional armies in 1861, guerrilla warfare gripped Missouri, waged between secessionist bushwhackers and Union forces which largely consisted of local militias known as jayhawkers. A bitter conflict ensued, resulting in an escalating cycle of atrocities committed by both sides. Confederate guerrillas murdered civilian Unionists, executed prisoners, and scalped the dead. The Union presence enforced martial law with raids on homes, arrests of civilians, summary executions, and banishment of Confederate sympathizers from the state.

The James–Samuel family sided with the Confederates at the outbreak of war. Frank James joined a local company recruited for the secessionist Drew Lobbs Army, and fought at the Battle of Wilson's Creek in August 1861. He fell ill and returned home soon afterward. In 1863, he was identified as a member of a guerrilla squad that operated in Clay County. In May of that year, a Union militia company raided the James–Samuel farm looking for Frank's group. They tortured Reuben Samuel by briefly hanging him from a tree. According to legend, they lashed young Jesse.

As a result of the James brothers' activities, Union military authorities forced their family to leave Clay County.

More information: All That's Interesting

Though ordered to move South beyond Union lines, they moved north across the nearby state border into Nebraska Territory.

After Bloody Bill Anderson was killed in an ambush in October, the James brothers separated. Frank followed Quantrill into Kentucky, while Jesse went to Texas under the command of Archie Clement, one of Anderson's lieutenants. He is known to have returned to Missouri in the spring. At the age of 17, Jesse suffered the second of two life-threatening chest wounds when he was shot while trying to surrender after they ran into a Union cavalry patrol near Lexington, Missouri.

At the end of the Civil War, Missouri remained deeply divided. The conflict split the population into three bitterly opposed factions: anti-slavery Unionists, identified with the Republican Party; segregationist conservative Unionists, identified with the Democratic Party; and pro-slavery, ex-Confederate secessionists, many of whom were also allied with the Democrats, especially in the southern part of the state.

The Republican-dominated Reconstruction legislature passed a new state constitution that freed Missouri's slaves. 

Frank & Jesse James

It temporarily excluded former Confederates from voting, serving on juries, becoming corporate officers, or preaching from church pulpits. The atmosphere was volatile, with widespread clashes between individuals and between armed gangs of veterans from both sides of the war.

Jesse recovered from his chest wound at his uncle's boardinghouse in Harlem, Missouri north across the Missouri River from the City of Kansas' River Quay, changed to Kansas City in 1889. He was tended to by his first cousin, Zerelda Zee Mimms, named after Jesse's mother. Jesse and his cousin began a nine-year courtship that culminated in their marriage. Meanwhile, his former commander Archie Clement kept his bushwhacker gang together and began to harass Republican authorities.

Jesse James did not become well known until December 7, 1869, when he and most likely Frank robbed the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri.

The robbery netted little money. Jesse is believed to have shot and killed the cashier, Captain John Sheets, mistakenly believing him to be Samuel P. Cox, the militia officer who had killed Bloody Bill Anderson during the Civil War.

More information: RDR Online

The 1869 robbery marked the emergence of Jesse James as the most famous survivor of the former Confederate bushwhackers. It was the first time he was publicly labeled an outlaw; Missouri Governor Thomas T. Crittenden set a reward for his capture. This was the beginning of an alliance between James and John Newman Edwards, editor and founder of the Kansas City Times. Edwards, a former Confederate cavalryman, was campaigning to return former secessionists to power in Missouri.

Six months after the Gallatin robbery, Edwards published the first of many letters from Jesse James to the public, asserting his innocence. Over time, the letters gradually became more political in tone, as James denounced the Republicans and expressed his pride in his Confederate loyalties.

Together with Edwards's admiring editorials, the letters helped James become a symbol of Confederate defiance of federal Reconstruction policy. The high tensions in politics accompanied his outlaw career and enhanced his notoriety.

On September 7, 1876, the opening day of hunting season in Minnesota, the James–Younger gang attempted a raid on the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota. The robbery quickly went wrong, however, and after the robbery, only Frank and Jesse James remained alive and free.

Jesse James Wanted

In 1879, the James gang robbed two stores in far western Mississippi, at Washington in Adams County and Fayette in Jefferson County. The gang absconded with $2,000 cash in the second robbery and took shelter in abandoned cabins on the Kemp Plantation south of St. Joseph, Louisiana. A law enforcement posse attacked and killed two of the outlaws but failed to capture the entire gang. Among the deputies was Jefferson B. Snyder, later a long-serving district attorney in northeastern Louisiana.

By 1881, with local Tennessee authorities growing suspicious, the brothers returned to Missouri, where they felt safer. James moved his family to St. Joseph, Missouri in November 1881, not far from where he had been born and reared. Frank, however, decided to move to safer territory and headed east to settle in Virginia. They intended to give up crime. The James gang had been reduced to the two of them.

With his gang nearly annihilated, James trusted only the Ford brothers, Charley and Robert. On April 3, 1882, after eating breakfast, the Fords and Jameses went into the living room before traveling to Platte City for a robbery. From the newspaper, James had just learned that gang member Dick Liddil had confessed to participating in Wood Hite's murder. He was suspicious that the Fords had not told him about it. Robert Ford later said he believed that James had realized they were there to betray him. Instead of confronting them, James walked across the living room and laid his revolvers on a sofa. He turned around and noticed a dusty picture above the mantle, and stood on a chair to clean it. Robert Ford drew his weapon, and shot the unarmed Jesse James in the back of the head. James's two previous bullet wounds and partially missing middle finger served to positively identify the body.

More information: Washington Examiner

The death of Jesse James became a national sensation. The Fords made no attempt to hide their role. Robert Ford wired the governor to claim his reward. Crowds pressed into the little house in St. Joseph to see the dead bandit. The Ford brothers surrendered to the authorities and were dismayed to be charged with first-degree murder. In the course of a single day, the Ford brothers were indicted, pleaded guilty, were sentenced to death by hanging, and were granted a full pardon by Governor Crittenden. The governor's quick pardon suggested he knew the brothers intended to kill James rather than capture him. 

The implication that the chief executive of Missouri conspired to kill a private citizen startled the public and added to James's notoriety.

After receiving a small portion of the reward, the Fords fled Missouri. Sheriff James Timberlake and Marshal Henry H. Craig, who were law enforcement officials active in the plan, were awarded the majority of the bounty. Later the Ford brothers starred in a touring stage show in which they re-enacted the shooting. Public opinion was divided between those against the Fords for murdering Jesse, and those of the opinion that it had been time for the outlaw to be stopped.

Suffering from tuberculosis, then incurable, and a morphine addiction, Charley Ford committed suicide on May 6, 1884, in Richmond, Missouri. Bob Ford operated a tent saloon in Creede, Colorado.

On June 8, 1892, Edward O'Kelley went to Creede, loaded a double-barrel shotgun, entered Ford's saloon and said Hello, Bob, before shooting Ford in the throat, killing him instantly. O'Kelley was sentenced to life in prison, but his sentence was subsequently commuted because of a 7,000-signature petition in favor of his release and a medical condition. The Governor of Colorado pardoned him on October 3, 1902.

James's original grave was on his family property, but he was later moved to a cemetery in Kearney. The original footstone is still there, although the family has replaced the headstone. James's mother Zerelda Samuel wrote the following epitaph for him: In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here. James' widow Zerelda Mimms James died alone and in poverty.

More information: CNN

No, I think it taught me to be independent and never expect

a handout and never wait for anybody to hand you

anything in any aspect of my life.

Jesse James