Jesse James

Jesse James 

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Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1847 – April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw and the most famous member of the James-Younger Gang. After his death, he became a legendary figure of the Wild West.

Contents1 Early life2 Civil War3 After the Civil War5 Downfall of the Gang6 Assassination

Early lifeJesse Woodson James was born in Clay County, Missouri, near the site of present day Kearney. His father, Robert James, was a commercial hemp farmer and Baptist minister from Kentucky who helped found William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. Robert James traveled to California during the Gold Rush and died there when Jesse was three years old. After his father's death, his mother Zerelda remarried, first to Benjamin Simms, and then to a doctor named Reuben Samuel. After their marriage in 1855, Samuel moved into the James home. Jesse had two full siblings: his older brother, Alexander Franklin "Frank" James, and a younger sister, Susan Lavenia James. In addition, Reuben and Zerelda eventually had four children: Sarah Louisa Samuel (sometimes Sarah Ellen), John Thomas Samuel, Fannie Quantrell Samuel, and Archie Peyton Samuel.

The James-Samuel family took the Confederate side at the outset of the war. Frank James joined a local company recruited for the secessionist Missouri State Guard, and fought at the battle of Wilson's Creek, though 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, and according to legend beat the young Jesse. Frank escaped. He is believed to have joined the guerrilla organization led by William C. Quantrill, and to have taken part in the notorious massacre of some 200 men and boys in Lawrence, Kansas. Contrary to legend, there is no evidence that Jesse ever rode with Quantrill's Raiders, as they would later be known.

Frank followed Quantrill to Texas over the winter of 1863–4, and returned in the spring in a squad commanded by Fletch Taylor. When they arrived in Clay County, the sixteen-year-old Jesse joined them. In the summer of 1864, Taylor was severely wounded, losing his right arm to a shotgun blast, and Frank and Jesse joined the bushwhacker group led by Bloody Bill Anderson. Though Jesse suffered a serious wound to the chest that summer, the Clay County provost marshal reported that both Frank and Jesse took part in the Centralia Massacre in September, in which some twenty-two unarmed Union troops were shot dead. The guerrillas ambushed and defeated a pursuing regiment of federal troops, shooting dead all who tried to surrender. As a result of the James brother's activities, their family was exiled from the state of Missouri by the Union military authorities. Anderson was killed in an ambush in October. Frank followed Quantrill into Kentucky, and Jesse went to Texas under the command of one of Anderson's lieutenants, Archie Clement. They returned to Missouri in the spring. Contrary to legend, Jesse James was not shot while trying to surrender; rather, as biographer Ted P. Yeatman shows, he and Clement were still trying to decide on what course to follow after the Confederate surrender when they ran into a Union cavalry patrol, and Jesse suffered a life-threatening chest wound.

After the Civil WarThe end of the Civil War left Missouri in shambles. The conflict split the population into three bitterly opposed factions: antislavery radical Unionists, who became the Republicans; the proslavery conservative Unionists, who became the Democrats; and the secessionists. The radicals had pushed through a new state constitution that freed Missouri's slaves but excluded the former Confederates from voting, serving on juries, becoming corporate officers, or even preaching from church pulpits. The atmosphere was volatile, with widespread violence between individuals, armed gangs of radicals, and those bushwhackers who remained under arms.

Jesse, bed-ridden with his chest wound, was tended to by his first cousin, Zerelda "Zee" Mimms, named after his own mother, who remained in exile in Nebraska until August 1865. Jesse and Zee began a prolonged courtship, leading to their marriage nine years later. Meanwhile, Jesse's commander, Archie Clement, kept his bushwhacker gang together, and began to harass radical authorities. These men were the likely culprits in the first armed bank robbery in the United States in peacetime, by holding up the Clay County Savings Association in the town of Liberty, Missouri, on February 13, 1866. As biographer T. J. Stiles shows, this bank was owned by radical former militia officers, who had recently conducted the first Republican Party rally in Clay County's history. One innocent bystander, a student of William Jewell College, was shot dead on the street during the gang's escape. It remains unclear whether Jesse and Frank James took part; it has been argued that Jesse remained bedridden with his wound, and no concrete evidence has surfaced to connect either brother to the crime. Archie Clement, however, continued his career of crime and harassment of the radical government, to the extent of occupying the town of Lexington, Missouri, on election day in 1866. The state militia shot Clement dead shortly afterward, an event that Jesse wrote about with bitterness a decade later.

The survivors of Clement's gang continued to conduct bank robberies over the next two years, though their numbers dwindled through arrests, gunfights, and lynchings. On May 23, 1867, for example, they robbed a bank in Richmond, Missouri in which the town's mayor and two others were killed . It remains uncertain whether either of the James brothers took part. In 1868, Frank and Jesse James allegedly joined Cole Younger in robbing a bank at Russellville, Kentucky. Jesse did not become famous, however, until December 1869, when he and Frank (most likely) robbed the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri. The robbery netted little, but James (it appears) shot and killed the cashier, mistakenly believing the man to be Samuel P. Cox, the militia officer who killed "Bloody Bill" Anderson during the Civil War. James's self-proclaimed attempt at revenge, 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 James's emergence as the most famous of the former guerrillas turned outlaw, 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 Confederate defiance of Reconstruction through his elaborate editorials and favorable reporting. He also reported false information to throw law enforcement off the bandits' trail. 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, Bob and Jim, 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 bystanders. 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, because he typically limited himself to the express safe in the baggage car. Such techniques fostered the Robin Hood image that Edwards was creating in his newspapers.

Downfall of the GangJesse and his cousin Zee married on April 24, 1874, and had two children who survived to adulthood: Jesse James, Jr. (b. 1875), and Mary Susan James (b. 1879). Twins Gould James (b. 1878), and Montgomery James (b. 1878), died in infancy. His surviving son Jesse Jr. was raised by his mother to become a lawyer, and spent his career as a respected member of the bar in Kansas City, Missouri.

On September 7, 1876, the James-Younger gang attempted their most daring raid to date, on the First National Bank of 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. Ames, as it turns out, was a stockholder in the bank, but Butler had no direct connection to it.

The gang divided into two groups. Three men entered the bank, and two guarded the door outside, and three remained near a bridge across an adjacent square. The robbery was thwarted when acting cashier 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. Meanwhile, the citizens of Northfield grew suspicious of the men guarding the door and raised the alarm. The five bandits outside fired in the air to clear the streets, which merely drove the townspeople to take cover and fire back from protected positions. Two bandits were shot dead and the rest were wounded in the barrage. Inside, the flummoxed outlaws turned to flee. As they left, one shot the unarmed Heywood in the head. The identity of the shooter has been the subject of extensive speculation and debate, but remains uncertain.

The gang barely escaped Northfield, leaving their two dead companions behind along with two innocent victims (Heywood and a Swedish immigrant named Nicholas Gustafson). A massive manhunt ensued. The James brothers eventually split from the others and escaped to Missouri. 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 went to the Nashville, Tennessee area, where they went by the names of Thomas Howard and B. J. Woodson, respectively. 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 old, battle-hardened guerrillas; they soon turned against each other or were captured, while James 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.

AssassinationWith 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 declared 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, after eating breakfast, the Fords and James prepared for departure for another robbery, going in and out of the house to prepare the horses. It was an unusually hot day; James removed his coat, then declared that he should remove his firearms as well, lest he look suspicious. James noticed a dusty picture on the wall and stood on a chair to clean it. Bob Ford took advantage of the opportunity, and shot James in the back of the head.[17]

The assassination proved a national sensation. The Fords made no attempt to hide their role. Indeed, Robert Ford wired the governor to claim his reward. As crowds pressed into the little house in St. Joseph to see the dead bandit, the Ford brothers surrendered to the authorities, but they were dismayed to find they were charged with first degree murder. The Ford brothers were tried and convicted. They were sentenced to death by hanging, but within two hours were granted a full pardon by the Governor of Missouri.

The governor's quick pardon suggested that he may have been 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 in James.

The Fords received a portion of the reward (some of it also went to law enforcement officials active in the plan) and fled Missouri. 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 later killed by a shotgun blast to the throat in his tent saloon in Creede, Colorado, on June 8, 1892. His killer, Edward Capehart O'Kelley, was sentenced to life in prison. Because of a medical condition, O'Kelley's sentence was commuted, and he was released on October 3, 1902.

Jesse James’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.