Jesse Woodson James was born on September 5, 1847, in Clay County, Missouri, near what is now Kearney. The region, settled largely by migrants from Kentucky and Tennessee, was known as Little Dixie. James had two siblings: older brother Alexander Franklin, known as Frank, and younger sister Susan. His father, Robert James, a Baptist minister who farmed commercial hemp, died in California during the Gold Rush when Jesse was just three years old.
His mother, Zerelda, remarried twice, eventually settling with Dr. Reuben Samuel, who moved into the family home in 1855. When the Civil War broke out, the James-Samuel family sided with the Confederacy. Frank James joined a local company and fought at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in August 1861 before falling ill and returning home.
In 1863, a Union militia company raided the family farm looking for Frank, who had been identified as a member of a guerrilla squad. During the raid, Reuben Samuel was tortured by being briefly hanged from a tree, and legend holds that young Jesse was whipped. Guerrilla warfare between Confederate bushwhackers and Union forces devastated Missouri, with atrocities committed on both sides. Frank James escaped capture and was thought to have joined the guerrilla organization led by William Quantrill.
Over the winter of 1863 to 1864, Frank accompanied Quantrill to Texas and returned in the spring with a squad led by Fletch Taylor. Jesse, then 16, joined his brother in Taylor’s group after their return to Clay County. After Taylor was severely wounded in the summer of 1864, the James brothers joined the bushwhacker gang led by William “Bloody Bill” Anderson. That summer, Jesse suffered a serious chest wound.
According to the Clay County provost marshal, both Frank and Jesse took part in the Centralia massacre in September 1864, when guerrillas stopped a train carrying unarmed Union soldiers and killed or wounded 22 of them. The guerrillas scalped and dismembered some of the dead and later ambushed a pursuing Union regiment, killing more than 100 men who tried to surrender. Jesse was identified as the man who fatally shot Major Johnson, who led the Union troops. Because of the brothers’ activities, Union military authorities forced the family to leave Clay County.
The James brothers split up after Bloody Bill Anderson was killed in an ambush in October 1864. Jesse went to Texas under the command of Archie Clements, one of Anderson’s lieutenants, while Frank followed Quantrill into Kentucky. Jesse suffered a second life-threatening chest wound at age 17 when he was shot while attempting to surrender after encountering a Union cavalry patrol near Lexington, Missouri. He was treated at his uncle’s boarding house by his first cousin, Zerelda Amanda Mims, who had been named after Jesse’s mother.
After the war, Clements maintained his bushwhacker gang and began harassing Republican officials. On February 13, 1866, these men were the most likely perpetrators of the first daylight armed bank robbery in the United States during peacetime: the robbery of the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri. It remains unclear whether Jesse and Frank took part, with no evidence connecting them to the crime or conclusively ruling them out. Local violence continued to rise.
On June 13, 1866, the gang killed a jailer while freeing two of Quantrill’s former prisoners. Archie Clements occupied Lexington, Missouri, on Election Day in 1866, but was killed shortly after by state militia. Over the next two years, the survivors of his gang continued committing bank robberies, though their numbers dwindled due to arrests, gunfights, and lynchings. The gang robbed a bank in Richmond, Missouri, on May 23, 1867, killing the mayor and two others.
Seven years later, an eyewitness who knew the brothers told a newspaper he positively and emphatically recognized Jesse and Frank among the robbers. Frank and Jesse allegedly also assisted Cole Younger in robbing a bank in Russellville, Kentucky, in 1868. Jesse James first gained notoriety on December 7, 1869, when he and most likely Frank robbed the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri. Although the robbery was unsuccessful, Jesse is suspected of shooting and killing cashier Captain John Sheets, mistaking him for Samuel P.
Cox, the militia officer who had killed Bloody Bill Anderson during the Civil War. The robbery marked the first time Jesse was publicly referred to as an outlaw, and Missouri Governor Thomas T. Crittenden set a reward for his capture. It also began a partnership with John Newman Edwards, editor and founder of the Kansas City Times, whose admiring editorials and Jesse’s letters helped make Jesse a symbol of Confederate defiance of federal Reconstruction policy.
The James brothers teamed up with Cole Younger, his brothers, and other former Confederates to form the James-Younger Gang, with Jesse as its most public member. The gang committed a series of robberies from Iowa to Texas and from Kansas to West Virginia, targeting banks, stagecoaches, and even a fair in Kansas City, often in front of large crowds. They turned to train robbery on July 21, 1873, derailing a Rock Island train west of Adair, Iowa, and stealing approximately $3,000. Later train robberies had a lighter touch, with the gang taking only the contents of the express safe in the baggage car.
Although Edwards cultivated a Robin Hood image for James, there is no evidence the gang ever shared any robbery money outside their personal circle. On April 24, 1874, Jesse married his cousin, Zerelda, and the couple had four children, two of whom died in infancy. The Adams Express Company hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1874 to track down the gang. The Chicago-based agency struggled because many former Confederate soldiers in Missouri supported the gang.
An agent sent to infiltrate the family farm was soon found dead. Captain Louis J. Lull and John Boyle were dispatched to track down the Youngers; Lull was killed in a roadside gunfight on March 17, 1874, after fatally shooting John Younger. The case became a personal vendetta for Alan Pinkerton, the agency’s founder.
Detectives staged a home invasion in which they threw an incendiary device into the James family house. The device exploded, killing Jesse’s young half-brother Archie and blowing off one of Zerelda’s arms. The raid outraged many residents, and the Missouri legislature narrowly defeated a bill that praised and offered amnesty to the James and Younger brothers. The legislature did vote to limit the size of fugitive rewards the governor could offer, providing some protection by lowering the incentive to capture the gang.
The James-Younger Gang attempted to raid the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, on September 7, 1876. Inside the bank, acting cashier Joseph Lee Haywood refused to open the safe, falsely claiming it was secured by a time lock, even as robbers held a Bowie knife to his throat and cracked his skull with a pistol butt. Outside, suspicious residents raised the alarm. The five bandits fired into the air to clear the streets, but the townspeople fired back from safe positions, killing two bandits and injuring the others.
As the gang fled, one of them shot the unarmed cashier Haywood in the head. The James brothers barely escaped and split from the rest of the group, fleeing to Missouri. A substantial manhunt ensued. The militia quickly discovered the Youngers and another bandit, Charlie Pitts, who was killed in a gunfight.
The Youngers were imprisoned. The James-Younger Gang was destroyed, with only Frank and Jesse remaining. Later that year, Jesse and Frank appeared in Nashville, Tennessee, under the aliases Thomas Howard and B. J.
Woodson. Frank seemed to settle down, but Jesse remained agitated. In 1879, he formed a new gang and returned to crime, holding up a train in Glendale, Missouri, on October 8, 1879. The robbery began a crime spree, but the new gang lacked battle-hardened guerrillas.
Members soon turned against each other or were captured. With his gang nearly destroyed, James relied solely on the Ford brothers, Charlie and Robert. Jesse asked the Fords to move in with him and his family for protection. Unbeknownst to him, Bob Ford had secretly negotiated with Governor Crittenden, who had made capturing the James brothers his top priority.
In his inaugural address, Crittenden declared that no political motives could keep them from justice. He turned to railroad and express corporations to put up a $5,000 bounty for the delivery of each brother, plus an additional $5,000 for their conviction, since a state law prohibited him from offering a large reward himself. On April 3, 1882, after breakfast, the Fords and Jesse went into the living room before traveling to Platte City for a robbery. Jesse had just learned that gang member Dick Liddil had confessed to involvement in the murder of a man who was an outlaw and a cousin of Frank and Jesse.
Suspicious that the Fords had not informed him, Jesse did not confront them. He crossed the room and placed his revolvers on a sofa, then climbed onto a chair to clean a dusty picture above the mantelpiece. Unarmed, Jesse James was shot in the back of the head by Robert Ford.