After the Civil War, many former soldiers, especially from the Confederacy, found themselves unemployed, and many who had land lost it during Reconstruction. Many turned to crime as a way to earn a living, and some were more famous and successful than others. Many films and TV shows, as well as books, have dealt with the Wild West outlaws, many times romanticizing the exploits of the famous desperadoes.
But few were as famous and wanted in their lifetime, or as successful, as Frank and Jesse James. Who were Frank and Jesse James? How and why did they start their careers as outlaws? What was it about them that gave them such mass public appeal? Hello, I'm Colin Heaton, former History Professor, Army and Marine Corps Veteran, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History. FIRE! Alexander Franklin Frank James was born on January 10, 1843, and Jesse Woodson James was born on September 5, 1847, in Clay County, Missouri, and they had a younger sister, Susan Lavinia James.
They were of English and Scottish descent. Their father, Robert S. James, was a hemp farmer in Kentucky and also a Baptist minister before coming to Missouri. After he married his wife, Zerelda, he moved to Bradford, Missouri, and bought a 100-acre farm worked by his six slaves.
An educated man, he helped found William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. Robert then headed to California to minister to miners, but died of unknown causes in 1850. Zerelda James later remarried twice, the first to Benjamin Sims in 1852, then, following his death in 1855, to Dr. Reuben Samuel.
Zerelda and Samuel had four children together, becoming the half-siblings of Frank, Jesse, and Susan: Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fannie Quantrell, and Archie Payton Samuel. Zerelda and Samuel bought seven additional slaves who worked on their tobacco farm. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 raised the question of whether slavery would be expanded into the Kansas Territory, which divided the state, and Clay County especially, as most of the residents had southern roots and allegiances.
Many people living in Missouri migrated to Kansas, both pro- and anti-slavery activists, and the violence that evolved on the Kansas-Missouri border was the precursor to the aggravating factors that would later begin the Civil War. When the war broke out, the James-Samuel family sided with the Confederates. Frank James joined a local company, recruited into Drew Lobb's army, and fought at the Battle of Wilson's Creek in August 1861.
Falling ill, he returned home to recuperate, but in 1863 he was recognized and reported as a member of a group of raiders that operated in Clay County. In May 1863, a Union militia company raided the James-Samuel farm looking for Frank's group, torturing Reuben Samuel by hanging him from a tree until he lost consciousness. It was reported that they whipped the 16-year-old Jesse to get information.
Infuriated, Frank and Jesse joined the Confederate raider William T. Bloody Bill Anderson. During a brief engagement, Jesse was shot in the chest but survived. Frank and Jesse James were accused of taking part in the Centralia Massacre in September.
At this point, they joined forces with William Clark Quantrill of the famed Quantrill Raiders. The Centralia Massacre was a raid against a train carrying unarmed Union soldiers returning home on leave, with 22 of them being killed or wounded, and some of the soldiers were scalped and dismembered. They also ambushed Major A. V. E. Johnson's Union troops of around 100 men who were sent to kill or capture them, and killed those survivors who surrendered, who numbered more than 100.
Jesse had personally killed Major Johnson. Becoming infamous, the Union occupation forces were ordered to leave Missouri, and, being civilians, they allowed them to go to Confederate territory, but they moved to Nebraska instead. After William T. Anderson was killed in an ambush, Frank and Jesse went their separate ways.
Frank formally joined William Clark Quantrill in Kentucky, while Jesse went to Texas with Archie Clement, one of Anderson's lieutenants. Jesse returned to Missouri in the spring when he was shot in the chest for the second time while trying to surrender after his group encountered and was surrounded by a Union cavalry patrol near Lexington, Missouri. On February 12, 1866, they committed perhaps the first daylight armed robbery in U.S. history at the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, making off with $60,000 in cash and bonds but killing passerby George Wymore on the street.
State authorities suspected Archie Clement of leading the raid and promptly issued a reward for his capture. In later years, the list of suspects grew to include Jesse and Frank James, Cole Younger, John Jarrett, Oliver Shepard, Bud and Donnie Pence, Frank Gregg, Bill and James Wilkerson, Joab Perry, Ben Cooper, Red Mancus, and Alan Parmer, who later married Susan James, Frank and Jesse's sister. On June 13, 1866, in Jackson County, Missouri, the gang freed two jail members of Quantrill's gang, killing the jailer in the effort.
It was believed that Frank and Jesse James were part of that action. In 1868, the authorities first identified Cole Younger, John Jarrett, Arthur McCoy, George Shepard, and Oliver Shepard as the prime suspects in the robbery of the Nimrod Long Bank in Russellville, Kentucky. Frank and Jesse were not named.
Jesse James himself became famous on December 7, 1869, when he and Frank robbed the Davis County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri. There was little profit, and Jesse is believed to have shot and killed the unarmed cashier, Captain John Sheets. It is believed that he mistakenly thought that Sheets was Samuel P. Cox, who had killed Bloody Bill Anderson during the Civil War.
Jesse and Frank managed to escape right through the middle of a posse chasing them, which brought widespread newspaper coverage of the duo for the first time. In 1882, an 1882 history of Davis County said, Ironically, the only civil case on record involving Frank and Jesse James was filed in the Common Police Court in Davis County in 1870. In that case, Daniel Smoot asked for $223 from Frank and Jesse James to replace a horse saddle and bridle stolen as they fled the robbery of the Davis County Savings Bank.
Frank and Jesse denied the charges, saying they were not in Davis County on December 7, the day the robbery occurred, and when they failed to appear in court, Smoot won his case, although it is not known if the money was ever paid. The robbery in 1869 made Jesse the most famous former Confederate raider, and it was the first time that he was publicly proclaimed an outlaw. In fact, Missouri Governor Thomas T. Crittenden posted a reward for his and Frank's capture.
The press coverage and notoriety started an alliance between Jesse, Frank, and former Confederate cavalryman John Newman Edwards, the editor and founder of the Kansas City Times. Edwards had been campaigning to return former Confederates to political power in Missouri. Six months after the Gallatin robbery, Edwards began publishing letters from Jesse James in his paper, asserting his innocence.
Over time, the letters gradually became more political in tone, and James denounced the Republicans and expressed his pride in his Confederate loyalties. The James brothers soon became symbols of Confederate defiance of Federal Reconstruction policy. The James brothers then joined with Cole Younger and his brothers John, Jim, and Bob, as well as Clell Miller and other former Confederates, becoming the James-Younger gang.
Other members were John Jarrett, who was married to the Younger's sister Jersey, Arthur McCoy, George Shepard, Oliver Shepard, William McDaniel, Tom McDaniel, Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts, William Chadwell, who was also known as Bill Stiles, and Matthew Ace Nelson. They committed several robberies across the country from Iowa to Texas and from Kansas to West Virginia, robbing banks, stagecoaches, and even a county fair in Kansas City, oftentimes committing crimes in front of crowds, and Jesse's personable demeanor during the crimes and joking with astonished witnesses increased his public image. The gang robbed a bank in Columbia, Kentucky, on April 29, 1872, and shot the cashier, R.A.C. Martin, who had refused to open the safe.
Later, on September 23, 1872, it was claimed that Jesse James and Cole and John Younger robbed a ticket booth at the 2nd Annual Kansas City Industrial Exposition, witnessed by thousands of people, getting away with $900. But during the encounter with the ticket seller, a girl was shot in the crossfire. With the exception of the information given by Childs, there was no evidence that James or the Younger brothers were involved.
Once the story broke, Jesse later wrote a letter denying that either he, Frank, or the Youngers were involved, quoting, Cole was furious over this because neither he nor brother John had been linked to the crime before the letter. Kansas City Times editor John Newman Edwards wrote a famous editorial entitled The Chivalry of Crime. Edwards soon published an anonymous letter from one of the outlaws believed to be Jesse that referred to the approaching presidential election.
Just let a party of men commit a bold robbery, and the criers hang them, but President Ulysses S. Grant and his party can steal millions, and it is alright. They rob the poor and rich, and we rob the rich and give to the poor. On May 27, 1873, the James Younger gang robbed the St. Genevieve Savings Association in Missouri.
As they left, they shot in the air and shouted, Hurrah for Hildebrand! This referred to Samuel S. Hildebrand, a famous Confederate raider who had recently been killed in Illinois. On July 21, 1873, they derailed a Rock Island Line train west of Adair, Iowa, taking almost $3,000, about around $76,000 in today's money. For some reason, they wore Ku Klux Klan hoods to hide their identities, probably because the Klan had been suppressed and declared illegal under President Grant's enforcement acts.
The locomotive engineer John Rafferty died in the crash. The outlaws took the money from the express safe in the baggage car, having narrowly missed another train that actually carried a much larger amount of cash. Frank James was later arrested and stood trial, but was found not guilty.
But the James-Younger gang was getting better. Their method of robbing trains evolved, and they only robbed passengers twice, usually only taking whatever was in the safe in the baggage car. These events were covered by John Newman Edwards to create an image of the James-Younger gang as modern-day Robin Hoods, although there is no evidence that the James gang ever shared any of the robbery money outside their personal circle.
In January 1874, they robbed a stagecoach in Beanville Parish, Louisiana, and another suspected stagecoach holed up between Marlboro and Hot Springs, Arkansas. In this latter robbery, the gang returned a pocket watch to a Confederate veteran, saying that Northern men had driven them to outlawry and that they intended to make them pay for it. On January 31st, the gang robbed a train on the Iron Mountain Railway at Gadds Hill, Missouri.
For the first of two times in all their train robberies, the outlaws robbed the passengers. Both robberies targeted the safes in the baggage cars belonging to an express company. In one strange situation that added to their public image was when they examined the hands of the passengers to ensure that they did not rob any working men.
Many newspapers reported this robbery was actually committed by the Arthur McCoy gang. Jesse made sure to telegraph a report of the Gadds Hill robbery to the St. Louis Dispatch Newspaper for publication, as it was good public relations. Jesse then married his cousin Zee on April 24, 1874, and had two children who survived to adulthood, Jesse Edward James, born in 1875, and Mary Susan James, later Barr, born in 1879.
Twins, Gold and Montgomery James, were born in 1878 but died in infancy. Ironically, Jesse James Jr. later became a lawyer who practiced in Kansas City, Missouri, and Los Angeles, California. Due to the railroad and bank losses, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was hired by the Adams Express Company in 1874 in response to the James-Younger gang's activities.
The Pinkertons found locating, let alone capturing, the gang very difficult, as they had a lot of former Confederate support in many states. Pinkerton agent Joseph Whitcher, who went to Zerelda Samuel's farm, was found murdered, and agents Captain Louis J. Lull and John Boyle, who were sent after the Youngers, were both killed. Lull was killed by two of the Younger brothers in a roadside gunfight on March 17, 1874, but Lull, before dying, fatally shot John Younger.
Also killed was Deputy Sheriff Edwin Daniels. The gang next robbed a train on the Kansas Pacific Railroad near Muncie, Kansas, on December 8, 1874, and it was one of their most successful robberies, netting $30,000. Soon after, William Budd McDaniel was captured by a Kansas City police officer, but shot during an escape attempt.
Alan Pinkerton took personal control, working the former Unionists who lived near the James family farm. On the night of January 25, 1875, he led a raid where an incendiary device was thrown into the house, and it exploded, killing James' young half-brother Archie and blowing off one of Zerelda Samuel's arms. Afterward, Pinkerton denied that the raid's intent was arson.
But biographer Ted Yeatman found a letter by Pinkerton in the Library of Congress in which Pinkerton declared his intention to burn the house down. Politics again played a role as former Confederates in the Missouri legislature voted to limit the amount of rewards offered for the gang, especially the James brothers, and even to offer them amnesty. Daniel Askew, who lived near the James farm, was believed to have been killed by the gang on April 12, 1875, for cooperating with the Pinkertons in the January 1875 arson of the James house.
In September 1875, some of the gang went to Huntington, West Virginia, robbing a bank on September 7. Two new members participated: Tom McDaniel, the brother of Bud, and Tom Webb, a Confederate veteran who had been at Lawrence with Frank and Cole. McDaniel was killed by the posse, and Webb was caught. Frank James and Cole Younger managed to escape.
On July 7, 1876, Frank and Jesse James, Cole and Bob Younger, Clell Miller, Charlie Pitch, Bill Chadwell, and Hobbs Carey robbed the Missouri-Pacific Railroad at the Rocky Cut near Otterville, Missouri. Carey was arrested soon after and identified his accomplices. On September 7, 1876, disaster struck when the James Younger gang's robbery of the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, went down at 2 p.m. when they split into two groups.
Three men entered the bank while two guarded the entrance door and three men covered the bridge into and out of town across the square. The cashier Joseph Lee Haywood claimed the safe was secured by a time lock despite having a knife at his throat. In frustration, he was struck on the head by a pistol butt.
The assistant cashier Alonzo Enos Bunker took off through the back door of the bank, catching a bullet in the shoulder for his efforts, while the suspicious men guarding the door drew attention. Some townspeople brought their guns, and they shot two of the five gang members dead and wounded the others. As the robbers left the bank, the unarmed cashier Haywood was shot in the head.
On the way out of town, Swedish immigrant Nikolaus Gustafsson was also killed as the gang's survivors rode out of town and along the way burned 14 Rice County mills. After several days, the gang had not gone beyond the western outskirts of Mankato when they split up, with the Youngers and Pitts on foot moving west until they were cornered in the Hanskaslof Swamp, just south of La Salle, Minnesota, on September 21. Pitts was killed, and the Youngers were again wounded and surrendered, and they pled guilty to murder in order to avoid being hanged.
Frank and Jesse stole horses and escaped through southern Minnesota on the border of the Dakota Territory. This marked the end of the James Younger gang. On September 23, 1876, the Younger brothers were taken to the Rice County Courthouse on November 16, where a grand jury issued indictments for the murders of Joseph Haywood and Nikolaus Gustafsson, bank robbery, and assault with deadly weapons on the wounded bank clerk.
All three brothers pled guilty on November 20, 1876, and were sentenced to life in prison in the Minnesota Territorial Prison at Stillwater. In another strange turn of events, the gang held a captive, William Elroy Curtis, a newspaper reporter. Curtis actually interviewed the gang members, and they allowed him to send his articles to the Chicago Interocean paper.
Frank and Jesse separated from the Youngers and the rest and went to Missouri, but the posse chasing the gang discovered both Youngers and gang member Charlie Pitt, who was killed, and the Youngers were captured. After this, Frank and Jesse assumed the names of B.J. Woodson and Thomas Howard, and Frank took a break from crime, but Jesse created a new gang, including Plow Miller's brother Ed and brothers Robert and Charles Ford. They robbed a bank in Glendale, Missouri, on October 8, 1879.
This robbery started an unprecedented crime wave, including robbing a federal paymaster of a canal project in Killin, Alabama, followed by two more train robberies. Jesse's new gang was not a group of combat veterans and hardcore believers, and they soon turned against each other or volunteered information when captured. On September 3, 1880, Jesse James and Bill Ryan robbed a stagecoach near Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, and then, on October 5, they robbed the store owned by John Dovey in Mercer, Kentucky.
The following year, on March 11, 1881, Jesse, Ryan, and Jesse's cousin Wood Hite robbed a federal paymaster at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, taking $5,240. Not much later, Bill Ryan got drunk and bragged about the robbery and was arrested in Whites Creek near Nashville, Tennessee. Hearing the news, Frank and Jesse returned to Missouri.
His bragging led to Frank James being arrested again, and the gang tried and was found not guilty. On July 15, 1881, Frank and Jesse James, Wood, Clarence Hite, and Dick Little robbed the Rock Island Railroad train station near Winston, Missouri, taking $900. The conductor, William Westfall, and the passenger, John McCullough, were killed in the process.
Then, on September 7, 1881, the gang robbed their last train belonging to the Chicago and Dalton Railroad, robbing the passengers when they found the safe empty. That same day, gang members Creed Chapman and John Bugler were arrested for the robbery and confirmed as having participated in previous robberies from the testimony given by the previously convicted members of the gang, but neither Creed nor Bugler was ever convicted of any crime. As a result of their renewed activity, the governor of Missouri, Thomas T. Crittenden, convinced the state's railroad and express executives to put up the money for a large reward for the capture of the James brothers.
Jesse himself grew suspicious of other members of the gang, scaring one man out of the gang, and many believed that he killed another man whom he distrusted. The remaining gang members then robbed two general stores in Washington in Adams County and Fayette in Jefferson County, Mississippi, netting $2,000 in the second robbery. They sought shelter in abandoned cabins on the Kemp Plantation south of St. Joseph, Louisiana, but they were followed by a posse which attacked and killed two of the gang, but the rest escaped, with Frank and Jesse going back to Tennessee.
Due to local authorities growing suspicious of who they were, they returned to Missouri, and Jesse moved his family to St. Joseph in November 1881, close to their boyhood home. Frank ostensibly went to Virginia to go straight. In December 1881, Wood Hite was killed by Little during a dispute regarding Martha Bolton, the sister of the Ford brothers.
Bob Ford, although not a member of the gang at that time, assisted Little in the shooting of Hite. Ford and Little, with Bolton as an intermediary, made their personal deals with Governor Crittenden and gave up information. On February 11, 1882, James Timberlake arrested Wood Hite's brother Clarence, who made a confession but died of tuberculosis in prison.
As part of his deal, Ford agreed to bring down Jesse James in return for the reward. In the aftermath of their criminal careers, the fates of all the gang members changed forever. On April 3, 1882, Bob Ford paid Jesse James a visit at his rented apartment in St. Joseph, Missouri, and shot him behind the ear.
Both Bob and Charlie Ford then surrendered to the authorities, pleaded guilty, were charged with first-degree murder, convicted, and sentenced to hang. But both men were granted a full pardon by Governor Crittenden. All of this happened in less than 17 hours.
That was apparently part of their deal. The Ford brothers received a small part of the reward and left Missouri. Sheriff James Timberlake and Marshal Henry H. Craig were awarded most of the bounty.
Later, the Ford brothers got into show business and starred in a touring stage show in which they reenacted the shooting of Jesse James. Suffering from tuberculosis, which was then incurable, and having a morphine addiction, Charlie Ford committed suicide on May 6, 1884, in Richmond, Missouri. Bob Ford operated a saloon in Creed, Colorado.
But on June 8, 1892, Edward O'Kelley arrived, entered the saloon, and said, Hello, Bob, before killing Ford with a double-barrel shotgun. O'Kelley was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison, which was commuted because of a 7,000-signature petition supporting his release, and also because he suffered from an undisclosed medical condition. The Governor of Colorado pardoned O'Kelley on October 3, 1902.
On October 4, 1882, Frank James returned and surrendered to Crittenden with the understanding that he would not be extradited to Northfield, Minnesota, for that robbery and murders. Frank James died on February 8, 1915, at age 72. The Youngers remained loyal to the James Brothers while in prison, and never informed on them, despite being offered early release to give statements.
They were model prisoners, and once helped keep other prisoners from escaping during a fire at the prison. Cole Younger founded what is still the longest-running prison newspaper in the country. Bob Younger died in prison of tuberculosis on September 15, 1889, at the age of 36.
Cole and Jim Younger were finally paroled in 1901 on the condition that they remain in Minnesota. Jim Younger committed suicide on October 19, 1902, in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the age of 54, suffering from medical problems and depression. Cole Younger received a pardon in 1903 on the condition that he leave Minnesota and never return.
He went back to Missouri and joined a Wild West show with Frank James, where he died on March 24, 1916, at the age of 72. Jesse James' original grave was on the family farm, but it was later relocated to a small cemetery in Kearney. The original footstone remains, but the family replaced the headstone.
Cyrilda James Samuel apparently wrote the following epitaph for Jesse. In loving memory of my beloved son, murdered by a traitor and coward whose name is not worthy to appear here. James' widow, Zee, died alone and in poverty.
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