Salem Press

American Villains
Jesse James

Western outlaw and gang leader

Born: September 5, 1847; near Centerville (now Kearney), Missouri
Died: April 3, 1882; St. Joseph, Missouri
Also Known As: Jesse Woodson James (full name); Dingus James; Thomas Howard; Ed Everhard; Dave Smith; J. T. Jackson; John Davis Howard; J. D. Howard

Cause of Notoriety: James, leader of the James-Younger Gang, led a sixteen-year lawless rampage and was suspected of robbing banks, trains, omnibuses, stagecoaches, and a state fair, as well as causing the deaths of ten people.

Active: February 13, 1866-September 7, 1881
Locale: Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, and West Virginia

Early Life
Jesse James (JEHS-ee jaymz) began his life as the third child of Robert James and Zerelda James. Robert James was a slave-owning, well-to-do, educated minister who cofounded William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, and several churches in Clay County, Missouri. When Jesse was three, his father left his family for the goldfields of California, where he died and was buried in an unmarked grave. Zerelda, a mother of three children, married Benjamin Simms but divorced him after a few months. Dr. Reuben Samuels became her third and last husband and stepfather to her children.

Little else is known of James's childhood. His teen years were marked by the bloodshed of the Civil War and its devastation of Missouri. He followed the exploits of William Quantrill's guerrillas, who roamed under the Black Flag, indiscriminately plundering and killing both Union and Confederate sympathizers. Frank James, Jesse's older brother, joined the guerrillas, and Jesse followed when he turned seventeen. He participated in the Centralia (Missouri) Massacre, where twenty-five unarmed Union soldiers were lined up and killed. From his days with Quantrill and Quantrill's lieutenant William "Bloody Bill" Anderson, Jesse James learned guerrilla tactics that would later serve him well as the leader of an outlaw gang. His outlawry did not hamper his marriage to his first cousin, Zerelda Mimms, with whom he had two children, Jesse Edwards James and Mary Susan James.

Criminal Career
Following the Civil War, James and Frank, who refused to take the loyalty oath demanded by the United States government, were not granted amnesty for their guerrilla activities. The James brothers gathered their old wartime comrades and formed a gang. Their first target, the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, is considered the first bank in the United States to experience a daytime robbery during peacetime. Over the following fifteen years, the gang netted more than $175,000 from nine banks, seven trains, two stagecoaches, two omnibuses, and one state fair. Rewards for the arrest and conviction of James ranged from three thousand to five thousand dollars. Although the Pinkerton's National Detective Agency and hundreds of posse members chased James and his gang through eight states, he was never captured. Only after Robert and Charles Ford, members of James's gang, met with Missouri governor Thomas T. Crittenden and agreed to kill James did his outlawry end. The Ford brothers waited until James was unarmed and shot him in the back of the head on April 3, 1882.

Impact
For more than one hundred years, Jesse James has been the subject of newspaper and magazine articles, dime novels, ballads, biographies, plays, poems, television series, movies, documentary footage, and an operetta. James, the Missouri farm boy with the alliterative name, became known as an American Robin Hood, an outlaw hero known far beyond his boyhood home. Historians, journalists, and sociologists have pondered how such a man gained such renown.

In post-Civil War Missouri, devastated by guerrilla warfare and Union military actions, James's outlawry resonated with people who had southern sympathies. They believed that James was forced to become an outlaw and that he was merely robbing the rich to give to the poor. Nationally, James appealed to America's sense of individualism, the little man taking on larger forces and escaping to rob another day. James's post-Civil War exploits evidence sociological arguments that societal upheavals are breeding grounds for outlaw hero adulation. In 1927, efforts failed to erect a monument to commemorate James's life, but the number of markers and festivals bearing his name ensure he will not be forgotten.

The violence of the way James lived has been largely forgotten. Beginning with the 1927 film Under the Black Flag, the quasi-historical treatments used by Hollywood have served to anchor James more firmly in a world of fiction than reality, where he remains today.

Further Reading
Brant, Marley. Jesse James: The Man and the Myth. New York: Berkley Books, 1998. Historical treatment that attempts to separate the legend from the reality of James's life.

Dyer, Robert L. Jesse James and the Civil War in Missouri. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. A historian documents the role James played in the Civil War and its influence on his outlaw career.

Kooistra, Paul. Criminals as Heroes: Structure, Power, and Identity. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. A sociologist notes the effect societal crises had on the lawless careers of Frank and Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, John Dillinger, Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow, Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd, and Al Capone.

Settle, William A. Jesse James Was His Name: Or, Fact and Fiction Concerning the Careers of the Notorious James Brothers of Missouri. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966. The first scholarly treatment of James's life traces his outlawry through newspapers, ballads, plays, dime novels, and movies.

Stiles, T. J. Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Well documented, this account depicts James as a nineteenth century terrorist and a public relations hound who politicized and maneuvered his way into infamy.

Cathy M. Jackson

See Also: Apache Kid; Tom Bell; William H. Bonney; Curly Bill Brocius; Bob Dalton; Emmett Dalton; Bill Doolin; John Wesley Hardin; Doc Holliday; Tom Ketchum; Harry Longabaugh; Bill Longley; William Clarke Quantrill; Johnny Ringo; Belle Starr; Hank Vaughan; Cole Younger.