James, Jesse (1847–1882), legendary midwestern bandit.Born near Kearney, Missouri, Jesse James and his brother Frank were “bushwhackers” (irregular Confederate guerrillas who attacked Union facilities) during the
Civil War. After the war, the James brothers' gang took up robbery and murder in Missouri and neighboring states. As newspaper articles and dime novels romanticized and justified his crimes, Jesse became famous. To defeated southerners, tales of former Confederate soldiers robbing Yankee banks and trains meant striking back at the enemy. Later, antirailroad sentiment enhanced his image. For the next fifteen years, as the James gang robbed banks and trains, an American Robin Hood legend was born. In a failed bank holdup in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1876, two gang members were killed and three others, the notorious Younger brothers, were later captured and given long prison terms. The James brothers, however, escaped. In 1882, living as “Thomas Howard” in St. Joseph, Missouri, with his wife and two children, James was in his home planning the next bank robbery when Bob Ford, a new gang member who was secretly working for the Missouri governor, shot him in the back. According to the later folk song, Ford was “that dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard, and laid poor Jesse in his grave.”
Little evidence suggests that Jesse James robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, or that he espoused lofty social ideals, but his
folklore image as an unvanquished hero of the defeated
South endured. Others, perhaps bored with their own humdrum existence, envied the exciting life he led and the fame he attained.
Bibliography
Paul I. Wellman , A Dynasty of Western Outlaws, 1961.
William A. Settle Jr. , Jesse James Was His Name, 1977.
David E. Conrad
