Everybody's heard of the legendary outlaw Jesse James thanks to the many movies and
TV shows dramatizing his life.
But how much of the legend is true, and how much is nonsense?
This is the life and tragic death of Jesse James.
The man who would become a fearsome outlaw started out like everyone else - first and
foremost, as a baby.
He was born Jesse Woodson James to the Reverend Robert James, a Baptist minister and successful
farmer, and Zerelda Cole James in Kearney, Missouri on September 5, 1847.
According to History, Robert died in the fall or winter of 1850, on a trip to preach in
the goldfields of California.
A widow at the age of 28 with three children to feed, Zerelda knew that finding another
husband was key to her survival.
She married Benjamin Simms in 1852 and after he died just two years later, Zerelda married
Reuben Samuel in 1855.
The world of the James children was rocked by their father's death, their mother's poverty,
and her subsequent marriages.
Things only got more complicated when, in 1863, a group of Union militiamen converged
on the family farm.
They were looking for Jesse's brother Frank, who was a member of a Confederate guerrilla
gang commonly known as 'bushwhackers’ which engaged in attacking Union sympathizers as
the Civil War raged.
Young Jesse was ambushed and whipped by militia soldiers, and Reuben Samuel was hanged from
a tree and tortured.
Samuel survived, but Jesse became determined to join his brother and fight for the South.
Soon after the attack on the family farm, Jesse James joined the war.
The National Park Service's documentation of the Civil War confirms that Jesse signed
up with the Confederate 4th Regiment of the Missouri Infantry.
Within a year he had joined his brother Frank, whose guerrilla gang was headed by William
"Bloody Bill" Anderson.
In September of 1864, the notorious group robbed a Union congressman, James S. Collins,
before raiding a Union passenger train.
On board were 22 furloughed soldiers who had surrendered, according to History.
Anderson's gang ordered the men from the train, and mercilessly murdered each of them.
The Union 39th Missouri Volunteer Infantry set out in pursuit of Anderson's gang, but
was ambushed at Centralia, Missouri by the guerrillas.
Anderson's men killed over 100 soldiers.
The bodies of the dead were mutilated, while the survivors were brutally tortured.
The battle, in which both Frank and Jesse participated, was later called the Centralia
Massacre.
Jesse was only 16-years-old.
In May of 1865, Jesse was outside of Lexington, Missouri when he was shot in the chest.
His cousin, Zerelda Mimm, nursed him back to health.
But the atrocities Jesse and Frank committed during the war were considered so terrible
that the family had to leave Clay County.
James' experiences during the Civil War would result in some post-traumatic stress disorder
of the worst kind.
Unable to return to a normal life, the young man turned to a life of crime instead.
According to History, James' first widely-publicized bank robbery occurred in 1869, and went terribly
wrong.
The robbery took place in Gallatin, Missouri, where James thought he recognized the cashier
as Samuel Cox - the man who had managed to kill James' army buddy Bloody Bill Anderson
in 1864.
So James shot him to death.
But the cashier was not Cox, rendering his killing even more senseless and brutal.
Worse yet, the bounty James snatched up on his way out the door turned out to be a portfolio
of bank stationery, not money.
As news of James' activities went public, pro-Confederate newspaper editor John Newman
Edwards decided to spice up his own paper with sensational stories about the murderer
and would-be bank robber.
Edwards published articles portraying Jesse James as a hero who used his ill-gotten gains
to help the poor, while James himself penned letters to the editor defending himself.
Readers got their dime-novel fodder, while Edwards used the stories to inspire his fellow
Confederates to regain political power.
America bought the story, although no evidence has ever been uncovered to substantiate Edwards'
claims that James was a 19th century Robin Hood.
Jesse James would commit more robberies over time.
According to PBS, by June of 1871 he had hooked up with the notorious Younger Brothers gang
and robbed another bank in Corydon, Iowa.
James discovered that most of the locals were attending a speech by orator Henry Clay Dean
at the Methodist Church.
After swiping $6,000 from the bank, the gang busted into the church and angrily taunted
the crowd with the money.
James also started robbing trains and leaving his own press releases at the crime scenes.
Many of James' robberies turned violent: At another bank holdup in Kentucky during 1872,
the unarmed cashier was shot but refused to open the vault even as he was dying.
A more successful robbery, a train at Gads Hill, Missouri, took place in 1874.
Three months after the Gads Hill Robbery, Jesse married Zerelda "Zee" Mimms, the cousin
who took care of him after he was shot in 1865.
After the train robbery, Pinkerton's National Detective Agency was brought in.
According to History, agents snuck up to Zerelda and Reuben Samuel's farm in the dead of night
on January 25, 1875 and tossed a bomb into the house.
In the resulting explosion James' 8-year-old half brother was killed, and his mother lost
her arm.
Worse yet, the James boys were nowhere near the farm.
In March of 1875, a sympathetic group of citizens rallied for an amnesty bill to release the
James brothers from all guilt.
The bill made it to the General Assembly, but failed to meet the two thirds majority
vote necessary for the bill to pass.
James, who had fled with his family to Tennessee, continued pushing for amnesty.
He was likely inspired by the impending birth of his first child, Jesse Edwards James.
Just before the baby was born, James wrote a letter to the New York Times which was reprinted
by other newspapers, including the August 5 issue of the Leavenworth Weekly Times in
Kansas.
In his letter, James claimed that he was a gentleman and that what really incensed him,
he said, was that he was being
"...persecuted for the sake of the confederacy [...] reproached with horse-stealing and burglary
by Democratic and Southern newspapers."
But the Times came to their own conclusion and disagreed.
James had no choice but to remain an outlaw, and set about acting like it.
A year after his plea for amnesty, Jesse's wife gave birth to a second child, identified
by census records as Ethel Louise James.
According to History, just a month later, on September 7, 1876, the James-Younger gang
- consisting of Frank and Jesse James, Cole, Jim, and Robert Younger, and three other gang
members, waltzed up to the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota.
The men had heard that Union general and Republican governor of Reconstruction-era Mississippi,
Adelbert Ames, had just recently deposited $75,000 with the bank.
According to the Grange Advance newspaper in Red Wing, Minnesota, three men went inside
and told the cashier to open the safe, which he refused to do, so they killed him.
The others remained outside as a lookout, but word quickly got out of the hold-up.
Angry townsfolk took up arms and approached the robbers in the street.
In the ensuing gunfight, two members of the gang were killed while the others fled without
any money, but with a few gunshot wounds.
The Younger brothers were captured two weeks later near Madelia, Minnesota and were later
sentenced to life in prison.
The failed robbery was a lesson to Frank and Jesse, who decided to remain in Tennessee
under assumed names to avoid capture.
After two years of living peacefully, however, James decided to resume his life of crime.
By the summer of 1879, Frank James had decided to leave his lawless life behind.
For Jesse James, however, going straight was not so easy.
Riding back to Missouri, he began looking around for a new set of gang members.
HistoryNet reports one of them was Ed Miller, Clell Miller's brother.
Ed decided to introduce Jesse to the Ford family outside of Richmond.
Jesse felt at ease with the Fords, especially Bob and Charlie, who were fellow guerrillas
from the Civil War days.
The new gang committed at least one robbery, in 1879, an express train on the Chicago & Alton
Road in October.
Soon, however, Jesse was shocked to learn that America was under the impression he had
been killed by one George Shepherd.
An incensed Jesse wrote a letter to the Clipper-Herald in Hannibal, from "Brownwood, the Hardest
Town in Texas."
The letter read, in part, "Your reporter and George Shepherd have the most brilliant imaginations
in America ... I read your reporter's yarn, and myself and wife laughed heartily over
it."
The outlaw even teased that he was now living in Brownwood under an assumed name.
"Tell your reporter to 'set 'em up' to the boys around and send the bill to me," he wrote.
He even enclosed a photograph of himself for all to see, although the paper didn't publish
it.
HistoryNet says James also remained appreciative of Ed Miller for introducing him to the Fords
- at least until the summer of 1880, when Miller announced he wanted to leave the gang.
Jesse immediately suspected Miller of betraying him and shot him to death.
James next appeared at the Ford house with Miller's horse, which he left there with the
explanation that ol' Ed was on the mend in Hot Springs, Arkansas from some ailment.
A member of the Ford family, Jim Cummins, grew suspicious.
After looking for Miller for awhile, Cummins visited James in Nashville during the winter
of 1880-81.
As with Miller, James became suspicious of Cummins when he asked too many questions.
Cummins took off in the night, fearful that he might too become one of James' victims.
As Jesse went after those who he felt might betray him, a whole new set of troubles appeared
on his horizon.
In 1880, Joseph A. Dacus published a book titled Life and Adventures of Frank and Jesse
James.
The book sold like hotcakes - 21,000 copies in four months.
The book might have spurred both Jesse and Frank to resume their lives of crime with
a vengeance.
There were more robberies, more killings.
But when Jesse again took up his hunt for Jim Cummins and roughed up a 15-year-old member
of the Ford family, the Fords had enough, according to HistoryNet.
In the fall of 1881, a meeting was arranged between Bob Ford and Governor Thomas Crittenden,
during which Ford agreed to capture Jesse James.
Ford would later claim he had agreed to get Jesse dead or alive.
In early March of 1882, Jesse and the Fords began planning several bank robberies in Kansas.
Charlie and Bob had moved into the James home, where they awaited their chance to take the
outlaw.
On the morning of April 3, Zee was in the kitchen as the men chatted in another room.
Jesse had taken off his pistol belt and he hopped on a chair to dust some pictures on
the wall.
Behind him, Bob and Charlie quietly drew their guns.
Jesse heard a noise behind him and was turning to look around when Bob shot him in the back
of the head.
Zee rushed into the room to see her husband lying on his back.
James was not quite gone, trying to say something to Zee as she cradled his head and attempted
to wipe off the fast-flowing blood, but unable to get out any haunting last words.
Within seconds he was dead.
"And that's how I killed Jesse James."
Charlie then explained that the gun went off accidentally.
In a 2006 issue of Wild West magazine, Ted Yeatman, long considered the foremost authority
on Jesse, wrote that the grieving Zee replied,
"Yes, I guess it went off on purpose."
Jesse James was buried at the family farm as America revered his death.
His widow Zee was forced to sell everything, including the family dog, to stay afloat.
Several historians discovered that in the coming years Zee, her landlord Henrietta Saltzman,
James' mother and even his brother Frank kept the James home as a tourist attraction and
charged admission.
Because he killed Jesse James rather than apprehending him as agreed, Bob Ford was denied
any reward money and even arrested for murder.
He was later pardoned and began roaming the country and selling his story, although his
actions caused many to believe he was a common coward for shooting James from behind.
By 1889 Ford was in Colorado, dealing cards in Old Colorado City and opening a bar in
Creede in 1891.
Notably, he was turned away from the city limits of Cripple Creek by the sheriff himself
in 1891.
Despite circulating rumors to the contrary, Ford remained alive until 1894, when one of
his enemies, "Red" Kelley, waltzed into Ford's Creede saloon.
Kelley called out, "Hello, Bob!" before firing a double-barreled, sawed off shotgun a mere
five feet from Ford's throat.
Today, the story of Jesse James remains as one of the best-known, and most debated, tales
of the West.
However you feel about James and Ford, though, one thing is certain: there were no happy
endings for anyone in this story.
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