Jesse James

His father was a Baptist minister who farmed hemp, held six enslaved people, and then left for the California gold fields to preach to miners. He died there when Jesse was three. What remained was his mother Zerelda, a hard Confederate partisan, and a tobacco farm in the Missouri counties called Little Dixie, worked by seven enslaved people. The war there was fought house to house. In May 1863 a Union militia company came looking for his brother Frank and hanged their stepfather from a tree. Jesse joined the bushwhackers next spring at 16. Whether he was at Centralia that September, where guerrillas killed unarmed Union soldiers, rests on a provost marshal's report and his brother's word. He was shot through the chest twice before 18.

For 16 years the James and Younger brothers robbed banks, trains and stagecoaches across 11 states, and left dead behind them. Cashier John W. Sheets at Gallatin in 1869, shot because Jesse mistook him for the officer who killed Bloody Bill Anderson. Cashier R. A. C. Martin at Columbia, Kentucky, in 1872, for refusing the safe. A jailer, a mayor, two deputies, a conductor, a passenger. Which robberies were truly theirs is thinner than the legend allows: names were attached to earlier crimes afterward, and the record neither ties the brothers to the first of them nor clears them.

The Robin Hood was manufactured, much of it in real time. John Newman Edwards, once General Joseph Shelby's adjutant, founded the Kansas City Times to put ex-Confederates back in power. He praised the 1872 robbery of a fair ticket booth in an editorial called The Chivalry of Crime, and printed Jesse's letters denouncing the Radical party. One, anonymous and probably his, carried the line that outlived him: we rob the rich and give to the poor. Nothing shows the gang sharing a dollar outside its own circle. The banks it hit were small local ones holding the savings of the neighbours it claimed to defend. Then the Pinkertons handed Edwards his best material: on January 25, 1875, detectives threw an incendiary device into the family house, killing Jesse's nine-year-old half-brother Archie and costing his mother her right arm.

Robert Ford shot him in the back of the head on April 3, 1882, in a St. Joseph house where he lived as Thomas Howard. Ford had dealt with Governor Thomas Crittenden, whose 10,000-dollar bounty came from the railroads because ex-Confederates in the legislature had capped what a governor could offer. The Fords pleaded guilty to murder and were pardoned that day. An 1887 ballad fixed it: the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard. A century of films kept him sympathetic. Historians since the 1990s, T. J. Stiles above all, read him instead as a political actor who built a myth out of the wreckage of the Confederacy. Northfield still marks the anniversary, as Defeat of Jesse James Days.

Jesse James's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The James-Younger Gang other
  A crew of former bushwhackers, suspected of robberies in at least 11 states 1868
• Proof of alibi, Liberty Tribune article
  Sworn affidavits from neighbours and family placing him at home the night of the Gallatin robbery 1870
• Letters to the Kansas City Times article
  Printed by John Newman Edwards. One, anonymous, carried the line about robbing the rich and giving to the poor. 1872
• Letters to the Nashville press article
  Claiming his place as a Confederate martyr to Radical Republican vindictiveness 1875
• The Northfield raid mission
  His idea, with Bob Younger. It ended the gang in an afternoon. 1876

• September 5, 1847 aged 0 Born in Clay County, Missouri, in the slaveholding country called Little Dixie
• May 1863 aged 15 A Union militia company raids the farm and hangs his stepfather from a tree They were hunting his brother Frank. Reuben Samuel survived. A story that they also lashed Jesse is legend, not record.
• September 27, 1864 aged 17 Named, disputedly, as one of the guerrillas at Centralia A Clay County provost marshal reported both brothers present, and Frank later said Jesse shot Major A. V. E. Johnson. Those two accounts are the whole case.
• December 7, 1869 aged 22 Kills cashier John W. Sheets at Gallatin, and becomes a public outlaw He appears to have mistaken Sheets for Samuel P. Cox, the officer who killed Bloody Bill Anderson.
• September 23, 1872 aged 25 A fair ticket booth in Kansas City is robbed and Edwards writes The Chivalry of Crime A girl was shot in the struggle. Only one witness ever named Jesse, and he later denied it in print.
• April 24, 1874 aged 26 Marries his first cousin Zerelda Mimms after nine years She had nursed him through the chest wound he took trying to surrender in 1865.
• January 25, 1875 aged 27 Pinkerton detectives firebomb the family house His half-brother Archie Samuel, aged nine, was killed. His mother lost her right arm. Missouri opinion swung behind the gang.
• September 7, 1876 aged 29 Northfield, Minnesota, ends the gang Armed townspeople fought back. Cashier Joseph Lee Heywood and a Swedish immigrant, Nicolaus Gustafson, were killed. Two robbers died in the street and the Youngers were taken.
• April 3, 1882 aged 34 Robert Ford shoots him in the back of the head in St. Joseph He was 34, unarmed, and living under the name Thomas Howard.

• Robert E. Lee 1807–1870
  Confederate commander whose military reputation and later commemoration became central to Civil War memory and the Lost Cause. fought for the cause of
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. denounced
• John Dillinger 1903–1934
  Depression-era bank robber whose 14-month run was used to build the modern FBI. successor in the outlaw myth