Civil War guerilla and postwar robber who has frequently been cast as an American
Robin Hood. Born into a staunch proslavery family in rural northwestern Missouri, James
was raised amidst the border conflict between Union and Confederate forces. In 1864—
soon after the torture of his stepfather and the jailing of his mother and sister by the local
militia—Jesse James followed his older brother Frank (1843–1915) into the ranks of
“Bloody Bill” Anderson’s irregular cavalry. Strife continued after the Civil War as
Missouri’s Radical Republican government denied amnesty to persons who had acted
under Confederate orders.
Although precise dates and motives are disputed, the James brothers became linked with
bank robberies as early as 1866. They carried a price on their heads after the 1869
plunder of a Gallatin, Missouri, bank in which an unresisting cashier, Captain Sheets, was
murdered—presumably for his part in the wartime death of Bill Anderson. Over the next
dozen years, the Jameses and a gang of pistol-wielding, hard-riding ex-guerillas were
implicated in bank and train robberies not only in Missouri, but throughout the Midwest.
Their 1876 attack on the bank in Northfield, Minnesota, proved disastrous. While Frank
and Jesse escaped, a posse killed and captured several gang members.
Thereafter the James brothers were largely in hiding, although numerous robberies
were attributed to them. On April 3, 1882, living under the name of Mr. Howard in St.
Joseph, Missouri, Jesse was fatally shot in the back of the head by a cousin, Robert Ford.
Missouri’s Governor Crittendon, under political pressure for harboring an outlaw, had
conspired with Ford and quickly granted him amnesty.
Several ballads soon circulated, the most popular of which recounted notable
robberies, lauded Jesse’s courage, pitied his family, and condemned Robert Ford as “the
dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard.” By 1882 the James gang’s sixteen years at
large had already generated considerable legendry, news stories, and imaginative popular
“histories.” A torrent of largely fictitious “dime novels” followed.
While detractors labeled Jesse a criminal continuing his wartime pursuits out of pure
meanness, more numerous defenders dubbed him an avenger of cruelties inflicted by
Missouri’s militia and bankers. The oral tradition from Jesse’s home territory typically
presented the outlaw as a bold and gallant Robin Hood. He gives money to a poor widow
so that she can save her home from a banker who plans to foreclose; after the payment,
Jesse steals the money back. Always deferent to women, Jesse is also the devout leader of
a Baptist choir. An artist with pistols, he monitors his pursuers in disguise, then shoes his
horse backward to confuse them. Ubiquitous stories even claim that Jesse James did not
die at all. Several pretenders to his identity sustained this notion into the mid-20th
century.
Since the 1883 production of J.J.McCluskey’s The Bandit King, the Robin Hood
version has been reprised often on stage and in films, perhaps the most notable of which,
Jesse James (1939), cast Tyrone Power as the Missouri outlaw. Meanwhile, the oftrecorded “The Ballad of Jesse James” persists in the repertoires of old-time country
musicians.
James P.Leary
References
Breihan, Carl W. 1953. The Complete and Authentic Life of Jesse James. New York: Frederick
Fell.
Croy, Homer. 1949. Jesse James Was My Neighbor. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce.
Randolph, Vance. 1980. Ozark Folksongs. Vol. 3. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Settle, William A. 1966. Jesse James Was His Name. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Wellman, Paul I. 1961. A Dynasty of Western Outlaws. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday.