Frank and Jesse James

Oscar Wilde spoke true when he said Americans draw their heroes from the criminal classes. Starting in 1866 with the robbing of the Clay County Savings Bank in Liberty, Missouri and continuing to today, two of America's foremost heroes have always been the brothers Alexander Franklin and Jesse Woodson James.

All right. Did Frank and Jesse really rob the Clay County Savings in what is recognized as the first true bank hold-up in American history and which netted the robbers a cool $62,000 (big money in 1866)? Well, yes and no. Consensus is that Frank probably was one of the robbers. Jesse, then only 19, was most likely back on the farm. He had been shot in the chest at the end of the Civil War and was still recovering from the near fatal wound. His cousin (and later wife), Zerelda (Zee) Mimms was taking care of him.

Oh, yes, the robbery of the Clay County Savings had one more distinction, if you want to call it that. It was also the first time a by-stander was killed in a bank hold up. As the robbers fled, one of them shot down George Wymore, a young student attending William Jewell College. Ironically, one of the founding board members of the college (and a trustee of whom the college boasts to this day) had been the Reverend Robert James, a local Baptist minister, who was the father of - yes - Frank and Jesse James.

Frank and Jesse's mother was the former Zerelda Elizabeth Cole, a feisty and forthright woman who, like most mothers of murderous criminals, thought her son unjustly maligned and misunderstood. Frank was born January 10, 1843 and Jess followed September 5, 1847 (a sister, Mary, was born two years later and a brother had died as a infant). Zerelda was eventually married three times, making it hard for fellow gang member Cole Younger to keep track of which James father had fathered whom.

It's easy for the armchair psychologist to explain Frank and Jesse's life of crime. During the Civil War, Union soldiers had come to the farm at Kearney, Missouri, demanding to know the whereabouts of Frank, who had been riding with the Confederate guerilla raider William Clarke Quantrill. Not receiving a satisfactory answer about Frank, the soldiers whipped the teenaged Jesse and "lifted" Zerelda's third husband, Dr. Ruben Samuel, from a tree and left him hanging before riding off. Although Dr. Samuel was cut down and survived, it may have left the good doctor with some brain damage, and he remains nothing more than a fixture in the story of Frank and Jesse. Anyway, this brutal treatment by the soldiers put Jesse on the road to a life of crime. That's one theory, anyway.

So what was the real Jesse James like? Was he a loyal friend to his gang members or was he a cold blooded killer? Was he a good father to his children and a loving husband to his wife or was he a greedy, insatiable bank robber? Was he a devoted son to his mother or was he a callous SOB who wouldn't think twice about killing a man?

The truth - as has become evident from ample research - is pretty much all of the above. You can, after all, be nice to your kids and sweetie, and still be a jackass to people you want to rob. But whether Jesse was basically a nice guy who went bad or a bad guy who could be nice has been debated ever since Jesse robbed his first bank. According to some of the people who knew the brothers, Jesse was quick tempered and impulsive, but for that reason if he said he was going to kill someone, you could probably talk him out of it. Frank, though, was a more thoughtful type and if he said he was going to kill someone then he had given it all due and proper consideration. In that sense, Frank was the more dangerous of the two.

Exactly how many robberies were due to the James Gang is disputed. The canonical number seems to be about twelve spread out over fifteen years or so. Some robberies were probably copycat crimes or simply misattributions at a time when masked bandits all looked alike.

The popular folk image of the James boys is they were real-life Robin Hoods who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Again this is half right. Yes, they were hoods, and some people they stole from were rich. But they kept the money themselves. Jesse, we learn, spent a lot of his in the gambling halls of New Jersey, while Frank preferred to attend the theater in New York.

It's been hard for some people to believe Frank and Jesse were bank and train robbers mainly in it for the money. Recently an author has argued that Jesse and his gang were actually "insurgents" who continued to wage the Civil War after the formal armies had surrendered. But this explanation isn't really new. The newspaper editor John Newman Edwards - a Confederate veteran turned newspaper editor - trumpeted Jesse as a good southern boy driven to a life of crime by the evil carpetbaggers from the North. But all the rationalization in the world doesn't change the fact that Frank and Jesse were hardened criminals who would not hesitate to shoot men down in cold blood.

But being critical of Jesse and Frank does not mean you have to admire the Pinkerton detectives who were hired by the railroads to hunt them down. There was, after all, the famous raid at the James farm which made the visit of the Union soldiers look like a Sunday afternoon social call. On the night of January 26, 1875, the Pinkertons came to the James farm. Not getting much cooperation from the family inside (particularly from Jesse and Frank who weren't there), the detectives threw a device which can accurately be described as a bomb into the house. It exploded, killing Jesse's nine year old half-brother Archie and blowing off the arm of their mother.

The tactics of the Pinkertons are understandable (if not excusable) since one of their detectives Joseph Whicher, had recently been found bound, tortured, and killed. It's been assumed (probably correctly) that the murder was by the James gang. But that doesn't make the Pinkerton raid any less criminal, and William Pinkerton, the son of the head detective Allan Pinkerton, was indicted for murder. But the sheer brutality of the raid plus the fact that no Pinkerton was ever arrested began to move popular sentifment toward Frank and Jesse.

Jesse, of course, was never brought to trial. On April 3, 1882, that dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard, baby-faced Robert Ford (he was twenty at the time), shot Jesse in the back of the head at Jesse's home in St. Joseph, Missouri. Jesse really was dusting a picture off at the time, and Bob's own account can be taken as authentic. It is a bit self-serving, though, and he claimed he shot Jesse in preemptive self-defense. Alas, that didn't sell with the jury, and Bob was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. Almost immediately, Missouri Governor Thomas T. Crittenden granted him a full pardon. That was all part of a deal, we're told. But politicians don't like to be accused of conspiracy to commit murder any more than anyone else, and Governor Crittenden always denied there was a quid pro quo.

After the obligatory photo op of Jesse's corpse, Jesse was given back to the family. Zerelda buried her son on the family farm which is now a museum (and well worth a visit). After Jesse's wife, Zee, died in 1900, Jesse was moved to the Mount Olivet Cemetery about three miles down the road and now conveniently close to the interstate. But when the coffin was being lifted out of the grave, it fell apart, spilling Jesse all over the place. He was picked up, put in a new coffin, and reburied alongside Zee. He's there to this day and anyone can simply drive to the small, completely open cemetery, park the car, and walk along until you come to the James family plot. There you'll find Jesse with his half of the gravestone simply reading.

JAMES

Jesse W.

Born Sept. 5, 1847

Assassinated

April 3, 1882

Probably because it was in a public cemetery that the epitaph was so muted. Compare that to what Zerelda put on the original marker at the family farm: Devoted Husband And Father ....Murdered ... By a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is Not Worthy to Appear Here. Over the years the marker was chipped away by visitors and today only the bottom remains and is kept from further harm in the James Farm museum.

The stories of Jesse surviving his shooting by Bob Ford are hogwash and not worth taking seriously. The old chest wound plus a missing finger proved it was Jesse (not the least that the gentleman shot was living with Jesse's wife). Then in 1995, DNA testing proved the case with statistical certainty (if not the near absolute certainty hoped for). Or at least it proved that the man buried in Jesse James' grave was from the James family matriarchal line. As everyone else was present (more or less) and accounted for, that pretty much clinches that it was Jesse buried in Jesse's grave. But that conclusion so ticked off the people in the town where the most famous Jesse impersonator, J. Frank Dalton, was buried that, by golly, they decided they would dig their man up and prove he was the real Jesse. Actually this game of you-dig-up-your-dead-guy-and-I'll-dig-up-mine is getting a bit ridiculous, particularly since in this case, they dug up the wrong body.

Zerelda continued to live modestly at the farm, making frequent visits (so we're told) by using train fare provided gratis by the railroads. Visitors also came to see where Jesse grew up, and Zerelda would sell pebbles from Jesse's grave at a quarter a pop, making frequent visits to the stream down the hill to replenish the supply. Mrs. Samuel was a pistol, all right. She died in 1911 near Oklahoma City. Ironically she was riding a train, at one time an indirect source of her income.

Jesse's seven year old son, Jesse Edwards James, was in the house the day Jesse was killed as was his daughter, Mary. For a while it looked like Jesse Edwards (somewhat inaccurately styled as Jesse James, Jr.) might follow in his dad's footsteps since in 1898 he was arrested and charged (but acquitted) for train robbery. Following the logical career choice, he became a lawyer and then a movie actor. His film career was brief, playing his dad in two silent movies both shot in 1921, Jesse James Under the Black Flag and Jesse James as the Outlaw. There is some unintentional comedy in the films, not the least that Jesse, Jr. was in his mid-forties and fairly tubby. Jesse, Jr.'s wife, Stella, lived until the early 1970's, and his grandson, James Ross, himself a well-known California judge, died in 2007. There are, though, plenty of James descendants still around.

With pomp and ceremony, Frank surrendered to Governor Crittenden in 1882 several months after Jesse was killed. He handed the Governor his 1870's model revolver saying he had carried it with him during the war. The Governor, knowing full well what a Civil War revolver looked like, accepted Frank's surrender with a smirk. Despite some rather preachy accounts of Frank getting off because of biased juries (no one would ever convict a James, we're told), the truth is there was not even enough evidence to put Frank at the location of any of the robberies, and none of the witnesses could identify him as being present. So Frank's verdict of "not guilty" was in fact the correct one.

On the other hand, Frank was never tried in Minnesota which (for him) was a good thing. At Northfield on September 7, 1876, he and Jesse with Bob, Cole, and Jim Younger and some others attempted to rob the First National Bank and were completely shot up. Four citizens, though, were also killed, including the bank cashier Joseph Heywood who was shot down for absolutely no reason. Even six years later, feelings in the state ran high, and Frank did not want to go to Minnesota to stand trial for multiple murder, particularly since testimony very well may have pegged Frank as the bandit who shot the cashier. So the story that he had an understanding with Governor Crittenden that he would not be extradicted to the Land of 10,000 Lakes (and at least one unbiased jury) has to be true. After all, Frank was no dummy.

When captured, both Bob and Jim Younger were seriously wounded, and somewhere along the line Cole got one a heck of a shiner. But Jesse and Frank were nowhere to be seen. In fact, the gang agreed to split up. Our sources are a bit contradictory, some saying Cole himself denied the story that Jesse wanted to kill Bob so they could move faster; others saying Cole always denied Frank and James were even in on the robbery. In any case, Jesse and Frank got away, Bob, Jim, and Cole were captured, and the remaining gang member was killed (two had been killed earlier at Northfield). At the time Minnesota law said that a guilty plea for murder removed the option of capital punishment. So the Youngers readily pled guilty and were sent to Stillwater. The Youngers were surprised at the courtesy and fairness of the people in Minnesota, and Bob simply explained their motive as they had made a gamble and lost. "We are rough men and used to rough ways", he added, somewhat obviously.

An interesting tidbit is that the doctor who autopsied the robbers killed at Northfield, Henry F. Hoyt, later went West just to see the sights (he was in his twenties). He took various odd jobs, finding ready employment as a bartender since he didn't drink. In one Texas town he met a young man calling himself William Bonney and the two became pretty good friends even though Henry never involved himself in Billy's enterprises.

But one time when Dr. Hoyt walked into a hotel dining room in Las Vegas, New Mexico, he saw Billy, actually gussied up in a suit, eating dinner with another gentleman. Billy introduced his companion as Mr. Howard. Later Billy took Henry aside and told him that the man had actually been Jesse James looking to recruit members of his now decimated gang.

There seems to be a tendency among historians to take Henry's word, mostly because he's not the stereotypical teller of tall tales. There was also a newspaper story printed a week after the purported meeting how the town had been honored by a visit from the incognito Jesse. "Naturally," the paper said, "the visit was not widely known". So there seems to actual historical documentation that Jesse and Billy did meet. But for what it's worth (and as mentioned in the footnotes), CooperToons doubts it.

After his surrender and various acquittals, Frank led a more or less itinerant life. He worked at various odd jobs in places as varied as New Orleans to Paris, Texas, where it should be noted, the grandfather of the present writer said he would see him around town. Frank finally bought a ranch in Fletcher, Oklahoma and lived there until his mother died. Then he returned to the family farm in Kearney and lived until 1915, dying at age 72. The last James to live on the farm was Frank's son, Robert, who died in 1959, eight years after his cousin, Jesse, Jr.

The Youngers were all model prisoners at Stillwater, but because they refused to reveal any information about the robbery, they were pretty much resigned to spending the rest of their days in jail. But at the turn of the century, Minnesota decided to clear the dockets and give lifers parole if they had served twenty-five years or more. Although Bob had died of tuberculosis in 1889, Cole and Jim were let out in 1901. Jim, though, didn't adjust well and committed suicide the following year. In 1903, Cole teamed up with Frank James as the front men in a Wild West show, violating, so Minnesota authorities believed, the stipulation that he wasn't to put himself on public display. In an obvious and not-so-veiled threat, the Minnesota governor recommended Cole not entertain good citizens of Minnesota. Cole didn't and remained a free man until he died in 1916, the year after Frank.

References

Jesse James Was His Name William A. Settle, University of Missouri Press (1967) The first serious scholarly work about Jesse James. Not to be confused with a book of similar title Jesse James Was One of His Names.

Frank and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend, Ted Yeatman, Cumberland House (2000). Currently the definitive biography of Frank and Jesse. If you read only one book about the James brothers, read this one.

The Outlaw Youngers: A Confederate Brotherhood Marley Brant, Madison Books (1992). Very nice book about the Youngers. Lots of detail about the Northfield Robbery.

A Frontier Doctor, Henry F. Hoyt (Edited by Doyce B. Nunis, Jr.). Originally published in 1929, this became really accessible when republished in 1977 by Lakeside Classics. This book is a major primary source for Western Historians largely because of Henry's friendhip with Billy the Kid. And here Henry also tells the story being introduced to "Mr. Howard" by Billy in New Mexico. This is sometimes looked on as confirming Billy the Kid knew Jesse James, but despite the credibility Henry has with historians, there are good reasons to doubt the account.

Henry's story was written decades after the events and long after Jesse and Billy had become folk legends. Henry could certainly be misremembering an encounter which may or may not even have involved Billy or someone named Howard. Next, the newspaper article was not discovered by a historian researching the issue, but was mentioned by Henry himself in the book. Even accepting Henry's honesty, it is likely the article could have tempered his memory, and so the newspaper story is not really documentary support in the normal sense.

Although virtually everyone looks on Henry as credible and truthful, there remains a slight nagging feeling the Good Doctor may have been stretching the blanket a bit. Certainly one of his encounters with Billy (after Billy's capture) seems a bit too pat and convenient. Dr. Hoyt's education and distinguished career notwithstanding, we have to remember that expanding on facts to make a better story is not that rare and has been known to be a characteristic of journalists, authors, preachers, book publishers, legislators, and yes, even American Presidents.

The Gunfighters Time-Life Books (Old West Series, 1974). Officially by "The Editors of Time Life Books", the text is by Paul Trachtman . OK chapter on the James, but also is a bit superficial. The earliest edition (1974) has the best photographs (the great virtue of the series), but later reprints suffer in quality.

"Outlaw Hunters", Amy Crawford, Smithsonian Magazine(Sept. 1, 2007) Tells the story of the Pinkertons including the raid on the James Farm.

"Is Jesse James Innocent?", New York Times, January 8, 1899. A story about Jesse Jr. under indictment for train robbery.

A Brief History of Jewell Yes, William Jewell college tells how Frank and Jesse's pa was a founding board member. See http://www.jewell.edu/william_jewell/gen/william_and_jewell_generated_pages/A_Brief_History_m21.html

Stray Leaves A nice site about the James family by a member. Nicely done. http://www.ericjames.org/

James & Youngers at the Civil War St. Louis website at http://www.civilwarstlouis.com/History/jamesgang.htm

The Life and Trial of Frank James http://www.civilwarstlouis.com/History/jamesgangfrankjamestrial.htm. A good account with documentation of the trail of Frank at Gallatin, this is a bit condensed of the booklet published in 1898. On the Civil War St. Louis website.