Jesse James

Jesse James rode with William Quantrill's Confederate bushwhackers during the Civil War, participating in the 1863 Lawrence massacre that killed roughly 200 unarmed men and boys in Kansas. He emerged from that war 17 years old and unrepentant. When his older brother Frank assembled a gang of fellow ex-bushwhackers in 1866 to rob the Clay County Savings Association in Missouri — likely the first daylight bank robbery in American peacetime — Jesse joined as a junior partner. Within a decade he was the senior partner, and the James-Younger Gang had taken banks, stagecoaches, and trains from Iowa to Texas.

What kept James in the public eye for fifteen years was less his crimes than the Kansas City newspaper editor John Newman Edwards, who reframed every robbery as a Confederate veteran's revenge against the railroads and banks that had betrayed the postwar South. The framing took. To Missouri farmers still angry about Reconstruction, Jesse James was a Robin Hood; to the Pinkerton detectives chasing him, he was a murderer who never gave money to the poor. The Northfield, Minnesota raid of September 1876 broke the gang — three Younger brothers wounded and captured — but Jesse rebuilt and kept robbing for six more years.

On April 3, 1882, Jesse James was shot in the back of the head by Robert Ford, a new gang member who had secretly accepted a pardon and $10,000 reward from Missouri governor Thomas Crittenden to do exactly that. He was 34. Ford was pardoned but never escaped public revulsion at the killing; he was shot to death himself ten years later in Colorado. Frank James turned himself in five months after Jesse died, was acquitted at trial, and lived quietly until 1915 — selling tours of the family farm for 25 cents apiece.