He rides through American history like a ghost in the wind, a figure as captivating as he is complicated. For over a century and a half, Jesse James has remained one of the most talked-about names from the Wild West, a legendary figure whose story is woven deep into our nation’s fabric. Was he a dashing hero, bravely defying a changing world, or a ruthless criminal who left a trail of violence? Here on Our American Stories, we unpack the enduring myth and the stark reality of the American outlaw who robbed banks and trains for sixteen years, a testament to both his cunning and the turbulent times he lived in.
To truly understand Jesse James, we must first journey back to his childhood in Civil War Missouri, a place torn apart by the strife of Bleeding Kansas and the bitter fight over slavery. It was here, amidst a landscape scarred by frontier violence and deeply divided loyalties, that a fierce mother raised her sons to fight for the Southern cause, shaping the man who would become infamous. Historian Roger McGrath, author of Gunfighters, Holliman and Vigilantes, joins us to bring this incredible saga to life, revealing how the chaos of a nation at war forged America’s most notorious bandit and why his story continues to resonate across generations of American history stories.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. After a century and a half, Jesse James remains one of the most iconic and romanticized figures in American history. You’re to tell the story of America’s most notorious outlaw is Roger McGrath. McGrath is the author of Gunfighters, Holliman and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier. He’s a U.S. Marine and former history professor at UCLA. He’s appeared on numerous History Channel documentaries, and he’s a regular contributor here on Our American Stories.
Take it away, McGrath.
A great American board. Carl Sandberg said, “Jesse James is the only American bandit who is classical to this country what Robin Hood or Dick Turpin is to England, whose exploits are so close to the mythical and apocryphal.” Almost. Biographers of Jesse James would agree with Sandberg’s description. They portrayed James’s dashing, courageous, and romantic, and he certainly was all of those things. However, it can also be ruthless, cunning, and deadly. Most of all, though, he was extraordinarily good at what he did. Robbed banks and trains for sixteen years. Jesse James rowed and robbed and went unapprehended. When his end did come, he came not at the hands of a lawman, but at the hands of a traitor in his own gang. Jesse James was born in 1847 in Clay County, at the far western edge of Missouri, an area known as Little Dixie. He is the second son of Robert and Zerelda James. Their older son, Frank James, is born in 1843. The father, Robert James, is a Baptist minister. Here’s Civil War historian Harry Jones.
Robert James.
He’s selected by a group of men there who want to go out west to California, and he’s the chaplain on this expedition to go out gold mining. Jesse’s a very young child at this time, and his father dies in California.
Jesse’s mother and now widow, Zerelda James, is a fierce Southern woman. She remarries twice after Robert’s death and continues to manage her late husband’s 300-acre hemp farm and seven slaves. Here’s historian David Eisenbach.
Zerelda raised both of her sons to not only be for the institution of slavery, but to fight for and to commit crimes in the name of the cause.
Her second marriage lasts no more than a few months before that husband leaves also. Then, in 1855, she marries Doctor Reuben Samuel, who spends most of his time farming rather than practicing medicine. He’s quiet and reserved; Zerelda is stormy and assertive. It proves a good match, and they have four children together. But life in Missouri in the 1850s is hardly stable. The question of slavery is ripping apart the American frontier. When Jesse is just nine, the Kansas-Missouri Border War erupts. During the five years of bloody war that followed, everybody on the border is forced to take sides. In 1854, the institution of slavery is being challenged in the nation’s capital. A Nebraska Territory on Missouri’s border is ready to become a state. Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas believes that the majority of citizens in a territory should decide the issue of slavery for themselves. Douglas proposes splitting the territory into Kansas and Nebraska and have the residents in each area vote for a slave state or a free state.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act leaves the decision on whether a new territory would be slave or free to the voters.
No opposition to this act leads to the formation of the Republican Party and its first presidential candidate, John C. Fremont in 1856. Well, nonetheless, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passes, which means slavery could possibly expand into new areas. This ignites a firestorm, and Kansas becomes a battleground as Free-Soil proponents rush in from the north and slavery advocates rush in from Missouri. Western Missouri becomes a staging ground for pro-slavery Southerners and are pejoratively called Bushwhackers. Free-Soil farmers from the north are called Jayhawkers. Kansas becomes Bleeding Kansas. Could be said the Civil War starts in Kansas. In the late 1850s, on the James family farm, Zerelda is busy shaping her boys to be the next generation of pro-Confederate fighters. Here’s Jesse James historian Michael Gooch.
She was not a wallflower by any means. Very vocal, very outspoken.
Don’t you take anything from those Yankees, Hemmy.
Zebra man’s responsibility to hold on to what they’ve got.
Over the next six years, the James family farm transforms into a Confederate stronghold. On April 12, 1861, the South fires and Fort Sumter in the Civil War formally begins. Frank James is immediately plunged into battle, fighting for the militia in the Confederate Army, but Union troops routed the Confederate forces in Missouri and then occupy Clay County. Here’s Andrew Nelson and Civil War historian Christopher Phillips.
The Southern sympathizers in this area could easily be taken out, lynched in their own yards. Their houses were burned on a regular basis, livestock confiscated by the Union authorities, and it became an eye for an eye.
It was so bad that one Union commander actually ordered the depopulation of four entire counties of Western Missouri. Had to leave, and then their homes were burned.
And you’ve been listening to Roger McGrath setting up a context in which Jesse James was born, and my goodness, talk about a divided nation. We’re sitting right in the middle of Bloody Kansas, which truly is the beginning of the American Civil War.
We talk about rough country.
When we continue more of the life of Jesse James here on Our American Stories. Here at Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love our stories and America like we do, please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.
Over the last six years, Jesse James has lied this outlaw band, picking his way on the Third Bird Grade through the trails of this Southern.
Land with a gun in his hand, riding, in a hiding and a running.
With his ed, James. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Roger McGrath telling the story.
of Jesse James. Let’s pick up where we last left off.
Here’s Jesse James biographer Dan.
Marcoop Union militia in the area started looking for these Bushwhackers. Zerelda had told everyone that Frank was one of them.
Fifteen-year-old Jesse is out plowing in a field when Northern soldiers come looking for Frank. Hang Frank’s respected stepfather, Doctor Reuben Samuel, to a tree right in front of Zerelda and Jesse, until Reuben finally gives up Frank’s location. It’s this violent experience who will push Jesse to join his brother. In the spring of 1864 in Missouri, vengeance is best got riding with one of the dozens of Confederate guerrilla bands. In the company of these men who operate outside the rules at war, Jesse James will be schooled in the art of ambushing, violence, and terror. There are no papers assigned, no uniforms, no government-issue firearms. Jesse simply follows creeks and hog trails into the darkness of the Missouri woods where the Confederate guerrillas make camp. Most notorious leader of these Confederate Guerrillas. The band is Quantrill’s Raiders, commanded by William Quantrill. By 1863, Frank James is riding with Quantrill, and a year later so too his seventeen-year-old Jesse. Quantrill’s band raid and luke, burn and gild. The main targets are the railroads, the lifeblood of the Union advance. One of Quantrill’s lieutenants, Bloody Bill Anderson, said to Jesse not to have any beard.
He is the.
keenest and cleanest fighter in the command. Well, during the summer of 1864, Jesse is shot in the chest. Within a month he’s back in the saddle, and he participates in a train hijacking led by Bloody Bill at Centralia, Missouri. Instead of captioning supplies, they find something even more valuable. Here’s a Civil War historian, Donald Fraser.
Try and have a bore a number of Union forces and Home Guards that are on their way home, and they’re unarmed. They really pose no threat, but they’ve now fallen to Bloody Bill Anderson and his band.
All you yanked at Ny like ball.
Bloody Bill’s guerrillas kill four civilians and 22 Union soldiers.
Bloody Bill wasn’t afraid to send a message that could be pretty brutal.
Confederates justifiably argue the massacres are in response to Union atrocities in Missouri. Jesse is shot in the just the second time, and shortly thereafter learns of Lee’s surrender to Grant Appomattics in April 1865. After four years of bloody fighting, though, he has no intention of surrendering.
For Jesse James, this is not an end of his conflict. This is the end of someone else’s conflict, not Jesse James’s conflict, not Frank James’s conflict. Their conflict isn’t over. It’s still going on.
Jesse James returns home to his deeply divided border state of Missouri. Here’s Old West historian Jeff Morey and David Eisenbach.
After the Civil War, the South was hlatious, it had been ruined, and there was a great deal of resentment of Northern authority, of federal authority.
Missouri is one of these states that’s stuck with the Union during the Civil War, but had large sectors.
of the population that wanted to go with the South in the first place. So you had Missourians fighting Missourians.
It’s in this incredibly voluable.
literally, brother against brother world that we get Jesse James.
Jesse discovers the war is not only torn up Artist homeland, it’s left his family with nothing. With Northern Reconstructionists in power across Missouri, Jesse and his brother Frank joined forces with their cousins, the brothers Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger, who share their fears hatred for Yankees. The Youngers also served under Quantrill and Bloody Bill and ended up losing their father and family home to the Union. Jesse decides the best way to express his hatred for the North is to go after Northern wealth.
They had to do something to strike back against federal authority and everything they saw as being oppressors in their lives.
They looked at themselves as freedom fighters and tried to strike a blow for Southern manhood, Southern honor, and Southern virtue.
Having converted to the now worthless Confederate money, there’s very little United States currency left in the South. Most of the money held in the banks is coming in from Reconstructionists investing in Reunion. Jesse James’ decision, therefore, to rob banks is as much political as it is criminal. The gang’s first heist is also the first daylight bank robbery in American history during peacetime. It occurs at 2 p.m. in Liberty, Missouri, on a cold, snowy day on February 13, 1866. The bank is owned by Republican former militia officers who recently conducted the first Republican Party rally in Clay County’s history. The James-Younger Gang hits the jackpot with a sum equal to nearly $900,000 in today’s money, and the bank is now known as the Jesse James Bank Museum.
Rob a bank, get a name for you.
Four months later, in Jackson County, Missouri, the gang frees two jailed members of Quantrill’s Raiders, killing the jailer in their effort. Now, the railroads are established by the Union during the war, and the railroad is a symbol of Northern power and progress and a tool to rebuild the country and its wealth. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, headquartered in Chicago, is hired to guard the cargo of railroads for Jesse and Frank. The trains are a perfect target. Jesse’s first train robbery comes in 1873. Year a Council Bluffs, Iowa, Jesse and company full of rail out of place, and the train’s engineer, John Rafferty, sees it and move as the gang tugs on a rope attached to the rail. Immediately reverses the control lever. He saves the train, but he and the locomotive flip off the track.
And he does.
Jesse and the boys get some $2,000 from the train safe, not the great haul they were expecting, and decide to rob the passengers also. Then, waving their hats and shouting farewell, the boys gallop off, evidently feeling bad about robbing the passengers. In their next train robbery, Jesse and the boys say they did not want to rob working men or ladies, but only the money and valuables of the plug at gentlemen. But the train robberies are bad for both the soft-handed businessmen and the callous hand at workers.
The railroads do not want robbers stopping their train. They don’t want robbers terrifying their passengers. It’s bad for business. In fact, there was one railroad passenger said, “I don’t care if it costs me $500. I’m not riding a train through Missouri. I’ll go around through Iowa or Minnesota or whatever, but I’m not going to take a train to the stateum Is.”
And you’re listening to Roger McGrath tell one heck of a story about Jesse James, his brother Frank as well.
And back then you had.
to choose sides, especially if you were somebody looking to get into a fight. And there was the Union militia and there was the Confederate militia in Missouri, and Jesse and Frank chose to work with the Confederate militia.
After the war was over, well, the.
conflict wasn’t over in the minds of Jesse and Frank. And many Missourians were against Missouri joining the Union. Cause, and had a shared hatred for Yankees.
And the best way to express that, of course, for young men and young fighters like Jesse and Frank, was to well see themselves as modern freedom fighters, uncle after Yankee wealth. The story of Jesse James, how he came to be who he was. That story continues here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and the riveting story, the remarkable story of Jesse James.
It’s also a story about American history and the moment James and his brother and his crew grew up in. And that’s, of course, the Civil War and post-Civil War Reconstruction. Let’s pick up where we last left off with Roger McGrath.
News of the James brothers’ holdup spreads quickly. The robbery is a blue to the railroads and embarrasses the Pinkertons.
Allan Pinkerton, their founder, who had been a spy for the Union during the Civil War, takes it personally upon himself to bring Jesse to.
Justice in Kansas City. The name Jesse James catches the eye of a former Confederate major turned newspaper editor who has tried mightily to inspire the Confederate wing of the Democratic Party to jump back into the fight. Here’s Western Frontier novelist Lieutenant Colonel Fred Kief In Tuni. If there was ever a minister of propaganda for the Southern rebels and the outlaws that followed the Civil War, it was John Newman Edwards. For Edwards and many other Southerners, this is not only about Jesse, another Confederate guerrilla, but about the Lost Cause of the Old South.
Edwards, he wanted to see these downtrodden Confederates take their political future into their own hands, and he thought that the James Gang would inspire them, and that’s why he started writing positive reports. He made them the legends that they were.
In.
Edwards’ fanciful telling: Jesse’s religious, kind of women, children, and animals saves poor widows from foreclosure. Well, he is America’s Robin Hood. Thanks to John Newman Edwards and the power of the press, Jesse James is no longer seen as a criminal, but as a folk hero for the South. Here’s Jesse James scholar Kathy Jackson.
If you are going to be an outlaw, what better way to escape the law and get people to help you than to have them believe that you are doing it for them, for a greater good?
Jesse partners with Edwards and continues is robbing spree, targeting Northern wealth. Newspaper readers across the country by end of the Robin Hood myth, but not the Pinkertons. Although Governor Silas Woodson issues a $2,000 reward for the James brothers, the biggest threat to Jesse’s life comes from the private sector: Allan Pinkerton, who’s made an art of reconnaissance and infiltration, sends his ambitious 26-year-old undercover agent, Joseph Witcher, into Clay County.
The first thing he did afte
Take it away, McGrath.
A great American board. Carl Sandberg said, “Jesse James is the only American bandit who is classical to this country what Robin Hood or Dick Turpin is to England, whose exploits are so close to the mythical and apocryphal.” Almost. Biographers of Jesse James would agree with Sandberg’s description. They portrayed James’s dashing, courageous, and romantic, and he certainly was all of those things. However, it can also be ruthless, cunning, and deadly. Most of all, though, he was extraordinarily good at what he did. Robbed banks and trains for sixteen years. Jesse James rowed and robbed and went unapprehended. When his end did come, he came not at the hands of a lawman, but at the hands of a traitor in his own gang. Jesse James was born in 1847 in Clay County, at the far western edge of Missouri, an area known as Little Dixie. He is the second son of Robert and Zerelda James. Their older son, Frank James, is born in 1843. The father, Robert James, is a Baptist minister. Here’s Civil War historian Harry Jones.
Robert James.
He’s selected by a group of men there who want to go out west to California, and he’s the chaplain on this expedition to go out gold mining. Jesse’s a very young child at this time, and his father dies in California.
Jesse’s mother and now widow, Zerelda James, is a fierce Southern woman. She remarries twice after Robert’s death and continues to manage her late husband’s 300-acre hemp farm and seven slaves. Here’s historian David Eisenbach.
Zerelda raised both of her sons to not only be for the institution of slavery, but to fight for and to commit crimes in the name of the cause.
Her second marriage lasts no more than a few months before that husband leaves also. Then, in 1855, she marries Doctor Reuben Samuel, who spends most of his time farming rather than practicing medicine. He’s quiet and reserved; Zerelda is stormy and assertive. It proves a good match, and they have four children together. But life in Missouri in the 1850s is hardly stable. The question of slavery is ripping apart the American frontier. When Jesse is just nine, the Kansas-Missouri Border War erupts. During the five years of bloody war that followed, everybody on the border is forced to take sides. In 1854, the institution of slavery is being challenged in the nation’s capital. A Nebraska Territory on Missouri’s border is ready to become a state. Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas believes that the majority of citizens in a territory should decide the issue of slavery for themselves. Douglas proposes splitting the territory into Kansas and Nebraska and have the residents in each area vote for a slave state or a free state.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act leaves the decision on whether a new territory would be slave or free to the voters.
No opposition to this act leads to the formation of the Republican Party and its first presidential candidate, John C. Fremont in 1856. Well, nonetheless, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passes, which means slavery could possibly expand into new areas. This ignites a firestorm, and Kansas becomes a battleground as Free-Soil proponents rush in from the north and slavery advocates rush in from Missouri. Western Missouri becomes a staging ground for pro-slavery Southerners and are pejoratively called Bushwhackers. Free-Soil farmers from the north are called Jayhawkers. Kansas becomes Bleeding Kansas. Could be said the Civil War starts in Kansas. In the late 1850s, on the James family farm, Zerelda is busy shaping her boys to be the next generation of pro-Confederate fighters. Here’s Jesse James historian Michael Gooch.
She was not a wallflower by any means. Very vocal, very outspoken.
Don’t you take anything from those Yankees, Hemmy.
Zebra man’s responsibility to hold on to what they’ve got.
Over the next six years, the James family farm transforms into a Confederate stronghold. On April 12, 1861, the South fires and Fort Sumter in the Civil War formally begins. Frank James is immediately plunged into battle, fighting for the militia in the Confederate Army, but Union troops routed the Confederate forces in Missouri and then occupy Clay County. Here’s Andrew Nelson and Civil War historian Christopher Phillips.
The Southern sympathizers in this area could easily be taken out, lynched in their own yards. Their houses were burned on a regular basis, livestock confiscated by the Union authorities, and it became an eye for an eye.
It was so bad that one Union commander actually ordered the depopulation of four entire counties of Western Missouri. Had to leave, and then their homes were burned.
And you’ve been listening to Roger McGrath setting up a context in which Jesse James was born, and my goodness, talk about a divided nation. We’re sitting right in the middle of Bloody Kansas, which truly is the beginning of the American Civil War.
We talk about rough country.
When we continue more of the life of Jesse James here on Our American Stories. Here at Our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love our stories and America like we do, please go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.
Over the last six years, Jesse James has lied this outlaw band, picking his way on the Third Bird Grade through the trails of this Southern.
Land with a gun in his hand, riding, in a hiding and a running.
With his ed, James. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Roger McGrath telling the story.
of Jesse James. Let’s pick up where we last left off.
Here’s Jesse James biographer Dan.
Marcoop Union militia in the area started looking for these Bushwhackers. Zerelda had told everyone that Frank was one of them.
Fifteen-year-old Jesse is out plowing in a field when Northern soldiers come looking for Frank. Hang Frank’s respected stepfather, Doctor Reuben Samuel, to a tree right in front of Zerelda and Jesse, until Reuben finally gives up Frank’s location. It’s this violent experience who will push Jesse to join his brother. In the spring of 1864 in Missouri, vengeance is best got riding with one of the dozens of Confederate guerrilla bands. In the company of these men who operate outside the rules at war, Jesse James will be schooled in the art of ambushing, violence, and terror. There are no papers assigned, no uniforms, no government-issue firearms. Jesse simply follows creeks and hog trails into the darkness of the Missouri woods where the Confederate guerrillas make camp. Most notorious leader of these Confederate Guerrillas. The band is Quantrill’s Raiders, commanded by William Quantrill. By 1863, Frank James is riding with Quantrill, and a year later so too his seventeen-year-old Jesse. Quantrill’s band raid and luke, burn and gild. The main targets are the railroads, the lifeblood of the Union advance. One of Quantrill’s lieutenants, Bloody Bill Anderson, said to Jesse not to have any beard.
He is the.
keenest and cleanest fighter in the command. Well, during the summer of 1864, Jesse is shot in the chest. Within a month he’s back in the saddle, and he participates in a train hijacking led by Bloody Bill at Centralia, Missouri. Instead of captioning supplies, they find something even more valuable. Here’s a Civil War historian, Donald Fraser.
Try and have a bore a number of Union forces and Home Guards that are on their way home, and they’re unarmed. They really pose no threat, but they’ve now fallen to Bloody Bill Anderson and his band.
All you yanked at Ny like ball.
Bloody Bill’s guerrillas kill four civilians and 22 Union soldiers.
Bloody Bill wasn’t afraid to send a message that could be pretty brutal.
Confederates justifiably argue the massacres are in response to Union atrocities in Missouri. Jesse is shot in the just the second time, and shortly thereafter learns of Lee’s surrender to Grant Appomattics in April 1865. After four years of bloody fighting, though, he has no intention of surrendering.
For Jesse James, this is not an end of his conflict. This is the end of someone else’s conflict, not Jesse James’s conflict, not Frank James’s conflict. Their conflict isn’t over. It’s still going on.
Jesse James returns home to his deeply divided border state of Missouri. Here’s Old West historian Jeff Morey and David Eisenbach.
After the Civil War, the South was hlatious, it had been ruined, and there was a great deal of resentment of Northern authority, of federal authority.
Missouri is one of these states that’s stuck with the Union during the Civil War, but had large sectors.
of the population that wanted to go with the South in the first place. So you had Missourians fighting Missourians.
It’s in this incredibly voluable.
literally, brother against brother world that we get Jesse James.
Jesse discovers the war is not only torn up Artist homeland, it’s left his family with nothing. With Northern Reconstructionists in power across Missouri, Jesse and his brother Frank joined forces with their cousins, the brothers Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger, who share their fears hatred for Yankees. The Youngers also served under Quantrill and Bloody Bill and ended up losing their father and family home to the Union. Jesse decides the best way to express his hatred for the North is to go after Northern wealth.
They had to do something to strike back against federal authority and everything they saw as being oppressors in their lives.
They looked at themselves as freedom fighters and tried to strike a blow for Southern manhood, Southern honor, and Southern virtue.
Having converted to the now worthless Confederate money, there’s very little United States currency left in the South. Most of the money held in the banks is coming in from Reconstructionists investing in Reunion. Jesse James’ decision, therefore, to rob banks is as much political as it is criminal. The gang’s first heist is also the first daylight bank robbery in American history during peacetime. It occurs at 2 p.m. in Liberty, Missouri, on a cold, snowy day on February 13, 1866. The bank is owned by Republican former militia officers who recently conducted the first Republican Party rally in Clay County’s history. The James-Younger Gang hits the jackpot with a sum equal to nearly $900,000 in today’s money, and the bank is now known as the Jesse James Bank Museum.
Rob a bank, get a name for you.
Four months later, in Jackson County, Missouri, the gang frees two jailed members of Quantrill’s Raiders, killing the jailer in their effort. Now, the railroads are established by the Union during the war, and the railroad is a symbol of Northern power and progress and a tool to rebuild the country and its wealth. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, headquartered in Chicago, is hired to guard the cargo of railroads for Jesse and Frank. The trains are a perfect target. Jesse’s first train robbery comes in 1873. Year a Council Bluffs, Iowa, Jesse and company full of rail out of place, and the train’s engineer, John Rafferty, sees it and move as the gang tugs on a rope attached to the rail. Immediately reverses the control lever. He saves the train, but he and the locomotive flip off the track.
And he does.
Jesse and the boys get some $2,000 from the train safe, not the great haul they were expecting, and decide to rob the passengers also. Then, waving their hats and shouting farewell, the boys gallop off, evidently feeling bad about robbing the passengers. In their next train robbery, Jesse and the boys say they did not want to rob working men or ladies, but only the money and valuables of the plug at gentlemen. But the train robberies are bad for both the soft-handed businessmen and the callous hand at workers.
The railroads do not want robbers stopping their train. They don’t want robbers terrifying their passengers. It’s bad for business. In fact, there was one railroad passenger said, “I don’t care if it costs me $500. I’m not riding a train through Missouri. I’ll go around through Iowa or Minnesota or whatever, but I’m not going to take a train to the stateum Is.”
And you’re listening to Roger McGrath tell one heck of a story about Jesse James, his brother Frank as well.
And back then you had.
to choose sides, especially if you were somebody looking to get into a fight. And there was the Union militia and there was the Confederate militia in Missouri, and Jesse and Frank chose to work with the Confederate militia.
After the war was over, well, the.
conflict wasn’t over in the minds of Jesse and Frank. And many Missourians were against Missouri joining the Union. Cause, and had a shared hatred for Yankees.
And the best way to express that, of course, for young men and young fighters like Jesse and Frank, was to well see themselves as modern freedom fighters, uncle after Yankee wealth. The story of Jesse James, how he came to be who he was. That story continues here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and the riveting story, the remarkable story of Jesse James.
It’s also a story about American history and the moment James and his brother and his crew grew up in. And that’s, of course, the Civil War and post-Civil War Reconstruction. Let’s pick up where we last left off with Roger McGrath.
News of the James brothers’ holdup spreads quickly. The robbery is a blue to the railroads and embarrasses the Pinkertons.
Allan Pinkerton, their founder, who had been a spy for the Union during the Civil War, takes it personally upon himself to bring Jesse to.
Justice in Kansas City. The name Jesse James catches the eye of a former Confederate major turned newspaper editor who has tried mightily to inspire the Confederate wing of the Democratic Party to jump back into the fight. Here’s Western Frontier novelist Lieutenant Colonel Fred Kief In Tuni. If there was ever a minister of propaganda for the Southern rebels and the outlaws that followed the Civil War, it was John Newman Edwards. For Edwards and many other Southerners, this is not only about Jesse, another Confederate guerrilla, but about the Lost Cause of the Old South.
Edwards, he wanted to see these downtrodden Confederates take their political future into their own hands, and he thought that the James Gang would inspire them, and that’s why he started writing positive reports. He made them the legends that they were.
In.
Edwards’ fanciful telling: Jesse’s religious, kind of women, children, and animals saves poor widows from foreclosure. Well, he is America’s Robin Hood. Thanks to John Newman Edwards and the power of the press, Jesse James is no longer seen as a criminal, but as a folk hero for the South. Here’s Jesse James scholar Kathy Jackson.
If you are going to be an outlaw, what better way to escape the law and get people to help you than to have them believe that you are doing it for them, for a greater good?
Jesse partners with Edwards and continues is robbing spree, targeting Northern wealth. Newspaper readers across the country by end of the Robin Hood myth, but not the Pinkertons. Although Governor Silas Woodson issues a $2,000 reward for the James brothers, the biggest threat to Jesse’s life comes from the private sector: Allan Pinkerton, who’s made an art of reconnaissance and infiltration, sends his ambitious 26-year-old undercover agent, Joseph Witcher, into Clay County.
The first thing he did afte
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