The famous outlaw Jesse James was born Jesse Woodson James in Missouri to a Baptist minister. During the Civil War, James left Missouri to fight as a Confederate guerilla and once killed eight men in a single day. After the war, he returned to Missouri and became the leader of one of history’s most notorious outlaw gangs. With his brother Frank James and several other ex-Confederates, including Cole Younger and his brothers, the James gang robbed their way across the Western frontier targeting banks, trains, stagecoaches, and stores from Iowa to Texas. Eluding lawmen, the gang escaped with thousands of dollars. James is believed to have carried out the first daylight bank robbery in peacetime, stealing $60,000 from a bank in Liberty, Missouri. In 1873, the gang pulled off the first successful train robbery in the American West. Despite their criminal and often violent acts, James and his partners were much adored. Journalists, eager to entertain Easterners with tales of a Wild West, exaggerated and romanticized the gang’s heists, often casting James as a contemporary Robin Hood. His humanitarian acts were probably more fiction than fact. In 1876 in Northfield Missouri, all the gang members were either killed or captured after a botched bank robbery attempt. All but Jesse and his brother, that is. The James men’s wives tried to get them to take on a normal life, but with bounties on their head, they had no choice but to hide out. He eventually recruited the Ford brothers for another heist, but was double-crossed when Robert Ford, hoping to claim the $10,000 reward on Jesse, shot and killed him. Jesse James’ mother provided his epitaph: “In loving memory of my beloved son, murdered by a traitor and coward whose name is not worthy to appear here.â€
