Jesse James and Frank James

American outlaw Jesse James, half-length ambrotype (reversed negative) portrait, c. May 15, 1882.

Jesse James and Frank James were two brothers who were among the most notorious outlaws of the American West, engaging in robberies that came to typify the hazards of the 19th-century frontier as it has been portrayed in motion-picture westerns.

Reared on a Missouri farm, Jesse James and Frank James shared their family’s sympathy with the Southern cause when the American Civil War broke out in 1861. Frank James joined William C. Quantrill’s Confederate guerrillas, becoming friends with Cole Younger, a fellow member. Jesse James followed suit by joining “Bloody” Bill Anderson’s guerrilla band. At the end of the war, the bands surrendered, but Jesse James was reportedly shot and severely wounded by Federal soldiers while under a flag of truce. The brothers, joined by eight other men, then began their outlaw career by robbing a bank in Liberty, Missouri, on February 13, 1866. During the same year, Cole Younger joined the gang, with the other Younger brothers following his lead one by one during the next few years. The James gang robbed banks from Iowa to Alabama and Texas and began holding up trains in 1873. The bandits also preyed upon stagecoaches, stores, and individuals. Throughout their long career and afterward, their exploits were seized upon by writers who exaggerated and romanticized their deeds to meet the demands of Eastern readers for bloody Western tales of derring-do. To the Missouri Ozark people, Jesse James emerged as a romantic figure, hounded into a life of crime by authorities who never forgave his allegiance to the South. The James brothers did, in fact, always seek to justify their banditry on grounds of persecution.

On September 7, 1876, the James gang was nearly destroyed while trying to rob the First National Bank at Northfield, Minnesota. Of the eight bandits, only the James brothers escaped death or capture. After gathering a new gang in 1879, the James brothers resumed robbing, and in 1881 Missouri Gov. Thomas T. Crittenden offered a $10,000 reward for their capture, dead or alive. Reputedly, Crittenden promised immunity for the murder of the James brothers to would-be assassin Robert Ford, whose brother Charles was a member of the new gang. (That immunity took the form of a gubernatorial pardon after Ford was convicted and sentenced to death for killing Jesse.)

In the event, Jesse James, living at St. Joseph under the pseudonym of Thomas Howard, was unarmed and in his home adjusting a picture frame on the wall (containing the words “In God We Trust” in cross-stitch) when he was shot in the back of the head and instantly killed by Robert Ford. Later Ford would be popularly characterized as a Judas, a judgment that may have derived largely from his portrayal as a “dirty little coward” in the “Ballad of Jesse James,” a traditional folk song, probably written in the immediate aftermath of James’s death, possibly by Billy Gashade. That song—recorded through the years by such performers as Vernon Dalhart, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen—also likely had much to do with the tradition that cast Jesse James as an American Robin Hood. Ford himself was shot in Creede, Colorado, on June 8, 1892, by Edward Capehart O’Kelley, who was viewed by some as Jesse James’s avenger and whose life sentence for Ford’s murder was commuted in 1901 by Colorado Gov. James Bradley Orman in response to pleas for executive clemency from at least two strident advocates for O’Kelley.

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A few months after his brother’s death, Frank James gave himself up. He was tried for murder in Missouri and found not guilty, tried for robbery in Alabama and found not guilty, and finally tried for armed robbery in Missouri and again released. A free man, he retired to a quiet life on his family’s farm, dying in 1915 in the room in which he was born.