American History Hit - Outlaws: Jesse James

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

Jesse James. Perhaps the most notorious American outlaw?He’s become legendary figure of the Wild West, compared to an American ‘Robin Hood.’ But with a legacy so pervasive, the myths about Jesse James can get often get confused for the truth…Did you know he played significant part in engineering his own reputation as a ‘Confederate hero’, comparing himself in newspapers to Napoleon and Alexander the Great? Or, that he married his first cousin while recovering from a gun wound?Don finds out about the real Jesse James with his guest, award-winning biographer, T.J. Stiles on today’s episode.You can see more about T.J’s work here: https://www.tjstiles.net/Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Max Carrey. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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A stride the saddle sits a young man, rugged from years outdoors, his face defined by a sharp nose and a chin jutted with determination. Raising his revolver, he spins the cylinder to check on the remaining rounds. He carries at least one more of these weapons. We can see it outlined in his profile. He's poised and ready, haggard but alert, prepared to do battle with the forces opposing him. But who are they?

These foes. And where are they out here on the range? It's the lonely life on the edge of the vast Western frontier. It's enough to survive, let alone thrive, let alone understand who is your ally and who is your enemy. Glad to be with you again. I'm Don Wilden. This is American history hit. The gun-slinging outlaw riding the wide western range, spurs jangling, gun-glinting in the sun is an archetypal American legend. This enigmatic

outcast, whose story has been told in so many dime store novels and pulp magazines, movies, radio, television, plays a leading role in the good versus evil drama of the American frontier. But the true motives behind these shadowy bandits, at least the non-fictional ones, are more revealed than we might expect when placed in their wider historical context. Such is the case with Jesse Woodson James, the most notoriously celebrated outlaw of the 19th century, whose criminal career had much to do with the causes and consequences of the war between the states. It is a tale definitively told in the book Jesse James, the last rebel of the Civil War, authored by Pulitzer Prize National Book Award-winning historian, T.J. Stiles,

who we are very honored to meet today right now. Hello, sir. Thanks for joining us. It's nice to be here. I have read your books, Custer's Trials, read and listened to the whole of First Tycoon, the epic life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. We are reaching back now more than a decade to another book, which continues to fascinate us, all about Jesse James, who you are willing to talk about today.

I appreciate it. I'm always happy to talk about Jesse James, who is someone who is as, let as interesting much as a meaningful life, a very significant. life, I think. Yeah, for any listener who's been with us for a while, this will be a conversation touching on so many episodes we've done in the past about the Civil War, of course, but also about the Kansas-Nabrasca Act, bloody Kansas, the whole notion of the border states, it's all here, surprisingly, in the story of a bank and train robber, famous in his day and ours. Some place and time first. Jesse James, born in September, 1847 in the west of Missouri, in a town called Kearney, a region

heavily populated by slaveholding farmers from southern states. They called it Little Dixie. Why is that? Well, this part of Missouri was not what we usually think of as the frontier. They were not self-sustaining farmers living in a sparsely settled area. They were next to the unsettled West, but Western Missouri was actually a part of the national commercial agricultural economy. And because it had been settled by people from Kentucky,

Tennessee, the slave states farther east, they brought their enslaved humans with them. And the Missouri River Valley, which runs west, has very rich farmland on both sides. And so the wealthiest farmers' new arrival settled there. And they grew crops for this national and even international market. So Jesse James' father was a Baptist minister, but that was an unpaid job, at least at the time. And so he purchased human beings. When Jesse James went off to war in the Civil War, his family had more black faces on the farm than white ones. And that made them actually quite wealthy because they counted, again, human beings as property.

Sure. And they raised hemp, which was used to make rope and baling twine for cotton. Later, they switched to tobacco. So these were people who were very much a part of the national economy, were not poor farmers, scraping out a living for themselves in the middle of the frontier. He has two siblings, an older brother, Alexander Franklin James, goes by Frank James, and we'll figure heavily in the story, and a sister, Susan, a farmer of hemp, also a Baptist minister, who heads off to the California Gold Rush and dies when Jesse is very

young, some three years old. In succession, he has two stepfathers, I believe, more half-brothers and sisters, but it is the looming crisis of secession that defines his early life. Jesse James is 14 when the Civil War begins. Tell me what it would have been like as a youngster growing up there. How would that news have shaped him? Well, first of all, his mother played a huge role in his life, both because of the death of his father, also because of her own domineering personality. She was described as six feet tall, which was enormously tall for women at the time. And she had a very forceful personality. And she was very strongly southern in her identity. entity. In fact, this whole story really undercuts the notion of a term you used at the beginning, the war between the states, because the civil war, as we see it in Jesse James's life, was very much a war between people, a civil war, and in his case, within the state of Missouri. So his family were not only slaveholders, but they were very strongly sympathetic to the most

militant slavery expansionists. And they very much sided with these groups that organized under the Kansas Nebraska Act to expand slavery by force if necessary into the Kansas territory to the West. And these groups, which were known as border ruffians, played two roles. One, these armed groups rode into Kansas and fraudulently voted when they didn't actually live in Kansas, terrorize the pro-slavery settlers there who formed their own organized armed groups. But they also suppress dissent and polarize the community within Missouri. So as Jesse James' community approached the Civil War, they saw society within Missouri being split apart.

And you had newspaper editors who had their newspapers destroyed by pro-slavery mobs. You had ministers who had ministers who were deemed. insufficiently pro-slavery being driven out of the state. You had armed groups actually seized a federal arsenal in Liberty, Missouri, which was the county seat where Jesse James lived, shortly before the Civil War, before any fighting in the Civil War actually broke out. So this is a society which is really on edge and bitterly divided even before the war starts. And interestingly, there were slaveholders on both sides, actually, because some people thought, as secession was talked about, we don't want to have an international boundary on three sides of Missouri, then our enslaved people will very easily run off. So it's a kind of a curious twist, whereas those who are most militant were determined to join a republic that was founded upon the, based upon the very idea of slavery.

Had a lot to do with all the border states, didn't it? All those, that dilemma was what really kept them in the middle. It really is. And a lot of people don't like to think of slavery being a motivating issue. But if you look at it purely in terms of material interests, enslaved people were a little less than 10% of the population of Missouri in 1860. So that makes it one of the least heavily enslaved states in the South. And yet, slaves were counted as the second most valuable form of property after land. Sure.

So this is a huge part of the economy and also of the wealth of the state of Missouri. And people divided very bitterly over it. It reminds me of the story of Buffalo Bill in a different sort of way. I mean, that he's raised, he sees his father stabbed in a riot over the bloody Kansas events. This is a hotbed of all sorts of problems that are happening as a result of this larger national crisis. and it's affecting kids like Jesse James. He joins the war when things get going, along with his brother Frank. They become guerrilla fighters for the South.

They were called bushwhackers, kind of a militia group, if I understand, that operates outside the normal chain of command. Can you explain how this goes for him? How does he develop a role in this unit? Sure. Just one thing to start off with, Frank actually joined the secessionist forces, the Missouri State Guard, in 1861. So it shows that his family were ideologically committed to the secessionist cause.

There's an old canard, which is partly true, about Missouri, about how it was driven by personal vengeance and how people had personal grievances, especially against the anti-slavery, Kansas troops raided Western Missouri in retaliation for the border ruffian days when pro-slavery people attack Kansas. But in fact, we see in Jesse James' family, they took the southern side right from the beginning before they personally suffered any retribution. Frank fought in the early battles, came back. And then as the state was put firmly under union control by a pro-unionist state government, then these groups began to form, which were irregular forces, often led by some of the wealthiest people in these Western border camps. So there are actually guerrillas all over the state.

And one of the things they did was fight for control of the state and also to drive out the other side. So Jesse James joined his brother Frank, who'd been already fighting for a year or so when he was 16 in 1864. And the first thing he did as a Confederate guerrilla with a small band that he joined was to go house to house killing neighbors who were on the unionist side. We're not under arms, didn't belong to the militia, but they were politically their enemies.

And so it was basically a death squad in an attempt to politically cleanse the neighborhood. The year before, Frank had taken part in the raid on Kansas, which led to a massacre of more than 200 men and boys inside Kansas. But this fighting within Missouri was very much directed at their neighbors. In fact, the forces that they fought were mostly the state militia, either the locally organized militia or the Missouri state militia. I don't have any evidence that Jesse James ever fired a gun at a soldier from another state until after the war officially ended in May 1865. So that's what I mean by when I say it was very much a civil war within a civil war. Yeah, exactly. A whole other angle of a civil war.

We all think of the giant armies marching against each other, but this is, you know, especially, again, in the border states, this sort of thing happened. How long did Jesse fight in the war, side by side with his brother or no? He fought mostly side by side with his brother. In 1863, we know that Frank was fighting with the guerrillas. As a result, Jesse James' family, we're now known as the Samuel family after his stepfather, Dr. Rubin Samuel. they came under suspicion and the attention of the state authorities. And again, the state of Missouri was under martial law. So in military trials of civilians in the Civil War,

42% of all trials of civilians took place in the state of Missouri. That's more than in all 11 Confederate states combined. So again, that shows you both the level of the fighting, but also the way in which the federal authorities really felt they had to clamp down at the neighborhood level, so to speak. So Jissy James' his stepfather was arrested, his mother was arrested. They were released on parole. They were under suspicion. And Jussie James very naturally joined the Confederate guerrillas in 1864. In the summer and fall of 1864, very active periods, when Jesse James belonged to some of the most savage grill organizations in Missouri, including one led by Bloody Bill Anderson.

And this group was notorious for not only murdering their prisoners, but dismembering them. They took scalps. They carved the scalps off the heads of their victims, and they tied them to their saddles and their bridles. So, you know, this was a particularly notorious group. In late 1864, when General Price led a Confederate invasion of Missouri, and they met up with Bloody Bill Anderson's group. Price told Bloody Bill that he really should go in the other direction and send him across the Missouri River. He had a lot of guerrillas joining him,

but Bloody Bill was a little bit too much for him. Wow. And in fact, they went on and carried out some particularly savage massacres during that period. Yeah, he's trained by a guy named Archie Clement, right? Is it part of his group? That's right. Archie Clement was known as Bloody Bill's chief scalper and head devil.

So he was a 19-year-old. You've got to remember, we've got a lot of teenagers like Jesse James. And these guys were mentors, both in the skills of guerrilla warfare, but also in the savagery of it. And they, along with his mother, actually, really encouraged him to his worst deeds. One of the most notorious incidents in the Civil War was the Centralia Massacre. When the group that Jesse James was with, Jesse James and Frank James took part in this, under Bloody Bill Anderson, stopped the train in Centralia, Missouri, pulled off two dozen Union soldiers who were unarmed returning home on leave, massacred them, mutilated the bodies. Then when they were pursued by a force of federal troops, all Missourians, but federal troops, they ambushed them, skillfully ambushed them, but then shot them down, killed every single one, mutilated the bodies. Jesse James was given credit for killing the commander on. on the field actually. So it showed how deadly they were, how effective they could be, but also just

how brutal they were. And Jesse James' mother was heard by the local union provost Marshall, the chief martial law enforcer in Clay County where he was from. And he reported that he heard Jesse James's mother say when she was challenged about what her boys are doing, that she was proud of them and prayed to God every day to help them in their work. So in other words, Jesse James is brought up in an environment, not simply of division, not simply of warfare, but in which he was encouraged by everyone from his mother to his best friends to be as violent and extreme as possible. Right. Retribution is the word.

I mean, he's going to take vengeance, and that's kind of his reputation as it grows, isn't it? Very much so. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like this to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an email at AHH at History. Historyhit.com. We'd love to hear from you. He's also injured twice. He's shot in the chest in two different episodes. In one of those incidents, his nurse is his first cousin, who he eventually marries. Even bank robbers find love in life. The civil war ends in April 1865, and we enter in the era of reconstruction. Such a complex conversation. But when we're talking about Jesse James, he is a man now, 18 years old. And Missouri, like the South, is a mess economically and politically. The James brothers are still rabidly anti-union, and one of his former commanders, Archie Clement, the man we've discussed, gets the gang back together for some more bushwhacking. But now they are harassing Republicans and northern businessmen.

This is what brings us to the first bank robbery that Jesse James takes part in. That's right. 1866 was a really critical year for understanding Jesse James and banditry in Missouri because Missouri had a reconstruction within a reconstruction. So a Republican government took shape and took over the state, and it's really created by the war. So a lot of the leaders in the local county-level Republican Party are former Union militia officers. People had never been Republicans until their neighbors began shooting at them, and they began trying to drive each other out of their counties. and there's a new registration law in which former Confederates are kept from voting. And there's a lot of grassroots conflict going on. So across the river from Clay County, or just James grew up in Lafayette County,

Archie Clement gets the old Confederate guerrilla gang together, and they begin to harass voter registration officials. They begin to attack local sheriffs and harass them. The sheriff of Clay County said that he's terrified that there isn't a Republican man who is safe in the county. In 1866 on Election Day, Jesse James leads his group into the county seat of Lafayette County and actually swings the election to the Democrats by terrorizing the Republicans. The state governor sends in the state militia and drives them out. And a little bit later, Archie Clement himself is ambushed and killed. which Jesse James is extremely upset about.

Well, he's not old enough to be a leader of these former guerrillas, but he's definitely a part of that group. He may have still been suffering from his wound at the time, but that group that he's a part of in early 1867 then decides to rob a bank in Clay County, Missouri. Now, to our knowledge, there's never been a bank holdup. There's been robberies, and there's been burglaries. not in the sense of somebody walking in the door during daylight hours, business hours, and putting a gun in the face of a teller. So they go into Clay County Savings Association in Liberty,

Missouri, and Clay County, and they robbed the bank. Now, it's one of two banks in town. This bank used to be owned by prominent slaveholders that supported the Confederacy, but they went bankrupt using the funds that try to support Confederate troops. The bank was taken over by former military officers. This is only a month after the first Republican Party rally in Clay County history held in Liberty. So all of the owners of this bank, by contrast with the other bank in town, are prominent Republicans and former Union militia officers. And that's the bank they decide to rob. And again, it's in the midst of all of this grassroots violence that's breaking out between Republicans, former union men and former Confederates. So it really has police.

overtones and it's discussed in that way. This group keeps going and over the course of 1867 and 1868 all of the senior men in the group get killed or captured by the state. And so by 1869, Jesse and Frank James are kind of left with a dilemma. There aren't many of them left. None of their commanders, their mentors are still around. Are they going to continue this life of crime? And so in December 1869, they give the answer of yes. The two of them ride to Gallatin, Missouri, and they rob the Davies County Savings Association. And as they walk in, there's a very small institution. There's just a cashier there, and Jesse James, it's believed, guns him down.

And we believe that because the gunman, when he went out and got on his horse, the horse threw him, and he, Frank had to circle back and pick him up. And that horse was identified as Jesse James's horse. It was actually locally famous. And so as they wrote away from this robbery, they declared that they'd taken revenge for the ambush and killing of bloody Bill Anderson, a wartime commander, because they mistakenly believed that the owner and cashier of the bank was the commander of the union forces that had ambushed and killed Bloody Bill Anderson. They were mistaken. He lived in that town, but they mixed up the men. I see. However, this starts a critical turn in Jesse James' story, and it's the reason why he's remembered it all, why he lived so long.

He comes to the attention of a newspaper editor in nearby Kansas City, founder of the Kansas City Times, John Newman Edwards. Edwards was a regular Confederate cavalry officer, and he was the adjutant to Joe Shelby, who was perhaps the most famous Confederate General in Missouri, a dashing cavalryman. He was so bound to the Confederate cause that Shelby and John Newman Edwards, they went to Mexico rather than surrender. And they came back after the French. are driven out of Mexico, a very long and complicated story. And in 1867, they returned to Missouri. 1868, he starts this newspaper, and he uses it to promote the cause of former Confederates to try to get them back into power. So along comes this bandit, and he always admired the Confederate

guerrillas because they were so ruthless. So John Newman Edwards hears about this bandit who had carried out this robbery and murder to get revenge for the Confederate defeat and for the with the bloody Bill Anderson. So somehow the two of them make contact. And he begins to praise this act in his newspaper. And Jesse James sends a letter to the newspaper. Now it's possible it was drafted by Edwards himself. But Jesse James was quite literate. He was raised by a father is well educated. They had a lot of books in the house. And we know that he wrote letters to newspapers later on that John Newman Edwards had nothing to do with. So he talks about politics. He talks about how he's but he doesn't dare surrender because a Republican mob will pull him out of the jail and

lynch him, which actually happened to some of the other Confederate guerrillas turned robbers. And it starts this partnership between the frontman, the public face, John Newman Edwards, and the outlaw, Jesse James. Now, Jesse James and Frank James, they form this loose gang we know as the James Younger gang with the younger brothers led by Cole Younger, who were also former Confederate guerrillas, and a few other men who they were friends with and had fought with during the war. They carry out robberies to make money. Jesse James himself was never able to hold down a regular job.

But what distinguishes them from all the other criminals after the Civil War is the way that Jesse James persistently brought politics into it. And the way he worked with Edwards to build a night. identity for himself in particular and the gang in general as men who are persecuted for being former Confederates and as symbols not simply to get the Democrats back in power but to get former Confederates back in charge of the Democratic Party and it ends up being extremely successful their crimes I mean and they are legion are as you say framed as attacks on northern institutions by and large is that fair to say?

Yes and no. They often picked banks, and later in 1873, they started to hit railroads, which were identified with particular unionists in the case of banks or that had a general air of unpopularity. In most of their robberies, they did not rob the passengers. It was only when there was no money in the express company safe carried in the baggage car. And ironically, they actually didn't rob the railroads. The express companies who, even in the populist politics of the late 1870s, farmers did not care about express companies. They transferred money for banks. But they made a point of not robbing passengers whenever they could, though they wanted money. They would rob passengers if there was no money in the safe. And in one case, they actually carried out a robbery, Gads Hill, Missouri, which was both the name of where the home of Dickens was, but it was also in Henry IV, part one, I believe, when Falstaff robs the Pilgrims.

So there are Shakespearean overtones of this robbery. In fact, it's believed Frank James actually quotes from Shakespeare as they rob the passengers and make a big dramatic show of returning money to a minister and checking the hands to make sure they're not working men. but this air of being robin hoods, they don't actually ever say that they're robbing the rich to give to the poor. Rather, the only time they actually say that is in 1872, and it's in a political context. So 1872 is the year that President Grant was running for re-election, and he had been enforcing the Reconstruction Act.

He'd been pursuing the Ku Klux Klan in the South and in border states, particularly Kentucky. And so he's very unpopular with the former Confederates. And John Newman Edwards has been railing against him, against Republican rule. And as the elections approaching, three men, one of whom is believed to be Jesse James, another one is probably Cole Younger and one of Youngers' brothers. they ride into the Kansas City Fair. And it's kind of like a state fair is a big event. The Industrial Exposition, yeah. Yes, exactly.

It's called the Industrial Exposition. And they ride up to one of the ticket booths. They're riding through a huge crowd and they pull out their guns and they demand the money. If they had arrived 30 minutes earlier, they would have grabbed $12,000, which at the time was staggering some. Instead, they get a little less than a thousand. Still a lot of money, but. And when they resisted, one of them pulls out a gun and fires and actually wounds a little girl.

You know, it's not exactly a noble event. John Newman, Edirons, however, publishes an editorial called The Chivalry of Crime, in which he talks about how these men are an example of bold, daring southern society. And then there's a letter from the bandits. Now, it might have been, again, it could have been drafted by Edwards himself. It very much sounds like the notes that Jesse James wrote to other newspapers. But he talks about how picking up themes from Edward's writings, you should call us bold robbers,

not the skulking thieves like Grant and his administration. It hurts me very much to be grouped in any way with Grant and his men. And they're the reason why we're robbing because we're driven to such extremes. We rob the rich and give to the poor, but Grant and his group Rob Richenpour alike. So the only time he actually says that is in the context of attacking the Republican administration. And then he closes the letter by saying, in closing, I hope everyone will vote for the Democratic candidate. Then taxes will not be so heavy and we will not have to rob.

Wow. So it's there's a little humor in it, but it's an explicitly political attack. How often do the letters get published? How often is the public seeing this? Not too often. There's only, you know, a few letters a year at most. They always come after a major robbery. Sometimes the robberies had political overtones beyond the victims. So for example, in 1873, when they pulled off their first train robbery, again, they did it for the money. Trains were, were, that was a cash-based banking system. And money was ship by train to reserve banks, particularly in New York. So there was a seasonal flow of money, and they were very smart about which trains they robbed moving in what direction at what time of year. They pulled over a train in Iowa. They went to the express safe, left the passengers

alone. But as they kept the passengers under guard, they wore what the, again, the Kansas City Times described as full Ku Klux regalia. Right. And this is during trials of Ku Klux Klan members, in Kentucky where the gang both carried out robberies and had a lot of family members and supporters. So again, even when a robbery is simply purely financially driven, they send a political message with their robbery. 1874, when they carried out that Gads Hill train robbery, they left behind a press release describing their robbery as one of the most daring, high-handed deeds in the state history. So they really always had, again, particularly just a just judge.

James always had an eye on the public and on the impression he was making. Isn't it interesting? I mean, this is more of a concluding remark, but I'm going to say it now. I'm a kid who was raised outside of Philadelphia. I remember playing when I was a kid, and Jesse James was always the name you threw out there, that none of this would have come down through the ages. I mean, it has a lost cause, obviously, a lost cause aspect to this. And it just didn't make it to my generation because he'd been, I guess, whitewashed by that time,

all of this stuff. me and Northern Kid playing Jesse James. I think the reason for that is really twofold. One is, of course, memory changes, reconstruction was seen as shameful. The kind of Confederate side of Jesse James just faded from memory. And it wasn't as noticeable far from Missouri.

You had writers in the East who didn't really see him in the way that they did within the politics of the state of Missouri. Where, by the way, former Confederates actually did take power. and in which they tried to protect Jesse James from the state legislature. Now, what happened in 1876 is the gang was shot to pieces when they rode far from Missouri to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota,

where I went to college, by the way. And I think they did it deliberately, because they said so after one of them was captured, to rob a former Republican general and governor of the state of Mississippi who had been driven out by a white supremacist insurrection there. and he joined his family in Northfield. And I believe during the 1876 election, they deliberately tried to rob him. But the townspeople famously shot the gang to pieces. Only Frank and Jesse James survived free and alive.

And in 1879, so three years, not quite three years later, Jesse James emerges again and begins a second bandit career. But this time, Reconstruction's over. Democrats run the state of Missouri. there's no political overtones. So again, he was always in it for the money, but now he's got no added on political message to send. And so for two and a half years or so, three years, he's active, is a bandit again. His gang members are not former Confederate guerrillas. They have none of that more time bond of loyalty and of professionalism, if I can call it that. So the second arc of his

bandit career is more of a typical Western outlaw. They rarely lasted more than a couple of years. And he's famous, but there's no political overtones. And so he's eventually brought down. He's down to two gang members in 1982, the Ford brothers, and they've made a secret deal with the governor of Missouri to do him in. Sure. They gun him down. They're immediately pardoned by the governor Missouri, and that adds a sort of sense of martyrdom. You know, this man of bandit of the people was murdered by the governor of Missouri. Got it. And it de-politicizes his memory.

What happens to John Newsom Edwards? He goes on and writes books and becomes even more famous? Well, he wrote a number of books, and he was very active in other newspapers as well. He left the Kansas City Times. He was editor of the St. Louis Dispatch, I believe it was. But his problem was that he was a heavy drinker, and which shows up in his writing. The term purple prose doesn't really do justice to his writing. He basically drinks himself to death.

And again, as the Civil War phase in reconstruction politics come to an end in Missouri, he fades from relevance as well. So he wants to be very powerful influential newspaper editor, and he fades out of the picture. How much was Jesse James, Jesse and Frank James, the tip of an iceberg as far as these Western outlaws were? I mean, were many of them such ex-Confederates and with the same political agenda?

Well, there's a fascinating book written by a man who's a mentor of mine, Richard Maxwell Brown, called No Duty to Retreat. And it's a slender volume, you know, published more than 20 years ago, maybe 30 years ago. He was a prominent historian of violence in the U.S. And he posited that there was actually the kind of loose civil war of incorporation in the actual frontier west, in which forces of capital and of incorporation, the kind of establishment side of settling the West, was often pitted against those who had been against the establishment, former Confederates, those who were associated with cattle thieves and horse thieves with, you know, the kind of unincorporated people who moved west. to take advantage of frontier conditions. There was a lot of violence in which you see people who had Confederate leanings or backgrounds

on one side and against people who had union backgrounds on the other. And it shows up even in things like the Cochise County War and the Lincoln County War in Arizona and New Mexico. You know, this is a little bit later period. We're talking about the late 1870s, 1880s, Billy the Kid comes in. these are more truly frontier conditions. And even there, they're often overtones of the Civil War find their expression out there as well.

Yeah. I want to recap a bit more about the assassination of Jesse James. You mentioned the governor, Thomas Crittenden, is the man we're talking about. This is really a secret pact that he brokers with these four brothers, right? Bob Ford being one of them. It's often portrayed in a very somber sort of gray time because I guess, as you have mentioned, and there's been a whole part two of his career, which has been much less about this driving force, which was sort of politically motivated. The cause is over at this point. So now there's not much

to fight for. And this secret deal is done. Can you explain to me how this works? I think people need to know. They're all living in a house. Bob Ford is trusted by Jesse James or suspected of worse? Well, first of all, the background is Jesse and Frank James were the standard reward for, capture of a fugitive in Missouri was, I think it was $400. And Justin Frank James were, with I think one exception, they were the only one singled out for rewards larger than that. So when the Confederates took over the state legislature in Missouri, they passed a limit on reward offers.

They limited reward offers to $400, the standard amount, which basically protected only Frank and Jesse James. So when the governor of Missouri, in later years, when again, there's no political halo over Jesse James, wants to bring them down, he is crippled by the fact that there is a state limit on reward offers. And no one is willing to try to take in Jesse James for $400. And so he has to raise the money from the railroad and express companies. And even those who had never been robbed were saying the reputation of Missouri is the robber state, as people talked about it, is hurting business. And so they pony up $10,000 reward money. So now he has a fund with which to try to attract one of the gang members or someone else

who knew Jesse James to bring him down. Well, the gang around Jesse James had largely broken up by late 1881. For example, Jesse James himself had gotten into a guy. gunfight with Ed Miller, who was the younger brother of Clell Miller, an old gang member who was killed in Northfield. And another cousin of his had turned state's evidence, had been gone over to the state. And the gang basically was all broken up. So he's left with just two gang members left, the Ford brothers, who were local boys, too young to fight in the Civil War, who were very much drawn by Jesse James, his reputation. And the younger one is, again, they just, they want fame, they want money, they have no sense of loyalty to Jesse James. And so through a young woman

who they knew acts as their intercessor who approaches the governor wearing a veil in Jefferson City and sets up a meeting. And so during a fancy ball in Kansas City, the governor steps aside into a private room and meets with Bob Ford. And they make this deal. The exact terms of the deal are not known. But we do know that when Jesse and Charlie Ford, they start staying with Jesse James in his rented house in St. Joseph, Missouri, again, to be safe, he brings them into his house. Jesse James one day he's talking about a robbery. He's planning the next day. He said it's going to shake up the country.

And as he gets up to either dust or straighten a picture, that's when he's got his guns off him because he'd been going in and out of the house and he didn't want to attract attention. And so with his back turned, with his guns off, that's the first time they feel safe in pulling their pistols on him and they shoot him in the back of the head. They immediately surrender to the camp.

sheriff, and the governor pardons them immediately. Wow, there you go. So, again, it's a sign that the deal was for the death of Jesse James. What happens to Frank? Frank goes on trial. He was certainly guilty. There's reason to believe that if the jury wasn't tampered with, it was certainly being less than honest. The governor, the new governor in Missouri, former Confederate general, sends word through

John Newman Edwards to Frank that if he lives quietly and peaceably after he's acquitted and he was acquitted, that he would not honor extradition requests from other states. Because, again, they carried out robberies and killings in other states as well. And so that's what happens. Frank James lives quietly and peacefully. He does what Jesse James never could do. He's able to hold down a job and stay out of the public eye. It's only later that he gets a job as a doorman and a burlesque house and, you know, other kind of petty positions where he can cash in on his fame.

Right. Ford's do a stage show, I understand. They reenact the killing of Jesse James. The James House stands to this day. You can go have a tour of this place. I mean, it's a name. Boy, does it ring? Has staying power, that name.

Bob Ford himself was killed by a man who wanted to be known as the man who killed the man who killed Jesse James. Wow, there you go. The James Farm in Clay County, Missouri is actually well worth visiting. They do a very good job. You can see that even though, as I said, they were from a prosperous slave-owning family that was engaged in commercial agriculture, you know, it was still a rough one-story house,

which was built out of logs. And it's a really fascinating place. The Clay County Savings Association is a museum today. It's very interesting. DJ Stiles is an award-winning author, both Pulitzer and National Book Award, books such as The First Tycoon, Story of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Story of Custer's Trials, among others, including this one that we've covered today. Jesse James, as a fan of your writing, I want to ask,

what's going on for you now? Can we keep track of what's to come? Well, I'm deep in a biography of Theater Roosevelt. Oh, wow. So it really, again, as with my other books, contextualizes his life, and wrestles with some of the darker sides, but also, yeah, I think he was somebody who really contributed tremendously to American history. Here's a title, Teddy Saves the World. Yeah.

You can have it. Thanks. He's still doing it. Nice to meet you. Thank you very much for joining us. I hope we meet again. Thank you. Hello, folks.

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