James wasn’t a Wild West Robin Hood.ĭuring the 1869 bank robbery in Gallatin, the incident that first brought Jesse public notice as an outlaw, he shot and killed the bank’s cashier in an act of revenge, thinking the man was Samuel Cox, commander of the pro-Union militia troops who had murdered guerilla leader Bloody Bill Anderson in October 1864. After being nursed back to health by his cousin Zerelda “Zee” Mimms (whom he would wed in 1874 and later have two children), Jesse eventually banded with his brother and other former Confederate guerillas to rob banks, stagecoaches and trains. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Jesse was shot in the chest during a skirmish with Union troops near Lexington, Missouri. In May 1865, a month after Confederate General Robert E. The guerillas viciously mutilated many of their victims’ corpses.

In that raid, at least 20 unarmed Union soldiers were forced from a train and executed by the guerillas, who then slaughtered more than 100 federal troops trying to hunt them down. He and his brother joined a gang led by William “Bloody Bill” Anderson and participated in a number of violent incidents, including a September 1864 raid on Centralia, Missouri. By age 16, Jesse followed in Frank’s footsteps and became a marauding bushwhacker. That August, Frank took part in a raid spearheaded by guerilla leader William Quantrill on the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, during which some 200 men and boys were killed and numerous buildings were destroyed. In May 1863, while at his family’s farm, a teenage Jesse was ambushed and his stepfather hung from a tree (he survived) by Union militiamen seeking the whereabouts of Frank and his fellow insurgents. Frank James fought with the pro-secession Missouri State Guard at the start of the war then joined a band of Confederate guerillas, also known as bushwhackers, who carried out attacks against Union sympathizers in the region.

Civil War.ĭuring the Civil War, Missouri, a border state, was home to guerilla fighting initiated by forces on both sides of the conflict. He was a Confederate guerilla in the U.S. After Frank and Jesse grew up to become outlaws, Zerelda, who was known as iron-willed, remained their staunch supporter. When she wed for a third time, in 1855, her husband, with whom she would have four more children, moved onto the farm. Zerelda soon left the marriage and returned to her first husband’s farm with her children. In 1852, Zerelda married a wealthy, older man and moved in with him, but he disliked the James children so they were made to live with another family.

Zerelda and her children-Jesse, his brother and future partner-in-crime, Frank, and younger sister, Susan-were plunged into perilous financial straits.

In 1850, Robert James traveled to California to preach in the gold mining camps however, not long after arriving he became sick and died. Born in Clay County, Missouri, on September 5, 1847, Jesse Woodson James was the son of Kentucky native Zerelda Cole James and her husband, Robert James, a Baptist minister and slave-owning hemp farmer who assisted in founding William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri.

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