American Experience (1988) s18e07 Episode Script
Jesse James
1
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NARRATOR:
For seven generations,
the legend of Jesse James has
roamed the American landscape.
He's come down to us
as a romantic figure of the West
and a man bold enough
to defy the rapacious villainy
of the newly industrializing
America.
MAN: He was someone who
lived outside the law,
who represented a strain
of rebellion, which, um
it gives us a sense
that we are a proud people,
that we are a people
of strong will
who are willing to go against
the grain when necessary.
WOMAN:
There's something about him
that still appeals to us
in our generation
about the need to, I guess,
be free, to escape,
to do what you want to do
when everything around you
seems to be going to pot.
He was about little people
going up against things
bigger than they were.
MAN:
Jesse James represents the man
that is anti-capitalist,
anti-corporation, anti-government
and who's willing to stand up
as other men wouldn't
or couldn't against all odds.
And ultimately
he would take a bullet
in the back of his head for it.
MAN:
He is the ultimate rebel
who fights and fights
and finally goes down--
not by the system
he is up against--
but by a Judas in his own midst.
We love that.
It is our American mythology--
Jesse James.
NARRATOR: More than a hundred
years after his death,
the story of Jesse James remains
one of the nation's
most cherished myths,
one of its most
widely trafficked
and one of
its most wrongheaded.
Even in his own lifetime,
the legend that grew
around Jesse James
shielded from public view
the darker truths
of his long and brutal career.
In the spring of 1864,
Jesse James rode to war.
There would be
no papers to sign,
no brass-button uniforms,
no government-issue firearms.
He simply followed creeks
and hog trails
into the darkness
of the Missouri woods,
where the guerrilla fighters
made camp.
MAN:
The regular Confederate forces
had already been driven out
of this area.
If a young man was going
to fight for the Southern side,
it was going to have
to be with a guerrilla unit,
because there were no active
Confederate forces in the area.
When Jesse James first joins
the Missouri guerrillas--
what they often referred
to as bushwhackers--
he's 16 years old, he's tall,
he's slender,
he's very fair-complexioned.
He has the most piercing
bright blue eyes.
MAN:
He was still growing.
He had a very youthful look.
He had a very soft,
sort of oval face.
He had a nose
that was slightly turned up.
He had these very bright
blue eyes and sandy hair.
He was about five-foot-six,
kind of lean, maybe 120 pounds.
First thing
that you thought was,
what is this kid doing here?
NARRATOR: Jesse James's boyhood was
a long, sure ride toward battle
on a trail marked by partisan
politics, violence and loss.
He was born in September of 1847
in Clay County, Missouri,
to Robert and Zerelda James, who
had migrated west from Kentucky.
Robert James was
a slave holding Baptist preacher
who worked hard
to keep the abolitionists
and their threatening doctrines
from circulating
among his congregants.
When Jesse was only three,
Robert James died of cholera.
Zerelda managed
to fend off poverty
by marrying a country doctor
named Reuben Samuel,
but life in Missouri
in the 1850s was hardly stable.
The question of slavery
was ripping apart
the American frontier.
When Jesse was just nine,
the Kansas-Missouri border war
erupted.
During the five years of
bloody fighting that followed,
everybody on that border
was forced to take sides.
The James-Samuel family
sided Southern.
Slaves accounted for nearly
half the family's wealth.
The way they saw it,
no government had the right
to strip them of their property
or tell them how
to conduct their business.
So there was no confusion
in Jesse's household
when the Civil War began.
His older brother Frank joined
up to fight with the Rebels.
But Union troops routed the
Confederate forces in Missouri
and then occupied Clay County.
STILES: For the most
part in Clay County,
these occupying forces were
other Missourians.
The provisional state government
of Missouri
organized its own militia force,
and these local Missourians saw
their Confederate neighbors
as traitors.
The local militia forces began
to raid the homes
of those suspected
of assisting the insurgents
and partisans in Clay County.
And the war quickly took on
this savage counterinsurgency,
guerrilla warfare conflict
that can be some of
the most savage warfare of all.
STEWART: 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, uh,
one Union commander
actually ordered
the depopulation
of four entire counties
of western Missouri.
Everyone had to leave, and
then their homes were burned.
NARRATOR: By 1864, most
Missourians were tired
of seeing
Confederate sympathizers
strung up
on their front porches
or Unionist civilians
gunned down in their fields.
But the James-Samuel clan
ran with a fierce
and militant minority.
Jesse's brother Frank had joined
a murderous Confederate
guerrilla group.
In retaliation,
Jesse's stepfather was tortured
nearly to death,
his pregnant mother arrested.
Zerelda signed an oath
of allegiance to the Union
to get out of jail,
but she refused to abide
by the terms of her surrender,
and she refused to let her sons
forget the family's humiliation.
MAN: She was not a
wallflower by any means--
very vocal, very outspoken.
Frank and Jesse were
definitely raised
pro-Southern, pro-Confederate.
To be treated
like the Jameses were treated
demanded that vengeance be taken
or you could not hold
your head up as a man.
NARRATOR: In Missouri,
vengeance was best got
riding with one of the dozens of
bushwhacker groups in the state.
In the company of these men,
Jesse James would be schooled
in violence and terror.
Though they were
partisan Confederates,
these guerrillas operated
without official sanction
and outside
the accepted rules of war.
They were simply out
to punish their enemies,
promoting fear as they went.
Jesse's most important mentor
was William T. Anderson--
Bloody Bill.
Anderson's sisters
had been arrested
for aiding the bushwhackers.
One was crushed to death
in a jail collapse.
By 1864, Bloody Bill was
in full fury.
MAN: Bill Anderson's group
never numbered more than 80,
and yet those 80 men just nearly
turned Missouri inside out.
His was the group.
And it only stands to reason
that some impressionable kid
like Jesse
would want to go out
and join the best,
because that's the one that's
going to do the most damage
to this hated enemy.
STEWART: William T.
Anderson was a psychopath.
This guy loved to kill.
And the odds didn't matter.
He could go in,
three-to-one odds against him,
and just look at his men and go,
“There they are, let's go,“
draw pistols and ride right
into the middle of them.
The actual fighting was
incredibly savage.
The warfare was
very close range.
The use of the revolver
as their primary weapon
dictated that it be
close-range warfare.
GOOCH: The guerrillas habitually
carried multiple revolvers.
You'd ride into battle,
shoot off one revolver, drop it,
pick up another revolver
and continue right on fighting.
So a guerrilla, armed with
even just three revolvers,
had 18 quick shots as opposed
to the single-shot weaponry
that his opponents
were carrying.
Now, the 36 caliber
not being a real fast killer
because of its small size,
but you still have a wounded
opponent laying on the ground.
And Union medical records
indicate
an awful lot of head shots,
so we know
they were just walking up
and finishing them off
after the battle.
CHIAVENTONE:
Jesse and his companions,
they're not satisfied
just to kill the enemy.
They will go in,
they'll wade in,
they'll break skulls,
they'll slash throats.
They took trophies-- very often
scalps, sometimes ears.
Oft times, they would
cut off noses.
What they set out to do was
to terrorize all of their
enemies and potential enemies
and to dissuade people from
supporting the federal cause.
They would spread word of their
deeds and also of their threats
that hopefully
would be picked up
by the newspapers and printed.
NARRATOR: On September 27,
1864, in Centralia, Missouri,
Anderson's boys give the papers
something to write about.
They murdered 22 unarmed Union
soldiers heading home on leave,
and as part
of a massive guerrilla army,
ambushed and butchered
150 federals.
WOMAN:
They are just slaughtered.
They are slaughtered
by the guerrillas.
And Jesse would have been there.
He would have seen this.
He would have taken part.
GOODRICH: This is one of ultimate
atrocities of the Civil War--
a hundred and some men,
helpless, disarmed,
murdered in their tracks.
It would have been
a very terrible thing to see--
beheadings, disembowelments,
torture, fiendish torture,
men begging for their lives.
Those bodies were
pretty well mutilated up.
Accounts say that there was
not a a corpse on that field
that had the same head on it
that it started the day with.
In one case, a man's privates
were described
as being cut off
and shoved in the man's mouth.
And there were scalps taken.
There were other acts
of mutilation.
It was an incredibly brutal day.
WOMAN: Every man that took
part in the Centralia massacre
witnessed something that
would be impossible to forget.
We can imagine the pictures.
We can imagine
what body parts thrown
across the field looked like.
It's more difficult
to imagine the smells.
It's more difficult to imagine
the sounds
that they would have heard
that day.
I don't know how they could
have not been transformed.
STILES: These were young men who
were literally soaked in blood.
Jesse James was immersed
in the most savage kind
of bloodshed conceivable.
NARRATOR: The horror of
Centralia focused attention
on Jesse's family
and on his guerrilla leaders.
Federal officers banished
Zerelda from Missouri
and had her shipped upriver
to Nebraska.
The Union Army assigned
an old Indian tracker
named Samuel P. Cox
to hunt down Bill Anderson.
A month after Centralia, Cox and
his men lured Anderson's crew--
Jesse James among them--
into a trap in western Missouri.
They shot Bloody Bill
off his horse that day
and displayed his body like
a trophy in a local courthouse.
But Jesse wouldn't quit.
Even after
the Confederacy surrendered
the following spring,
Jesse James was still fighting.
Weeks after the surrender,
Wisconsin cavalrymen shot him
through the lung
and forced the 17-year-old rebel
to pledge allegiance
to the Union.
STILES:
There was a sense that
the Civil War had ended not
just in the Confederate defeat,
but that Jesse James himself
had been defeated.
The end of the war was
as personal an experience,
as bitter an experience,
as you can imagine for him.
NARRATOR: After a decade of vicious
war, Missourians craved normalcy.
They wanted to harvest crops,
raise hogs, go to church.
Men on both sides went back
to their farms
and tried to fit themselves
into their old lives.
But after the war,
how could things be like old?
Politics in Missouri
was complicated and nasty,
still split along
the fault lines of the war.
The Radicals-- hard-line
Unionist and anti-slavery--
took power in postwar Missouri,
and they meant
to make a stiff peace.
They pushed through a new state
constitution outlawing slavery,
ran Confederate partisans
out of public office
and stripped them of the vote.
In Clay County,
three out of four white males
were disenfranchised.
STILES:
Old office holders--
people who had been leading
figures in their community--
were forced out of office, and
new men were put in their place.
These new men
who were put into place
were the Radicals who had
emerged out of the Civil War--
people who had embraced
the new society of emancipation,
of civil rights
for African Americans,
and who represented an overthrow
of everything the old society
had stood for.
CHIAVENTONE:
There were a great many men
who were able
to put aside old hurts,
and they were able to go back
and buckle under with
the Republican administration.
But there were some,
especially the younger ones--
Little Archie Clement,
Fletch Taylor,
Jesse James, his brother Frank--
who just couldn't accept
the status quo after the war.
They just couldn't deal with it.
They felt
they were being hounded,
they were being persecuted
for their role in the war,
and so they elected
to live outside of society
and to prey on it.
GOOCH: The James boys were
not forced into anything.
It was not easy on any
former guerrilla after the war.
But so many of the boys did not
resort to outlawry or violence.
It's kind of like
everything else in life:
You make your choices.
NARRATOR:
Beginning in 1866,
the old bushwhackers robbed
banks in Liberty, Richmond
and Savannah, Missouri,
and Russellville in Kentucky,
leaving a trail of dead bank
clerks, lawmen and civilians.
Many of the bushwhackers
were tracked down and jailed,
or shot dead, or lynched.
The James brothers were known
to associate with the suspects
in this string of robberies,
but Jesse had never been
publicly connected with a crime,
never been so much
as mentioned in a newspaper.
That changed in December
of 1869
in a small town
in northwest Missouri.
The way Jesse and Frank
understood it,
Bill Anderson's killer,
Samuel Cox,
was running the bank
in Gallatin.
( No dialogue )
( no dialogue )
NARRATOR: By most standards, the
bank robbery was a disaster.
Jesse had stolen a portfolio
full of worthless paper.
He hadn't killed Cox,
but a cashier named John Sheets.
But it was a crime that set
the James brothers mold--
an armed daylight raid,
a cold-blooded murder
carried out in the name
of the Confederate cause,
and 22-year-old Jesse
practically screaming
for attention.
STILES: As Jesse made his
escape from the scene,
more than once,
they spoke to bystanders,
and Jesse repeatedly stated
that he'd killed the killer
of Bill Anderson,
that he had taken revenge
for Anderson's death,
and he was certainly
quite proud of the fact.
In fact, he seemed to have been
in a state of ecstasy over it.
WOMAN:
The Gallatin bank robbery
was significant for Jesse James,
because it was the first time
he was really mentioned
in conjunction with a crime.
They told his name.
They told where he was from.
NARRATOR: Newspapers across the
state replayed the robbery,
the deliberate assassination
of the clerk
and the James brothers'
daring escape.
A “desperate and dangerous man,“
they called Jesse,
"wandering, reckless“
"a strong Southern man.“
The story caught the attention
of an editor
at the Kansas City Times,
John Newman Edwards.
Edwards was
a former Rebel Army officer
who was trying mightily
to inspire
the old Confederate wing
of the Democratic party
to jump back
into the political skirmish.
CHIAVENTONE: Edwards is
a bit of an alcoholic.
He's disappointed.
He is an unrepentant Rebel.
And 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.
Edwards learns of
this Confederate guerrilla
who four years
after the end of the war
tries to take revenge
for the death of Bill Anderson--
one of the most ruthless
Confederate guerrillas--
and this naturally
appeals to him.
NARRATOR: Not long after
the Gallatin robbery,
Edwards sought out
the James brothers,
and as soon as he met them,
he understood what he had.
Frank was shy and sullen, maybe,
but Jesse was a horse that
could be ridden for distance.
STILES:
Jesse was temperamentally
clearly the one who liked
to get attention.
He wanted to be somebody
who had a public presence.
He wanted to be out there
in the public eye.
NARRATOR: With Edwards as
his spur and proofreader,
Jesse wrote a letter addressed
to the governor of Missouri,
but published
in the Kansas City Times.
Jesse denied any involvement
in the killing at Gallatin
and began a campaign
to win himself status
as Missouri's
“number one victim.“
The beauty of it was
that Jesse's own story
rhymed perfectly
with the bigger myth
Edwards was trying to create--
all ex-Confederates were being
victimized by the Radicals.
Over the next year and a half,
Jesse James--
along with Frank and
a half dozen ex-bushwhackers
such as Clell Miller
and the Younger brothers--
robbed one bank, two
stagecoaches and two railroads.
Meanwhile, Edwards was busy
knitting the new legend.
Young Jesse,
according to Edwards,
had fought with grit and valor
in the war,
and he was still fighting.
If Jesse James was
robbing anybody,
it was only Radical banks
and the corrupt railroad
corporations
who were ruining
the Missouri farmers.
In Edwards' fanciful telling,
Jesse was religious, fastidious,
kind to women,
children and animals,
saved poor widows
from foreclosure.
He was
America's own Robin Hood.
CHIAVENTONE: Now, there's no
evidence that Frank and Jesse James
ever robbed from the rich
and gave to the poor.
It's a pretty good bet
that Frank and Jesse
used their ill-gotten gains
for their own purposes.
But there is this mythology
which grows around,
and Edwards is the one
who waters this myth
and allows it to flourish
and grow.
PHILLIPS:
Some of the newspaper titles
that emerge
during this period of time
suggest the deep groundswell
of sympathy
for people
like Jesse and Frank James
who were fighting a war that,
in many people's minds,
hadn't ended.
And many of these papers were
were paying close attention
to the antics
of Frank and Jesse James.
CHIAVENTONE: Frank and Jesse James
decided what they would best do
is turn their efforts
against the representatives
of the Northern elites,
and that would be the railroads
and the banks
and the express companies.
And in many ways, they looked at
themselves as freedom fighters
and tried to strike a blow
for Southern manhood
and Southern honor
and Southern virtue.
GOODRICH: There was shame
in losing the war.
But here was Jesse, who was
still making life difficult
for the occupation forces.
If you're 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're doing it for them,
for a greater good?
NARRATOR: Jesse's rising
notoriety coincided neatly
with the improving political
fortunes of ex-Confederates.
While Missourians had blocked
full citizenship
for freed slaves, the ex-Rebels
had won back the vote.
And by 1874, the old
Southern-sympathizing Democrats
were beginning to win back seats
in the state legislature.
Zerelda was in her glory.
Jesse and Frank's mother
was pleased
to grant an audience
to reporters,
through whom
she could threaten witnesses
who stepped forward
to identify her sons
or deny their involvement
in any crime.
“No mother,“ she opined,
“ever had better sons,
more affectionate,
obedient and dutiful.“
But she was hardly alone.
The James boys and their
Confederates had safe harbor
with dozens of friends in Clay
and the wealthiest farmers
in neighboring Jackson County.
They hid in plain sight
in Nelson County, Kentucky,
where a former bushwhacker
had been made deputy sheriff,
or at their uncle's
in Logan County, Kentucky.
They were welcomed by former
Rebels in Texas and California
and by Klansmen
in North Carolina.
STILES: During the 1870s, Frank,
Jesse James, the Youngers,
lived in their home counties,
traveled freely,
used the trains,
and were often protected
and given help
by their neighbors and their
old Confederate supporters.
STEWART:
They helped them considerably.
They would hide them out.
They would give them food,
clothing, horses,
trade off tired horses
for fresh horses.
NARRATOR: Not everybody in Missouri,
or even in their own neighborhood,
was so sanguine
about the James brothers.
More sober souls were lamenting
Missouri's growing reputation
as the “Robber State,“
pointing out the alarming drop
in property values.
Republicans made the James gang
a campaign issue,
accusing the Democrats
of being soft on crime
when the criminals were
old Confederates.
Love him or hate him, everybody
was talking about Jesse James.
When Jesse married
his first cousin,
the decidedly plain and careworn
Zee Mims, in April of 1874,
Edwards described the bride
as elegant, attractive
and devoutly religious.
And the 26-year-old outlaw
worked hard
to keep up his end
of the bargain.
He carried a well-thumbed Bible,
kept fine horses,
dressed in style.
Over time, Jesse James began to
inhabit the myth Edwards made.
“We're not ordinary thieves,“
he announced to the passengers
on the first train the gang
robbed, “we're bold robbers!“
At another train robbery
in 1874
the James gang left
the telegraph wires uncut,
and the contents of the press
release they left behind
were quickly dispatched
throughout the country.
JACKSON:
Let's face it,
his story was a good story.
It had conflict.
It had drama.
And the national press
took up the news:
The New York Times,
San Francisco, New Mexico,
Chicago, Kentucky.
The news spread everywhere.
GOOCH: I think he gloried
in that attention.
I think Jesse had
a tremendous ego
and he loved reading
about himself in the papers.
GOODRICH: Jesse's just a little
farm boy from western Missouri.
And all of a sudden he's in
newspapers across the country.
It's a lot easier
to buy into that legend
than it is to take a long,
hard look at yourself.
NARRATOR: What he was, was a thief
and a cold-blooded murderer.
Jesse had little interest
in a fair fight;
each of his victims
had been unarmed and helpless.
For all his press clippings,
Jesse James had no permanent
home, few possessions
and fewer safe havens.
His success in getting attention
for himself
only made things worse.
Governor Silas Woodson
issued a $2,000 reward
for the James brothers, then
persuaded the state legislature
to fund a squad of secret police
to track down the bandits.
The biggest threat
to Jesse's life
came from the private sector.
In 1874, the express companies,
tired of having
their baggage car safes emptied,
hired Allen Pinkerton
and his detective agency
to put a stop
to Jesse and Frank.
Pinkerton sent an undercover
agent into Clay County.
The first thing he did
after getting off the train
was to go to the sheriff,
ask where the James
or Samuel farm is.
He told the sheriff who he was,
what he was doing.
The sheriff told him,
“Do not go out there.
“Those boys will kill you.
If they don't kill you,
the old lady will.“
He didn't listen.
He was later found the next day
with four gunshot wounds in
his chest and two in his head,
with a note pinned on his jacket
that said, “This is what happens
to detectives who come looking
for the James boys.“
STILES: Allen Pinkerton had never
suffered a defeat like this.
It became a personal vendetta
for him,
and he began to undertake the
operation on his own expense.
NARRATOR:
On January 25, 1875,
on information that
Frank and Jesse were at home,
three Pinkerton detectives and
a handful of Clay County locals
made a raid on Zerelda's.
Shortly after midnight,
the posse tried
to flush Frank and Jesse
from their mother's house.
The Pinkertons
abandoned the raid
when one of their incendiary
devices exploded
inside the cabin.
Jesse's half-brother,
Archie Samuel,
had been killed
by flying shrapnel;
part of Zerelda's right arm
had been severed.
Frank and Jesse
were nowhere to be found.
STEWART: The public outcry after
the Pinkerton raid was widespread.
The general consensus was,
we don't like
what the boys are doing
as far as robbing banks and
trains and killing people,
but that does not justify
blowing up houses
with old ladies
and small children.
Yes, we want to get rid
of these guys, but at what cost?
People who before had either
been skeptical or openly hostile
to Jesse James as simply
a criminal who was trying
to manipulate the public
with his letters to the press
actually began to see him as
he had been promoting himself.
He was a victim
of these Northerners
who were trying
to persecute the South
and were picking on him
as a former Confederate.
NARRATOR: Jesse and
Frank hid in Nashville,
with good reason to keep
their heads down:
that summer, Zee gave birth
to Jesse's son,
Jesse Edwards James.
Frank had just married Annie
Ralston, a former schoolteacher
who had little enthusiasm
for her husband's life of crime.
With public sympathy
behind them,
John Newman Edwards was working
the Missouri state legislature,
trying to get Frank and Jesse
amnesty for war crimes
and a fair trial for any crimes
that could be charged to them.
Police work being
what it was in Missouri,
and juries being what they were,
there was a good chance
the James brothers could
walk away free men.
STEWART: Frank James looked
at it as an opportunity
to settle down
into a normal life
which, especially by 1875, is
exactly what Frank wanted to do.
Jesse, on the other hand,
believed that it was all a ploy,
that if they rode into
Jefferson City or anyplace else
to give themselves up,
they would be hung immediately.
STILES: The attention he had
gotten only fed his ambition
to be seen even more widely
as a Confederate hero.
At this moment, I think he saw
it not as a chance to give up
his life of crime, but, in fact,
to take it to another level.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1876,
the entire country seemed on fire.
Economic depression loomed,
and labor fights escalated
toward destruction and murder.
Western expansion grew
more and more bloody:
in the Dakota Territory, Crazy
Horse and his warriors wiped out
George Armstrong Custer
and his soldiers.
A bitter presidential election
divided the nation.
Reconstruction advocates
in the South were buckling
under the weight of white
supremacist thuggery.
With Radical Reconstruction
teetering, the fate and future
of civil rights in the South
was at stake,
and Jesse James made bold to
insert himself into that story.
That September, Jesse, Frank
and a band of ex-bushwhackers
that included Cole Younger
and his brothers, Clell Miller,
Charlie Pitts
and William Chadwell
set out
for Northfield, Minnesota.
Bob Younger said
one of the gang had a spite
against a major depositor
at Northfield's
First National Bank.
STILES: There was one very
distinctive thing about Northfield:
that was the presence of
Adelbert Ames, who had been
the Radical Republican governor
of Mississippi, who had been
one of the foremost advocates
for civil rights in the South,
and who had been elected with
almost unanimous black support
in Mississippi during the period
when Reconstruction
was in force there.
So Ames's presence
was definitely a draw for them.
NARRATOR:
After a decade
of well-publicized
daylight bank robberies,
civilians had learned
to be on the lookout.
And when Northfield's
Main Street merchants
saw three strangers
go into the bank,
and five more armed men
take up positions outside,
they picked up their guns
and headed for the street.
JACKSON: These were
hard-working Northerners
who did not believe
in such foolishness
as letting people
come into their town
and hold up their bank and take
their hard-earned dollars.
STILES: They lost the
element of surprise.
( Gunshots cracking )
The Younger brothers,
in particular, were cornered
against this bare masonry wall,
basically a shooting gallery
in which they were butchered.
And on the inside, the
bookkeeper, Joseph Lee Heywood,
bravely refused
to open the safe.
And as the robbers gave up
and left, one of them turned
and shot the bookkeeper down in
his tracks: cold-blooded murder.
By the time the inside men
emerged from the bank,
William Chadwell
was already dead,
and Clell Miller
lay dying in the street.
Frank, Jesse, Charlie Pitts and
the Youngers managed to escape,
but found themselves lost in
the unfamiliar Minnesota woods
and hunted.
Thousands of Minnesotans
pulled down their shotguns
and formed posses
and picket-lines,
in one of the largest manhunts
in American history.
Two weeks later, cold, hungry
and badly wounded,
the Younger brothers
and Charlie Pitts
were cornered by a posse
near Madelia, Minnesota.
Pitts was killed, and the three
Youngers shot up and captured.
Only Jesse and Frank emerged
from the Minnesota woods.
Northfield had been
a bitter defeat for Jesse.
The gang had been cut to pieces,
by Northerners,
but that was not the story
that took hold.
In the Southern-leaning
broadsheets,
the James Gang's Waterloo turned
into Jesse's Great Escape.
JACKSON: The Northfield bank
robbery secured his fame
as being extraordinary.
Here you have a man
who travels almost 500 miles
from Minnesota back to Missouri.
He is horseless,
doesn't have any food.
He only had a few weapons.
Yet they traveled 500 miles
back through posses
that numbered over 1,000 men.
And that escape was played up
over and over again.
NARRATOR: After the
botched Northfield job,
Frank and Jesse disappeared
from public view.
They quietly resettled
in Tennessee,
where Jesse lived
under the alias J.D. Howard;
Frank became B.J. Woodson.
Jesse and Zee had a second child
on the way,
and Frank and his wife, Annie,
had a newborn, too.
Frank James lost a lot of his
enthusiasm for the outlaw game
after Northfield.
Frank rented a farm,
was raising hogs, corn,
had a son, and, I believe,
was very content and peaceful
right outside of Nashville.
Jesse, on the other hand,
also living in Nashville
very restless.
( Horse neighing )
STILES: He continued to engage
in get-rich-quick schemes:
cornering the local corn market
in his county,
buying racehorses and entering
them in races around the South.
Jesse was noted
for being a gambler
and being a very bad gambler.
He lost a lot of money
playing cards and such.
By the late, say, 1878, '79,
Jesse was running out of money.
Something was going
to have to be done.
NARRATOR: For Jesse, it was
bad enough being broke.
But after more than seven years
of constant play in the press,
he couldn't stand that his name
was fading from sight.
His son Jesse and daughter Mary
had no idea
their father
was a notorious outlaw.
They didn't even know
their own last name,
and they certainly
didn't enjoy the spoils.
The Howards owned little
besides some stolen jewelry
Jesse had given Zee
and an arsenal of revolvers,
rifles and shotguns.
GOOCH: There's no glory in sitting
on a horse farm in Tennessee.
Jesse James
had to be Jesse James.
I think he was perhaps
a victim of the times
and a victim of himself,
of his own innate tendencies
to like violent things
and to be caught up
in that kind of excitement.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1879,
Jesse rode back into Missouri
and made a new James gang,
recruiting a couple of cousins
and some young farmhands
from the old burnt district.
GOOCH: They were not a ghost
of what he'd before--
just common, run-of-the-mill,
backcountry thieves and killers.
You don't have the people
who were trained, if you will,
during the war.
NARRATOR: That October, the
James gang stopped a train
at the Glendale depot
in Jackson County, Missouri,
robbed the express car, pistol-
whipped the express manager
and left a press release:
“We are the boys
that are hard to handle
and will make it hot
for the party that
ever tries to take us.“
Jesse and his gang went
on his most vicious
and fast-paced spree,
robbing a stage
at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky,
a government payroll office
in Muscle Shoals, Alabama,
and then two separate trains
in Missouri.
At the first, they murdered
the conductor and one passenger.
At the second, Jesse identified
himself to all who could hear.
"If we're going to be wicked,“
he yelled,
“we might as well
make a good job of it.“
Amid his own noise,
Jesse James was deaf
to the sound of public sentiment
shifting beneath him.
Not even John Newman Edwards
stood up
to defend his old friend.
PHILLIPS: By the 1880s,
there was a completion
of the Confederate renaissance
in Missouri.
Both senators had had some tie
to the Confederacy.
Both Houses of the state
legislature by the late 1870s
were filled with former
supporters of the Confederacy
or outright Confederates,
former Confederates themselves.
The ex-Confederates
had accomplished
what Jesse James
had been fighting for
for the last 15 years.
STILES: It was clear that
Jesse's time had passed.
And there was an increasing
sense of resentment,
even among former Confederates,
who saw that there was really
no excuse anymore
for Jesse's bandit career,
because the battle had been won.
NARRATOR: Jesse James's
home-staters were, in fact, anxious
to be rid of him
once and for all.
His own ex-Confederate neighbors
made plans to assassinate him.
The new Democratic governor,
Thomas T. Crittenden,
convinced the executives
of the state's railroads
and express companies
to put up the money
for a fat reward:
$10,000 for each
of the James brothers.
Frank had abandoned his little
brother for safer pastures.
Left to himself, Jesse grew
increasingly paranoid
that one of his own men
would turn on him
and increasingly violent.
He murdered one of his crew
and was hunting another.
Gang members Dick Liddil
and Bob Ford decided
it might be a good time
to open up negotiations
with the governor.
STEWART: By 1881, early '82,
Jesse James' life was changing,
and not for the better,
as far as he was concerned.
He moved his family up
to St. Joseph, Missouri,
and again was trying
to get this gang together.
The only thing
that he could come up with
as far as gang members were
Bob and Charlie Ford--
and they were less
than credible or dependable--
but was almost to the point
that he had no choices.
STILES: Jesse still had
robberies planned,
so he brought the Ford brothers
into his own house.
He thought it would be safer
that way.
NARRATOR: By the time Bob Ford
arrived at Jesse's house in St. Joe,
he had already cut a deal
with Governor Crittenden.
In a private meeting
two months earlier,
the governor had assured
Bob Ford
the reward money would be his
if he captured Jesse.
If he killed him, the governor
had the power to pardon.
STILES: It's widely believed that
the governor understood clearly
that the deal meant
the death of Jesse James.
The governor of Missouri
had essentially conspired
to assassinate someone--
a private citizen.
As notorious and as ruthless and
as vicious as Jesse James was,
it was an extraordinary event,
where the governor of the state
conspires to assassinate
one of his citizens.
STEWART:
Early morning of April 3, 1882,
they were sitting around the
table, and Charlie was sweating.
Zee thought
that Charlie was sick.
Asked him if he was sick,
not knowing that Bob had
told Charlie about the plot
to capture or kill Jesse, and
that he was going to take Jesse
the first opportunity he had.
STILES: Jesse was
preparing for a robbery
that he was planning
on carrying out,
and he was going
in and out of the house,
and it was so hot,
he had to take off his coat,
and that led him
to take off his guns
for fear that he'd be seen as
he went in and out of the house.
STEWART: He made a comment that
it wouldn't be a good idea
if passers-by saw a man in
his own house so heavily-armed.
So he took his gun belt off,
laid it in on a bedroom bed.
Now, that was very unusual.
In fact, Bob Ford later said
that he had never seen Jesse
without his guns before.
STILES: And that was
exactly the opportunity
that they'd been waiting for.
And, as legend correctly has it,
Jesse got up on a chair
to dust a picture.
STEWART:
Bob pulled a pistol.
The end of the barrel was
just about three and a half
to four feet
from the back of Jesse's head.
( Hammer clicks )
And if there's anybody
in the world
that knows the sound
of a cocking hammer,
it was Jesse James.
For a fraction of a second,
Jesse knew that it was over.
NARRATOR: The dramatic death
of Jesse James, at age 34,
only increased
the reach of his name.
News spread from
his home county papers
to both coasts and beyond.
Jose Marti wrote him up in
Venezuela's La Opinión Nacional;
Oscar Wilde reported on the
auction of Jesse's possessions.
Death pictures went on sale;
so did pieces
of the St. Joe house
pried off by
the most intrepid onlookers.
Bob Ford and his horse went
on the New York stage
to reenact his daring deed.
Zee James agreed
to write a book.
She needed the cash.
Jesse's mother considered--
and then rejected
with great fanfare--
a $10,000 offer
for her son's body.
A promoter wanted to take it
on a countrywide tour.
Zerelda James Samuel had her son
buried in her front yard,
where she could keep watch
on the grave
from her bedroom window.
But she soon gave in
to temptation--
offering tours to travelers
who came over from the new spas
in nearby Excelsior Springs
and selling pebbles from
his grave for a quarter apiece.
When she ran out,
she replenished the grave site
from the stream
behind her house.
Brother Frank managed
to get in on the action too
after he wriggled free
from the noose.
Within months of Jesse's death,
Frank had turned himself in
to Governor Crittenden
and gone to trial in Missouri.
A jury had acquitted him
on all charges.
Around 1900, Frank and
his old buddy Cole Younger
went on tour
with a Wild West show.
By then, the ugly truths about
Jesse had been papered over.
Jesse James, Confederate
avenger, disappeared.
And as big business
took hold of America
and the public began to see the
corporation as the new villain,
people clung
to the image of Jesse
as the American Robin Hood
fighting for the little guy.
CHIAVENTONE: All his crimes and
misdeeds seem to be stripped away
or seem not to adhere to him
simply because
he is the underdog.
He is the man who is fighting
against authority,
and something in that appeals
to the American character
or the American sense
of justice.
GOOCH: What we celebrate today--
if "celebrate" is the right word--
is the myth of Jesse James,
not the reality of Jesse James.
And that's a wide divergence--
myth versus reality.
STILES: The irony of Jesse
James is that, in death,
he's become a symbol
of what's seen
as quintessentially American,
what unites all of us--
the frontier,
westward expansion,
the cowboys and Indians story
of American history,
whereas, in life, he had been
a symbol of what divided us.
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The foundation also seeks
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NARRATOR:
For seven generations,
the legend of Jesse James has
roamed the American landscape.
He's come down to us
as a romantic figure of the West
and a man bold enough
to defy the rapacious villainy
of the newly industrializing
America.
MAN: He was someone who
lived outside the law,
who represented a strain
of rebellion, which, um
it gives us a sense
that we are a proud people,
that we are a people
of strong will
who are willing to go against
the grain when necessary.
WOMAN:
There's something about him
that still appeals to us
in our generation
about the need to, I guess,
be free, to escape,
to do what you want to do
when everything around you
seems to be going to pot.
He was about little people
going up against things
bigger than they were.
MAN:
Jesse James represents the man
that is anti-capitalist,
anti-corporation, anti-government
and who's willing to stand up
as other men wouldn't
or couldn't against all odds.
And ultimately
he would take a bullet
in the back of his head for it.
MAN:
He is the ultimate rebel
who fights and fights
and finally goes down--
not by the system
he is up against--
but by a Judas in his own midst.
We love that.
It is our American mythology--
Jesse James.
NARRATOR: More than a hundred
years after his death,
the story of Jesse James remains
one of the nation's
most cherished myths,
one of its most
widely trafficked
and one of
its most wrongheaded.
Even in his own lifetime,
the legend that grew
around Jesse James
shielded from public view
the darker truths
of his long and brutal career.
In the spring of 1864,
Jesse James rode to war.
There would be
no papers to sign,
no brass-button uniforms,
no government-issue firearms.
He simply followed creeks
and hog trails
into the darkness
of the Missouri woods,
where the guerrilla fighters
made camp.
MAN:
The regular Confederate forces
had already been driven out
of this area.
If a young man was going
to fight for the Southern side,
it was going to have
to be with a guerrilla unit,
because there were no active
Confederate forces in the area.
When Jesse James first joins
the Missouri guerrillas--
what they often referred
to as bushwhackers--
he's 16 years old, he's tall,
he's slender,
he's very fair-complexioned.
He has the most piercing
bright blue eyes.
MAN:
He was still growing.
He had a very youthful look.
He had a very soft,
sort of oval face.
He had a nose
that was slightly turned up.
He had these very bright
blue eyes and sandy hair.
He was about five-foot-six,
kind of lean, maybe 120 pounds.
First thing
that you thought was,
what is this kid doing here?
NARRATOR: Jesse James's boyhood was
a long, sure ride toward battle
on a trail marked by partisan
politics, violence and loss.
He was born in September of 1847
in Clay County, Missouri,
to Robert and Zerelda James, who
had migrated west from Kentucky.
Robert James was
a slave holding Baptist preacher
who worked hard
to keep the abolitionists
and their threatening doctrines
from circulating
among his congregants.
When Jesse was only three,
Robert James died of cholera.
Zerelda managed
to fend off poverty
by marrying a country doctor
named Reuben Samuel,
but life in Missouri
in the 1850s was hardly stable.
The question of slavery
was ripping apart
the American frontier.
When Jesse was just nine,
the Kansas-Missouri border war
erupted.
During the five years of
bloody fighting that followed,
everybody on that border
was forced to take sides.
The James-Samuel family
sided Southern.
Slaves accounted for nearly
half the family's wealth.
The way they saw it,
no government had the right
to strip them of their property
or tell them how
to conduct their business.
So there was no confusion
in Jesse's household
when the Civil War began.
His older brother Frank joined
up to fight with the Rebels.
But Union troops routed the
Confederate forces in Missouri
and then occupied Clay County.
STILES: For the most
part in Clay County,
these occupying forces were
other Missourians.
The provisional state government
of Missouri
organized its own militia force,
and these local Missourians saw
their Confederate neighbors
as traitors.
The local militia forces began
to raid the homes
of those suspected
of assisting the insurgents
and partisans in Clay County.
And the war quickly took on
this savage counterinsurgency,
guerrilla warfare conflict
that can be some of
the most savage warfare of all.
STEWART: 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, uh,
one Union commander
actually ordered
the depopulation
of four entire counties
of western Missouri.
Everyone had to leave, and
then their homes were burned.
NARRATOR: By 1864, most
Missourians were tired
of seeing
Confederate sympathizers
strung up
on their front porches
or Unionist civilians
gunned down in their fields.
But the James-Samuel clan
ran with a fierce
and militant minority.
Jesse's brother Frank had joined
a murderous Confederate
guerrilla group.
In retaliation,
Jesse's stepfather was tortured
nearly to death,
his pregnant mother arrested.
Zerelda signed an oath
of allegiance to the Union
to get out of jail,
but she refused to abide
by the terms of her surrender,
and she refused to let her sons
forget the family's humiliation.
MAN: She was not a
wallflower by any means--
very vocal, very outspoken.
Frank and Jesse were
definitely raised
pro-Southern, pro-Confederate.
To be treated
like the Jameses were treated
demanded that vengeance be taken
or you could not hold
your head up as a man.
NARRATOR: In Missouri,
vengeance was best got
riding with one of the dozens of
bushwhacker groups in the state.
In the company of these men,
Jesse James would be schooled
in violence and terror.
Though they were
partisan Confederates,
these guerrillas operated
without official sanction
and outside
the accepted rules of war.
They were simply out
to punish their enemies,
promoting fear as they went.
Jesse's most important mentor
was William T. Anderson--
Bloody Bill.
Anderson's sisters
had been arrested
for aiding the bushwhackers.
One was crushed to death
in a jail collapse.
By 1864, Bloody Bill was
in full fury.
MAN: Bill Anderson's group
never numbered more than 80,
and yet those 80 men just nearly
turned Missouri inside out.
His was the group.
And it only stands to reason
that some impressionable kid
like Jesse
would want to go out
and join the best,
because that's the one that's
going to do the most damage
to this hated enemy.
STEWART: William T.
Anderson was a psychopath.
This guy loved to kill.
And the odds didn't matter.
He could go in,
three-to-one odds against him,
and just look at his men and go,
“There they are, let's go,“
draw pistols and ride right
into the middle of them.
The actual fighting was
incredibly savage.
The warfare was
very close range.
The use of the revolver
as their primary weapon
dictated that it be
close-range warfare.
GOOCH: The guerrillas habitually
carried multiple revolvers.
You'd ride into battle,
shoot off one revolver, drop it,
pick up another revolver
and continue right on fighting.
So a guerrilla, armed with
even just three revolvers,
had 18 quick shots as opposed
to the single-shot weaponry
that his opponents
were carrying.
Now, the 36 caliber
not being a real fast killer
because of its small size,
but you still have a wounded
opponent laying on the ground.
And Union medical records
indicate
an awful lot of head shots,
so we know
they were just walking up
and finishing them off
after the battle.
CHIAVENTONE:
Jesse and his companions,
they're not satisfied
just to kill the enemy.
They will go in,
they'll wade in,
they'll break skulls,
they'll slash throats.
They took trophies-- very often
scalps, sometimes ears.
Oft times, they would
cut off noses.
What they set out to do was
to terrorize all of their
enemies and potential enemies
and to dissuade people from
supporting the federal cause.
They would spread word of their
deeds and also of their threats
that hopefully
would be picked up
by the newspapers and printed.
NARRATOR: On September 27,
1864, in Centralia, Missouri,
Anderson's boys give the papers
something to write about.
They murdered 22 unarmed Union
soldiers heading home on leave,
and as part
of a massive guerrilla army,
ambushed and butchered
150 federals.
WOMAN:
They are just slaughtered.
They are slaughtered
by the guerrillas.
And Jesse would have been there.
He would have seen this.
He would have taken part.
GOODRICH: This is one of ultimate
atrocities of the Civil War--
a hundred and some men,
helpless, disarmed,
murdered in their tracks.
It would have been
a very terrible thing to see--
beheadings, disembowelments,
torture, fiendish torture,
men begging for their lives.
Those bodies were
pretty well mutilated up.
Accounts say that there was
not a a corpse on that field
that had the same head on it
that it started the day with.
In one case, a man's privates
were described
as being cut off
and shoved in the man's mouth.
And there were scalps taken.
There were other acts
of mutilation.
It was an incredibly brutal day.
WOMAN: Every man that took
part in the Centralia massacre
witnessed something that
would be impossible to forget.
We can imagine the pictures.
We can imagine
what body parts thrown
across the field looked like.
It's more difficult
to imagine the smells.
It's more difficult to imagine
the sounds
that they would have heard
that day.
I don't know how they could
have not been transformed.
STILES: These were young men who
were literally soaked in blood.
Jesse James was immersed
in the most savage kind
of bloodshed conceivable.
NARRATOR: The horror of
Centralia focused attention
on Jesse's family
and on his guerrilla leaders.
Federal officers banished
Zerelda from Missouri
and had her shipped upriver
to Nebraska.
The Union Army assigned
an old Indian tracker
named Samuel P. Cox
to hunt down Bill Anderson.
A month after Centralia, Cox and
his men lured Anderson's crew--
Jesse James among them--
into a trap in western Missouri.
They shot Bloody Bill
off his horse that day
and displayed his body like
a trophy in a local courthouse.
But Jesse wouldn't quit.
Even after
the Confederacy surrendered
the following spring,
Jesse James was still fighting.
Weeks after the surrender,
Wisconsin cavalrymen shot him
through the lung
and forced the 17-year-old rebel
to pledge allegiance
to the Union.
STILES:
There was a sense that
the Civil War had ended not
just in the Confederate defeat,
but that Jesse James himself
had been defeated.
The end of the war was
as personal an experience,
as bitter an experience,
as you can imagine for him.
NARRATOR: After a decade of vicious
war, Missourians craved normalcy.
They wanted to harvest crops,
raise hogs, go to church.
Men on both sides went back
to their farms
and tried to fit themselves
into their old lives.
But after the war,
how could things be like old?
Politics in Missouri
was complicated and nasty,
still split along
the fault lines of the war.
The Radicals-- hard-line
Unionist and anti-slavery--
took power in postwar Missouri,
and they meant
to make a stiff peace.
They pushed through a new state
constitution outlawing slavery,
ran Confederate partisans
out of public office
and stripped them of the vote.
In Clay County,
three out of four white males
were disenfranchised.
STILES:
Old office holders--
people who had been leading
figures in their community--
were forced out of office, and
new men were put in their place.
These new men
who were put into place
were the Radicals who had
emerged out of the Civil War--
people who had embraced
the new society of emancipation,
of civil rights
for African Americans,
and who represented an overthrow
of everything the old society
had stood for.
CHIAVENTONE:
There were a great many men
who were able
to put aside old hurts,
and they were able to go back
and buckle under with
the Republican administration.
But there were some,
especially the younger ones--
Little Archie Clement,
Fletch Taylor,
Jesse James, his brother Frank--
who just couldn't accept
the status quo after the war.
They just couldn't deal with it.
They felt
they were being hounded,
they were being persecuted
for their role in the war,
and so they elected
to live outside of society
and to prey on it.
GOOCH: The James boys were
not forced into anything.
It was not easy on any
former guerrilla after the war.
But so many of the boys did not
resort to outlawry or violence.
It's kind of like
everything else in life:
You make your choices.
NARRATOR:
Beginning in 1866,
the old bushwhackers robbed
banks in Liberty, Richmond
and Savannah, Missouri,
and Russellville in Kentucky,
leaving a trail of dead bank
clerks, lawmen and civilians.
Many of the bushwhackers
were tracked down and jailed,
or shot dead, or lynched.
The James brothers were known
to associate with the suspects
in this string of robberies,
but Jesse had never been
publicly connected with a crime,
never been so much
as mentioned in a newspaper.
That changed in December
of 1869
in a small town
in northwest Missouri.
The way Jesse and Frank
understood it,
Bill Anderson's killer,
Samuel Cox,
was running the bank
in Gallatin.
( No dialogue )
( no dialogue )
NARRATOR: By most standards, the
bank robbery was a disaster.
Jesse had stolen a portfolio
full of worthless paper.
He hadn't killed Cox,
but a cashier named John Sheets.
But it was a crime that set
the James brothers mold--
an armed daylight raid,
a cold-blooded murder
carried out in the name
of the Confederate cause,
and 22-year-old Jesse
practically screaming
for attention.
STILES: As Jesse made his
escape from the scene,
more than once,
they spoke to bystanders,
and Jesse repeatedly stated
that he'd killed the killer
of Bill Anderson,
that he had taken revenge
for Anderson's death,
and he was certainly
quite proud of the fact.
In fact, he seemed to have been
in a state of ecstasy over it.
WOMAN:
The Gallatin bank robbery
was significant for Jesse James,
because it was the first time
he was really mentioned
in conjunction with a crime.
They told his name.
They told where he was from.
NARRATOR: Newspapers across the
state replayed the robbery,
the deliberate assassination
of the clerk
and the James brothers'
daring escape.
A “desperate and dangerous man,“
they called Jesse,
"wandering, reckless“
"a strong Southern man.“
The story caught the attention
of an editor
at the Kansas City Times,
John Newman Edwards.
Edwards was
a former Rebel Army officer
who was trying mightily
to inspire
the old Confederate wing
of the Democratic party
to jump back
into the political skirmish.
CHIAVENTONE: Edwards is
a bit of an alcoholic.
He's disappointed.
He is an unrepentant Rebel.
And 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.
Edwards learns of
this Confederate guerrilla
who four years
after the end of the war
tries to take revenge
for the death of Bill Anderson--
one of the most ruthless
Confederate guerrillas--
and this naturally
appeals to him.
NARRATOR: Not long after
the Gallatin robbery,
Edwards sought out
the James brothers,
and as soon as he met them,
he understood what he had.
Frank was shy and sullen, maybe,
but Jesse was a horse that
could be ridden for distance.
STILES:
Jesse was temperamentally
clearly the one who liked
to get attention.
He wanted to be somebody
who had a public presence.
He wanted to be out there
in the public eye.
NARRATOR: With Edwards as
his spur and proofreader,
Jesse wrote a letter addressed
to the governor of Missouri,
but published
in the Kansas City Times.
Jesse denied any involvement
in the killing at Gallatin
and began a campaign
to win himself status
as Missouri's
“number one victim.“
The beauty of it was
that Jesse's own story
rhymed perfectly
with the bigger myth
Edwards was trying to create--
all ex-Confederates were being
victimized by the Radicals.
Over the next year and a half,
Jesse James--
along with Frank and
a half dozen ex-bushwhackers
such as Clell Miller
and the Younger brothers--
robbed one bank, two
stagecoaches and two railroads.
Meanwhile, Edwards was busy
knitting the new legend.
Young Jesse,
according to Edwards,
had fought with grit and valor
in the war,
and he was still fighting.
If Jesse James was
robbing anybody,
it was only Radical banks
and the corrupt railroad
corporations
who were ruining
the Missouri farmers.
In Edwards' fanciful telling,
Jesse was religious, fastidious,
kind to women,
children and animals,
saved poor widows
from foreclosure.
He was
America's own Robin Hood.
CHIAVENTONE: Now, there's no
evidence that Frank and Jesse James
ever robbed from the rich
and gave to the poor.
It's a pretty good bet
that Frank and Jesse
used their ill-gotten gains
for their own purposes.
But there is this mythology
which grows around,
and Edwards is the one
who waters this myth
and allows it to flourish
and grow.
PHILLIPS:
Some of the newspaper titles
that emerge
during this period of time
suggest the deep groundswell
of sympathy
for people
like Jesse and Frank James
who were fighting a war that,
in many people's minds,
hadn't ended.
And many of these papers were
were paying close attention
to the antics
of Frank and Jesse James.
CHIAVENTONE: Frank and Jesse James
decided what they would best do
is turn their efforts
against the representatives
of the Northern elites,
and that would be the railroads
and the banks
and the express companies.
And in many ways, they looked at
themselves as freedom fighters
and tried to strike a blow
for Southern manhood
and Southern honor
and Southern virtue.
GOODRICH: There was shame
in losing the war.
But here was Jesse, who was
still making life difficult
for the occupation forces.
If you're 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're doing it for them,
for a greater good?
NARRATOR: Jesse's rising
notoriety coincided neatly
with the improving political
fortunes of ex-Confederates.
While Missourians had blocked
full citizenship
for freed slaves, the ex-Rebels
had won back the vote.
And by 1874, the old
Southern-sympathizing Democrats
were beginning to win back seats
in the state legislature.
Zerelda was in her glory.
Jesse and Frank's mother
was pleased
to grant an audience
to reporters,
through whom
she could threaten witnesses
who stepped forward
to identify her sons
or deny their involvement
in any crime.
“No mother,“ she opined,
“ever had better sons,
more affectionate,
obedient and dutiful.“
But she was hardly alone.
The James boys and their
Confederates had safe harbor
with dozens of friends in Clay
and the wealthiest farmers
in neighboring Jackson County.
They hid in plain sight
in Nelson County, Kentucky,
where a former bushwhacker
had been made deputy sheriff,
or at their uncle's
in Logan County, Kentucky.
They were welcomed by former
Rebels in Texas and California
and by Klansmen
in North Carolina.
STILES: During the 1870s, Frank,
Jesse James, the Youngers,
lived in their home counties,
traveled freely,
used the trains,
and were often protected
and given help
by their neighbors and their
old Confederate supporters.
STEWART:
They helped them considerably.
They would hide them out.
They would give them food,
clothing, horses,
trade off tired horses
for fresh horses.
NARRATOR: Not everybody in Missouri,
or even in their own neighborhood,
was so sanguine
about the James brothers.
More sober souls were lamenting
Missouri's growing reputation
as the “Robber State,“
pointing out the alarming drop
in property values.
Republicans made the James gang
a campaign issue,
accusing the Democrats
of being soft on crime
when the criminals were
old Confederates.
Love him or hate him, everybody
was talking about Jesse James.
When Jesse married
his first cousin,
the decidedly plain and careworn
Zee Mims, in April of 1874,
Edwards described the bride
as elegant, attractive
and devoutly religious.
And the 26-year-old outlaw
worked hard
to keep up his end
of the bargain.
He carried a well-thumbed Bible,
kept fine horses,
dressed in style.
Over time, Jesse James began to
inhabit the myth Edwards made.
“We're not ordinary thieves,“
he announced to the passengers
on the first train the gang
robbed, “we're bold robbers!“
At another train robbery
in 1874
the James gang left
the telegraph wires uncut,
and the contents of the press
release they left behind
were quickly dispatched
throughout the country.
JACKSON:
Let's face it,
his story was a good story.
It had conflict.
It had drama.
And the national press
took up the news:
The New York Times,
San Francisco, New Mexico,
Chicago, Kentucky.
The news spread everywhere.
GOOCH: I think he gloried
in that attention.
I think Jesse had
a tremendous ego
and he loved reading
about himself in the papers.
GOODRICH: Jesse's just a little
farm boy from western Missouri.
And all of a sudden he's in
newspapers across the country.
It's a lot easier
to buy into that legend
than it is to take a long,
hard look at yourself.
NARRATOR: What he was, was a thief
and a cold-blooded murderer.
Jesse had little interest
in a fair fight;
each of his victims
had been unarmed and helpless.
For all his press clippings,
Jesse James had no permanent
home, few possessions
and fewer safe havens.
His success in getting attention
for himself
only made things worse.
Governor Silas Woodson
issued a $2,000 reward
for the James brothers, then
persuaded the state legislature
to fund a squad of secret police
to track down the bandits.
The biggest threat
to Jesse's life
came from the private sector.
In 1874, the express companies,
tired of having
their baggage car safes emptied,
hired Allen Pinkerton
and his detective agency
to put a stop
to Jesse and Frank.
Pinkerton sent an undercover
agent into Clay County.
The first thing he did
after getting off the train
was to go to the sheriff,
ask where the James
or Samuel farm is.
He told the sheriff who he was,
what he was doing.
The sheriff told him,
“Do not go out there.
“Those boys will kill you.
If they don't kill you,
the old lady will.“
He didn't listen.
He was later found the next day
with four gunshot wounds in
his chest and two in his head,
with a note pinned on his jacket
that said, “This is what happens
to detectives who come looking
for the James boys.“
STILES: Allen Pinkerton had never
suffered a defeat like this.
It became a personal vendetta
for him,
and he began to undertake the
operation on his own expense.
NARRATOR:
On January 25, 1875,
on information that
Frank and Jesse were at home,
three Pinkerton detectives and
a handful of Clay County locals
made a raid on Zerelda's.
Shortly after midnight,
the posse tried
to flush Frank and Jesse
from their mother's house.
The Pinkertons
abandoned the raid
when one of their incendiary
devices exploded
inside the cabin.
Jesse's half-brother,
Archie Samuel,
had been killed
by flying shrapnel;
part of Zerelda's right arm
had been severed.
Frank and Jesse
were nowhere to be found.
STEWART: The public outcry after
the Pinkerton raid was widespread.
The general consensus was,
we don't like
what the boys are doing
as far as robbing banks and
trains and killing people,
but that does not justify
blowing up houses
with old ladies
and small children.
Yes, we want to get rid
of these guys, but at what cost?
People who before had either
been skeptical or openly hostile
to Jesse James as simply
a criminal who was trying
to manipulate the public
with his letters to the press
actually began to see him as
he had been promoting himself.
He was a victim
of these Northerners
who were trying
to persecute the South
and were picking on him
as a former Confederate.
NARRATOR: Jesse and
Frank hid in Nashville,
with good reason to keep
their heads down:
that summer, Zee gave birth
to Jesse's son,
Jesse Edwards James.
Frank had just married Annie
Ralston, a former schoolteacher
who had little enthusiasm
for her husband's life of crime.
With public sympathy
behind them,
John Newman Edwards was working
the Missouri state legislature,
trying to get Frank and Jesse
amnesty for war crimes
and a fair trial for any crimes
that could be charged to them.
Police work being
what it was in Missouri,
and juries being what they were,
there was a good chance
the James brothers could
walk away free men.
STEWART: Frank James looked
at it as an opportunity
to settle down
into a normal life
which, especially by 1875, is
exactly what Frank wanted to do.
Jesse, on the other hand,
believed that it was all a ploy,
that if they rode into
Jefferson City or anyplace else
to give themselves up,
they would be hung immediately.
STILES: The attention he had
gotten only fed his ambition
to be seen even more widely
as a Confederate hero.
At this moment, I think he saw
it not as a chance to give up
his life of crime, but, in fact,
to take it to another level.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1876,
the entire country seemed on fire.
Economic depression loomed,
and labor fights escalated
toward destruction and murder.
Western expansion grew
more and more bloody:
in the Dakota Territory, Crazy
Horse and his warriors wiped out
George Armstrong Custer
and his soldiers.
A bitter presidential election
divided the nation.
Reconstruction advocates
in the South were buckling
under the weight of white
supremacist thuggery.
With Radical Reconstruction
teetering, the fate and future
of civil rights in the South
was at stake,
and Jesse James made bold to
insert himself into that story.
That September, Jesse, Frank
and a band of ex-bushwhackers
that included Cole Younger
and his brothers, Clell Miller,
Charlie Pitts
and William Chadwell
set out
for Northfield, Minnesota.
Bob Younger said
one of the gang had a spite
against a major depositor
at Northfield's
First National Bank.
STILES: There was one very
distinctive thing about Northfield:
that was the presence of
Adelbert Ames, who had been
the Radical Republican governor
of Mississippi, who had been
one of the foremost advocates
for civil rights in the South,
and who had been elected with
almost unanimous black support
in Mississippi during the period
when Reconstruction
was in force there.
So Ames's presence
was definitely a draw for them.
NARRATOR:
After a decade
of well-publicized
daylight bank robberies,
civilians had learned
to be on the lookout.
And when Northfield's
Main Street merchants
saw three strangers
go into the bank,
and five more armed men
take up positions outside,
they picked up their guns
and headed for the street.
JACKSON: These were
hard-working Northerners
who did not believe
in such foolishness
as letting people
come into their town
and hold up their bank and take
their hard-earned dollars.
STILES: They lost the
element of surprise.
( Gunshots cracking )
The Younger brothers,
in particular, were cornered
against this bare masonry wall,
basically a shooting gallery
in which they were butchered.
And on the inside, the
bookkeeper, Joseph Lee Heywood,
bravely refused
to open the safe.
And as the robbers gave up
and left, one of them turned
and shot the bookkeeper down in
his tracks: cold-blooded murder.
By the time the inside men
emerged from the bank,
William Chadwell
was already dead,
and Clell Miller
lay dying in the street.
Frank, Jesse, Charlie Pitts and
the Youngers managed to escape,
but found themselves lost in
the unfamiliar Minnesota woods
and hunted.
Thousands of Minnesotans
pulled down their shotguns
and formed posses
and picket-lines,
in one of the largest manhunts
in American history.
Two weeks later, cold, hungry
and badly wounded,
the Younger brothers
and Charlie Pitts
were cornered by a posse
near Madelia, Minnesota.
Pitts was killed, and the three
Youngers shot up and captured.
Only Jesse and Frank emerged
from the Minnesota woods.
Northfield had been
a bitter defeat for Jesse.
The gang had been cut to pieces,
by Northerners,
but that was not the story
that took hold.
In the Southern-leaning
broadsheets,
the James Gang's Waterloo turned
into Jesse's Great Escape.
JACKSON: The Northfield bank
robbery secured his fame
as being extraordinary.
Here you have a man
who travels almost 500 miles
from Minnesota back to Missouri.
He is horseless,
doesn't have any food.
He only had a few weapons.
Yet they traveled 500 miles
back through posses
that numbered over 1,000 men.
And that escape was played up
over and over again.
NARRATOR: After the
botched Northfield job,
Frank and Jesse disappeared
from public view.
They quietly resettled
in Tennessee,
where Jesse lived
under the alias J.D. Howard;
Frank became B.J. Woodson.
Jesse and Zee had a second child
on the way,
and Frank and his wife, Annie,
had a newborn, too.
Frank James lost a lot of his
enthusiasm for the outlaw game
after Northfield.
Frank rented a farm,
was raising hogs, corn,
had a son, and, I believe,
was very content and peaceful
right outside of Nashville.
Jesse, on the other hand,
also living in Nashville
very restless.
( Horse neighing )
STILES: He continued to engage
in get-rich-quick schemes:
cornering the local corn market
in his county,
buying racehorses and entering
them in races around the South.
Jesse was noted
for being a gambler
and being a very bad gambler.
He lost a lot of money
playing cards and such.
By the late, say, 1878, '79,
Jesse was running out of money.
Something was going
to have to be done.
NARRATOR: For Jesse, it was
bad enough being broke.
But after more than seven years
of constant play in the press,
he couldn't stand that his name
was fading from sight.
His son Jesse and daughter Mary
had no idea
their father
was a notorious outlaw.
They didn't even know
their own last name,
and they certainly
didn't enjoy the spoils.
The Howards owned little
besides some stolen jewelry
Jesse had given Zee
and an arsenal of revolvers,
rifles and shotguns.
GOOCH: There's no glory in sitting
on a horse farm in Tennessee.
Jesse James
had to be Jesse James.
I think he was perhaps
a victim of the times
and a victim of himself,
of his own innate tendencies
to like violent things
and to be caught up
in that kind of excitement.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1879,
Jesse rode back into Missouri
and made a new James gang,
recruiting a couple of cousins
and some young farmhands
from the old burnt district.
GOOCH: They were not a ghost
of what he'd before--
just common, run-of-the-mill,
backcountry thieves and killers.
You don't have the people
who were trained, if you will,
during the war.
NARRATOR: That October, the
James gang stopped a train
at the Glendale depot
in Jackson County, Missouri,
robbed the express car, pistol-
whipped the express manager
and left a press release:
“We are the boys
that are hard to handle
and will make it hot
for the party that
ever tries to take us.“
Jesse and his gang went
on his most vicious
and fast-paced spree,
robbing a stage
at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky,
a government payroll office
in Muscle Shoals, Alabama,
and then two separate trains
in Missouri.
At the first, they murdered
the conductor and one passenger.
At the second, Jesse identified
himself to all who could hear.
"If we're going to be wicked,“
he yelled,
“we might as well
make a good job of it.“
Amid his own noise,
Jesse James was deaf
to the sound of public sentiment
shifting beneath him.
Not even John Newman Edwards
stood up
to defend his old friend.
PHILLIPS: By the 1880s,
there was a completion
of the Confederate renaissance
in Missouri.
Both senators had had some tie
to the Confederacy.
Both Houses of the state
legislature by the late 1870s
were filled with former
supporters of the Confederacy
or outright Confederates,
former Confederates themselves.
The ex-Confederates
had accomplished
what Jesse James
had been fighting for
for the last 15 years.
STILES: It was clear that
Jesse's time had passed.
And there was an increasing
sense of resentment,
even among former Confederates,
who saw that there was really
no excuse anymore
for Jesse's bandit career,
because the battle had been won.
NARRATOR: Jesse James's
home-staters were, in fact, anxious
to be rid of him
once and for all.
His own ex-Confederate neighbors
made plans to assassinate him.
The new Democratic governor,
Thomas T. Crittenden,
convinced the executives
of the state's railroads
and express companies
to put up the money
for a fat reward:
$10,000 for each
of the James brothers.
Frank had abandoned his little
brother for safer pastures.
Left to himself, Jesse grew
increasingly paranoid
that one of his own men
would turn on him
and increasingly violent.
He murdered one of his crew
and was hunting another.
Gang members Dick Liddil
and Bob Ford decided
it might be a good time
to open up negotiations
with the governor.
STEWART: By 1881, early '82,
Jesse James' life was changing,
and not for the better,
as far as he was concerned.
He moved his family up
to St. Joseph, Missouri,
and again was trying
to get this gang together.
The only thing
that he could come up with
as far as gang members were
Bob and Charlie Ford--
and they were less
than credible or dependable--
but was almost to the point
that he had no choices.
STILES: Jesse still had
robberies planned,
so he brought the Ford brothers
into his own house.
He thought it would be safer
that way.
NARRATOR: By the time Bob Ford
arrived at Jesse's house in St. Joe,
he had already cut a deal
with Governor Crittenden.
In a private meeting
two months earlier,
the governor had assured
Bob Ford
the reward money would be his
if he captured Jesse.
If he killed him, the governor
had the power to pardon.
STILES: It's widely believed that
the governor understood clearly
that the deal meant
the death of Jesse James.
The governor of Missouri
had essentially conspired
to assassinate someone--
a private citizen.
As notorious and as ruthless and
as vicious as Jesse James was,
it was an extraordinary event,
where the governor of the state
conspires to assassinate
one of his citizens.
STEWART:
Early morning of April 3, 1882,
they were sitting around the
table, and Charlie was sweating.
Zee thought
that Charlie was sick.
Asked him if he was sick,
not knowing that Bob had
told Charlie about the plot
to capture or kill Jesse, and
that he was going to take Jesse
the first opportunity he had.
STILES: Jesse was
preparing for a robbery
that he was planning
on carrying out,
and he was going
in and out of the house,
and it was so hot,
he had to take off his coat,
and that led him
to take off his guns
for fear that he'd be seen as
he went in and out of the house.
STEWART: He made a comment that
it wouldn't be a good idea
if passers-by saw a man in
his own house so heavily-armed.
So he took his gun belt off,
laid it in on a bedroom bed.
Now, that was very unusual.
In fact, Bob Ford later said
that he had never seen Jesse
without his guns before.
STILES: And that was
exactly the opportunity
that they'd been waiting for.
And, as legend correctly has it,
Jesse got up on a chair
to dust a picture.
STEWART:
Bob pulled a pistol.
The end of the barrel was
just about three and a half
to four feet
from the back of Jesse's head.
( Hammer clicks )
And if there's anybody
in the world
that knows the sound
of a cocking hammer,
it was Jesse James.
For a fraction of a second,
Jesse knew that it was over.
NARRATOR: The dramatic death
of Jesse James, at age 34,
only increased
the reach of his name.
News spread from
his home county papers
to both coasts and beyond.
Jose Marti wrote him up in
Venezuela's La Opinión Nacional;
Oscar Wilde reported on the
auction of Jesse's possessions.
Death pictures went on sale;
so did pieces
of the St. Joe house
pried off by
the most intrepid onlookers.
Bob Ford and his horse went
on the New York stage
to reenact his daring deed.
Zee James agreed
to write a book.
She needed the cash.
Jesse's mother considered--
and then rejected
with great fanfare--
a $10,000 offer
for her son's body.
A promoter wanted to take it
on a countrywide tour.
Zerelda James Samuel had her son
buried in her front yard,
where she could keep watch
on the grave
from her bedroom window.
But she soon gave in
to temptation--
offering tours to travelers
who came over from the new spas
in nearby Excelsior Springs
and selling pebbles from
his grave for a quarter apiece.
When she ran out,
she replenished the grave site
from the stream
behind her house.
Brother Frank managed
to get in on the action too
after he wriggled free
from the noose.
Within months of Jesse's death,
Frank had turned himself in
to Governor Crittenden
and gone to trial in Missouri.
A jury had acquitted him
on all charges.
Around 1900, Frank and
his old buddy Cole Younger
went on tour
with a Wild West show.
By then, the ugly truths about
Jesse had been papered over.
Jesse James, Confederate
avenger, disappeared.
And as big business
took hold of America
and the public began to see the
corporation as the new villain,
people clung
to the image of Jesse
as the American Robin Hood
fighting for the little guy.
CHIAVENTONE: All his crimes and
misdeeds seem to be stripped away
or seem not to adhere to him
simply because
he is the underdog.
He is the man who is fighting
against authority,
and something in that appeals
to the American character
or the American sense
of justice.
GOOCH: What we celebrate today--
if "celebrate" is the right word--
is the myth of Jesse James,
not the reality of Jesse James.
And that's a wide divergence--
myth versus reality.
STILES: The irony of Jesse
James is that, in death,
he's become a symbol
of what's seen
as quintessentially American,
what unites all of us--
the frontier,
westward expansion,
the cowboys and Indians story
of American history,
whereas, in life, he had been
a symbol of what divided us.
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