The Jesse James mythology had a lasting effect on Charley Floyd. Although he gobbled up a constant diet of half-baked yarns and distortions about James and his outlaw band, he still could not get enough. Like his elders, Charley was not concerned with authenticity. He was a schoolboy caught up in the glamour and romance of the James folklore. His appetite for such stories of the legendary desperado became voracious.
There was not a breath of doubt in Charley’s mind that of all the glorified outlaw figures, Jesse James was irrefutably America’s Robin Hood. And just like Robin Hood, the popular outlaw hero whose exploits with his band of Merry Men in Sherwood Forest became the staple of English ballads, James was also depicted as a gallant highwayman who robbed from the rich in order to give to the poor.
The James family, like the Floyds, traced its roots back many years to Wales. Members of the James clan came to America in the mid-1700s, and through the next century, branches of the family settled in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and finally Missouri. Born in 1847 in Clay County, Missouri, Jesse was the son of a devoutly religious mother and a Baptist minister who doubled as a farmer. Jesse’s father left his family on their frontier farm near Kearney, Missouri, and headed to the California goldfields with the other forty-niners to strike it rich. Instead, he became ill and died, and was buried in an unmarked grave near a mining camp. Jesse and his older brother, Alexander Franklin James, or Frank, born in 1843, and their sister, Susan, born in 1849 just before their father left, were raised by their mother, who remarried briefly in 1851 and again in 1855.
The James boys grew up in an atmosphere of hate and fury. Missouri was a free state, but many people there, including the James family, sympathized with the South. Jesse and Frank were caught up in those turbulent years before the Civil War when abolitionist forces and pro-slavery raiders passed back and forth on the Missouri-Kansas border winning converts and convincing citizens to join their respective causes. Oftentimes, the standard method of persuasion was arson, and numerous towns and farms were attacked and burned. Rapes, robberies, beatings, and murders were committed in the name of the avenging God for both sides of the conflict. Innocents were caught in the cross fire.
When the Civil War commenced, the western counties of Missouri were already acquainted with the horrors of unbridled violence. Frank, and later Jesse and their first cousins, the Younger brothers, rode off to war and served as Confederate irregulars, better known as bushwhackers. They ended up in the guerilla band of Confederate William Quantrill, the psychopath who was remembered by Northerners as “the bloodiest man known to the annals of America.”
In August 1863, Frank James and Cole Younger were with Quantrill when he led 450 raiders into Lawrence, Kansas. The town was sacked and 182 of its citizens murdered. Jesse James and Jim Younger rode with Quantrill’s lieutenant, Bloody Bill Anderson, just one year later at the Centralia, Missouri, massacre where more than two hundred Union soldiers, many of them prisoners, were shot and killed. During the terrible war, the James brothers learned the tactics of advance scouting and surprise attack. They honed their survival instincts, such as finding refuge at hideouts they had established in advance of their raid. These skills served them well in later years when they went on the prowl.
At the end of the war, most of the surviving Confederate soldiers who were granted amnesty by the federal government willingly laid down their weapons and went home to farm and put their lives back together. Not all of them were able to make the transition to a quiet civilian life, however, especially not the James boys. As they themselves pointed out, there were no guaranteed assurances of pardon for those who had ridden with Quantrill and the other guerilla bands. It was even rumored that when young Jesse, with a white flag in hand, tried to surrender to federal troops, he was shot and left for dead.
Frank, a bookish man who enjoyed reading William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, and the energetic Jesse, the natural-born leader of the duo who sang in the church choir whenever he went home, organized a band of former guerrillas. They later claimed they were forced to take to the outlaw trail by the northern establishment, which controlled the banks, railroads, and real estate.
“We were driven to it,” Jesse remarked.
Friends and neighbors believed them and rallied to the James brothers’ defense. Bankers and big-business interests were considered to be the real villains, not the James boys and their fellow riders who came from humble beginnings and were victims of the Reconstruction Republicans. Jesse and Frank told everyone they knew that they were persecuted and hounded because they had served with the Confederacy; they claimed they were interested in leading productive lives, but if they had to teach some of the Yankees a lesson, then so be it.
On the afternoon of February 14, 1866, the gang dressed in long soldiers’ overcoats and armed themselves with Colt pistols. They rode into the town square at Liberty, Missouri, dismounted in front of the Clay County Savings Association, and entered the bank. With guns drawn, they terrorized the tellers and proceeded to “withdraw” $15,000 in gold and silver coins and greenbacks and about $45,000 in bonds. On the way out of town, a nineteen-year-old student from William Jewell College tried to get out of the bandits’ path. One of the outlaws pumped four bullets into the boy. He was dead before he hit the street. The crime made headlines across the land. It was the first recorded daylight bank robbery in the nation’s history.
There were reports that Jesse did not participate in the Liberty bank robbery, but nonetheless the brazen crime placed the James gang at the forefront of the public’s consciousness. Afterward, additional bank robberies took place in Missouri and the surrounding states and were attributed to the James brothers and their followers. In 1869, the bank at Gallatin, Missouri, was robbed and a cashier was shot—some witnesses said executed—by one of the robbers. Jesse and Frank were positively identified as two of the culprits. For the first time, the James boys were not just suspects but were branded as wanted outlaws.
In response to the charges, Jesse and Frank launched a public relations campaign designed to clear their names. Jesse vehemently denied any wrongdoing, and he even penned a letter of protest to the governor of Missouri. The Liberty Tribune saw fit to publish the epistle, in which Jesse said, “[I can] prove by some of the best men in Missouri, where I was the day of the robbery and the day previous to it, but I well know if I want to submit to an arrest I would be mobbed and hanged without trial…. Governor, when I can get a fair trial, I will surrender myself to the civil authorities of Missouri. But I will never surrender to be mobbed by a set of bloodthirsty poltroons.”
Jesses’s words did not go unheeded. Soon the James bunch were worshiped as heroes by the economically disenfranchised as well as many of those citizens still loyal to the ways of the Old South. For more than sixteen years, the James brothers operated in several states, and were thought of by many to be caring bandits who were solely motivated by political and social injustice.
Jesse’s showmanship reached its pinnacle in 1872 when he and two others swooped down on the Kansas City Fair and made off with the cash box. Although the bold robbery yielded only about one thousand dollars, a young girl was wounded by a stray bullet. The sheer audacity of the crime brought Jesse much attention, especially from the pro-Democratic newspapers. The day after the robbery, John Newman Edwards, a hero of the Confederacy and the editor of the Kansas City Times, praised the robbery as “a deed so high-handed, so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators.”
Edwards went on to explain two days later that these men “are bad citizens but bad because they live out of their time.” He compared them to those who might have sat with King Arthur at his Round Table and ridden into tournaments with Sir Lancelot. “Such as these are they who awed us on Thursday…. It was as though three bandits had come to us from the storied Odenwald, with halo of medieval chivalry upon their garments and shown us how the things were done that poets sing of.”
About two weeks after Edwards’s glowing editorial appeared, the Times published a letter purportedly written by a member of Jesse’s band and perhaps even by “Dingus” James himself. Other newspaper editors and the critics of the Missouri outlaws’ admiration society guffawed and said the letter undoubtedly came from none other than John Edwards. Whoever the author was, the letter defended the actions of the trio who had struck at the Kansas City Fair. An apology was extended for the accidental shooting of the little girl, and the mysterious writer offered to cover all medical expenses if her parents would send a bill and give their address through the newspaper columns. The letter also talked about the question of who was and who was not a thief.
Some editors call us thieves. We are not thieves—we are bold robbers. It hurts me to be called a thief. It makes me feel like they are trying to put me on par with Grant and his party. We are bold robbers and I am proud of the name, for Alexander the Great was a bold robber, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and Sir William Wallace…. Please rank me with these and not with the Grantites. Grant’s party has no respect for anyone. They rob the poor and rich, and we rob the rich and give to the poor. As to the author of this letter, the public will never know. I will close by hoping that Horace Greeley will defeat Grant, and then I can make an honest living, and then I will not have to rob, as taxes will not be so heavy.
In the presidential election of 1872, Grant handily defeated Greeley by taking 286 of the electoral votes. James did not get to hang up his guns and “make an honest living.” He continued his life as a bank robber.
At least James could take solace in the continued praise and comfort he received from some of the newspapers as well as a large segment of the public. While Edwards of the Times served as almost an unofficial press agent for the gang, James proceeded to build the best possible image, especially considering that he was, after all, a career criminal. He gained support for his exploits by writing letters to newspapers and issuing statements and press releases, including one for a train holdup that was headlined THE MOST DARING ROBBERY ON RECORD. But by far his best ploy for winning public approval came from a series of carefully calculated deeds. Stories abounded about how Jesse and his boys shared their bounty with widows and orphans. Adoring fans said that when Jesse plundered a train, he examined the palms of the passengers and took valuables only from the “soft-handed ones,” since, as one of Jesse’s gang members said, they were “the capitalists, professors, and others that get money easy.” One man, however, riding in a stagecoach robbed by Jesse and the boys, was given his money and pocket watch back when they found out about his loyal service in the Confederate army.
In 1874, James made his cousin Zerelda (Zee) Amanda Mimms a June bride. The occasion was treated like a major social event and was extensively covered by the nation’s press, although not on the society page. The St. Louis Dispatch reported that finally Jesse had been corralled. His captor was a woman described as “young, accomplished, beautiful.” As one historian later said, at last Robin Hood had his Maid Marian. But not everything was rosy for James. Trouble loomed ahead.
Desperate Midwestern bankers grew weary of Jesse James and his antics. They hired Allan Pinkerton, the detective dubbed The Eye by the criminals he tracked, to take care of the James problem. A Scottish immigrant who had come to the United States as a young man to avoid arrest for his political activities, Pinkerton worked his way up through the police ranks and became a favorite of Abraham Lincoln when he uncovered a plot to assassinate the President. During the Civil War, Pinkerton acted as a sort of police chief for the federal government while he headed the Secret Service and gathered intelligence for the Union. In the years following the war, Pinkerton quickly became regarded as a henchman for big-business interests and helped to break up mining strikes in Pennsylvania. He was a scourge of the labor unions and the methods used by his men were ethically questionable. Pinkerton was as relentless as a terrier, and so were those who served under him and his two sons, Robert and William. The motto of their agency said it all: We Never Sleep. The Pinkertons and their small army of crack detectives, despised by the stalwart former Confederates of the border states, were determined to snare James, break up his gang, and shatter the outlaws’ myth of invincibility.
From the very start, the Pinkerton agents assigned to track the James brothers found the going difficult. Residents of Clay County, Missouri, sided with Jesse and Frank, offering them protection from the snooping detectives. Those citizens who did not sympathize with the outlaws remained quiet out of fear. At least three Pinkertons were murdered during the course of the investigation. Finally, in 1875, a group of special agents, together with some local constables, managed to move in under cover of darkness and surround the James’s family homestead. They were convinced Jesse was inside. Two illumination devices were tossed through a window of the farmhouse. One of the flares exploded and showered the room with iron shrapnel. Neither Jesse nor Frank was present but other family members were there. Zerelda Samuel, the James boys’ mother, had her right arm shattered so badly that it had to be amputated, and Jesse’s nine-year-old half brother was killed by the blast. Press coverage was immediate and overwhelmingly in support of the James family. The Pinkertons were denounced and lambasted. There were heated political debates and investigations about the incident. A grand jury indicted several men for murder. More cries for amnesty for the James brothers followed. So did bank and train robberies in Missouri, Kentucky, and Iowa.
On September 7, 1876, about ten weeks after Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his entire command were annihilated by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors on the Little Bighorn River, the James gang ran into troubles of their own at Northfield, Minnesota. Since newspaper accounts had compared James to Napoleon, the gang’s raid on the bank at Northfield, a small northern town far from the gang’s familiar territory, was Jesse’s Waterloo. Within moments of the Missourians’ arrival in their fine linen dusters, all hell broke loose. An alarm went out that the bank was being robbed and the citizens responded. Farmers in town for the day along with merchants armed themselves with rifles and shotguns. Some of the locals threw rocks at the outlaws. In the heated battle that followed, three of the gang were killed outright and the three Younger brothers were shot and captured. Only Jesse and Frank managed to escape unscathed. In just twenty minutes, the desperado gang that had kept the nation entranced for more than a decade was decimated—but not forever.
The Younger brothers recovered from their wounds and went to prison. As he entered the Minnesota State Penitentiary, Cole Younger gave a newspaper reporter the standard James-Younger excuse for their lawless ways. “We were victims of circumstance,” said Younger. “We were drove to it, sir.”
Meanwhile, Jesse and Frank, although wounded by the posse that hounded them for more than a week, managed to make it to the Dakota Territory. Next, they went south to nurse their wounds and regroup. The brothers visited old haunts, including a few in the nations. They camped in the caves located in the San Bois Mountains and found hot meals and soft bunks at a sanctuary not far from the Indian Territory town of Eufaula, where the South Canadian River made a sweeping turn. Called Younger’s Bend, this was the domain of Sam Starr and Myra Maebelle Shirley, also known as Belle Starr. A Missouri girl turned horse thief, Belle had been the lover of an array of outlaws, including Cole Younger, Jim Reed, Jack Spaniard, Jim July, and an Indian known as Blue Duck. She enjoyed her role as outlaw hostess as well as her celebrity status, particularly the many references to her as “the female Jesse James.”
During the years when Frank and Jesse laid low after the botched Northfield robbery, they lived quietly under assumed names with their families in Tennessee. Proud of his two children born in Nashville, Jesse especially doted on his son, Jesse Edwards James, his own namesake. The boy’s middle name honored the Kansas City newspaper editor who had written the heroic accounts of Jesse’s life.
By 1879, even though public sentiment had turned against the James brothers, Jesse and Frank came out of retirement and returned to their old outlaw tricks. They emerged with a new gang and rode out in search of prey. However, the men they recruited were not like the former guerillas—proud ex-Confederates—who had ridden with the James boys in the past. The new gang members were green and unseasoned. They sometimes overcompensated for their inexperience with extreme shows of violence. Not emotionally bound to the James brothers or each other through Civil War bloodshed, many of them drank too much, while others liked to brag and swagger about their exploits. James longed for the old days when every gang member who filled a saddle could be trusted like kinfolk.
Over the next few years, more banks and trains were robbed, but because of the large rewards on the heads of Jesse and Frank, a natural tension was created within the outlaw band. By the early 1880s, Jesse used the name Thomas Howard and had moved his family to a comfortable cottage on a hilltop in St. Joseph, Missouri. Gang members, however, were being picked off one by one. Some were killed, while others, who were apprehended, confessed to their sins and implicated their accomplices. The infamous James gang was crumbling.
On the morning of April 3, 1882, an event occurred that would become part of popular folklore. Two rookie gang members, Robert and Charley Ford, their minds on the staggering ten-thousand-dollar reward offered for James, decided the time had come to strike. During a secret meeting in Kansas City, Missouri Governor Thomas T. Crittenden had already assured the Fords of the substantial bounty. He had dangled full pardons before their eyes if they could deliver the outlaw leader dead or alive. After breakfast with the Ford boys, James, who had just returned from Indian Territory, where he had planned his next bank robbery, walked into the parlor and pulled off his coat and two pistols. When he climbed onto a chair to brush some dust off a picture, Charley winked at Bob, who then drew his gun and fired a shot directly into James’s head. Jesse James tumbled headlong to the floor. He was thirty-four years old and stone dead.
Bob Ford ran from the house screaming, “I have killed Jesse James!” Within hours, the news spread through the rest of the nation. A banner headline in the St. Joseph Gazette shrieked, JESSE, BY JEHOVAH! The fact that the desperado had been shot from behind in his own home by someone from his inner circle fueled the Jesse James myth and forever assured him of a niche in the annals of American folklore.
James’s body was taken to the family farm near Kearney and he was buried in a field beneath a coffee-bean tree. An epitaph was cut in the marble tombstone:
Jesse W. James
Died April 3, 1882
Aged 34 years, 6 months, 28 days Murdered by a traitor and a coward whose name is not worthy to appear here.
Five months after his brother’s death, Frank James, weary of being hunted, strode into Governor Crittenden’s office in Jefferson City, handed over his .44 Colt pistol, and surrendered. There was strong public sentiment in support of Frank. He was tried for his crimes and was, predictably, acquitted.
In subsequent years, Frank went on to do some public speaking. He worked at several jobs, including a position as a doorman at a St. Louis theater. For a few years, he operated a small farm near Fletcher, Oklahoma. Just before his mother died in 1911—the year the Floyd family moved from Georgia to Oklahoma—Frank returned to the James farm near Kearney, where he passed away in 1915. The following year, his cousin Cole Younger, who had been paroled from prison in 1901, died at Lee’s Summit, Missouri. Both Frank and Cole lived out the rest of their lives as respectable citizens and as heroes. They maintained to the end that they were not outlaws at heart but had been driven to crime through persecution.
“A lot of robberies blamed on us we never did,” Frank wrote when he was an old man preparing to meet his Maker. A good many folks agreed and took Frank at his word. Charley Floyd was one of them.
The stories of Jesse and Frank seemed wonderfully delicious to Charley, as rich and luscious as the divinity candy and chocolate fudge that made a boy’s teeth ache. And as with the confections Mamie Floyd kept squirreled away in hidden tins that her children usually found, Charley always came back for more. He wanted to know every detail about the elusive Jesse James. He was relentless in his pursuit, and he pestered Grandpa Floyd or some other old man with time on his hands to tell the outlaw stories again and again.
Tales of the James brothers and their crowd, forever portrayed as innocent victims of the Yankee authorities, were as addictive as those first few forbidden cigarettes Charley and the boys clumsily hand-rolled out behind the cedar trees. Jesse James’s exploits, together with the stories of the old Indian Territory renegades, served as lessons in courage for Charley Floyd. He learned them very well.