How Jesse James Became a Legend: An Interview with His Two Best Biographers

“Jesse James was a lad who killed many a man.” So went the opening line of the popular song, author unknown, that did much to spread the legend of Jesse Woodson James after his death on April 3, 1882—125 years ago today. Jesse and his brother Frank were already legends in their own time, but the last two lines in the verse cemented Jesse’s image in American folklore:

“He stole from the rich and gave to the poor,

He’d a hand and a heart and a brain.”

There is no surviving evidence that justifies the James brothers’ reputation as American Robin Hoods, but as the journalist says in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

In Jesse’s case, the legend was becoming fact long before a prospective gang member, Robert Ford, shot him in the back of the head at his home in St. Joseph, Missouri, while he was straightening a picture. By the estimate of some historians, James was by then probably as famous as the President of the United States.

Born in Clay County, Missouri, in 1847, he joined the Confederate guerrilla band led by the infamous William “Bloody Bill” Anderson. Life might have been different for him had he fought in another theater of the Civil War, but Missouri saw some of the most savage fighting of the entire conflict, and Jesse, still a teenager when the war ended, never really recovered. In 1865 he was shot and nearly killed by Union soldiers whose attitude was no charity for guerrillas.

Most scholars date the first James brothers bank robbery as December 7, 1869, in Gallatin, Missouri, though they may have been at it as early as 1866. For the next seven years, the Jameses and the equally notorious Younger brothers, Cole, John, Jim, and Bob, were thought to have robbed trains and banks around the country. Their disastrous foray into Minnesota in 1876 led to the shootout at Northfield, the most famous botched robbery attempt in American history, resulting in the deaths of several gang members and the capture of the Youngers. Jesse James regrouped with a new gang and continued robbing banks and trains, unsuccessfully pursued by federal agents. By 1881, Missouri Governor Thomas Crittenden had had enough and made a secret deal with Robert and Charles Ford, two men who had associations with the James gang, to assassinate Jesse. Their reward was reported to be the fabulous sum of $10,000. After Jesse’s death, Frank James was tried but never convicted of a major crime. After Cole Younger was released from prison, the two men cohosted a Wild West show.

Jesse James has been the focus of countless movies, including Henry King’s Jesse James (1939), with Tyrone Power as Jesse, Philip Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), with Robert Duvall, and Walter Hill’s The Long Riders (1980), with the Keach brothers, James and Stacy, as Jesse and Frank.

More recent entries are the execrable American Outlaws (2001), with Colin Farrell as Jesse, and the much-anticipated The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with Brad Pitt, to be released later this year (based on a novel by Ron Hansen).

Jesse James has inspired art both high—in addition to Hansen’s novel, there has been Susan Dodd’s Mamaw (1988), based on the life of the Jameses’ mother, Zerelda, and The Chivalry of Crime (2000), by the Welsh novelist Desmond Barry—and low—from dime novels to the movie Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter(1966) and even Pokémon characters. But reliable nonfiction has been hard to come by. The best of the recent biographies are Frank and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend, by Ted P. Yeatman, from 2000, the definitive biography of the brothers, and T. J. Stiles’s Jesse James, Last Rebel of the Civil War, 2002, a groundbreaking work that takes Jesse’s legend out of the frontier tradition and properly places it back in the context of the Civil War and its aftermath.

For the 125th anniversary of Jesse’s death, I talked to both Yeatman and Stiles. Here, they square off on various aspects of his life and legend.

Jesse James is the best-known American outlaw of the post–Civil War period. Was it that way in his own time? Or was he just another colorful member of a gang that included such notables as his brother, Frank, and Cole Younger?

TJS: To understand Jesse James’s place, we need to separate the actual operations from the gang’s public image and public relations. In operational terms, all available evidence points to Jesse as one among equals. I do see signs that he liked to be front and center during robberies, but there’s no good reason to think any of these three men was a commander over the others. However, after the disastrous Northfield robbery of 1876, at which all the surviving Younger brothers were captured, there is evidence that a shift took place, and that Jesse dominated the robberies in which Frank took part.

Regarding the gang’s image, however, Jesse James clearly stood out. Frank and Cole Younger were indeed famous, particularly in Missouri, but Jesse James wrote repeated letters to the press, making him the public face of the outlaws. In addition, Jesse seems to have been a particular favorite of John Newman Edwards, the newspaper editor who did so much to make heroes out of the bandits. In Edwards’s famous profile, “A Terrible Quintet,” he devoted most of his space to the James Brothers, focusing in particular on Jesse. Jesse gave his son the middle name “Edwards” in honor of his friend.

TPY: Jesse, at least at first, was part of what you might call a floating gang of ex-guerrillas. He perhaps got more attention as the result of letters attributed to him in the press, and his alliterative name certainly helped. According to my research, which took some 20 years, Frank James and Cole Younger, the older brothers, had more control before the Northfield raid. The story that the gang didn’t rob Confederate veterans probably started with Cole Younger, who apparently issued the orders for the Hot Springs stage robbery in 1874. Cole was the son of a judge in Cass County, Missouri, who was murdered during the Civil War. After 1876, following Northfield and the capture of the Youngers, some of the Younger folk mystique transferred over to Jesse, who started a new gang in 1876, his brother Frank having gone straight in Nashville, at least into 1881.

Jesse stole around $1,000 worth of cattle from a veteran of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate cavalry, using a bad check. He also robbed at least one Confederate veteran in a stage robbery near Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, in 1880. Jesse’s image has more to do with his sendoff by Bob Ford, a recruit to his gang, who shot him while his back was turned. It’s an archetypal end. You have his name, and his appearance in dime novels during the late 1800s. Frank came in and surrendered, and after a number of trials he was able to beat whatever he was charged with by skillful legal maneuvering, and the P.R. maneuvering of the newspaper editor John Newman Edwards. And so Frank never really got the credit, or notoriety, due to him. But in 1881 the governor of Missouri issued a rewards for the capture of both of the brothers and named them both on the reward handbill.

As I said, the gang was floating, made up of various individuals who floated in and out for different robberies at different points in time. It was not some highly organized outfit, as Hollywood would later portray it. The robberies were normally carefully planned, but some of the folks recruited were not the best and would end up being captured or killed.

Michael Wallis, in his new book, Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride, makes a case that Billy’s reputation as a killer has been exaggerated and that he was no more violent than the country he lived in or the events of his time. Do you feel that way about Jesse? Was he ultimately a product of his environment, or was his environment more a product of him?

TJS: I believe Jesse James went from product to shaper of his times. Without question he was a product of the Civil War—of the most savage theater of the Civil War and the most bloodthirsty outfit in the Civil War. Two things made him a hardened killer: his and his family’s strong pro-Southern convictions, which propelled him into the fight and made him unable to accept the Union victory, and the social process of “violentization,” to use the criminologist Lonnie Athens’s term. On the other hand, once peace came, his insistence on living outside the law and his craving for publicity had an impact on the world he lived in. Most former Confederate guerrillas in Missouri put down their arms in 1865, but the James brothers and their close colleagues refused to, and Jesse’s letters to the press attracted attention to their crimes.

I do think Jesse James’s prowess as a killer after the Civil War is exaggerated in myth and popular memory, though his violence during the war is sorely underestimated. But that is just a hunch. It’s very hard to pin down who killed whom.

TPY: I’d say that Jesse James was more a product of his times, with the guerrilla war in Missouri as the key factor. Instead of spending his formative years in a peaceful setting, it was sort of like growing up in some parts of Iraq today. As soon as he was allowed into the ranks of Fletch Taylor’s band, he ultimately came in contact with other guerrillas who had a definite violent, if not criminal, streak. “Bloody Bill” Anderson was probably a psychopath to boot. It was like some modern street gangs in a lot of ways. As T. J. Stiles noted, Jesse became violentized. I also think he and Frank, not to mention the Youngers, had posttraumatic stress disorder, and this combination spelled trouble later. Jesse had learned to live by the gun, and he couldn’t shake it, unlike his older brother Frank. He tried to settle down in Tennessee but couldn’t cut it.

We’re marking the 125th anniversary of Jesse’s death—or at least his supposed death. With the possible exception of Elvis, no one in American history has been the subject of more survival rumors than Jesse James. Was there ever any doubt in your minds that he was actually killed by Robert Ford? And why are we still hearing stories about how he survived and relocated to Mexico, Canada, or Australia?

TJS: All of the facts indicate that Jesse James lies in Jesse James’s grave, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind at the time he was killed. But there’s something more we should consider. In the Missouri Historical Society Library, I found a letter from Jesse James’s widow, Zee, dated April 1, 1896. She offered to sell some possessions to a historical collector, writing, “I am not in good circumstances, and a little money would greatly assist me.” If we are to believe the Jesse-didn’t-die conspiracy theorists, we have to believe that he suddenly abandoned his wife, his children, his mother, his brother, everyone dear to him; that he suddenly found himself able to live peacefully, which he was unable to do before; that he suddenly was happy with an obscure existence. We have to believe that his entire personality completely changed. It’s absurd.

Why do the rumors of his persistence persist? Simply because he was an antiestablishment hero. When he died, the establishment won, and that’s difficult for many to accept. Add to that the fact that he lived underground, by his wits. The mystery and romance of his life naturally led some people to imagine that he outwitted his enemies one last time.

TPY: Don’t get me started here. Much of the last chapter of my book and one appendix deal with this. I think Jesse was indeed killed in 1882. The forensic evidence alone shows this. Incredibly, backers of four different claimants to being the secretly surviving Jesse were present when the forensic team gave its report. You have the media and folklore, not to mention some strange people, to take credit. There were people who claimed to be most of the other members of the James family. It makes for good filler on a slow news day, and controversy sells. Eric Hobsbawm struck the nail on the head when he drew the parallel between the deaths of the “good king” and the “noble robber.” The “good king” hasn’t really died, and in the case of King Arthur he has gone away to the Isle of Avalon, to one day return. If you believe the robber was noble, it goes that he didn’t really die.

Most of the films on Jesse’s life have been, from a historical standpoint, nonsense. But while we wait for Brad Pitt’s version, do you have a particular favorite? Who do you think has come closest to bringing the Jesse you know to life?

TJS: When I was writing my biography, I avoided any movies about Jesse James, and it had been some time since I had seen any. When I finished, it struck me how poorly the characters on screen fit the man I had researched. I found the real man to be a set of contradictions: a lighthearted joker who was explosively violent; a devoted husband who gambled incessantly (and may have frequented brothels); a secretive, almost paranoid figure who loved publicity. Overall, my favorite movie so far is The Long Riders, but James Keach wasn’t particularly accurate. I have hopes for Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

TPY: I’d have to say that none really strikes my fancy, though I did like Henry Fonda’s Frank James. If they’d just had a better script or two or three. Pitt may have potential for the role, however. The jury is still out.