Jesse Woodson James

Jesse James

He was a Western Outlaw. He was born Jesse Woodson James in Kearney, Missouri to Baptist minister Reverend Robert and Zerelda James. His father heeding a calling left for California with the intent of preaching to gold miners but contracted cholera and died. He is buried in an unmarked lost grave in Placerville. By the time Jesse was eight, his mother had remarried twice more. From the third marriage, he gained two stepbrothers and two stepsisters. As a youth, he was churchgoer, baptized at the Kearney Baptist Church and sang in the choir wanting to emulate his father and become a Baptist preacher. Jesse had very little formal education but was skilled with horses and a natural leader. When but fifteen, he followed his brother James into the ranks of Quantrill's Raiders. After the war ended, he attempted to surrender at Lexington, Missouri and gain amnesty along with his brother Frank, Cole Younger and others but a gun battle ensured. The remnants of the "Raiders" were forced to hide out in the woods. With no means of livelihood, the James-Younger gang came into being. Jesse and his Brother were among the most notorious outlaws of the American West. Jesse and Frank both fought as Confederate guerrillas in the American Civil War. In 1866 they and eight other men robbed a bank in Liberty, Mo. Joined by other outlaws in subsequent years, the James gang robbed banks from Iowa to Alabama and Texas. In 1873 the bandits began robbing trains; they also preyed upon stagecoaches, stores, and individuals. In 1876 Jesse led a failed attempt to rob a bank in Northfield, Minn.; though the brothers escaped, the rest of the gang was killed or captured. After assembling a new gang in 1879 the brothers resumed robbing, and in 1881 the governor of Missouri offered a $10,000 reward for the brothers' capture, dead or alive. In 1882 Jesse was shot in the back of the head and killed instantly by Robert Ford, a gang member, who claimed the reward. A few months later, Frank gave himself up. Tried and acquitted three times, he retired to a quiet life on his family's farm. The exploits of the James brothers were romanticized in pulp fiction and in movies.

His mother had him buried in the front yard of the James Farm with an imposing monument with a inscription condemning the assassin. The house in St Joseph where Jesse met his death is preserved and is the epitome of morbidity. Here you can see the bullet hole made as it passed thought the skull of Jesse. The structure is filled with James memorabilia. The house was actually moved here after being saved from the jaws of demolition. Now more has been added. Artifacts from the controversial exhumation of 1995. A bullet from his right lung stemming from an old civil War injury, the tie tack he was wearing when first buried and fragments of wood, the handles and the glass fragments from the coffin front piece grace a glass cabinet. Jesse James boyhood home today remains relatively secluded in the countryside near the small town of Kearney. After Zerelda's third and very successful marriage to her neighbor a country doctor, the two farms became one and was very prosperous with several slaves doing most of the work. After the death of her son, a defiant mother sat on the front porch giving tours of the house and selling stones from the grave and supposed pistols owned by her famous son. It was here Union soldiers harassed the family known as confederate sympathizers and attacked Zerelda and tried to hang her third husband. The incident defined young Jessie's determination to join the Confederate army. It was here Pinkerton detectives threw an incendiary bomb into the residence killing a younger step brother and maiming Zerelda. After her death and Jesse's wife, his body was moved from the farm to the family plot in Mount Olivet Cemetery Kearney and interred beside her. Clay County purchased the rundown property and after two restorations, 75 percent of the original material remains. It contains original furnishings. The James home is perhaps one of the most authentic birthplace sites in America today.

From this toxic environment came the teenaged boys who would become America's real and fictional Wild West outlaws. Large interconnected families like the Jameses, the Youngers, the Daltons, the Millers and the Fords, all swept up in the uncompromising guerrilla war, contributed their men folk to be killed or psychologically warped for the rest of their lives.