The James-Younger Gang: How Civil War Guerrillas Became Folk Heroes

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On a January night in 1875, armed men surrounded a Missouri farmhouse and threw an incendiary device through the window. It rolled into the fireplace and exploded, nearly severing a mother's arm and killing her nine-year-old son. The attackers were Pinkerton detectives. The victims were the family of Frank and Jesse James, who were not even home. This episode starts there to ask how a gang of bank and train robbers came to look like the wronged party, and the answer begins in Civil War Missouri, where teenagers like the James brothers and Cole Younger learned ambush and terror as Confederate bushwhackers.

When the war ended, those skills moved to a new target. The February 1866 raid on the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty used cavalry tactics on a bank and took around $60,000. A newspaper editor named John Newman Edwards then recast the robbers as noble knights in an editorial called The Chivalry of Crime, and Jesse James wrote his own letters to the press. The story follows that publicity machine through the Pinkerton war, the catastrophic 1876 raid on Northfield, Minnesota, and the reward money that finally turned the gang against itself.

• At Gallatin in December 1869, Jesse James shot cashier John W. Sheets because he mistook him for Samuel P. Cox, the Union officer who had killed Bloody Bill Anderson.
• During the 1874 Gads Hill train robbery the gang reportedly checked passengers' hands for calluses, then telegraphed their own press release to a St. Louis newspaper.
• In Northfield, citizens grabbed rifles from hardware stores and fought back, and medical student Henry Wheeler shot gang member Clell Miller from a hotel window.
• The Youngers were cornered at Hanska Slough about two weeks later, pleaded guilty to murder to avoid the death penalty, and never informed on Frank or Jesse.
• On April 3rd, 1882, Bob Ford shot Jesse James behind the ear as he stood on a chair to dust a picture, in a deal made with Governor Thomas T. Crittenden.