Jesse James and the James-Younger Gang

The case

At about two in the afternoon on 7 September 1876, eight riders from Missouri came into Northfield, Minnesota, a small milling town on the Cannon River, to rob the First National Bank. Three went inside. Two waited at the door and three more held the bridge end of the square. They were Jesse and Frank James, the brothers Cole, Jim and Bob Younger, Clell Miller, Bill Chadwell and Charlie Pitts, most of them hardened by the guerrilla war in Missouri. Within a few minutes two of them were dead in the street and the gang that had robbed banks and trains across half a dozen states was finished.

The James brothers came out of Clay County, Missouri, a slaveholding district where the Civil War was fought farm to farm. Both had ridden with pro-Confederate bushwhackers, Jesse from the age of sixteen, and served under William Quantrill and "Bloody Bill" Anderson. When the war ended the fighting did not. Former guerrillas turned to robbing banks, and from the Gallatin robbery of December 1869, when the cashier John Sheets was shot dead, Jesse's name was in the newspapers. The editor John Newman Edwards of the Kansas City Times printed his letters protesting innocence and cast him as a defiant son of the lost Confederacy. With the Youngers, the brothers robbed banks, stagecoaches and, from 1873, trains.

Their enemies made them more popular. In January 1875 Pinkerton agents raided the James-Samuel farm at night and threw an incendiary device into the house. It killed Jesse's young half-brother Archie Samuel and cost his mother Zerelda an arm. Missouri opinion swung toward the outlaws, and the legislature narrowly rejected a bill offering them amnesty.

Northfield ended that. Townspeople noticed the strangers loitering outside the bank and raised the alarm, then took up guns from the hardware stores and fired from windows and doorways. Inside, the acting cashier Joseph Lee Heywood refused to open the safe, telling the robbers it was on a time lock, which was untrue. He was beaten and then shot dead as the robbers left. Assistant cashier Alonzo Bunker was wounded in the shoulder escaping through the back door. Out on the square, Miller and Chadwell were killed. Nicholas Gustafson, a Swedish immigrant who had been in Minnesota only three months and probably did not understand the shouted orders to clear the street, was mortally wounded.

The survivors escaped with almost nothing and were hunted across southern Minnesota for two weeks. The James brothers split off and got away to the south and west. On 21 September a posse cornered the others in thick brush along the Watonwan River near Madelia. Pitts was killed and the three Youngers, all wounded, surrendered. They pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty that a murder conviction would have carried and were sentenced to life in the state prison at Stillwater.

Jesse and Frank resurfaced near Nashville under false names. Frank settled into farming, but Jesse put together a new and less reliable gang in 1879 and resumed train robbery. Several of its members were caught or turned informant. Late in 1881 he moved his wife and two children to a rented house in St. Joseph, Missouri, as "Thomas Howard".

Governor Thomas T. Crittenden had made the James brothers his priority, and with the law capping state rewards he arranged for the railroads and express companies to fund $5,000 for each. Robert Ford, twenty years old and a newcomer to the gang, and his brother Charley were living in the St. Joseph house as Jesse's trusted companions. Robert had already been in secret contact with the governor. On the morning of 3 April 1882 Jesse took off his gun belt, stood on a chair to straighten or dust a picture, and Robert Ford shot him in the back of the head.

The Fords gave themselves up at once. They were indicted for murder, pleaded guilty and were sentenced to hang, all on 17 April, and Crittenden pardoned them the same day. The speed of the pardon convinced many people that the governor had sanctioned a killing rather than an arrest, and it made the dead outlaw more sympathetic than he had been alive.