Rober Ford's Letter--Jesse James

Jesse James' home in St.Joseph where he was shot and killed by Robert Ford

Ford's letter to Governor Thomas Crittenden giving his version of how he killed Jesse James (April, 1882)



"On the morning of April 3, Jess and I went downtown, as usual, before breakfast, for the papers. We got to the house about eight o'clock and sat down in the front room. Jess was sitting with his back to me, reading the St. Louis Republican. I picked up the Times, and the first thing I saw in big headlines was the story about Dick Liddil's surrender. Just then Mrs. James came in and said breakfast was ready. Beside me was a chair with a shawl on it, and as quick as a flash I lifted it and shoved the paper under. Jess couldn't have seen me, but he got up, walked over to the chair, picked up the shawl and threw it on the bed, and taking the paper, went out to the kitchen. I felt that the jig was up, but I followed and sat down at the table opposite Jess.


Mrs. James poured out the coffee and then sat down at one end of the table. Jesse spread the paper on the table in front of him and began to look over the headlines. All at once Jess said: "Hello, here. The surrender of Dick Liddil." And he looked across at me with a glare in his eyes.


"Young man, I thought you told me you didn't know that Dick Liddil had surrendered," he said.

I told him I didn't know it.

"'Well," he said, "it's very strange. He surrendered three weeks ago and you was right there in the neighborhood. It looks fishy."


He continued to glare at me, and I got up and went into the front room. In a minute I heard Jess push his chair back and walk to the door. He came in smiling, and said pleasantly: "Well, Bob, it's all right, anyway."


Instantly his real purpose flashed upon my mind. I knew I had not fooled him. He was too sharp for that. He knew at that moment as well as I did that I was there to betray him. But he was not going to kill me in the presence of his wife and children. He walked over to the bed, and deliberately unbuckled his belt, with four revolvers in it, and threw it on the bed. It was the first time in my life I had seen him without that belt on, and I knew that he threw it off to further quiet any suspicions I might have. He seemed to want to busy himself with something to make an impression on my mind that he had forgotten the incident at the breakfast table, and said: "That picture is awful dusty." There wasn't a speck of dust that I could see on the picture, but he stood a chair beneath it and then got upon it and began to dust the picture on the wall.

As he stood there, unarmed, with his back to me, it came to me suddenly, 'Now or never is your chance. If you don't get him now he'll get you tonight.' Without further thought or a moment's delay I pulled my revolver and leveled it as I sat. He heard the hammer click as I cocked it with my thumb and started to turn as I pulled the trigger. The ball struck him just behind the ear and he fell like a log, dead."

Assassination--Jesse James

With his gang depleted by arrests, deaths, and defections, Jesse thought he had only two men left whom he could trust: brothers Bob and Charley Ford. Charley had been out on raids with Jesse before, but Bob was an eager new recruit. To better protect himself, Jesse asked the Ford brothers to move in with him and his family. Little did he know that Bob Ford had been conducting secret negotiations with Thomas T. Crittenden, the Missouri governor, to bring in Jesse James. Crittenden had made the capture of the James brothers his top priority; in his inaugural address he declared that no political motives could be allowed to keep them from justice. Barred by law from offering a sufficiently large reward, he had turned to the railroad and express corporations to put up a $10,000 bounty for each of them.

Robert Ford with the gun he used to kill Jesse James

On April 3, 1882, after eating breakfast, the Fords and James went into the living room. Before sitting down, James noticed a crooked picture on the wall and stood on a chair to straighten it. James was not wearing his guns and Bob Ford took advantage of the opportunity and shot James in the back of the head.

Robert Ford wired the governor to claim his reward. He then turned himself in to the law, but was dismayed to find he was charged with first degree murder. The Ford brothers were tried and convicted. They were sentenced to death by hanging, but within two hours were granted a full pardon by the Governor of Missouri. Ford then received a portion of the reward money.

Fall--Jesse James

Jesse and his first cousin, Zerelda "Zee" Mimms (pic right) married on April 24, 1874, and had four children: Jesse James, Jr. (b. 1875), Gould James (b. 1878), Montgomery James (b. 1878), and Mary Susan James (b. 1879). Twins Gould and Montgomery died in infancy. His surviving son was raised by his mother to become a lawyer, and he spent his career as a respected member of the Kansas City, Missouri, bar.

On September 7, 1876, the James-Younger gang attempted their most daring raid to date, on the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota (pic left). Cole and Bob Younger later stated that they selected the bank because of its connection to two Union generals and Radical Republican politicians: Adelbert Ames, the governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, and Benjamin Butler, Ames's father-in-law and the stern Union commander in occupied New Orleans. However, the gang had been casing other locations in the area, as well.

The robbery was thwarted when Assistant Cashier Joseph Lee Heywood, left in charge while the bank officers attended the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, refused to open the safe, falsely claiming that it was secured by a time lock even as they held a bowie knife to his throat and cracked his skull with a pistol butt. The vault was in fact unprotected at the time of the robbery, the inner door closed but unlocked. Meanwhile, the citizens of Northfield had taken notice of the robbery and were arriving with guns. Before leaving the bank, Jesse James shot the unarmed Heywood in the head. When the bandits exited the bank, they found the rest of their gang dead or wounded amid a hail of gunfire. Suspicious townsmen had confronted the bandits, ran to get their arms, and fired from under the cover of windows and the corners of buildings. The gang barely escaped, leaving two of their number and two unarmed townspeople (Heywood and a Swedish immigrant named Nicholas Gustafson) dead in Northfield. A massive manhunt ensued. The James brothers eventually split from the others and escaped to Missouri. The Youngers and one other bandit, Charlie Pitts, were soon discovered. A brisk gunfight left Pitts dead and the Youngers all prisoners. Except for Frank and Jesse James, the James-Younger Gang was destroyed.

Jesse and Frank went to the Nashville, Tennessee area, where they went by the names of Thomas Howard and B. J. Woodson, respectively. Frank seemed to settle down, but Jesse remained restless. He recruited a new gang in 1879 and returned to crime, holding up a train at Glendale, Missouri, on October 8, 1879. The robbery began a spree of crimes, including the hold-up of the federal paymaster of a canal project in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and two more train robberies. But the new gang did not consist of old, battle-hardened guerrillas; they soon turned against each other or were captured, while James grew paranoid, killing one gang member and frightening away another. The authorities grew suspicious, and by 1881 the brothers were forced to return to Missouri. In December, Jesse rented a house in Saint Joseph, Missouri, not far from where he had been born and raised. Frank, however, decided to move to safer territory, heading east to Virginia.

The Pinkertons--Jesse James

Express companies turned to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1874 to stop the James-Younger Gang. The Chicago-based agency worked primarily against urban professional criminals as well as targeting unions and breaking strikes. The former guerrillas, supported by many old Confederates in Missouri, proved to be too much for them. One agent (Joseph Whicher) was dispatched to infiltrate Zerelda Samuel's farm and turned up dead shortly afterward, with all but his hands eaten by the hogs that freely roamed the area. Two others, Louis J. Lull and John Boyle, were sent after the Youngers; Lull was killed by two of the Youngers in a roadside gunfight on March 17, 1874, though he killed John Younger before he died (an event depicted in the film The Long Riders (1980)). Allan Pinkerton, the agency's founder and leader, took on the case as a personal vendetta. Working with old Unionists around Jesse James's family's farm, he staged a raid on the homestead on the night of January 25, 1875. An incendiary device thrown inside by the detectives exploded, killing James's young half-brother and blowing off one of James's mother's arms. Afterward, Pinkerton denied that the raid's intent was to burn the house down.

However, a 1994 book written by Robert Dyer entitled Jesse James and the Civil War in Missouri (ISBN-13: 978-0826209597) contains the following:

"In early 1991, a Jesse James researcher named Ted Yeatman found an interesting letter among the papers of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The letter was written by Allan Pinkerton to a lawyer working for him in Liberty, Missouri, named Samuel Hardwicke. In the letter Pinkerton tells Hardwicke that when the men go to the James home to look for Jesse they should find some way to 'burn the house down.' He suggests they use some type of firebomb."

This letter illustrates just how far Pinkerton was willing to go in his vendetta against the James brothers, but the move backfired. The bloody fiasco did more than all of Edwards's columns to turn Jesse James into a sympathetic figure for much of the public. A bill that lavishly praised the James and Younger brothers and offered them amnesty was only narrowly defeated in the state legislature. Former Confederates, allowed to vote and hold office again, voted a limit on reward offers the governor could make for fugitives.

A Folk Hero is Born--Jesse James

The robbery marked James' emergence as the most famous of the former guerrillas turned outlaw, and it started an alliance with John Newman Edwards, a Kansas City Times editor who was campaigning to return the old Confederates to power in Missouri. Edwards published Jesse's letters and made him into a symbol of Rebel defiance of Reconstruction through his elaborate editorials and supportive reporting. Jesse James' own role in creating his rising public profile is debated by historians and biographers, though politics certainly surrounded his outlaw career and enhanced his notoriety. However it is known that John Newman Edwards was a notorious liar and drunkard whose claims and writings were entirely false about Jesse's career as a guerrilla as well as Edwards' relationships with other guerrillas.

Meanwhile, the James brothers, along with Cole Younger and his brothers, Bob and Jim, Clell Miller and other former Confederates—now constituting the James-Younger Gang—continued a remarkable string of robberies from Iowa to Texas, and from Kansas to West Virginia. They robbed banks, stagecoaches and a fair in Kansas City, often in front of large crowds, even hamming it up for the bystanders. In 1873, they turned to train robbery, derailing the Rock Island train in Adair, Iowa. Their later train robberies had a lighter touch—in fact only twice in all of Jesse James's train hold-ups did he rob passengers, because he typically limited himself to the express safe in the baggage car. Such techniques fostered the Robin Hood image that Edwards was creating in his newspapers. Jesse James is thought to have shot 15 people during his bandit career.

Headlines for the First Time--Jesse James

In 1868, Frank and Jesse James joined Cole Younger in robbing a bank at Russellville, Kentucky. Jesse did not become famous, however, until December 1869, when he and Frank (most likely) robbed the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri. The robbery netted little, but James (it appears) shot and killed the cashier, mistakenly believing the man to be Samuel P. Cox, the militia officer who killed "Bloody Bill" Anderson during the Civil War. James's self-proclaimed attempt at revenge, and the daring escape he and Frank made through the middle of a posse shortly afterwards, put his name in the newspapers for the first time.

A First--Jesse James

The end of the Civil War left Missouri in shambles. The pro-Union Republicans took control of the state government, keeping the Democrats from voting or holding public office. Jesse James was shot by Union militia when he attempted to surrender in Lexington, Missouri a few months after the war's end, leaving him badly wounded. His first cousin, Zerelda "Zee" Mimms (named after his mother), nursed him back to health, and he started a nine-year courtship with her. She eventually became his wife. Meanwhile, some of Jesse's old war comrades, led by Archie Clement, another of the bushwhacker leaders once allied with Quantrill, refused to return to a peaceful life. In 1866, this group conducted the first armed robbery of a US bank in post-Civil War times, holding up the Clay County Savings Association in the town of Liberty (pic top right). During this raid, Jesse deliberately shot a bystander student of William Jewell College (see Wellman, 1961). James claimed the reason he robbed the bank was to get back the deed to his land. The gang robbed the Alexander Mitchell Bank in Lexington shortly thereafter, and staged several more robberies over the next few years, though state authorities (and local lynch mobs) had decimated the ranks of the older bushwhackers.

The Begining...--Jesse James

Jesse Woodson James was born on September 5, 1847 in Clay County Missouri, near the site of present day Kearney. As an adult Jesse was of medium height, of slender but solid build, with a bearded, narrow face, and prominent blue eyes. Until his later years, when he became abnormally suspicious and moody, he was good-natured and jocular, though quick-tempered. He always justified his criminal activities by the claim that he had been driven into it by persecution.

His father, Robert James was a farmer and Baptist minister from Kentucky who helped found William Jewel College in Liberty, Missouri. Robert James traveled to California to prospect for gold and died there when Jesse was three years old. After his father's death, his mother Zerelda (pic left) remarried, first to Benjamin Simms, and then to a doctor named Reuben Samuel. After their marriage in 1855, Samuel moved into the James home.

In the tumultuous years leading up to the American Civil War, Zerelda and Reuben acquired a total of seven slaves and had them grow tobacco on their well-appointed farm. In addition to Jesse's older brother, Alexander Franklin "Frank" James and younger sister Susan Lavenia James, Jesse had four half-siblings: Sarah Louisa Samuel (sometimes Sarah Ellen), John Thomas Samuel, Fannie Quantrill Samuel, and Archie Peyton Samuel. Sarah married a man named John C. Harmon.

The James farm was supposedly visited in 1863 by Federal troops looking for information regarding Confederate guerrilla groups. James claimed the soldiers beat him and hanged his stepfather (who survived). Shortly after that, in 1864, Jesse joined a guerrilla unit led by Bloody Bill Anderson, who led the Centralia Massacre. Jesse joined at about the same time Anderson's group split from Quantrill's Raiders, so there is some uncertainty regarding whether Jesse James ever served under Quantrill.

Who was Jesse James?

Of Jesse Woodson James, crime historian Jay Robert Nash asserts, "Millions of words would be written about this handsome, dashing and utterly ruthless bank and train robber. To many of his peers, he would appear a folklore hero who took vengeance in their name upon an industrial society that was grinding the old agrarian lifestyle to ashes. To others, Jesse James and his band represented the last vestiges of the Old South and its lost cause of secession...He was at large for sixteen years. He committed dozens of daring robberies and killed at least a half-dozen or more men. He died at the age of thirty-four."


Every century brings its heroes and its villains. Every now and then, however, a character lurches forth with a combination of the two; maybe because the world doesn't know whether to love or hate him or her, he or she becomes a milestone in the study of complex mankind. Nitty, gritty, but with the spirit of a conquering warrior. In short, a legend is born.

Such is the legend of Jesse James...

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford--More Wallpapers

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford--Wallpapers

Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford trl 2

The Assassination of Jesse James (Trailer)