James gang members9/19/2023 ![]() Allan Pinkerton never pursued his hunt for Jesse and Frank any further. The James brothers also launched an intimidation campaign against their perceived enemies near Zerelda’s farm and in April of that year one of their mother’s neighbors, a former Union militiaman who had assisted the Pinkerton agents in preparing for the raid, was shot to death. Following the raid, public support for Jesse and Frank increased, and the Missouri state legislature even came close to passing a bill offering the men amnesty. The agents threw an incendiary device into the farmhouse, setting off an explosion that fatally wounded Jesse and Frank’s 8-year-old half-brother and caused their mother, Zerelda, to lose part of her arm. Shortly after midnight on January 25, 1875, a group of Pinkerton agents, acting on an outdated tip that Jesse and Frank were at their mother’s farm, carried out a raid on the place. In March 1874, after the agency took on the case of the James gang, a Pinkerton detective searching for Jesse and Frank in Missouri wound up dead, while a Pinkerton agent who pursued the brothers’ fellow gang members Cole and Robert Younger in another part of the state also was killed.Ĭatching the James brothers became a personal mission for Allan Pinkerton, an abolitionist who had aided slaves on the Underground Railroad, uncovered a plot to assassinate President-elect Abraham Lincoln and gathered military intelligence for the federal government during the Civil War. Founded in Chicago in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant who had served as the first full-time detective on the Windy City’s police force, the private agency was experienced in capturing train robbers. James wasn’t a Wild West Robin Hood.Īllen Pinkerton (left) with President Abraham Lincoln and a Union general during the Civil WarĪfter Jesse and Frank robbed a train at Gads Hill, Missouri, in January 1874, the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency was called in to hunt them down. ![]() After being nursed back to health by his cousin Zerelda “Zee” Mimms (whom he would wed in 1874 and later have two children), Jesse eventually banded with his brother and other former Confederate guerrillas to rob banks, stagecoaches and trains. ![]() Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Jesse was shot in the chest during a skirmish with Union troops near Lexington, Missouri. In May 1865, a month after Confederate General Robert E. Then they slaughtered more than 100 federal troops trying to hunt them down. In one infamous September 1864 atrocity in Centralia, Missouri, the guerrillas forced two dozen unarmed Union soldiers heading home on leave from a train and executed them. By age 16, Jesse followed Frank as a marauding bushwhacker, with both joining a ruthlessly violent gang led by William “Bloody Bill” Anderson. That August, Frank took part in an infamous raid on the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, during which more than 150 men and boys were killed and numerous buildings destroyed. In May 1863, while at his family’s farm, a teenage Jesse was ambushed and his stepfather hung from a tree by Union militiamen seeking the whereabouts of Frank and his fellow insurgents. Frank James fought with the pro-secession Missouri State Guard at the start of the war, then joined a band of Confederate guerrillas known as "bushwhackers," who carried out attacks against Union sympathizers on the frontier. ![]() Civil War.ĭuring the Civil War, the border state of Missouri was home to bitter fighting in which both sides of the conflict regularly murdered prisoners and civilians alike, mutilated enemy dead, looted property and livestock, and left towns and homes ablaze. He fought as a Confederate guerrilla in the U.S. WATCH: Full episodes of ' I Was There' online now. After Frank and Jesse grew up to become outlaws, the iron-willed Zerelda remained their staunch supporter. Zerelda and her children-Jesse, his older brother and future partner-in-crime Frank, and younger sister, Susan-were plunged into perilous financial straits.Īfter a brief failed marriage to a wealthy, older man, Zerelda returned for good to her first husband’s farm with her children, married again in 1855, and proceeded to have four more children. In 1850, Robert James traveled to California to preach in the gold mining camps however, not long after arriving he became sick and died. Jesse Woodson James, born in Clay County, Missouri, on September 5, 1847, was the son of Kentucky native Zerelda Cole James and her husband, Robert James, a Baptist minister and slave-owning hemp farmer who assisted in founding William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. ![]()
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