who shot frank james

The most famous incident was the disastrous Northfield, Minnesota, raid on September 7, 1876, that ended with the death or capture of most of the gang. Petrone, Gerard S. (1998). 19. (Frank managed to escape.). James fell ill and was left behind when the Confederate forces retreated. Both films, “Jesse James Under the Black Flag” and “Jesse James as the Outlaw”, were filmed in 1921. Jesse—under the name of J.D. Frank was an expert shot and undoubtedly killed many men. But the dates, as well as the locations, check out. After his surrender James was taken to Independence, Missouri, where he was held in jail three weeks, and later to Gallatin, where he remained in jail a year awaiting trial. $0.25 in 1915 dollars would be $5 in 2007 dollars, Learn how and when to remove this template message, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, "Frank and Jesse James in Brandenburg, Kentucky", https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/537/frank-james, "Johnny Cash's childhood memories, in his own words, show love and a sense of humor", Official website for the Family of Frank & Jesse James: Stray Leaves, A James Family in America Since 1650, John Koblas, author of several Jesse James books, Biographical information for the James Family, The James brothers' familiar connection to other notorious outlaws, Summary of the Battle of Wilson's Creek where Frank fought, Summary of the Battle of Lexington where Frank fought, A history of Missouri during the Civil War, A site devoted to the Missouri Partisan Rangers and their history, A description of the raid at Lawrence, Kansas, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, I Feel Like a Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Ford), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frank_James&oldid=1000753849, People of Missouri in the American Civil War, Articles needing additional references from April 2008, All articles needing additional references, Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 16 January 2021, at 15:17. He made a point of making friends with prominent citizens and officers of the law, banking their good opinion against a time when his identity might be exposed. On his arrival, however, he was arrested by the local pro-Union militia and was forced to sign an oath of allegiance to the Union. The site is only a few miles away from Jesse’s grave, which now bears a modest stone flush to the ground (“Born Sept. 5, 1847, assassinated April 3, 1882”) that replaces the desecrated tombstone I saw as a 9-year-old boy. Frank himself died quietly at 72, just another old man on his farm, felled by a stroke. In early 1949, a newspaper article appeared in Lawton, OK stating that local J. Frank Dalton was none other than the infamous Jesse James. When Zerelda died, Frank took over the family business of showing curiosity-seekers the place where he and Jesse were born. Ironically, one of the founding board members of the college (and a trustee of whom the college boasts to this day) had been the Reverend Robert James, a local Baptist minister, who was the father of - yes - Frank and Jesse James. In the aftermath of the failed Northfield bank robbery of 1876, Frank and Jesse James were forced to hide under assumed names in Tennessee. As a boy, Frank James started shooting percussion rifles, shotgun and “cap and ball” revolvers. But his new persona wasn’t entirely an impersonation. By early 1863, Frank, ignoring his parole and oath of allegiance, had joined the guerrilla band of Fernando Scott, a former saddler. He also served as an AT&T telegraph operator in St. Joseph, Missouri. As Frank implies in his story, only very small children were spared — 17 kids under the age of 7 were the massacre's only survivors. After a few years of bank jobs, the gang began holding up trains. It’s also where Frank spent the last years of his life, making small talk with tourists and young boys like my grandfather. On the far side was what the guide referred to as the “Pinkerton kitchen”—named for the bungled nighttime raid on the farm in 1875 by Allan Pinkerton’s detective agency. Reporters who interviewed Frank in his jail cell in Independence and were determined to keep the James legend rolling filled column after column about the appearance of this renowned criminal who had eluded their scrutiny for 20 years. The victim just happened to be Robert Ford, “the dirty little coward” who shot Jesse James 10 years before. I learned about Frank’s beloved horse Dan, who was buried on the farm and whose grave was included in the tours that he used to give curiosity seekers. He is buried—at least his ashes are—in nearby Independence, in a tiny cemetery surrounded by a stone wall at the edge of a rambling city park. They seem never to have troubled themselves with the idea that there was a difference between righteous ven­geance and outright robbery. This was the house where Frank had lived as a boy, where Jesse was born and where the brothers hid out during their wild outlaw times in Missouri. I was 9 years old. Having seen his mother stand vigil over Jesse’s resting place to ward off grave robbers, having watched his brother’s tombstone chipped away by souvenir hunters, he had—true to character—planned carefully ahead. He stipulated no religious service, though there was a simple funeral at the farm, with Frank’s eulogy given by John F. Phillips, a federal court judge and one of the attorneys who secured his acquittal. This ended the life of one of post-Civil War America’s most famous outlaws – or did it? (The True Story of Jesse James, the latest Hollywood version of the story, had been released the year before.) [3] There is a report that after his parole, Frank was involved in a gunfight in Brandenburg, Kentucky with four soldiers that resulted in two soldiers killed, one wounded, and Frank wounded in the hip. James Files, 72, who claims he was the one who assassinated President John F. Kennedy has been moved to a less secure jail in Illinois in preparation for his release next Spring. [7] He died there at age 72 on February 18, 1915. This photo appeared in Zerelda’s personal photo album, which states the photos were taken on September 26, 1897. As the older brother of the famous Jesse James, Frank was a public figure after his retirement from crime and his subsequent acquittals. He was tried for only two of the robberies/murders – one in Gallatin, Missouri for the July 15, 1881 robbery of the Rock Island Line train at Winston, Missouri, in which the train engineer and a passenger were killed, and the other in Huntsville, Alabama for the March 11, 1881 robbery of a United States Army Corps of Engineers payroll at Muscle Shoals, Alabama. When the troops on the Confederate side were withdrawn during the fall of 1864, a guerrilla conflict broke out between groups of pro-Confederates (bushwhackers) and the home guards for the Union. Also a stressful one, no doubt, particularly after the calamity of the Northfield robbery, which netted the James-Younger gang $26.70 and turned into a street shootout and desperate manhunt that left all the outlaws except Frank and Jesse dead or captured. Zerelda, a widowed mother of three who had lost much of her furniture and farm equipment to her late husband’s creditors, would have been alarmed by the abolitionists who were flooding into neighboring Kansas in order to swing it into the free state column and further undermine her precarious solvency. (Rodney Bryant and Daniel Woolfolk/Military Times)... HistoryNet, Homepage Featured Top Stories, Homepage Hero. A telephone Frank installed in 1911 still hung near the entranceway to the kitchen. Astonishingly, this lethal character—who had been among the most remorseless partisans in the Missouri border wars, and who afterward preyed on banks and railroads and express companies and robbed and murdered innocent civilians—walked freely into a new life, the beneficiary of various dropped charges and two sensational murder trials that ended in acquittal. Among others, former Confederate General Joseph Orville Shelby testified on James' behalf in the Missouri trial. Most people know that Jesse James, and his brother Frank … Frank James sits with his mother, Zeralda Samuel, on the front porch of the James family farm in Kearney, Missouri, where he was raised. It starts: “James R. Hoffa, age 62, former president International Brotherhood of Teamsters, missing from Bloomfield Township, since July 30, 1975. Frank James’ life can be easily seen as a chronicle of violence and hatred. By all accounts, these were mostly civilians who were unarmed. There is truth enough in that conventional paradigm. I joined in as a James Farm guide led a small group from the museum along a boardwalk to a white clapboard farmhouse in a clearing a few yards beyond two commanding shade trees. THE MAN WHO WOULD BE JESSE JAMES J. FRANK DALTON, ROUTE 66 AND THE CAVE THEY BOTH MADE FAMOUS. Frank James – who preyed on banks and railroads and robbed and murdered innocent civilians – walked freely into a new life. Jesse’s only full brother, Alexander Franklin James—remembered by history simply a Frank—had left home in 1861 at age 18 to fight on the Confederate side in the Civil War with the Missouri State Guard. He was shuttled around various homes and orphanages, where he suffered physical abuse and sexual abuse at the hands of var… James, along with his older brother, Frank, were out to get rich by breaking all the rules. He soon switched to the more active command led by William Clarke Quantrill. (They are.). He returned to the North Texas area where he was a shoe salesman at Sanger Brothers in Dallas. His new life, after some wandering years and sputtering career steps, ultimately brought Alexander Franklin James back home to the farm in northwestern Missouri where he was born in 1843. Five months after Jesse was killed, Frank took a calculated risk and surrendered to Missouri governor Thomas Crittenden on October 5, 1882. If my grandfather related more details about his relationship with Frank James, I’ve forgotten them. Howard was the alias that James lived under in Saint Joseph, Missouri at the time of his killing.. The conflict left the secessionists of Missouri defeated and disenfranchised, suddenly powerless in an occupied land. On the near side of the fireplace was Zerelda’s bedroom. During his years as a bandit, James was involved in at least four robberies between 1868 and 1876 that resulted in the deaths of bank employees or citizens. He stated that after being hunted for more than twenty years he was tired of the vigil and handed his gun over. Missouri accepted legal jurisdiction over him for other charges, but they never came to trial. His face was “one among ten thousand, and one never to be forgotten.” He had “a peculiarly-shaped head, being narrower between the eyes than any other man in America.” His thinning hair was “so unruly that it infused a sort of earnest, positive, self-asserting aspect into the tout ensemble.”, The James boys were the sons of a charismatic, college-educated Baptist preacher who perished on a quixotic journey to the California gold fields when Frank was 7. The robbery took place in Gallatin, Missouri, where James thought he recognized the cashier as Samuel Cox — the man who had managed to kill James' army buddy Bloody Bill Anderson in 1864. He left instructions for his remains to be cremated and kept safe in a bank vault until his wife’s death, when they would be buried with hers. The onset of World War II and the vast expansion of Naval personnel ushered in a new era of the tatted tradition... Homepage Featured Top Stories, Homepage Hero. But after they robbed a train at Blue Cut, Mo., Frank headed off with his family to Virginia, determined to slip back onto an upright path. The surname “James” is carved at the top, but on Frank’s side of the stone the name inscribed is technically correct but pointedly evasive: “Alexander F.”. There was no positive spin the formerly-fawning press could put on these murders. He left behind his wife Annie Ralston James and one son. Other films about Jesse James: I Shot Jesse James (dir: Sam Fuller, USA, 1949) A rare but largely fictional version of the story from Robert Ford’s point of view. After Northfield Frank had had enough. (It's recurring imagery in American crime reporting. Shortly afterward, Frank took part with Quantrill's company in the August 21, 1863 Lawrence Massacre where approximately 200 mostly unarmed civilians were killed. Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, and again in 1995 for DNA testing to confirm that the remains were actually those of Jesse James. In 1902, former Missourian Sam Hildreth, a leading thoroughbred horse trainer and owner, hired James as the betting commissioner at the Fair Grounds Race Track in New Orleans. Whereas Frank’s story just went quietly on. On September 13, 1861, the Missouri State Guard, including private Frank James, besieged Lexington, Missouri. Our guide pointed out samples of Annie’s tatting displayed on the walls, the business degree from Jones Commercial College acquired by Frank and Annie’s son, Robert F. James, who later built a three-hole golf course on the property. Here he lies: the older brother, the second banana, the faded outlaw legend. St. Joseph The Jesse James home where he … So James shot him to death. In the end, Frank’s gallant pose paid real dividends. The brothers, though shot up at times, survived the Civil War, but had no inclination to put it behind them. But it set him on a path that would result in his own violent death in … Frank was the oldest of three children. Jesse followed suit by joining “Bloody” Bill Anderson’s guerrilla band. Conductor William Westfall was shot in the back as he was collecting tickets while passenger Frank McMillen was shot straight through the forehead as he peered through a car window. As the robbers fled, one of them shot down George Wymore, a young student attending William Jewell College. For a long time I stood in front of a portrait of the outlaw at age 55. He was in the midst of Quantrill’s horrific raid on the abolitionist capital of Lawrence, Kan., which the guerrilla leader ordered “thoroughly cleansed” and in which almost 200 men and boys were slaughtered. It was a stupefyingly hot day when I returned to Jesse’s grave as an adult, paid whatever respects were due the memory of an unrepentant robber and murderer and continued down Jesse James Farm Road through fields where the baled hay looked like giant loaves of bread baking in the open-air oven that is Missouri in July. He surrendered to the Union troops, was paroled, and was allowed to return home. As a child, James showed interest in his late father's sizable library, especially the works of William Shakespeare. It’s not clear why O’Kelley killed Ford—maybe to avenge Jesse, perhaps to get some publicity. On the front is a hand-colored photo of a white-bearded old man wearing a suit and bowler hat, standing in front of a farm gate. Robert Ford posing with the gun that killed Jesse James, circa 1882-1892 Two of the gang members, Wood Hite, a cousin of Jesse James, and a friend of Ford’s named Dick Liddil, were on the run from the law in December of 1881 and taking refuge at the house of Robert Ford’s sister when an argument between Hite and Liddil got out of hand. Their string of bank hold-ups, which began in 1866—possibly with a daylight assault on the bank in Liberty, only a few miles from the James farm—were often marked by lethal shootouts with citizens and sometimes by cold-blooded executions of bank employees. [6], In his final years, James returned to the James Farm, giving tours for the sum of 25 cents. “You ought to see how the women flock around him to buy dry goods,” one observer wrote when Frank was working in a store in Dallas. These robberies resulted in deaths of citizens as well as bank employees. His New York Times obituary summarized his arrest and acquittal: In 1882 ... Frank James surrendered in Jefferson City, Missouri. After his death, she married a third time to Dr. Reuben Samuel in 1855, when Frank was 13 years old. He was never extradited to Minnesota for his connection with the Northfield Raid. The Jesse James Trail starts in St. Joseph, Mo., and includes stops at numerous historic sites associated with James and his brother, Frank. My grandfather surprised my brother and me with this declaration one summer day in 1958. We walked through the parlor, whose walls were decorated with James family photos, among them one of a youthful Jesse, supposedly made when he was near death from a bullet wound, a characteristically forbidding image of Zerelda and a photo of Frank’s lamented horse Dan. In it, Frank is impeccably turned out in a wingtip collar and tie and is staring at the lens with the direct, suspicious gaze of a hostile neighbor. The Tacoma Times reported in July, 1914 that he was picking berries at a local ranch there in Washington state and planned to buy a farm nearby. The book chest was still there in the room, next to the bed in which Frank James had died. He shares a modest tombstone with his wife, but you would never know it was his grave unless you were somebody like me who had gone looking for it for his own wistful reasons. His body has been exhumed twice, once in 1902 when Zerelda had it transferred to Mt. Most people know that Jesse James, and his brother Frank … Let your partner know how you really feel with acronyms such as MALAYA: My Ardent Lips Await Your Arrival... Get inside articles from the world's premier publisher of history magazines. Texas Tech University Press. He was also part of a Chicago investment group which purchased the Fletcher Terrell's Buckskin Bill's Wild West Show, third in size after the Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill shows. For Frank and Jesse James, and for the Younger brothers and other former guerrillas in their iconic gang, the seething resentments of the war melded smoothly into predatory self-aggrandizement. The room we entered first was the sitting room Zerelda added onto the house in the 1890s, and which after her death became Frank and Annie’s bedroom. Explore articles from the History Net archives about Frank James. After he led the fatal ambush of Bonnie and Clyde, former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer said, "We just shot the devil out of them.") Charles suffered from tuberculosis and a morphine addiction, not to mention the rumor that Frank James was coming to hunt the Ford brothers down. Her parents were horrified when she ran off with Frank, but it turned out to be an enduring marriage. This time, Pinkerton’s men, wrongly thinking that Frank and Jesse were hiding out with their mother, surrounded the house and tried to flush out the fugitives with an incendiary device they threw though the window, an iron ball filled with a liquid called Greek fire. The farm had been a tourist site since shortly after Jesse’s death, operated with an unsentimental eye for profit by Frank and Jesse’s formidable mother, Zerelda James. Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, Mo. We were standing at the grave of Jesse James in the Mt. The quiet life did not suit his younger brother. One of the theater's spins to attract patrons was their use of the phrase "Come get your ticket punched by the legendary Frank James." Shortly after he began robbing trains, Frank married Annie Ralston, the daughter of a prosperous local farmer, a graduate of Independence Female College and, according to one childhood friend, an excellent pistol shot. “I feel a positive conviction,” Phillips said, “that the troublous, tragic life that befell him was neither of his liking or inclination.”. It was this group of Confederate irregulars that 16-yea… Union militiamen searching for Fernando Scott raided the Samuel farm and hanged Dr. Reuben Samuel (though not fatally), Frank's stepfather, torturing him to reveal the location of the guerrillas. Finally James was acquitted and went to Oklahoma to live with his mother. One of America’s most famous criminals, Jesse James, is shot to death by fellow gang member Bob Ford, who betrayed James for reward money. ', Accounts say that James surrendered with the understanding that he would not be extradited to Northfield, Minnesota.[5]. From time to time, I’ve even wondered if he made it up to impress two young boys at a time when Jesse James fervor was at one of its periodic heights. The raid was personal for Pinkerton; an agent he had sent to apprehend the James brothers the year before was found with a note pinned to his corpse that read “This to all detectives.”. According to History, James' first widely-publicized bank robbery occurred in 1869, and went terribly wrong. It was one long, anxious, inexorable, eternal vigil.' In 1940, Fonda played Frank James in the sequel The Return of Frank James. Jesse’s death six years later—at the hands of his own gang members—was sordid and sad, but it ended his story on a clarion note of treachery that helped seal his legend. The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (dir: Philip Kaufman, USA, 1972) Robert Duvall plays Jesse James in a film that focuses on his most ambitious and calamitous bank robbery. A few months later, Frank and Jesse—finally old enough, at 16, to get into the fight—fell under the deadly spell of the grandiloquent and perhaps psychopathic “Bloody” Bill Anderson, whose men decorated their horses’ bridles with human scalps and who were responsible, among other atrocities, for the giddy execution of 24 unarmed Union soldiers at Centralia, Mo., and for the slaughter and mutilation of almost 150 more who set out in reprisal. Frank inherited the books—54 of them—from his erudite preacher father and kept them in a long wooden book chest with his name burned into the lid. My grandfather went on to explain that when he was a kid in Excelsior Springs, 10 miles away, he had often talked to Frank James, who was by then a man in late middle age with nothing much better to do than while away afternoons on city benches entertaining children with stories of how Pinkerton detectives had blown off his mother’s right arm in a botched raid on the James family farm. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 5,000 articles originally published in our various magazines. The war in Missouri, a border state that never succeeded from the Union, turned bad for Frank and he soon found himself mixed up with a group of guerrillas under William Quantrill. The grave was marked by a ragged chunk of granite the size of a bowling ball, all that was left of a once-towering tombstone that had been chipped away by souvenir hunters. Standing next to the 9-foot-high tombstone, our guide told us how Zerelda used to sell tourists stones lying on top of her son’s grave for 25 cents apiece, and then quickly replenish the supply from a nearby creekbed, and how she would carve his initials onto the handles of old pistols and sell them to particularly gullible visitors. In I Shot Jesse James (1949), directed by Samuel Fuller, Ford is portrayed by John Ireland. This was a disastrous raid that occurred on September 7, 1876 and resulted in the capture or death of most of the Gang. Placing his holster in Governor Crittenden's hands, he explained, 'I have been hunted for twenty-one years, have literally lived in the saddle, have never known a day of perfect peace. He must have told us more, because I remember being hungry for details, startled by the idea that our soft-spoken, law-abiding grandfather, general manager of a Chevrolet dealership in Oklahoma City, had known one of the great outlaws of American history. While Frank was a part of this company they were involved with the Lawrence Massacre of August 21, 1863 where about 200 people were killed. The Vacation Murderers- Suspected of committing the crime based on the fact that the scene matches their M.O. James Burkewas born in Bronx, New York as the illegitimate son to Jane Conway, a prostitute who was an immigrant of Anglo-Irish lineage from Dublin, Ireland. After the withdrawal of regular Confederate troops in the fall of 1861, a bitter guerrilla conflict soon began between bands of pro-Confederate irregulars (commonly known as bushwhackers) and the Union homeguards. Alexander Franklin James (January 10, 1843[1] – February 18, 1915) was an American Confederate soldier and guerrilla; in the post-Civil War period, he was an outlaw. Judgment at Gallatin: the trial of Frank James. [8], American outlaw, Confederate guerrilla, and train robber, For the career of the James brothers after the Civil War, see. It startles me even more today, because at this distance—more than 50 years after my grandfather’s revelation and nearly 150 years after Frank James robbed his first bank—it seems impossible that the living roots of my own existence could reach so deeply into such a distant past. Frank James was four years older than Jesse, but his routine life span, his mellowing temperament and colorless death have made him his brother’s junior in the annals of criminal fascination. The various actors who played Frank—Bill Paxton, Stacy Keach, Sam Shepard, even Johnny Cash—had a natural air of horse sense and moral weariness, in contrast to the spell of mercurial menace cast by stars like Robert Duvall or Brad Pitt in the role of Jesse. Though Frank was intelligent and supposedly a great reader who always had a Shakespeare quote handy, he was also rash and embittered and a ready participant in the depredations of this close-fought border war. The Story Of Robert Ford – The “Coward” Who Assassinated Jesse James Though Jesse James was an outlaw, Robert Ford wasn't immediately hailed as a hero for killing him. We learned that Annie maintained an 18-inch waist most of her life and that Frank had an impressive library, at least by rural 19th-century Clay County standards. Frank disregarded his sworn allegiance and joined Fernando Scott’s guerrilla band later switching to William Clark Quantrail’s band. The secessionists in Missouri, including Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, attempted to drive the Union army out of the state but were eventually defeated. Like many of the whites in northwest Missouri, they had strong Southern fealties. “I don’t like to talk about Pat Garrett,” Brito told Metz. I paid my admission at the farm’s visitors center, watched the obligatory short film, then wandered through a much better-than-expected museum that briskly chronicles the lives and times of the James brothers with admirable objectivity. Also in on the shooting was Bob’s older brother Charley, a James gang member. After his death, Jesse’s mother charged tourists a quarter for … The American Civil War began in 1861, when James was eighteen years old. At age two he was placed in a foster home by his mother, where he spent most of his early years in a Roman Catholic orphanage run by nuns, never to see his birth parents again. It’s a story that cannot be told without acknowledging the savage regional violence that came on the heels of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and which only grew in intensity when Missouri, a nominally neutral border state, cracked apart during the Civil War. I thought finding where Hoffa was shot, and investigating everything about the house, could be key to the case. Census records show that James attended school regularly, and he reportedly wanted to become a teacher. His father died in 1851 and his mother remarried Benjamin Simms in 1852.

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