Jesse James

Jesse James was an American outlaw, bank robber, train robber, and Confederate guerrilla whose 16-year career as the leader of the James-Younger Gang across 1866–1882 produced one of the foundational figures of late-19th-century American Wild West outlaw mythology — particularly his James-Younger Gang train-and-bank-robbery career across the post-Civil-War Reconstruction Era American Midwest. He was born Jesse Woodson James on September 5, 1847, in Kearney, Missouri (then in Clay County, Missouri, just north of Kansas City). His father Robert Salle James was a Baptist minister and Missouri tobacco-plantation owner who abandoned the family in 1850 to lead a Methodist mission to the California Gold Rush mining camps (where he died of cholera in August 1850), and his mother Zerelda Cole James was a homemaker.

His American Civil War career across 1864–1865 — across his teenage Confederate-Army-allied bushwhacker guerrilla service under William Quantrill's Quantrill's Raiders and "Bloody Bill" Anderson's Anderson Bushwhackers (which produced multiple American Civil War atrocities, particularly the September 27, 1864 Centralia Massacre in which Confederate guerrillas including the 17-year-old Jesse James killed 24 unarmed Union Army soldiers) — produced his early-career Confederate Missouri-Kansas guerrilla-warfare biographical narrative.

His February 13, 1866 Liberty, Missouri Clay County Savings Association bank robbery — at age 18, six months after his post-Civil-War May 1865 Confederate-amnesty surrender — produced his post-Civil-War American Midwest outlaw breakthrough. The 1866 Liberty bank robbery has been continuously identified by American historians as the first daylight peacetime American bank robbery in U.S. history.

His subsequent 1866–1882 James-Younger Gang career produced approximately 26 train and bank robberies across Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi. The September 7, 1876 Northfield, Minnesota First National Bank robbery — across which the James-Younger Gang lost three gang members (Clel Miller, Bill Chadwell, and Charlie Pitts) and produced the wounding-and-capture of all three Younger brothers — shaped the late-1870s decline of the James-Younger Gang. He died on April 3, 1882, at age 34, in St. Joseph, Missouri, from a single gunshot wound to the back of his head fired by James-Younger Gang member Robert "Bob" Ford (who shot Jesse James for the $10,000 Missouri-state reward, although Ford was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to death — although Missouri Governor Thomas T. Crittenden pardoned Ford within hours of the murder conviction).

His name Jesse derives from the Hebrew Yishai meaning "gift" — the Old Testament name of the father of King David. Jesse was the most-popular American unisex name through the late 19th century.