Robert Ford was born in 1862 in Ray County, Missouri, to James Thomas and Mary Bruin Ford as the youngest of seven siblings. Those are the classic words that Road Dogg Jesse James bellowed to alert the WWE Universe to the presence of the hell raising New Age Outlaws. The American outlaw and train robber was also a guerrilla and leader of the James-Younger Gang who grew up in the "Little Dixie" area of Western Missouri. Founded in Chicago in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant who had served as the first full-time detective on the Windy Citys police force, the private agency was experienced in capturing train robbers. After the war, as members of various gangs of outlaws, Jesse and Frank robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains across the Midwest, gaining national fame and often popular sympathy despite the brutality of their crimes. 1875) and Mary Susan James (later Barr, b. Ford had his back to Kelly. [3] This area of Missouri was largely settled by people from the Upper South, especially Kentucky and Tennessee, and became known as Little Dixie for this reason. "[53] James's widow Zerelda Mimms James died alone and in poverty. Jesse James and Frank James, in full, respectively, Jesse Woodson James and Alexander Franklin James, (respectively, born September 5, 1847, near Centerville [now Kearney], Missouri, U.S.died April 3, 1882, St. Joseph, Missouri; born January 10, 1843, near Centervilledied February 18, 1915, near Kearney), two brothers who were among the most [23] Historians believe that the James brothers were involved in this crime. I was for Billy all the time." . Bob Ford, a new recruit into the James gang, had pulled the trigger, having conspired with his older brother Charley, already a member of the gang. James's two previous bullet wounds and partially missing middle finger served to positively identify the body. [50], By 1881, with local Tennessee authorities growing suspicious, the brothers returned to Missouri, where they felt safer. 622 Words; 2 Pages; . In March, James invited the Ford brothers to join him, his wife and two children at their new home in St. Joseph, Missouri, in advance of a planned bank robbery. The gang barely escaped Northfield, leaving two dead companions behind. Their biggest function was turning their home and those of other Ford family members into safe houses for gang members escaping the law. [92], The small town of Oak Grove, Louisiana, also hosts a town-wide annual Jesse James Outlaw Roundup Festival, usually in the early to mid autumn. Despite public sentiment toward the gang's crimes, there is no evidence that the James gang ever shared any of the robbery money outside their personal circle. The James brothers were most active as members of their own gang from about 1866 until 1876, when as a result of their attempted robbery of a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, several members of the gang were captured or killed. Jesse James : Now you think otherwise? dead and in coffin, 1882. It remains unclear whether Jesse and Frank took part in the Clay County robbery. Jesse James was a lad that killed many a man He robbed the Danville train He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor He'd a hand, a heart, and a brain Jesse was a man, a friend to the poor He couldn't see a brother suffer pain And with his brother Frank he robbed the Springfield bank And he stopped the Glendale train Poor Jesse had a wife, a The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a 2007 American revisionist Western film written and directed by Andrew Dominik. Daniel Rennie is a freelance writer residing in Melbourne, Australia. The brothers denied the charges, saying they were not in Daviess County on December 7, the day the robbery occurred. There is no evidence that he shared the loot of his robberies with anyone other than his gang members; they alone enjoyed the riches with him. Wikimedia CommonsJesse James open casket funeral. "[40][41], Many residents were outraged by the raid on the family home. They brought slaves with them and purchased more according to their needs. A law enforcement posse attacked and killed two of the outlaws but failed to capture the entire gang. Robert Newton Ford (January 31, 1862 June 8, 1892) was an American outlaw who killed fellow outlaw Jesse James on April 3, 1882. January 31, 1874. Because the gang received support by many former Confederate soldiers in Missouri, they eluded the Pinkertons. Farmers raised the same crops and livestock as in the areas from which they had migrated. Their escape from a botched robbery in Northfield, Minnesota, in September 1876 that wiped out the rest of the gang seemingly bolstered the myth that the brothers were beyond the reach of the law. Ford was also promised the $5,000 bounty placed on James head. The James brothers then joined the bushwhacker group led by William "Bloody Bill" Anderson. Both were sentenced to hang. His remains were later moved and reinterred at Richmond Cemetery in his native Richmond in Ray County, Missouri; "The man who shot Jesse James" was inscribed on his grave marker.[22]. To carry out the robbery, the gang divided into two groups. The Ford brothers also enjoyed a brief taste of celebrity as the killers of the notorious outlaw, even reenacting the experience in a stage show. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Vintage 1998 WWF WWE Road Dogg Jesse James DX 420 Shirt Men's Size XXL 2XL at the best online prices at eBay! Then they slaughtered more than 100 federal troops trying to hunt them down. The dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard (James alias) and laid poor Jesse in his grave.. The brothers were Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War and, for approximately a decade after the war's conclusion, led the James-Younger gang that infamously robbed banks and murdered throughout the Midwest, their actions glorified by Kansas City Times editor James Newman Edwards. None of James's biographers accepted them as plausible. Robert Ford drew his weapon and shot the unarmed Jesse James in the back of the head. James didnt trust the Ford brothers, especially Bob. Ford lost the contest and left town. Dalton died August 15, 1951, in Granbury, Texas. The documentary was dismissed as pseudo history and pseudoscience by historian Nancy Samuelson in a review she wrote for the Winter 20092010 edition of The James-Younger Gang Journal. Narrator : And so it went, Jesse was increasingly cavalier. They were brought into a meeting with Crittenden, as they had been around James's cousin Wood Hite the day Hite was murdered. They surrendered themselves to legal authorities but were dismayed to be charged with first degree murder. The militia soon discovered the Youngers and one other bandit, Charlie Pitts. He fell ill and returned home soon afterward. After 50 years of living incognito, impersonating his secretly murdered cousin, he had perfected a cleaner and more refined style of writing.
. Later in 1876, Jesse and Frank James surfaced in the Nashville, Tennessee, area, where they went by the names of Thomas Howard and B.J. Woodson, respectively. However, his makeshift gang was already coming apart at the seams, fueled by the tension between Hite and Liddil over their competition for the affection of the Fords' sister, a widow named Martha Bolton. They had two children who survived to adulthood: Jesse Edward James (b. After the deadly heist, an influential pro-Confederate newspaper editor in Missouri, John Newman Edwards, befriended Jesse and went on to promote the former bushwhacker as a hero and defiant Southern patriot of the Reconstruction era. The only known civil case involving Frank and Jesse James was filed in the Common Pleas Court of Daviess County in 1870. In the end, the gang killed the bank cashier and a passerby, while two bandits were shot to death by townsfolk before the rest of the outlaws fled. He and his brother Charley, both members of the JamesYounger Gang under Jamess leadership, went on to perform paid re-enactments of the killing at publicity events. According to Robert Ford, it became clear to him that James had realized they were there to betray him. [12][13] Frank followed Quantrill to Sherman, Texas, over the winter of 18631864. The James and Ford brothers were popular subjects of Western films in the 1940s and 1950s: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I Feel Like a Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Ford), "New Facts on the "Blue Cut" and Glendale", "One more shot at the legend of Jesse James", "Jesse James Wanted Poster Goes Up for Auction", "Death of the man who killed, the man who killed Jesse James", "Jesse James's Murderers. "I wasn't the leader of any gang. During the 1869 bank robbery in Gallatin, the incident that first brought Jesse public notice as an outlaw, he shot and killed the banks cashier in an act of revenge, thinking the man was Samuel Cox, commander of the pro-Union militia troops who had murdered guerrilla leader Bloody Bill Anderson in October 1864. [10], The JamesSamuel family sided with the Confederates at the outbreak of war. Ames, along with his father-in-law Benjamin Butler, also a former Union general and Radical Republican politician, was rumored to have deposited $75,000 in the bank. The Fords resided in St. Joseph with the James family, where Jesse went by the alias Thomas Howard. Unarmed, he mounted a chair to dust off a picture on the wall, his back to the brothers as they cocked their pistols. They continued in crime for several years afterward, recruiting new members, but came under increasing pressure from law enforcement seeking to bring them to justice. [12] He also appeared on stage with his brother Charles, reenacting the murder in a touring stage show. Meanwhile, the James brothers joined with Cole Younger and his brothers John, Jim, and Bob, as well as Clell Miller and other former Confederates, to form what came to be known as the JamesYounger Gang. His wife and two children were in a nearby room. He stormed into Fords tent saloon armed with a 10-gauge shotgun. The robbery netted little money. [7][9], After a series of campaigns and battles between conventional armies in 1861, guerrilla warfare gripped Missouri, waged between secessionist "bushwhackers" and Union forces which largely consisted of local militias known as "jayhawkers". The gang targeted the bank after learning that Adelbert Ames, a former Union general and Republican governor of Reconstruction-era Mississippi, had recently moved to Northfield. Jesse Jr. became a lawyer who practiced in Kansas City, Missouri, and Los Angeles, California. 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