Explore the scandalous life & strange death of Jesse James

The Clay County Savings Association was owned by some former Union militiamen, which is why Jesse James's gang of Confederate raiders targeted it for robbery. The heist (which no one can prove that Jesse or his brother Frank participated in, but for legend's sake, Jesse was involved in) was actually the first successful armed robbery to occur in broad daylight during peacetime (ie because the Civil War was going on.) Today, the bank is known as the Jesse James Bank Museum and it appears as it did during the 1860s. Peer into the vault, and check out the vintage clock, which is set to the exact date and time of the robbery. From there, Jesse, his brother Frank, and other various friends robbed dozens of banks and stagecoaches from Texas to West Virginia.

Then, in 1873, the gang decided to level up from bank robberies to train robberies. The James-Younger gang, of which Jesse was the de facto leader, committed the first peacetime train robbery in the West in Adair, Iowa. To do it, they wore disguises (in the form of KKK hoods) and derailed the Rock Island Railroad train. They made off with around $3,000-- not a bad payday. As they robbed more trains, they stopped bothering to hold up the passengers, and simply emptied the safes and rode off. This actually gave the James-Younger gang an almost Robin Hood-esque reputation, since they were more targeting businesses rather than innocent individuals.

You can visit the Monument to the First Train Robbery in the West today. There's a wheel with a plaque and a section of railroad track-- the original track that Jesse James and his gang derailed. In fact, you can even still see the section of metal that the outlaws moved to stop the train; the track only needed to be adjusted a tiny bit in order to derail it.

Jesse James and his gang continued to rob and pillage their way around the country, crisscrossing the West and Midwest. Legend holds that in the fall of 1876, Jesse was escaping a posse from Minnesota that was hot on his tail, and he came across a 20-foot chasm at what is now Devil's Gulch Park. Rather than give himself up, he supposedly coaxed his horse into jumping across, thus making a triumphant escape. You can take a walking tour today, and cross the footbridge that now stands where he made the leap.

By 1880, the James-Younger gang had been decimated from robberies that went wrong, and Jesse's attempts to form a new gang had fizzled. Jesse returned home to Missouri, and kept the only two people he thought he could trust close by: Charley and Robert Ford. Sadly, Jesse didn't know that the Fords had been talking with Missouri's governor, Thomas Crittenden, about turning in Jesse's body for a reward. On April 3rd, as they prepared to leave for another robbery, Jesse put his revolvers down, and reached up to dust off a picture above the mantle. Since his back was turned, Robert Ford took the opportunity to shoot Jesse in the head and kill him. The two Fords brought in Jesse's body and then were charged with first-degree murder. They were charged, plead guilty, were sentenced to death, and were pardoned by Crittenden in one eventful (and very suspicious) day. The house where Ford shot James is on display in St. Joseph.

He's now buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Kansas City, although he was buried for some time at the farm where he grew up. The epitaph his mother wrote for his original gravesite is pretty legendary (you can still see it at the Jesse James Farm and Museum today): "In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here." She also reportedly moved her bed to a position that allowed her to always keep an eye on his grave... just in case.