Hollywood is about to release another telling of the legend, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; this will add to over 40 movies already in existence and more than a thousand books.

Shortly after the break up of the Soviet Union, I had the honor of escorting four officials from the Republic of Georgia about the halls of government in Jefferson City, Missouri. These gentlemen were eager to put their new government in operation, especially wanting to learn about approaches to environmentalism and economic development. After a series of morning meetings, I took them to lunch in the State Capitol cafeteria.

The language barrier made lunch an awkward time. We found making small talk through an interpreter almost unworthy of the effort. When the meal concluded a half-hour before our afternoon sessions were scheduled to begin, I was desperate to find something to entertain them and so led them to the Capitol's museum of Missouri history. The men walked quietly through the exhibits, making polite murmurs, and I definitely felt I was being humored. Then, one pointed excitedly to a display case and shouted, “Jesse James!” The other three hurried to look at the photograph of the legendary outlaw, all echoing “Jesse James!” then engaging in enthusiastic conversation that passed too quickly for the interpreter to relay to me. I stood there marveling that the fame of Missouri's outlaw folk hero had traveled so far.

Being a Missouri girl, I can't recall a time when I didn't know the name Jesse James. His farm homestead in Kearney, Missouri, was not far from my childhood home. In the days when my older brother played cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians, I often was cast as Jesse James in games of revised history where the sheriff and his posse quickly captured the outlaw, either shooting him dead outright or tying him up and holding him captive in the jail (my brother's backyard fort).

In Pineville, Missouri, an annual “Jesse James Days” festival is held in August. Jesse had no known ties to this southern Missouri community, but the 1939 film, Jesse James starring Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda as Jesse and his brother, Frank, was filmed in Pineville. Jesse James was the first Western filmed in color, and it remains a vibrant adventure. Each year, the Pineville festival includes an outdoor screening of the film. Years ago, my family went to the festival, taking my grandparents and a neighbor couple. Grandma's neighbor was originally from the Pineville area, though living out in the country. In the 1930s, her parents did not yet have an automobile. One morning, her father hitched the horse to the wagon, put on his old straw hat and helped his sunbonnet-clad wife up to the wagon seat. They drove into town on business, not knowing a Hollywood film was shooting, and they rode right into a scene as it was being filmed. Director Henry King thought they simply added to the period feel and left them in the picture.

Now, Hollywood is about to release another telling of the legend, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt in the role Tyrone Power made famous. This will add to the over 40 movies already in existence about a subject who has also inspired more than a thousand books.

What is it about a Missouri Confederate turned bank and train robber (though never convicted of a crime in a court of law) that endures for over a century, inspiring so many books and films? Author Harold Dellinger (Jesse James: The Best Writings on the Notorious Outlaw and His Gang), offered several possible explanations in a recent lecture in Kansas City, Missouri.

First, there is the name: Jesse James. Short, alliterative, it conjures a romantic picture of a dark-clad man on horseback. As R. F. Dibble wrote in 1925 in Strenuous Americans “Jesse James! The magical words are pregnant with romance. Their terse, alliterative compactness was of heroic stuff, so the people felt. It was distinctly a name worthy of a great man, worthy of a President. In truth, it seems possible that the name may account, as much as anything, for his reputation; so far as one can see, he was not essentially greater than the others in his gang, except in this one point. His brother, Frank, appears to have equaled him in almost every way; but—Frank James! No, it wouldn't do.”

Secondly, Dellinger notes Jesse James is forever entwined with a losing cause. Missouri was a fierce battleground in the Civil War, with much of the state of Southern leaning. Even before the war officially began with the firing on Fort Sumpter, the Missouri-Kansas Border Wars foreshadowed what was to come. Jesse and Frank rode with William Quantrill's raiders, along with Cole and Bob Younger who would later become integral members of the James Gang. Jesse was only 16 at the time he left home to join with Quantrill's guerrillas, most famous for the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863, when over 150 residents were killed and 180 buildings burned. At the end of the war, Jesse attempted to surrender near Lexington, Missouri. Union troops shot him in the lung, a nearly mortal wound, which generated much sympathy for the young man. Sympathies heightened in 1875 when agents from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency threw an incendiary devise into the James farmhouse. Dr. Reuben Samuels, Jesse's step-father, hurriedly rolled it into the fireplace, but it exploded, killing Jesse's young half-brother, Archie, and severing Jesse's mother's right arm.

Missouri Confederates who returned to farms often devastated by Yankee occupation identified with the James Boys. Disenfranchised, barred from certain professions, many faced great difficulties in earning a living. Meanwhile, the banks and railroads, often controlled by Republican, Yankee interests, prospered.

This leads to another reason for Jesse's endurance, Dellinger notes; the attacks on popular targets. Robbing the banks and railroads, the James Gang lived a dream of many rural Missourians who had no objections to seeing their perceived oppressors assaulted. Jesse became a Confederate Robin Hood, and stories swirled that added to his legend. He robbed the railroads, but not the passengers. He provided help to widows and orphans. One of the best stories, widely told but never authenticated, was related by Homer Croy in Jesse James Was My Neighbor (1949). He tells of the James gang stopping at a farmhouse and asking the lady of the house if she would prepare food for them. This was a custom of the gang, and they always paid well for what they were given. As the woman began cooking, she seemed sad and tearful. Jesse asked why, and she said having men in the house reminded her of her husband, now deceased. Noticing she seemed even more upset, Jesse asked what was wrong. She told him without her husband, she had not been able to keep the farm producing, and she could not pay the mortgage. A man was coming to the cabin that afternoon to foreclose.

Jesse asked how much she owed the man, and the widow replied, $800. Jesse asked what the man looked like and how he would be traveling. Then he told the widow he had $800, and he would lend it to her. He urged the woman to protect herself in a business-like way by demanding a receipt for the payment. Frank wrote out a receipt, and Jesse told the widow to copy it in her own handwriting. The outlaws finished their meal and left. Happily, the widow paid her mortgage and saved her farm, making the collector sign a receipt as Jesse had advised. About a mile or so down the road, the collector encountered a band of outlaws in the roadway who relieved him of the sum of $800. With stories like this swirling about, who could doubt Jesse was, indeed, Robin Hood come to life in Missouri?

And the stories did keep swirling. Dellinger notes that Jesse and his gang had “good press.” The outlaws found a powerful fan in the person of John Neuman Edwards, a long-time newspaperman and one of the founders of the Kansas City Times. In his 1876 publication Noted Guerrillas, or Warfare on the Border, Edwards described “Bloody” Bill Anderson as saying, “Not to have any beard he [Jesse James] is the keenest and cleanest fighter in the command.” Throughout the outlaws' career, Edwards wrote with sympathy for the James Boys.

And the career of the James Gang was a long one, another factor that has added to the legend's longevity, according to Dellinger. Crimes attributed to the James Gang cover a period from 1866 to 1882. Few men who lived by the gun have lived so long engaged in such pursuits.

Finally, Dellinger notes the “Shakespearean death” of Jesse James made him an instant martyr. Shot in the back of the head by Bob Ford, a trusted member of his own gang, Jesse immediately captured any sympathy he had failed to garner while he lived. As John Newman Edwards wrote “There never was a more cowardly and unnecessary murder committed in all America than this murder of Jesse James. It was done for money. It was done that a few might get all the money. . . . It was his blood the bloody wretches were after—blood that would bring money in the official market of Missouri.”

Jesse James was an outlaw, a robber, a murderer, trained in the art of guerrilla warfare, a terrorist in his day. So, why has he endured as a romantic figure, and sometimes even a hero? Perhaps John Newman Edwards offers the best explanation.

“We called him outlaw, and he was, but Fate made him so. When the war came he was just turned of fifteen. The border was all aflame with steel, and fire, and ambuscade, and slaughter. He flung himself into a band which had a black flag for a banner and devils for riders. What he did, he did and it was fearful. But it was war. .”

“When the war closed Jesse James had no home. Proscribed, hunted, shot, driven away from his people, a price put upon his head—what else could the man do, with such a nature, except what he did do? He had to live. It was his country. The graves of his kindred were there. He refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted the hunters. Would to God he were alive to-day to make a righteous butchery of a few more of them.”

To Read My View of Dellinger’s Book Jesse James: The Best Writings on the Notorious Outlaw and His Gang Click Here