Legends of the Old West - JESSE JAMES D.C. Ep. 1 | "Retribution"

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Frank and Jesse James grow into young men amid the chaos of the Civil War. They learn the skills and tactics of guerilla warfare in their home state of Missouri. And when the war is finished, they must decide on a new path. When the first daylight bank robbery in peacetime America happens in their home county, the men of their former guerilla outfit become the chief suspects. Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The The The The To be continued... The American Civil War was probably the final time in human history when tens of thousands of men marched up to appointed battlefields, stared at each other across open spaces, and then annihilated each other. Author Shelby Foote said it plainly in Ken Burns' landmark documentary, the weapons were way ahead of the tactics. Generals in the Civil

War used the same strategies that had been employed since the dawn of warfare, but now the weapons had killing ranges of hundreds of yards. Battles looked more like slaughters. But that was the war in the eastern states. In the west, in Missouri, it was a whole different story. In Missouri, there were only a handful of the classic battles we picture when we think of the Civil War. More often, the fighting in Missouri was a guerrilla war, a war of smaller militias striking hard and fast and then escaping into the countryside. The huge battles were brutal because of the sheer volume of destruction. The guerrilla raids in Missouri were brutal for different reasons.

They were fought at closer range, sometimes hand-to-hand. They were vicious. Many times no mercy was given, and mutilations were not uncommon. It was the perfect training ground for the men who would usher in a new era of American history, the era of armed robbery. Jesse James and his older brother Frank and their friends and cousins in central Missouri used these skills and tactics from the Civil War

to become the most famous bank robbers and train robbers of the age. They set the bar and became legends for all time. From Black Barrel Media, this is Season 7 of the Legends of the Old West podcast. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. Longtime listeners have heard a version of this story before, but I'm updating it and reworking it for all the new listeners who are joining us from our show, Infamous America. The story of Jesse James is unlike any other in American history, and if you're hearing it now for the first time, you're in for a wild ride. This is Episode 1, Retribution. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you.

But we also sell merch, and organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere. They have an all-in-one e-commerce platform and in-person POS system, so wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With the internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms, Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify has allowed us to share something tangible with the podcast community we've built here, selling our beanies, sweatshirts, and mugs to fans of our shows without taking up Thank you. and Brooklinen, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across 175 countries.

Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash realm, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash r-e-a-l-m now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash realm. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws. Like Fresh Promise. Produce is carefully selected and checked for freshness.

And if it's not fresh, it's free. Yes, you heard that right. From the crispest lettuce to the juiciest apples, And if it's not fresh, it's free. Yes, you heard that right. From the crispest lettuce to the juiciest apples, Loblaws is committed to fresh, so you get the best fruits and veggies. Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. Jesse James was 15 years old when Union soldiers beat him to find out where his older brother Frank was. Jesse had been plowing the field at the James family farm in Clay County, Missouri,

when a troop of men had ridden into the yard and demanded the location of Frank and his fellow guerrilla raiders. Jesse didn't know or wouldn't say, so the soldiers moved on to his stepfather, Reuben Samuel. Reuben was generally a mild-mannered guy, unlike Jesse's mother, Zerelda, who had a fiery disposition. But Reuben's low-key personality didn't mean he was a pushover. He refused to tell the soldiers the location of Frank and the other men, so the soldiers grabbed a rope. They tied one end around his neck, flipped the other end over a tree branch, and pulled.

Reuben rose into the air, kicking and struggling and choking. After several seconds, the soldiers lowered him to the ground so he could talk. He refused, again. In the background, Xarelda screamed obscenities at the soldiers and cursed them for nearly lynching her husband. Jesse glared at the two men who operated the rope. He knew them. One had briefly ridden with his brother Frank in a Confederate militia two years earlier,

but now he had switched sides. Their names and faces were seared into Jesse's mind. They would pay for this. The soldiers hoisted Reuben into the air a second time. The rope must have torn and burned the skin of his neck, but he still refused to give up the location. After a third strangling, Reuben finally broke. He said he would lead them to Frank's camp.

The soldiers put him on a horse, and he led them toward the woods. This action was indicative of the Civil War in Missouri. Here, it was a war of raids and counter-raids, quick strikes and retaliation. And this was retaliation. Just a few days ago, Frank James, who was 20 years old, had joined the most notorious group of guerrilla fighters in Missouri,

Quantrill's Raiders. William Quantrill had organized a band of mostly local boys to fight an unconventional war in the region. They attacked smaller groups of Union soldiers, they terrorized and looted enemy towns, and they did dirty work when asked. And that was what had happened a few days ago. A Confederate officer's wife had been thrown in jail by a Union captain. The Confederate officer was livid, and he asked Quantrill to eliminate the captain. Quantrill and his gang, including the new guy, Frank James, set up an ambush for the captain. They lured the captain and four other soldiers into a trap and opened fire. They killed the captain in a private immediately and wounded a lieutenant.

When the guerrillas converged on the three Union soldiers, the lieutenant tried to surrender. Quantrill's men shot him twice in the head. Then they put three more bullet holes in the head of the captain, just to drive the point home. That's what brought Union soldiers to the home of Zerelda James and her husband Reuben Samuel and her two children still on the farm, 15-year-old Jesse and 13-year-old Susan. The Union soldiers in the area were learning the identities of Quantrill's raiders, and they stormed the James Farm in May 1863, looking for Frank and his companions. Reuben Samuel led the troops to the nearby timber and told them the location of the Confederate campsite. The soldiers crept quietly through the woods and caught the guerrillas completely off guard. The Confederates were lounging around camp, eating and playing cards. The Union soldiers charged into the camp and fired at the unsuspecting rebels.

The raiders fled in all directions. Frank and a few others raced through the trees toward a river. They dove into the water and swam to the other side to escape the surprise attack. Frank was lucky that day. The war had already ended once for the eldest child of Zerelda James, and it almost ended again, this time for good. Frank had joined a more formal Confederate militia when the war began in 1861, but after a bout of measles and then capture by the Union, he had done very little for the effort.

Now, in 1863, after joining Quantrill's raiders with neighbors and friends like Cole Younger, he would see action nonstop until the end of the war. And in less than a year, Frank's little brother Jesse would join Quantrill's raiders and track down the two men who had nearly strangled their stepfather in the front yard. Three months after the Union Army nearly lynched Jesse's stepfather and nearly caught his older brother, a mysterious tragedy occurred and a brutal massacre followed. In the way that the trauma of war builds bonds, those two events likely brought two young men closer together, Frank James and his friend from a neighboring county, Cole Younger. Cole's family suffered losses in the tragedy,

and he and Frank took part in the massacre. On August 14, 1863, a building in Kansas City that was being used as a Union prison collapsed. The reason for the collapse is still unknown, and four people died in the catastrophe. To make matters worse, they were non-combatants, and they were all women. Late that summer, the Union Army rounded up the mothers and sisters and cousins and friends of known guerrilla fighters and held them as spies. Many of them were confined to the building in Kansas City that suddenly crashed to the ground in mid-August. Four women died in the collapse. One was a cousin of Cole Younger. Another was a sister of Bloody Bill Anderson. Anderson was the notorious lieutenant of William Quantrill.

He was second in command of Quantrill's raiders, and he earned his nickname, Bloody Bill, by cutting the scalps off of dead Union soldiers and tying them to his saddle. One week after the prison collapsed, William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson led Frank James, Cole Younger, and about 400 Confederates on a raid against Lawrence, Kansas. Lawrence was the traditional home of the anti-slavery movement in the region, and its possible connection to the prison collapse probably didn't factor into the equation. Quantrill's 400 raiders struck the town early in the morning and terrorized the community

all day. They looted shops and burned buildings and killed as many men as they could find. When they finally rode away at dusk, they had killed nearly 200 men and boys, almost 20% of the male population in Lawrence. Cole Younger called it simply, a day of butchery. As fall turned to winter on the southern plains, Quantrill's raiders drifted down to Texas to avoid the deep snow and brutally cold temperatures.

Northern Texas wasn't immune to cold and snow, but at least it wasn't as bad as Kansas and Missouri. Frank James and Cole Younger and the rest of Quantrill's raiders made their home in Sherman, Texas, and while they were in the area, they were nominally under the command of Confederate Brigadier General Ben McCullough. McCullough was one of the most accomplished and famous Texas Rangers who ever lived, and when the Civil War rolled around, he was given command of Texas. But as he soon learned, no one commanded or controlled Quantrill's raiders. McCullough issued orders to Quantrill, and Quantrill ignored them.

Bloody Bill and his right-hand man, Archie Clement, routinely led squads of men into Sherman and scared the hell out of the townsfolk. They got drunk and fired their guns and tore up businesses and generally acted rowdy. But that rowdiness paled in comparison to other transgressions. General McCullough wrote numerous letters to his superiors about Quantrill's raiders. He called them a terror and a curse to the country. He accused them of theft and murder, and he added one key detail. He said many of those crimes had been committed by men who were disguised as Union officers. They wore the classic sky-blue overcoats of federal soldiers.

When the first armed bank robbery in peacetime America happened almost exactly two years later, it happened in Missouri, and it was committed by men wearing sky blue Union overcoats. wearing sky blue Union overcoats. But before that historic occasion, Jesse James had to earn his stripes with the guerrilla fighters and exact revenge for the assault on his stepfather. Quantrill's raiders returned to Missouri in the spring of 1864, and the word returned might be too gentle a description. It was more like they fled back to Missouri before General Ben McCullough could arrest them for wreaking havoc on his territory. By that point, the tide was turning

for the guerrilla fighters and the Confederacy as a whole. William Quantrill got in a fight with one of his men, and he left the group for several months. In his absence, Bloody Bill Anderson took command, and the gang welcomed a new man to its ranks, Frank James' younger brother, Jesse. And calling Jesse a man is an overstatement. He was 16 years old, but that was certainly old enough to kill his first enemy. Under Bloody Bill's leadership, Jesse and the raiders tracked down the first of the two men who had operated the rope that nearly strangled Jesse's stepfather. Before Jesse and his new comrades killed the man, Jesse reportedly told him to pray if you've ever prayed in your life,

because you've only got about a minute to live. We don't know for sure who fired the fatal shot, but the safe bet is Jesse. Shortly thereafter, the gang tracked down the other man who held the rope that day He was killed just as swiftly And the rumor mill said Frank James was the trigger man Frank and Jesse made quick work of the revenge process But then Jesse's first round with the Raiders came to an abrupt end

He was shot in the chest while trying to steal a saddle Frank rushed him to a small inn in Kansas City. It was a friendly establishment and a good place for Jesse to hide while he healed, and it would, inadvertently, allow him to spend time with the girl he would eventually marry. The boarding house was owned by the brother of Benjamin Mims, Jesse's first stepfather. The boarding house was owned by the brother of Benjamin Mims, Jesse's first stepfather. The complicated history goes like this. Frank and Jesse and Susan hardly knew their father, Robert James.

He had been a Baptist preacher and a farmer, and he had hurried west to California with the gold rush of 1849 and never returned. He died in a mining camp a few months after his arrival. That left his wife Zerelda back in Missouri with three young children. Frank was seven when his father died. Jesse was three, and little Susan was less than a year old. Zerelda married Benjamin Mims, a man who was 20 years her senior. The relationship was rocky, and Benjamin died two years later. After that, Zerelda married Reuben Samuel, and they restarted the family farm in Clay County, Missouri, where Union soldiers would eventually attack Reuben during the war.

Now, in the summer of 1864, Jesse lay in an inn owned by the brother of his first stepfather The man's daughter, Zerelda, who went by Z, nursed Jesse back to health as he recovered from the gunshot wound When Jesse was fit enough to ride, he returned to the gang just in time to play some part in the event that would become the signature crime of Quantrill's raiders, the Centralia Massacre. With Bloody Bill Anderson still in command of the raiders, about 80 men rode into the railroad village of Centralia, Missouri, in September 1864.

They captured a train and robbed the civilian passengers. But also on board were 25 Union soldiers. Bloody Bill and the raiders executed 24 of the 25 men right there on the train platform. The next day, about 110 Union soldiers found the Raiders, but by that time, the Confederates' numbers had swelled to 225, which now included Frank and Jesse James. In the battle that followed, the Confederates wiped out the Union troops. The Raiders killed every Union man that day. And Frank said later that his little brother made the biggest kill of all, that of the Union commander. Jesse had turned 17 just three weeks earlier. The Centralia Massacre signaled the beginning

of the end for Quantrill's raiders. Their leaders were about to die, the war was about to end, and Jesse was about to have his second near-death experience. After the Centralia Massacre, a Union officer named Samuel Cox made it his personal mission to eliminate Bloody Bill Anderson. Cox assembled a force of 300 men and took the fight to the Raiders. In the fall of 1864, he set up an ambush in Ray County, Missouri. Bloody Bill Anderson and 20 guerrillas rode into the trap. Nearly all were killed, including Bloody Bill. When Union troops collected his horse and body,

there were fresh scalps tied to the saddle. Bloody Bill Anderson's corpse was sent to Richmond, Missouri. It was photographed, and then his head was cut off and mounted on a telegraph pole. His headless body was dragged through the streets. His remains were buried in a shallow grave. With Bloody Bill dead, Quantrill's raiders faced a crossroads. William Quantrill had returned to the gang,

and he wanted to lead the men out of the hot zone of Missouri and into neighboring Kentucky. But Archie Clement, Bloody Bill's top lieutenant, disagreed. Archie wanted to stay in his home country of Missouri, so the Raiders split into two factions. Quantrill led Frank James and most of the men to Kentucky, while a small group stayed in Missouri with Archie. That group included Jesse. Archie was only a couple years older than Jesse, and he became Jesse's closest friend and mentor.

And he was thoroughly and completely insane. So Jesse went from mentor number one, a guy whose nickname was Bloody Bill, to Archie Clement, who was utterly ruthless and remorseless. Archie was the type of guy who would, as the saying went, shoot a man at the drop of a hat. And he dropped the hat himself. In the middle of May 1865, Archie Clement wanted to attack Lexington, Missouri. But the war was in its final days and many of Archie's men refused to stage another assault.

A month earlier, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, which meant the war was all but over and Archie's men saw no reason to throw themselves into a pointless battle. So the guerrillas found themselves in a standoff with the Union troops who controlled Lexington. The details of the events that followed are murky at best, but at some point, Jesse and some of the raiders rode toward Lexington. It doesn't seem like it was an attempt to attack the town,

so they might have been trying to surrender. Either way, the raiders ran into a group of Union troops, and a firefight broke out. Jesse was shot in the chest again, just inches from where he'd been shot a year ago. And he formally surrendered the next day. the next day. His recovery process was also the same as it had been a year ago. He was taken to Kansas City and nursed by Zee Mims, his cousin by marriage. She cared for him for a total of four months, and during that time, they fell in love. When Jesse was finally able to function again, they were secretly engaged to be married, and by that time, Frank James was back home in Missouri after his own adventures to end the war.

Frank's full name was Alexander Franklin James, and his war came to an end in July 1865, shortly after his longtime commander died. After the split between William Quantrill and Archie Clement, Quantrill and most of the raiders, including Frank, blazed a trail of destruction through Kentucky. But on May 10th, one month after Lee surrendered to Grant, William Quantrill's years as the most notorious guerrilla commander of the war came to an end.

Quantrill and several of his men took shelter in a barn in the central part of the state. It was pouring rain outside, but despite the weather, a Union patrol found them and attacked. Two raiders were killed, and Quantrill was shot in the spine. He survived, but he was paralyzed from the waist down. He was taken to a Union hospital, where he lingered for another month. He died in June 1865 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Portland Catholic Cemetery, which is now St. John's Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky. In the years after Quantrill's burial, the priest of the local parish ordered dishwater and chamber pots to be emptied on Quantrill's grave. He said it was to keep grave robbers away, but there was probably a little bit

of poetic justice in it as well. Frank James was 15 miles away when William Quantrill was shot, and he stayed free for two months before he surrendered. At the end of July 1865, he turned himself in. Jesse was still in bad shape at the time, and it took another two months before he could walk again. But by late autumn of 1865, the brothers were reunited at their home in Clay County. Over the summer and fall, Confederate soldiers drifted home from battlefields across the nation. They had survived the indescribable hardship of war, and now they faced hardship of a different kind. They were men without a country, as they saw it. The Confederacy was gone. The slaves were free, according to the law, anyway.

The southern states were smoldering ruins. Every resource had been consumed by one army or burned by the other. And in Missouri, the fighting had been personal in a way that had not been in the East. The men who marauded with guerrilla outfits like Quantrill's raiders were known to everyone in the area. Some people supported them, but others hated them. As the raiders straggled back into Missouri in late 1865, another fight began to take shape, one of pure revenge. Missouri had been a conflicted state in the war.

Some people supported the Union, while others supported the Confederacy. Sometimes, these splits happened within a family, like Cole Younger's family. Cole's father, Henry, was a staunch Union supporter, but he had been murdered early in the war, shot three times in the back. Then a pro-Union Missouri militia commander forced Cole's mother to burn down the family house with her own two hands. After that, Cole joined Quantrill's raiders.

Cole joined Quantrill's raiders. So when Cole and Frank and Jesse and the rest of the surviving raiders returned to their homes after the war, they banded together once again, in part because of camaraderie, but also because of their shared hatred of the new anti-slavery, pro-union government in Missouri, and just because of basic safety. Many people hated them for the death and terror they inflicted on the region, and those people had no problem shooting them on sight. And after the Civil War, guns held new status in American society.

The nation had undergone profound transformations during those four years, and one of them was the new relationship with firearms. Prior to 1861, muskets were used primarily for hunting, and almost no one owned a handgun. The weapons were big, heavy, hard to handle, and slow to load. But the war introduced refinements that turned them into rapid killing machines. The muskets were better, shotguns were popular, and repeating rifles were quickly integrating themselves into civilian life. And now men walked around with pistols strapped to their hips. An argument could escalate into a fistfight and then into a gunfight at a speed that was unthinkable before the war.

And at the end of 1865, all those factors combined to form the perfect recipe for a new era in America. The era of armed robbery. There were two banks in Liberty, Missouri. One was owned and operated by men who supported the new pro-union government of Missouri. The other was not. The one owned by the pro-union men was called the Clay County Savings Association. At the end of January in the new year of 1866, those men held a mass meeting in liberty in support of their new government.

Two weeks later, their bank earned a place in history as the site of the first daylight bank robbery in peacetime America. At two o'clock in the afternoon on February 13th, a dozen men rode into Liberty wearing the signature sky-blue overcoats of Union Army officers. They stopped in front of the Clay County Savings Association. Most of the men stayed outside on their horses. Two hopped down and went inside. The bank was warm and cozy. A fire crackled in the wood-burning stove,

and the only two people inside were the cashier and his son, who also worked at the bank. The two men in soldier's coats entered and then paused by the stove to get warm. One of them peeled away and headed for the counter. He asked the cashier's son to make change for a $10 bill and then leveled a gun at the young man. The bandit jumped over the counter, keeping his gun trained on the cashier's son. In a flash, his partner leapt over the counter as well

and pointed a gun at the cashier. They demanded all the money in the vault. When the stunned young man was too slow to move, one of the robbers cracked him on the back with the gun and shouted at him to open the vault. He shoved the terrified assistant into the vault and made the young man load bags of gold and silver coins into a sack. and made the young man load bags of gold and silver coins into a sack. Outside the vault, the second bandit forced the cashier to stuff all the paper money into another sack.

With their work complete, the robbers pushed the cashier and his son into the vault and closed the door. They quickly hopped back over the counter and hurried outside. As they pulled themselves into the saddle, the rest of the gang fired their pistols in the air, startling everyone on the streets. In the bank, the cashier nudged the vault door. It wasn't locked. He rushed out of the vault and ran to a window. He threw it open and shouted that the bank had just been robbed. In the street, as the bandits fired shots around town, a bullet struck a 19-year-old young man who stood across from the bank. Some have suggested the young man was repeating the warnings of the cashier. The bandits thought he was a threat, so they killed him.

Others contend he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was hit by a stray bullet. Whatever the intent, the shot was fatal. The robbers charged out of town, leaving behind them a stunned community, a dead bystander, and a historic heist. The End The bandits escaped. They were never positively identified, but the robbery took place in the home county of the James Boys. And the robbers wore Union Army coats,

a tactic pioneered by Quantrill's raiders, while Frank, Jesse, and Cole Younger were active. So it didn't take long for people to whisper that the old bushwhackers were back in action. And in the string of robberies that followed, they knew for sure. The first bank job netted the bandits $58,000, an astounding sum in 1866. And it was just the beginning. Next time on Legends of the Old West, Jesse and Frank begin their bank-robbing careers in earnest.

They start out on the edges of the gang, but then rise to take command. And when a murder leads to a shootout on the family farm, they embrace the outlaw trail and expand into new territories with new targets. That's next week on Jesse James, Director's Cut. Original music by Rob Valliere. Music editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your writer and host, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Please visit our website, Black Barrel Media, for more details and join us on social media. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and Be Barrel Media on Twitter.

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