Legends of the Old West - JESSE JAMES D.C. Ep. 3 | "Fame and Fortune"

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

A bank robbery Iowa jumpstarts the career of the James-Younger gang. A train robbery -- also in Iowa -- cements the gang as the premier outlaw group in America. The bandits' rise to stardom is fueled by their biggest fan: an aggressive newspaper editor in Kansas City. Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials: 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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Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. This episode is brought to you by LEGO Fortnite. LEGO Fortnite is the ultimate survival crafting game found within Fortnite. It's not just Fortnite Battle Royale with minifigures. It's an entirely new experience that combines the best of Lego Play and Fortnite. Created to give players of all ages, including kids and families, a safe digital space to play in. Download Fortnite on consoles, PC, cloud services, or Android and play Lego Fortnite for free. Rated ESRB E10+. The man who made Jesse James famous was John Newman Edwards. Edwards was an eloquent writer, a chronic alcoholic, and a steadfast supporter of the Confederacy.

He spent three years as an aide to a general during the Civil War, and then he went into the newspaper business. He co-founded the Kansas City Times and was its popular editor. He wrote romanticized stories of old Confederate battles, and his readers loved them. He hated the government that ran Missouri after the war, and his readers loved them. He hated the government that ran Missouri after the war, and his readers loved that too. And in the spring of 1870, he met Jesse James. He'd heard about Jesse's attempt to avenge the death of bloody Bill Anderson, and he was a fan. Jesse had killed an innocent man, of course, but it was the thought that counted. That summer, the summer of 1870, John Newman Edwards began a newspaper campaign that turned the James boys into folk heroes.

He crafted images of the men for the general public who would never meet them in person, but who would follow their adventures with rabid appetites. Edwards described the two men separately and at the same time. Jesse laughs at everything, Frank at nothing at all. Jesse is lighthearted, reckless, devil may care. Frank, sober, sedate, a dangerous man always in ambush in the midst of society. And after John Newman Edwards built them up, the world heard directly from the outlaw himself, Jesse James, for the first time. From Black Barrel Media, this is Season 7 of the Legends of the Old West podcast.

I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season, we're revisiting the life and legacy of Jesse James. This is episode three, fame and fortune. 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.

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Wherever you go, we'll go together. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. In June of 1870, Jesse wrote a letter to the governor of Missouri. He sent it to the Kansas City Times to have it published for all to see. John Newman Edwards happily put it in print. to see. John Newman Edwards happily put it in print. Jesse said he was innocent of the cold-blooded murder in Gallatin, Missouri six months earlier. It was a lie. He had killed the owner of a bank

in a case of mistaken identity. And while he had bragged about it afterwards, he denied it now. A month later, he published another letter. This time he claimed he had alibis who could prove he was innocent. Between Jesse's direct letters and Edwards' editorials, the propaganda campaign was off and running, and it was having an effect. Readers in Missouri began to lean in favor of the James boys. They still didn't fully trust Frank and

Jesse, but they trusted them more than the authorities. With their fame spreading, Frank and Jesse decided to lay low for a spell. They followed their old Civil War trails down to Dallas County, Texas, and spent the winter of 1870 out of the public eye. When they returned to Missouri the following spring, they turned their attention to their personal lives. Jesse had fallen in love with Zee Mims, the girl who had cared for him when he'd been shot twice during the Civil War. Frank began the secret courtship of a schoolteacher named Anna Ralston, who was also called Annie. Anna's father said years later he would never have approved of a husband like Frank James if he had known what was going on. But Frank and

Anna successfully hid their relationship from her father in the early stages. But while Frank and Jesse spent the spring of 1871 building relationships with their future wives, they were also thinking about their next bank job. They may have found love, but they were nowhere close to settling down. While Frank and Jesse had been in Texas for the winter, they had reunited with three brothers who were friends of theirs from the war, Cole, Jim, and John Younger. The Youngers were from Jackson County, straight south of the home of the James boys in Clay County. Frank and Cole had been longtime members of Quantrill's Raiders.

Jesse joined the group in the final year of the war, and Jim had joined at the very end. John was too young to fight, but he was with his brothers now, which landed him on the outlaw trail at an early age. John Younger was 19 or 20 years old when he killed a deputy sheriff in Texas in the winter of 1871. Not long afterward, the two sets of brothers returned to Missouri. When they reunited in their home counties, they planned the raid that truly launched their careers as bank robbers. The gang was a four-man team, Frank and Jesse,

Cole Younger, and their buddy, Clell Miller. Miller was two years younger than Jesse, and like the others, he was a member of Quantrill's Raiders in the war. But because of his age, he joined late in the action. His only battle was the fight that killed Bloody Bill Anderson. Miller had been wounded and then captured. Bloody Bill Anderson. Miller had been wounded and then captured. He was nearly executed by federal troops, but a colonel from Missouri recognized him and helped save his life. Now, in June of 1871, he trotted north into Iowa with the James Boys and Cole Younger. Their target was the Okabok Brothers Bank in Cordon, Iowa.

The tiny town was just 10 miles north of the Iowa-Missouri border and about 100 miles from the gang's home turf. As they rode into town that day, they found a strange sight. The place was nearly deserted. They didn't know it yet, but almost everyone was at the Methodist church. They didn't know it yet, but almost everyone was at the Methodist church. Celebrated speaker Henry Clay Dean was in town to give a speech, and in those days, public speeches were entertainment.

The local paper said there'd be free beer at the event, so of course, everybody showed up. And when four dusty strangers trotted into town, they discovered only a skeleton crew of employees in the businesses. The four men stopped their horses in front of the bank, walked inside, and found just one man in the building, the cashier. The gang easily convinced the cashier to give up the $6,000 in the safe. With the money in hand, the men went back outside, got on their horses, and headed for home. It was probably the easiest bank robbery in history. So, on their way out of town, they decided to have a little fun.

They rode over to the Methodist church, where Henry Clay Dean was in the middle of his speech. Mark Twain described Dean as a human volcano. Dean's speeches were thunderous events. He shouted and gestured, and he held his audience in rapt attention, so much so that they didn't notice the four men who had ridden up to the venue. The bank robbers listened for a few moments, but when they couldn't take any more of Dean's bellowing, they interrupted with an important announcement. They shouted to the crowd that they had just robbed the bank. They waved the money in front of the audience, but no one believed them. The townspeople just turned back to Dean. Dean cursed them for being hecklers, and he continued his speech.

The four men rode coolly out of town. When the speech was finished, the crowd drifted back into town and discovered the frightened cashier. The bank had been robbed after all. discovered the frightened cashier. The bank had been robbed after all. The display at the church was the first example of the brash and arrogant character of the gang, and it would come back to haunt them down the road. Instead of riding quietly out of town with their money,

they set themselves up for a run-in with a posse in their first encounter with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. When the robbery was discovered, the owners of the bank quickly wired the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago. The founder of the agency, Alan Pinkerton, sent his son Robert to Iowa to handle the job. In the meantime, the county sheriff rounded up a posse and headed south after the bandits. The majority of the posse stopped at the Iowa-Missouri border, but the sheriff and Robert Pinkerton kept going. Jesse and the gang traveled south for two days, stopping with friends and family along the way. At the end of the second day, they were relaxing at a supporter's house in Davies County when they learned that the law was closing in on them.

Robert Pinkerton and the Iowa County Sheriff had tracked the bandits to this home. Frank, Jesse, Clell Miller, and Cole Younger ran outside and hurried to the stable to get their horses. Pinkerton and the sheriff opened fire, but they were hasty and excited. They used up all their ammo in one burst. When the shooting stopped, the gang charged out of the stable and rode toward the thick timber in the distance. Pinkerton and the sheriff did not follow. The sheriff decided his job was done. He'd chased the bandits, but they'd escaped. He headed back to Iowa, but Robert Pinkerton stayed in Missouri. He spent several days learning the land and the

people. He interviewed Zerelda James, Frank and Jesse's mother. By the time he was done, he was convinced the James boys had robbed the Iowa bank. But he had no proof, and he couldn't find them. The bank called off the search, and robber Pinkerton went back to Chicago empty-handed. The brothers won this round, but it was just the beginning of a deadly feud between the James Boys and the Pinkertons. After the Iowa job, Jesse and John Newman Edwards cranked up the propaganda campaign. Jesse wrote a letter to the newspaper saying he and Frank were innocent once again. And then he went one step further.

He said he was actually the victim. He portrayed himself as a martyr. Edwards helped Jesse construct a new public persona. To readers, Jesse would seem like an innocent young man who was being targeted by the cruel government because he fought for the Confederacy. It was all lies, but it worked perfectly. Rather than believe one of their local boys was a robber and a killer, the readers believed he was being trampled by politicians. But within a year, Jesse changed his tactic again. Over the course of that year, he began to embrace an updated version of his new persona, that of a bold robber.

In April 1872, ten months after the Iowa robbery, five men struck a bank in Columbia, Kentucky. Frank, Jesse, and Cole Younger were the core of the group. They shot the cashier and stole $1,500, but the heist was not much of a success. The cashier at the Columbia bank knew about the robbery in Russellville, Kentucky three years earlier. Frank, Jesse, and Cole had also been part of that one. The cashier in Columbia vowed that he would never open the safe if he were unlucky enough to find himself in a robbery, and he kept his word.

The bandits shot him at close range, and he still refused to open the safe. The wound was fatal, and the man died not long afterward. The gang had to settle for a small iron box that held $1,500 so they wouldn't leave completely empty-handed. Back in Missouri, September of 1872 was devoted to the Kansas City Industrial Exposition. It was similar to what we'd call a World's Fair, and tens of thousands of people traveled to Kansas City for the week-long event. That meant the ticket offices were miniature banks. They collected thousands of dollars a day, and they had no direct security.

A large police force guarded the event, but apparently no one was stationed at the entrances. So on the fourth day of the fair, as the sun set in the background, three men rode their horses through the crowd to the 12th Street gate. They pulled cloths up over their noses in the classic outlaw disguises we've seen in hundreds of Western movies. One of the men shouted at the crowd to get back. The biggest of the three hopped down, walked up to the ticket booth, and grabbed the money out of the cash box. As he returned to his horse, the ticket seller ran out of the booth and tried to stop him.

One of the men on horseback fired at the ticket seller, but he missed. He hit a young girl in the leg instead. The bandits stole $978, but if they'd arrived just 30 minutes earlier, they would have had $12,000. The fair's treasurer had collected the money at just the right moment. As usual, the three men were never identified, but they were almost certainly Frank, Jesse, and Cole Younger. Cole was a big, broad-shouldered man,

and he was probably the one who took the money from the cash box. Even though the dollar amount from the Kansas City Fair robbery was relatively low, the brazen nature of the act sparked the most vivid article to date from John Newman Edwards. Here's a little of what he wrote. It was one of those exhibitions of superb daring that chills the blood and transfixes the muscles of the looker-on with a mingling of amazement, admiration, and horror. It was a deed so high-handed, so diabolically daring, and so utterly in contempt of fear,

that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators for the very enormity of their outlawry. Instead of cursing the bandits for robbing a family event and shooting a girl in the leg, he complimented their audacity for trying it in the first place. Then, two days later, he produced his masterwork, an epic editorial called The Chivalry of Crime. He went all out to turn Jesse and his friends into heroes in the style of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. to turn Jesse and his friends into heroes in the style of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. His efforts provoked a response, though it was almost certainly a coordinated response. Two weeks after his big article,

Edwards' paper received an anonymous letter that was supposedly written by the men who robbed the Kansas City Fair. The bandits said, Some editors call us thieves. We are not thieves. We are bold robbers. The bandit said, The unsigned letter can never be conclusively traced to Jesse James, but if he didn't write it, then he worked with Edwards on it. Or Edwards simply wrote it himself. The author aside, if Edwards thought the Kansas City Fair robbery was daring, he would be blown away by what happened next. Shop with Rakuten and you'll get it. What's it?

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After the Kansas City Fair robbery and the publicity campaign in the newspapers, the winter of 1872 passed quietly. But when the weather warmed up, the boys were back at it. Four men robbed the St. Genevieve Savings Association in May of 1873. The small town of St. Genevieve is on the far eastern edge of Missouri, right on the border with Illinois, about 40 miles south of St. Louis. The police said the James boys and the Younger brothers were responsible, but they never revealed the evidence behind the claim. They were probably right, though, and if they were,

it was the final time the gang robbed a bank in their home state of Missouri. Missouri changed rapidly as the two sets of brothers grew into their skin as famous outlaws. The peak years of the James Younger gang were on the horizon, and they began with a change of target. That target was the first big industrial boom in post-war America, railroads. Railroads had been built and destroyed as fast as humanly possible during the war. The ones that survived crisscrossed the eastern states in a crazy patchwork of separate routes. Some connected to main lines and major cities. Others connected just two or three towns, in the middle of Alabama, for instance.

But after the war, there was a mad rush to build railroads across the country. The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific joined in Utah to complete the Transcontinental Railroad. A person could now ride uninterrupted from Council Bluffs, Iowa to Sacramento, California. Speculators and tycoons hurried to stitch together the rest of the nation, and Missouri was a prime piece of real estate. It had a major hub on the eastern side of the state in St. Louis, and a growing hub on the western side of the state in Kansas City. From St. Louis, you could easily get to Memphis, Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Chicago. Kansas City became the gateway to the East for Texas cattle.

When the famous Texas cattle drives ended in towns like Abilene and Wichita and Dodge City, that beef was transported by railroad to Kansas City, and then on to Chicago. Building railroads in Missouri became big business. Towns sold bonds to try to convince railroads to come to their areas. Land speculators bought thousands of acres with the hope of selling them to the railroads for huge profits. But with every boom, a bust soon followed. The federal government was supposed to help subsidize construction, and then that plan fell apart. The burden then fell on local governments, and they couldn't handle it.

Corruption and greed plagued the system. One by one, new railroad companies failed. They abandoned their tracks half-finished in the dirt, or never began them at all. The Missouri state government and local governments lost money. They raised taxes in response. The citizens reacted angrily, as expected. Railroads had promised to connect rural communities.

They were supposed to make it easier to travel and easier to buy goods, and they were going to bring new jobs to the areas. But very little of that happened. Missouri had the third highest debt to railroad companies in the entire Union. So when the James Younger gang began to rob trains in the summer of 1873, it wasn't just about stealing money. It was also about payback. At least that's what they wanted everyone to believe. It was the final day of July, 1873, and the weather would have been stifling hot and god-awful humid in western Iowa. The town of Adair was situated almost halfway between Des Moines and Omaha, and it was positioned near the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad line.

The 5 o'clock express train from Omaha to Chicago would pass over Turkey Creek Bridge a couple miles west of Adair. But before the train made it to the bridge, it would have to slow down significantly to make a sharp turn. It was the perfect place for an ambush. There was supposed to be $75,000 in gold on the train, and that was what led six men to western Iowa on this steamy summer night. Frank and Jesse James, Cole Younger, and three more men spent part of the day working in the heat to lay their trap. They hammered the train tracks to loosen them from their supports.

They looped a rope through the tracks so they could pull them apart at the right time, a rope through the tracks so they could pull them apart at the right time. And then they waited. Each man was armed with two new Colt revolvers and a Winchester rifle. Now, for the first time, they carried the weapons we've seen in countless movies. They split into two groups and stood on either side of the tracks. And lastly, they wore masks to hide their faces. Those masks made them look like members of the Ku Klux Klan. At around 8.30 p.m., they heard the unmistakable sound of the train rumbling down the tracks. It slowed to make the sharp turn before Turkey Creek Bridge. The six men yanked the rope and pulled the tracks apart. The engineer saw the tracks separate.

He slammed on the brakes and reversed power, but it was too late. The train hit the loose section and careened off the tracks. The cars smashed into each other in an ear-splitting roar of grinding metal and breaking glass. The locomotive plowed into the dirt and fell off the tracks. The first baggage car jackknifed and slid onto its side. The second baggage car flipped over the tracks as smoke billowed out from under it. Passengers screamed as they were thrown around inside the cars. Four bandits ran to the smoking train. Two jumped in the passenger car and held their guns on the frightened riders. The other two jumped in the second baggage car and began the robbery.

The remaining two stayed outside as guards. One of the two men who entered the baggage car was Jesse James. At this point in his young career, he believed he really was the daring outlaw hero who had been created by John Newman Edwards in the newspapers. Jesse ripped off his mask. He didn't care if people saw his face. He pointed his gun at the man who controlled the money, the express messenger, and demanded the key to the safe. The man gave it up willingly. and demanded the key to the safe. The man gave it up willingly. Jesse removed $2,300,

but that was about 73,000 short of what he expected. He demanded to know where the rest was hidden. The express messenger said that was all the money on the train. Then he pointed to the sacks on the floor. The rest of the load was in the form of raw ore, about 6,000 pounds of bullion. It was on its way east to be refined and turned into coins.

There was no way the gang could carry that much weight. They escaped with $2,300 and disappeared into the night. to the night. The train engineer's fast reaction saved everyone on board, but it cost him his life. He died during the crash. The Adair robbery was not the first time a train had been derailed for the purpose of a heist. The James boys didn't pioneer the tactic. But it was the first time a gang of outlaws held possession of the entire train while they conducted a coordinated robbery. Previously, bandits derailed a train and then ran on board and grabbed whatever they could from the passengers or whatever was easy to take. Then they ran away. The James boys took over the train. Then they ran away. The James boys took over the train. They held it hostage with an organized plan.

The size and audacity of the act shocked the nation. But it was right in line with the outlaw personas created by John Newman Edwards in the newspaper. The men embraced their characters. As they strode through the aisles, they quoted Edward's articles. They said, All of that was true, except the last three words. They gave nothing to the poor. Next time on Legends of the Old West, it's the beginning of an unprecedented two-year run for the James Younger gang. They rob stagecoaches and another train, and watch their fame continue to grow in the newspapers.

But with more attention comes more heat. The Pinkertons are back on the trail of the James boys, and the case turns deadly. 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, blackbarrelmedia.com, for more details.

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