Northfield's 'Defeat of Jesse James': Last gasp of the civil war

One of Minnesota's largest festivals, Northfield's "Defeat of Jesse James Days," observes a famous failed bank robbery 140 years ago. The Sept. 7-11 event took shape in 1948, and ever since, the town has annually realized a handsome financial reward on what the bandits thought would go the other way.

There'll be a tractor pull, biker rallies, fun runs, a hog roast, bingo, a duck-boat race, and lots more, including re-enactments of one of history's legendary shootouts.

The botched heist by the notorious James-Younger Gang was a very big deal in Minnesota and nationally at the time. It featured media celebrity Jesse James and scintillating elements of a Wild West shootout by notorious bad guys with blazing guns on horseback, good citizens who shot back, and a posse that tracked the thieves for two long weeks before their capture in a swamp near Madelia, Minn.

While it was the end of the James-Younger Gang, the star of the show certainly wasn't defeated, as the festival proclaims. Jesse and brother Frank escaped, and Jesse went on to rob for several years more.

But mostly lost in all that followed and present-day hoopla is perhaps the most intriguing part of this yarn:

Evidence is strong that the holdup was actually the last (and Minnesota's only) skirmish of the American Civil War, even though it occurred far from any battlefield and a decade after Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union.

Before the James and Youngers turned into robbers, they rode with fierce guerrillas in border-state Missouri to zealously defend the Confederate South before and during the war, and avenged its defeat long afterward. For them, the war never ended.

Theirs is a gripping tale of murderous rampages, daring robberies, revenge (as in Northfield), myth-building by star-struck media, uncompromising ideology and even about founding the country's longest-running prison newspaper.

It all started outside present-day Kearney, Mo., near Kansas City, where, in 1843, Zerelda and Robert James bore son Frank and, four years later, Jesse. The boys never knew their absentee father, a Baptist minister, but their doting mother imprinted her fierce Southern allegiance on the two.

Successful farmers, the Jameses brought with them six slaves when they moved from Kentucky to Clay County, so heavily populated by southern transplants it was known as "Little Dixie."

Missouri's secessionist governor sought to push Union troops out of a state with split loyalties, provoking hostilities that turned Confederate sympathizers like the James boys into ruthless "bushwhackers." At 20, Frank rode with William Quantrill's Raiders as they stormed Lawrence, Kan., torched the town and massacred 200 mostly unarmed abolitionists who favored Kansas entering the Union as a free state. Among the Raiders was Cole Younger.

Enraged Kansas "Jayhawkers" avenged by executing Confederate sympathizers in Missouri raids, often burning their farms. During the savage Missouri-Kansas Border War, bushwhacker "Bloody Bill" Anderson stopped a train and ordered off 24 unarmed Union troops on leave, then slaughtered and mutilated them all before horrified passengers. His raiders dangled scalps of the dead from their horse bridles.

Young Jesse lied about his age and at 16 rode with "Bloody Bill," only to see his hero killed and decapitated shortly after joining up. Hardened and bitter, Jesse was destined to lead a violent outlaw life.

Frank was less inclined initially, once taking an interest in his father's Shakespeare collection and even the Bible. Still, Frank teamed with Jesse after the war to rob banks and trains, seen as hated symbols of wealthy northern industrialists. The pair soon attracted the like-minded Younger brothers, including Cole, Bob and Jim, who were part of the Northfield debacle.

Banks were easy pickings for the James-Younger Gang, often staged to avenge the defeated Confederacy. At Gallatin, Mo., the gang robbed a small bank where Jesse fatally shot an unarmed cashier in the mistaken belief he was the Union militiaman who killed "Bloody Bill."

The gang and especially Jesse gained celebrity through glorified media reports and dime novels about their adventurous exploits. Accounts by Eastern journalists helped create much of Jesse's adoring legend.

Still in his early 20s, Jesse relished the notoriety and took to leaving "press releases" at robberies and sending notes to newspapers about his high-profile daring. In a letter to the Kansas City Times, Jesse wrote:

"Just let a party of men commit a bold robbery and the cry is hang them. But [President Ulysses S.] Grant and his party can steal millions and it is all right. They rob the poor and rich, and we rob from the rich and give to the poor."

Thus spread a populist myth that Jesse was a latter-day Robin Hood.

Hardly, as written on the DVD jacket of a PBS film for "American Experience":

"… Jesse James, so the legend goes, was a Western outlaw, though he never went West; America's own Robin Hood, though he robbed from the poor as well as the rich and kept it all for himself; and a gunfighter whose victims were almost always unarmed. Less heroic than brutal, James was a product, from first to last, of the American Civil War — a Confederate partisan of expansive ambition and unbending politics …"

The "Confederate partisan" in Jesse helps explain why he and the gang left the security of their home range and ventured to unfamiliar Minnesota.

The gang relished taking out a bank in the hated North, but to them Northfield's First National Bank was something more: They believed it was owned by ex-Union general Benjamin Butler and held deposits of his son-in-law, Adelbert Ames, a Union commander and postwar Mississippi governor. Turns out that was mostly untrue.

Regardless, on Sept. 7, 1876, the gang rode into Northfield and staked out positions. But things went awry when a cashier refused to open the bank safe and was promptly shot dead by, some say, Jesse.

The shot drew attention of already-suspicious townsfolk, who took up arms and shot it out with the gang, killing two. It all lasted seven minutes.

Jesse and Frank escaped on horseback, but the badly wounded Younger brothers, on foot, were captured, tried and sent to long sentences at Stillwater prison. Cole and Bob, both model prisoners, scraped up $50 and raised $150 more from inmates to found the Prison Mirror newspaper that's still being published 130 years later.

At Stillwater, Cole admitted that the Northfield bank was targeted for its Unionist connections.

Frank settled down after the failed holdup, and tried with varying success to lead a law-abiding life that ended at 72.

Not Jesse. Under the alias "Thomas Howard," he formed another gang and kept robbing banks, leading to a $10,000 reward for his dead-or-alive capture. Hoping to cash in on the reward, one in his "trusted" gang fatally shot the unsuspecting Jesse in the back of the head as he dusted a picture at home in St. Joseph, Mo. He was 34.

Jesse's legend grew in death, and there's a chorus line in a 1924 song about him: "But that dirty little coward / That shot Mr. Howard / Has laid poor Jesse in his grave."

In truth, Jesse was gunned down the same as nearly all his unarmed victims.

Meanwhile, back at the present-day Jesse James Museum near Kearney, Mo., where the restored farm home stands with slave quarters out back, visitors can buy their kids a blue Union cap or a gray Confederate cap like those worn by Civil War soldiers. As evidence that divided sympathies persist, the clerk says more than half of the caps sold are gray.

Ron Way lives in Edina.