The Rise and Fall of Jesse James

ix, 446 pp. Photographic frontispiece portraits of Jesse and Frank James and Cole Younger, jacket art by Paul Laune. "Jesse and Frank James were household names long before images of America's most wanted were televised. For several decades after the Civil War, they were hunted by hundreds who supposed them to be involved in every bank and train robbery in the Midwest. Trained as guerrilla fighters in the border conflict between Kansas and Missouri, they joined with the Younger brothers in February 1866 to rob a bank in Liberty, Missouri. That was the beginning of a criminal confederation that seemed beyond the reach of the law until the Northfield, Minnesota, raid killed three of them and sent the James brothers into hiding. But they were the objects of posted rewards that proved too tempting in Jesse's case: in 1882 he was shot in the back by Robert Ford of his own gang. The Rise and Fall of Jesse James, by Robertus Love, a newspaperman who knew Frank James, is a pioneering work that plumbs the personalities of the outlaws, looks at their domestic lives, cites many stories about them, and attempts to separate fact from legend in tracking their violent operations." SGSL: "Probably the most reliable book written about Jesse James to that date. Like most biographers, the author is sympathetic with his subject. He places much of the blame for the James boys' outlawry upon Pinkerton agents and their persecutions. He also repeats the fable about Jesse helping the impoverished widow hounded by the tyrannical landlord. The book contains a chapter on the Union Pacific robbery at Big Springs as an argument against the common belief that Frank and Jesse were connected with this robbery. His account of this event is fairly accurate except that he gives Joel Collins the first name Jim. He states that Jesse 'invented train robbing' and that 'the first railway train holdup that ever happened has been charged to the James-Younger group.' The Renos were the first to rob a train. He also states that Ed Kelly, the killer of Bob Ford, was killed in a sidewalk fight with a town marshal in Texas. He was killed by a city policeman in Oklahoma City."