The story of Frank James is the story of the American frontier at its most violent and ambiguous, a narrative that begins in the guerrilla warfare of the Civil War and ends, improbably, with a quiet surrender in a Missouri governor's office. The older brother of Jesse James, Frank spent decades as one of the most wanted outlaws in the United States, yet he outlived his brother, survived two trials, and died in his bed at the age of seventy-one, a minor celebrity of the Wild West lecture circuit.
Alexander Franklin James was born on 10 January 1843 in Kearney, Missouri, to Robert Sallee James, a Baptist minister, and his wife Zerelda Cole. The family had come from Kentucky and was of English, Welsh, and Scottish descent. Frank was the eldest of three children. His father died in 1850, and his mother remarried twice: first to Benjamin Simms in 1852, and then, after Simms's death, to Dr. Reuben Samuel in 1855, when Frank was thirteen. He showed an early intellectual bent, spending considerable time in his late father's sizable library and reportedly developing a fondness for the works of William Shakespeare. Census records indicate he attended school regularly, and he is said to have harbored ambitions of becoming a teacher.
The Civil War shattered whatever conventional future might have awaited him. When the conflict began in 1861, Frank was eighteen, and Missouri was a deeply divided border state. The James family came from the heavily Confederate western portion of the state. On 13 September 1861, Frank served as a private in the Missouri State Guard during the siege of Lexington, Missouri. He fell ill during the campaign and was left behind when Confederate forces retreated, surrendering to Union troops and being paroled. Upon returning home, he was arrested by pro-Union militia and compelled to sign an oath of allegiance, a formality he appears to have taken with no great seriousness.
As regular Confederate forces withdrew from Missouri, a bitter guerrilla conflict erupted between pro-Confederate bushwhackers and Union homeguards. By early 1863, Frank had violated his parole and joined the guerrilla band of Fernando Scott. He soon attached himself to the far more active company of William Clarke Quantrill, whose irregular forces carried out some of the most brutal operations of the conflict. When Union militiamen raided the Samuel farm looking for Scott, they hanged Frank's stepfather, Dr. Reuben Samuel, though not fatally, in an attempt to extract information about guerrilla whereabouts. The incident deepened Frank's commitment to the Confederate irregular cause. On 21 August 1863, he participated in the Lawrence Massacre, Quantrill's raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in which approximately 200 mostly unarmed civilians were killed.
After the Confederacy's defeat, Frank was paroled on 27 July 1865 in Nelson County, Kentucky. What happened next is disputed. One account places him in a gunfight in Brandenburg, Kentucky, with four soldiers, resulting in two soldiers killed, one wounded, and Frank wounded in the hip. Another account suggests that in the autumn of 1865, while traveling from Kentucky to Missouri, he was suspected of horse theft in Ohio and shot two members of a pursuing posse before escaping. Whatever the exact sequence of events, his post-war life was characterized by an almost immediate return to violence.
The James-Younger Gang became one of the most notorious outlaw organizations in American history, carrying out bank and train robberies across Missouri, Kentucky, and beyond. Frank was involved in at least four robberies between 1868 and 1876 that resulted in the deaths of bank employees or bystanders. The most catastrophic operation was the raid on the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota, on 7 September 1876. The townspeople of Northfield fought back with unexpected ferocity. Most of the gang was killed or captured, and the Younger brothers were eventually imprisoned. Frank and Jesse escaped but the gang was effectively broken.
Jesse James was shot dead on 3 April 1882 by a fellow gang member, Robert Ford, who was hoping to collect a reward. Five months later, Frank made a decision that surprised virtually everyone. He boarded a train to Jefferson City, Missouri, and met with Governor Thomas T. Crittenden. Handing over his revolver, he offered what became one of the most quoted surrenders in Western lore: he had been hunted for twenty-one years, had literally lived in the saddle, had never known a day of perfect peace. He added that he had not let another man touch his gun since 1861. He surrendered with the reported understanding that he would not be extradited to Minnesota for the Northfield raid.
He was tried for the 15 July 1881 robbery of the Rock Island Line train at Winston, Missouri, in which the train engineer and a passenger had been killed, as well as for one other robbery. Both trials ended in acquittals, a result that reflected as much the sympathies of Missouri juries as it did the weakness of the evidence. Frank subsequently worked as a shoe salesman, a theater doorman, a race starter, and eventually a paid attraction at his family's farm in Kearney, where tourists paid to see the birthplace of the James brothers. He died on 18 February 1915, the last prominent survivor of the Civil War guerrilla tradition that had shaped his entire life.
