James-Younger Gang Robberies, Clay County Savings Association & Nimrod, Long & Co.

 

Jesse James

At about 2 p.m. on February 13, 1866, ten or twelve men dressed in tattered Union army apparel rode into Liberty, Missouri. Three guarded the city’s outskirts, and the others went to the Clay County Savings Association. Two men went inside while the others waited outside.

The men warmed their hands by the stove while checking out the bank. They quickly decided there was nothing to worry about here, just two employees, one of them an old man, and no guards or guns. One of them asked the clerk, William Bird, to change a ten-dollar bill. As he did, the man pointed a gun at Bird’s head. The other man jumped over the counter and stuck his revolver in cashier Greenup Bird’s face.

After that, they forced William Bird to open the vault and put all the valuables into a seed bag. When he finished, they asked for the key to the vault. Then they slammed the vault door shut, locking the clerk and cashier inside. “No doubt, [they] thought they had locked the door,” The Daily Journal of Commerce reported. But something went wrong, and it didn’t lock. The Birds pushed on the door, and to their surprise, it opened.

Greenup Bird waited a moment, then raised the window and shouted an alarm that the bank had been robbed.

Meet the James-Younger gang

Jesse James

The James-Younger Gang was fluid, changing with the needs of the job and who was available. The core members of the original gang were Jesse and Frank James, Cole Younger, Arthur McCoy, Clell Miller, and Bill Chadwell, men battle-hardened in the Civil War. Most of them had joined Bloody Bill Anderson or William Clarke Quantrill in their teens and had taken part in the raids on Lawrence and Centralia, Kansas.

Jesse James was the face of the gang. He was tall, thin, wiry, good-looking, and craved publicity. Jesse had sandy-brown hair (some said reddish), a big, bushy beard, and steely-blue eyes that could cut you to the core. His brother, Frank James, stood an inch or two taller than Jesse, was quiet, reserved, and preferred to stay out of the limelight.

 

Most people go back and forth, deciding which brother ran the gang. Some credit Frank as the genius behind it, carefully planning their every move. Others, like J. T. Buell, an early authority on western outlaws, called Jesse the “administrative leader,” saying he managed its finances, carried out its diplomacy, and devised its strategies.

 

Others say Cole Younger was the leader, at least when Jesse and Frank rode with him. Cole was a meticulous planner and thought out every move he made, and unlike Jesse James, Cole Younger had a heart. He “hated murder,” said The Kansas City Times, “and yet he killed ruthlessly,” doing what was right at the moment. In short, Cole lived by his own code of ethics.

Cole Younger Never Stopped Defending Himself

Cole Younger in 1876

Most outlaws get the last word from a newspaper reporter. Cole Younger got twenty-five years to prepare his own version. 

That’s the thing that makes him different from Jesse James.

 

Jesse died in 1882 with a bullet in his back and a growing legend attached to his name. Cole survived the gunfights and prison, living long enough to watch the Old West become history.

 

Then he wrote a book.

 

Reading The Story of Cole Younger, By Himself is a little like listening to a defense attorney’s closing argument. Again and again, Cole returns to the same point.

 

He was a soldier first, and then an outlaw. Everything started in Missouri during the Civil War.

 

Missouri wasn’t like Virginia or Pennsylvania. The war there wasn’t fought by organized armies. A good portion of it was fought by guerrillas, bushwhackers, jayhawkers, and men settling personal grudges under the cover of military service.

Frank James, The Forgotten Brother

 

Frank James during his outlaw days

Everyone knows Jesse James.

 

Even people who couldn’t tell you much about the Old West know the name. They’ve seen the movies, heard the songs, and watched as Hollywood turned him into everything from a cold-blooded killer to a Robin Hood on horseback.

 

Frank James gets forgotten in the shuffle. Which is a shame because Frank may have been the more interesting brother.

 

Jesse died young. Frank lived long enough to explain himself. And he spent much of the rest of his life trying.

 

When most people picture the James brothers, they imagine a pair of hard-riding outlaws thundering across Missouri with revolvers blazing.

The Day Jesse James Died - Or Did He?

 

A young Jesse James

By 1882, Jesse James was running out of road.

 

The robberies. The killings. The train holdups and bank jobs had finally caught up with him.

 

His old gang was scattered. Pinkerton detectives had spent years chasing him. The governor of Missouri and the railroads had put a price on his head. Former friends were turning state’s evidence.

 

Jesse was living quietly in St. Joseph, Missouri under the name Thomas Howard. He had a wife. Children. A rented house. On the surface, it looked like he was trying to settle down.

 

Then Robert Ford showed up.

 

Ford and his brother Charles had been riding with Jesse only a short time. Unknown to Jesse, they were also talking to Missouri Governor Thomas Crittenden about the reward money.

A New Look At the Discovery of America

 

I had some fun today, and asked AI to make illustrations of the European discovery of America as they would have been done by five visionary artists—Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, William Blake, Frederic Remington, and Pablo Picasso.

Pablo Picasso

Picasso didn’t paint the discovery of America.

He exploded it.

The ships, the shoreline, Columbus, the people—everything has been broken apart and stitched back together again. Nothing stays put. Your eye bounces around the canvas, trying to make sense of the chaos.

Which is probably the point.

The arrival of Europeans in the Americas wasn’t neat. It wasn’t simple. It was confusion, curiosity, excitement, fear, opportunity, and misunderstanding all crashing together at once. Picasso turns the whole thing into a beautiful wreck.

Joan Miró

If Picasso blows the story apart, Miró lets it float away.

The ships become symbols. The people become playful little characters. Stars, dots, colors, and strange shapes drift across the scene like they’re dancing to music only they can hear.

History takes a backseat.

This isn’t really about Columbus. It’s about wonder, sailing toward something nobody has ever seen before, and finding a world that feels almost magical.

Guglielmo Marconi: The Inventor Who Let the World Talk Across Ocean

 

Find it on eBay

Today, most people take wireless communication for granted.

A text message can travel around the world in seconds. A phone call can connect two continents instantly.

Few people stop to ask where it all started.

The answer is a young Italian inventor named Guglielmo Marconi.

Long before smartphones, radio stations, and Wi-Fi, Marconi helped prove that messages could travel through the air without wires. It was an idea so revolutionary that many experts thought it couldn’t possibly work.

Marconi proved them wrong.