Taking Aim at Jesse James & History

It was in early 1880 when James first met Ford, an aimless cowpoke. Ford's brother Charley was already a member of the James gang. The relationship of the Fords and James was further cemented because of Martha Bolton (Alison Elliott in the film), the Fords' sister. James often relaxed at her house and a rumor circulated that the married James was smitten with her. In time, Bob Ford went on robberies with James.

Robert Ford had actually told many people how much he admired Jesse James.

But the James gang's fame begat the horrors of the time and kept the eight-column headlines rolling off the presses.

In a crazy and murderous time, it was as if the blood from the fatal bullet wound in James's skull began to seep out, spreading, circling dark alleyways and galloping toward the demented minds of killers to come, killers yet to be born.

"What's interesting about the period in which Bob Ford shoots Jesse James is that Charles Guiteau is [arrested] for shooting President James Garfield," says Hansen. "Robert Ford saw all the attention a killer could get."

Myths are ripe to be probed and attacked.

To be peered into and around. "He's the Elvis Presley of the 19th century," Hansen says of James. "He became famous before his death because of the novels that were being written about him."

The myth of Jesse James, then, had already taken off, rampaging as if on a white horse, carrying a man who many were wont to believe held a code of ethics and a desire to redeem their own lost pride. They were, for the most part, rural whites. Ground down by the Civil War and existing hand-to-mouth. "They bought into the idea of him robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. He was their champion," says Hansen, who teaches literature at Santa Clara University.

James murdered more than a dozen people -- some say 17. Gary Chilcote, director of Patee House Museum and Jesse James Home in St. Joseph, Mo., cites that number: "These are murders where we can put a name, face and time to them."

Riding across the West, across Nebraska and Missouri and Minnesota, wearing a long black coat and hat with upturned brim, sporting bullet scars from the Civil War, Jesse James grew full of himself. He traveled at night. He was elusive, enabling many to believe there was something nearly holy about him. "He was really pretty ruthless. He knocked people around," adds Hansen.

Pinkerton detectives rode hard after him as he rode after the express trains he robbed. But they couldn't corner him.

There were those who thought James a rather creepy individual, believing, as he did, in superstitions, flaunting his paranoia by relentlessly questioning friends. Hansen would write in his novel: "He could neither multiply nor divide without error and much of his science was superstition. He could list the many begotten of Abraham and the sixty-six books of the King James Bible; he could recite psalms and poems in a stentorian voice with suitable histrionics; he could sing religious hymns so convincingly that he worked for a month as a choirmaster. . . . And yet he thought incense was made from the bones of saints, that leather continued to grow if not dyed, that if he concentrated hard enough his body's electrical currents could stun lake frogs as he bathed."