The Real Frank James

Frank sitting, Jesse right

The year of Frank’s birth, 1843, marked a turning point for his impoverished parents, Robert and Zerelda James. The first large wagon train to Oregon departed that spring, and Robert took advantage of a necessary tool for these journeys—rope—by farming hemp as his crop. After Alexander Franklin James was born on January 10, 1843, he and his parents moved into a three-room cabin by a creek in Clay County, which would be the James family home for the rest of their lives. Frank’s brother, Jesse, was born on September 5, 1847, followed by Susan Lavenia, on November 25, 1849. The next year, their father died of cholera while prospecting for gold and preaching to miners in California. Zerelda remarried twice, first to Benjamin Simms in 1852 and then to Dr. Reuben Samuel in 1855. With Samuel, she would give her brood four step siblings: Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fannie Quantrell and Archie Peyton. Frank, who was seven or eight when his father died, clung to his papa through the words he loved, reading his father’s sizable library, especially the works of William Shakespeare. Frank’s propensity for quoting Shakespeare would come up in his trial in 1883, when the Rev. Jamin Machette testified that the day before an 1881 train robbery in Winston, a man named Willard (alias for Frank) and a man named Scott (alias for Jesse) ate a meal at Machette’s home, and that the man named Willard had recited long passages from Shakespeare’s works. The James family were slaveholders, so when abolitionists spilled blood from Kansas into Missouri, Frank joined the Confederate cause, helping to defeat Union forces at the Battle of Wilson Creek in August 1861. Six months later, Frank was captured. He lied through his teeth that he would not take up arms against the Union, then returned home and joined William Clarke Quantrill’s guerrillas. This gang of men is where Frank met bushwhacker Cole Younger...more