"Out of the frontier West the American character was formed..."

-- Dee Brown

Every century brings its heroes and its villains. Every now and then, however, a character lurches forth with a combination of the two; maybe because the world doesn't know whether to love or hate him or her, he or she becomes a milestone in the study of complex mankind. Nitty, gritty, but with the spirit of a conquering warrior. In short, a legend is born.

Such a landmark is Jesse Woodson James.

Of James, crime historian Jay Robert Nash asserts, "Millions of words would be written about this handsome, dashing and utterly ruthless bank and train robber. To many of his peers, he would appear a folklore hero who took vengeance in their name upon an industrial society that was grinding the old agrarian lifestyle to ashes. To others, he and his band represented the last vestiges of the Old South and its lost cause of secession...He was at large for sixteen years. He committed dozens of daring robberies and killed at least a half-dozen or more men. He died at the age of thirty-four."

Jesse James at the height of his career, 1876 (Nash)

In that short span of life he moved unprincipled yet talented, unschooled yet successful in a changing world. While he rode at his peak, the nation tumbled over its centennial celebration, happy and fat and beating its patriotic breast till black and blue. Changes were a-comin' – some frightening in prospect, others promising. In no other fold of life was American colloquialism turning an about-face more severely than in the West. The Pony Express couldn't keep up with the stage lines, and the stage lines couldn't keep up with the railroads. Agriculture went mechanical. A teacher of the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell, had the crust to dream up something called a telephone. And a wizard named Tom Edison pondered the possibility of lighting cities incandescently. But, Jesse James outrode the changes taking place around him, thumbing his nose at others who said this was a modernized world, and continued to be the Templar knight of things that were; tradition his saddle mate.

A Missourian caught up in the split emotions of his state at the advent of the Civil War, his family chose the states' rights doctrine of the South. Jesse detested what represented the Industrial North and what it did to the glory of the Old Dominion; not one to forgive and forget, he continued to fight the fathers of the Union decades after the conflict ended – to the point that he raided a bank in far off Minnesota because of a Union Army connection. There the North won, again, but he remained a rebel, lessons unlearned and convictions unaltered.

"Jesse James (partly) turned to crime as a means of exacting revenge on all things Yankee," says Time-Life Books' The Wild West.

But, was the Civil War the only motivating factor that turned Jesse, the son of a Baptist minister, into a Colt-packing, six-chambered desperado? Some researchers say his die was cast at an earlier age, before the first gun of the rebellion sounded. On a Miltonesque note, they speak of pre-destiny, he being a child of the wild mountain country from whence he came. Whatever caused him to lay the plow for the highwayman's tools, Jesse James relished being an outlaw.

America loved him being an outlaw, too, for in him there was adventure in an otherwise dull, slowly-turning-scientific age. And there lieth that often-too-unbelievable twist of fate that makes legends – in rampaging a society he didn't like, a society of America's second century, he became its folk hero. Probably, say the social scholars, because much of that society needed an old-fashioned hero to represent its own pioneer yearning kept harnessed by a supposedly more docile, less-demanding democracy.

What makes Jesse a totally fascinating character is the human trait he brought to outlawry, akin only to Robin Hood. "Like his famous predecessor in folklore (although in fact James was a real person), Jesse James robbed from the rich and was kind to the poor," explains Encyclopaedia Britannica's Annals of America series. "(He) was always willing to help some cowpoke who was 'down on his luck'."

Like anyone who has made an incredible dent in his/her own texture of time, Jesse rose above the realm of mortal fame by playing his own life on a human level. He preferred to be known as one of earth's seedlings who fought back against the sequoia of (what he saw) oppression. And by driving his pursuers crazy with anxiety and anger on their own level, that made his victories – and, yes, the pursuit, too – that much more thrilling.