everybody was a spy for his side,” Frank James
recalled about the atmosphere in Clay Coun-
ty during the war. “You were for the South and
your neighbor was for Lincoln.” As slave owners
with Kentucky roots, there was little question
which side Jesse’s family would take. A neigh-
bor recalled that when news of the war came,
18-year-old Frank James “was wild, shooting
his pistol and hallooing for Jeff Davis.”
Jesse was far too young to enlist. Frank joined
the pro-Southern Missouri State Guard and in
less than five months’ time fought in two major
Missouri battles, Wilson’s Creek and Lexing-
ton, both Confederate victories. But that win-
ter he was a patient in a military hospital, laid
low not by a bullet but by measles. Captured by
Federal forces, Frank was subsequently paroled
and sent home, bound by an oath not to take up
arms again against the Union. Yet as the war in
Missouri devolved into bloody atrocities and
reprisals, it was impossible for any able-bodied
young man to stay out of the fight.
In May 1863 Frank joined the command
of Southern guerrilla leader William Clarke
Quantrill. The guerrillas, also known as bush-
whackers, acted as irregular cavalry, generally
operating independently of the Confederate
army and devising their own objectives as their
leaders saw fit. They supported themselves
through raiding and help from their kin, which
is why Federal militia appeared at the James
farm soon after Frank joined the guerrillas.
The militia believed Frank was hiding nearby
with other bushwhackers and ordered young
Jesse to tell them where they were. When Jes-
se refused to talk, the soldiers mercilessly beat
and whipped him. Next they tortured Jesse’s
stepfather, Reuben Samuel, stringing him up by
the neck until the poor man agreed to lead them
to the bushwhacker camp. The militia had not
come to take prisoners and immediately opened
fire on the guerrillas, killing two of them. Frank
ran like hell, barely escaping as bullets whizzed
around him. “After that day,” Frank would recall
years later, “Jesse was out for blood.”
But Jesse’s vendetta ride would have to wait
until the next year. He was only 15 and, more
importantly, a valuable tobacco crop on theMARK LEE GARDNER COLLECTIONWAR CRIME
A chromolithograph
(above) depicts
Union soldiers
torturing Reuben
Samuel, Jesse
James’s stepfather, in
May 1863. Severely
injured, Samuel
agreed to reveal the
whereabouts of his
stepson Frank and a
bushwhacker camp.NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC HISTORY 81