Jesse James is born, September 5, 1847
He was a son of the Old South. Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County, Missouri, an area known as “Little Dixie.” When the Civil War began, his older brother, Frank, joined the Rebels in the clothes his mother had sewn for him. Two years later, sixteen-year-old Jesse joined his brother to ride with Quantrill’s Raiders, an especially violent band of Rebel bushwhackers. The James boys followed a subdivision led by Bloody Bill Anderson, whose savagery they would put to use after the war was over. For men like the Jameses, returning to any kind of normal civilian life would prove impossible.