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Most People Picture History Wrong, These Facts Will Set them Straight

Khalid Elhassan April 25, 2020 34 min

Franklin D. Roosevelt - Joseph Stalin — The Big Three of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, at the Tehran Conference in 1943. Rare Historical Photos

17. Switching to Peacetime Banditry

After recovering from his wounds, Jesse James and his brother Frank joined a gang led by one of their former guerrilla commanders. In 1866, they robbed a bank in Liberty, Missouri, during which robbery an innocent bystander was killed. A few months later, they killed a jailer while freeing imprisoned fellow gang members. In 1867, the gang killed the mayor of Richmond, Missouri, along with two others, during a bank robbery.

In 1868, Jesse and Frank teamed up with Cole Younger to rob a bank in Kentucky, and with him formed what became the James-Younger Gang. In 1869, Jesse gained notoriety when he murdered a cashier during the course of a robbery, after mistaking him for the man who had killed his former guerrilla commander, “Bloody Bill’ Anderson. The gang then went on a spree, robbing stagecoaches, trains, banks, and county fairs, from Iowa to Texas, and from West Virginia to Kansas.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.