Caption	Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
Birth place	Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France
Death date	July 10, 1851
Death place	Bry-sur-Marne, France
Knowj for	invention of the daguerreotype process

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (November 18, 1787 – July 10, 1851) was a French artist and chemist, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography.

Biography

Daguerre was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France. He apprenticed in architecture, theatre design, and panoramic painting with Pierre Prévost, the first French panorama painter. Exceedingly adept at his skill for theatrical illusion, he became a celebrated designer for the theater and later came to invent the Diorama, which opened in Paris in July 1822.

In 1822 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the world's first permanent photograph (known as a Heliograph). Daguerre partnered with Niépce three years later, beginning a four-year cooperation. Niépce died suddenly in 1833. The main reason for the "partnership", as far as Daguerre was concerned, might have been connected to his already famous dioramas. Niepce was a printer and his process was based on a faster way to produce printing plates. Daguerre perhaps thought that the process developed by Niepce could help speed up his diorama creation.

Daguerre announced the latest perfection of the Daguerreotype, after years of experimentation, in 1839, with the French Academy of Sciences announcing the process on January 7 of that year. Daguerre's patent was acquired by the French Government, and, on August 19, 1839, the French Government announced the invention was a gift "Free to the World."

Daguerre and Niépce's son obtained a pension from the Government in exchange for freely sharing the details of the process. Daguerre died in Bry-sur-Marne, from Paris. A monument marks his grave there.

Competition with Talbot

The work on the Daguerre process was taking place at the same time as that of William Fox Talbot in England on the calotype process. Both men knew that they were working on a process that would revolutionize the art world. The Grand Tours which were so popular were illustrated by drawings of scenes and the "photographic" process would improve the quality and ease with which these popular holiday memories could be produced.

To protect his own invention, Daguerre himself registered the patent for Britain on August 12, 1839 (a week before France declared it "Free to the World"), and this greatly slowed the development of photography in that nation. Great Britain was to be the only place the patent was enforced. Antoine Claudet was one of the few people legally able to take daguerreotypes there.

Daguerre did not need to make money from the invention to live, since he had been pensioned by the French government. Fox Talbot spent a considerable amount of money on his process (est. £5,000 in 1830s money) and licensed the process to British photographers where it was used instead of the Daguerreotype.

Development of the Daguerreotype

", taken by Daguerre in 1838 in Paris, was the first photograph of a person. The image shows a street, but because of the over ten minute exposure time the moving traffic does not appear. The exceptions are the man and shoe-shine boy at the bottom left, and two people sitting at a table nearby who stood still long enough to have their images captured. (click photo to enlarge)]]

The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, building on a discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz (1724): a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light. Niépce and Daguerre refined this process. Daguerre first exposed silver-coated copper plates to iodine, obtaining silver iodide. Then he exposed them to light for several minutes, coated the plate with mercury vapor heated to 75° Celsius (to amalgamate the mercury with the silver) and finally fixing the image in salt water. These ideas led to the famous Daguerreotype.

The resultant plate produced an exact reproduction of the scene. The image was laterally reversed -- as images in mirrors are -- unless a second mirror was used during exposure to flip the image. The image could only be viewed at an angle and needed protection from the air and fingerprints so was encased in a glass-fronted box.

Some ambrotypes were passed off as Daguerreotypes by being placed in these type of boxes. But the process was cheaper involving a weakly-developed glass card or paper to appear as a positive. Tintypes also were "boxed" as Daguerrotypes.

Daguerreotypes were usually portraits; the rarer views are much sought-after and are more expensive. The portrait process took several minutes and required the subjects to remain stock still. Samuel Morse was astonished to learn that Daguerrotypes of streets of Paris did not show any humans, until he realized that due to the long exposure times all moving objects became invisible. The time was later reduced with the "faster" lenses such as Petzval's portrait lens, the first mathematically calculated lens.

In 1849, Daguerreotype images photographed by the famous Russian Photographer Sergei Lvovich Levitsky (1819-1898) while on a mission to the Caucasus in 1843, were exhibited by the famous Parisian optician Chevalier at the Paris Exposition of the Second Republic as an advertisement of their lenses. Levitsky's use of the Chevalier lens which used two cemented double lenses improved the camera's focusing ability, thus reducing the time needed to capture an image for portraiture and landscape photography. Levitsky's Dageurreotypes would receive the Exposition's gold medal; the first time a prize of its kind had ever been awarded to a photograph.

The Daguerreotype was the Polaroid of the day, producing a single image which was not reproducible (unlike the Talbot process). Despite this drawback, millions of Daguerreotypes were produced. By 1851, the year of Daguerre's death, the Fox Talbot negative process was refined by the development of the wet collodion process, whereby a glass negative enabled a limitless number of sharp prints to be made. These developments made the Daguerreotype redundant and the process very soon disappeared.

Popular culture

Louis J. M. Daguerre is mentioned in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse 5.

Selected works

See also

Palladiotype

Photographic processes

William Willis

John Herschel

Platinotype Company

Diorama

References

Carl Edwin Lindgren. Teaching Photography in the Indian School. Photo Trade Directory: 1991. India International Photographic Council. Edited: N. Sundarraj and K. Ponnuswamy. VII IIPC-SIPATA Intl. Workshop and Conference on Photography - Madras, p. 9.

R. Colson (ed.), Mémoires originaux des créateurs de la photographie. Nicéphore Niepce, Daguerre, Bayard, Talbot, Niepce de Saint-Victor, Poitevin, Paris 1898

Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre. The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, London 1956 (revised edition 1968)

Beaumont Newhall, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama by Daguerre, New York 1971

Hans Rooseboom, What’s wrong with Daguerre? Reconsidering old and new views on the invention of photography, Nescio, Amsterdam, 2010 (www.nescioprivatepress.blogspot.com)

External links

Daguerre (1787–1851) and the Invention of Photography from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) from World Wide Art Resources.

Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mande by Robert Leggat.

Daguerre and the daguerreotype An array of source texts from the Daguerreian Society web site

Daguerre's Boulevard du Temple photograph - a discussion on its making and subsequent history.

Daguerre Memorial in Washington D.C.

Louis Daguerre Encyclopedia Britannica

Louis Daguerre's "Ruined Gothic Colonnade"

Category:1787 births Category:1851 deaths Category:French inventors Category:French artists Category:French chemists Category:French photographers Category:19th-century photographers Category:People from Val-d'Oise Category:Pioneers of photography Category:Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)

Name	Jesse James
Caption	Jesse James c. 1882
Birth name	Jesse Woodson James
Birth date	September 05, 1847
Birth place	Clay County, Missouri, USA
Death date	April 03, 1882
Death place	St. Joseph, Missouri, USA
Known for	Robbery
Nationality	American
Spouse	Zerelda Mimms
Children	Jesse E. James, Mary James Barr
Parents	Robert S. James, Zerelda Cole James

Jesse James (September 5, 1847 – April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw, gang leader, bank robber, train robber, and murderer from the state of Missouri and the most famous member of the James-Younger Gang. Already a celebrity when he was alive, he became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death. Some recent scholars place him in the context of regional insurgencies of ex-Confederates following the American Civil War rather than a manifestation of frontier lawlessness or alleged economic justice.

Jesse and his brother Frank James were Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War. They were accused of participating in atrocities committed against Union soldiers. After the war, as members of one gang or another, they robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains. Despite popular portrayals of James as a kind of Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, there is no evidence that he and his gang used their robbery gains for anyone but themselves.

The James brothers were most active with their gang from about 1866 until 1876, when their attempted robbery of a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, resulted in the capture or deaths of several members. They continued in crime for several years, recruiting new members, but were under increasing pressure from law enforcement. On April 3, 1882, Jesse James was killed by Robert Ford, who was a member of the gang living in the James house and who was hoping to collect a state reward on James' head.

Early life

Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County, Missouri, near the site of present day Kearney, on September 5, 1847. Jesse James had two full siblings: his older brother, Alexander Franklin "Frank", and a younger sister, Susan Lavenia James.

His father, Robert S. James, of Welsh ancestry, was a commercial hemp farmer and Baptist minister in Kentucky, who migrated to Bradford, Missouri after marriage and helped found William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. and died there when Jesse was three years old.

After the death of Robert James, his widow Zerelda remarried twice, first to Benjamin Simms and then in 1855 to Dr. Reuben Samuel, who moved into the James' home. Jesse's mother and Reuben Samuel had four children together: Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fannie Quantrell, and Archie Peyton Samuel. Zerelda and Reuben Samuel acquired a total of seven slaves, who served mainly as farmhands in tobacco cultivation in Missouri.

The approach of the American Civil War overshadowed the James-Samuel household. Missouri was a border state, sharing characteristics of both North and South, but 75% of the population was from the South or other border states.

After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Clay County became the scene of great turmoil, as the question of whether slavery would be expanded into the neighboring Kansas Territory came to dominate public life. Numerous people from Missouri migrated to Kansas to try to influence its future. Much of the tension that led up to the Civil War centered on the violence that erupted in Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery militias.

Civil War

The Civil War may have shaped the life of Jesse James. After a series of campaigns and battles between conventional armies in 1861, guerrilla warfare gripped the state, waged between secessionist "bushwhackers" and Union forces which largely consisted of local militia organizations ("jayhawkers"). A bitter conflict ensued, bringing an escalating cycle of atrocities by both sides. Guerrillas murdered civilian Unionists, executed prisoners and scalped the dead. Union forces enforced martial law with raids on homes, arrests of civilians, summary executions and banishment of Confederate sympathizers from the state.

The James-Samuel family took the Confederate side at the outset of the war. Frank James joined a local company recruited for the secessionist Drew Lobbs Army, and fought at the Battle of Wilson's Creek, though he fell ill and returned home soon afterward. In 1863, he was identified as a member of a guerrilla squad that operated in Clay County. In May of that year, a Union militia company raided the James-Samuel farm, looking for Frank's group. They tortured Reuben Samuel by briefly hanging him from a tree. According to legend, they lashed young Jesse.

Frank James followed Quantrill to Texas over the winter of 1863–4. In the spring he returned in a squad commanded by Fletch Taylor. After they arrived in Clay County, 16-year-old Jesse James joined his brother in Taylor's group. As a result of the James brothers' activities, the Union military authorities made their family leave Clay County. Though ordered to move South beyond Union lines, instead they moved across the nearby state border into Nebraska.

After Anderson was killed in an ambush in October, the James brothers separated. Frank followed Quantrill into Kentucky; Jesse went to Texas under the command of Archie Clement, one of Anderson's lieutenants. He is known to have returned to Missouri in the spring.

After the Civil War

, 1872]] At the end of the Civil War, Missouri was in shambles. The conflict split the population into three bitterly opposed factions: anti-slavery Unionists, identified with the Republican Party; the segregationist conservative Unionists, identified with the Democratic Party; and pro-slavery, ex-Confederate secessionists, many of whom were also allied with the Democrats, especially the southern part of the party. The Republican Reconstruction administration passed a new state constitution that freed Missouri's slaves. It temporarily excluded former Confederates from voting, serving on juries, becoming corporate officers, or preaching from church pulpits. The atmosphere was volatile, with widespread clashes between individuals, and between armed gangs of veterans from both sides of the war.

Jesse recovered from his chest wound at his uncle's Missouri boardinghouse, where he was tended to by his first cousin, Zerelda "Zee" Mimms, named after Jesse's mother. the robbery of the Clay County Savings Association in the town of Liberty, Missouri, on February 13, 1866. This bank was owned by Republican former militia officers who had recently conducted the first Republican Party rally in Clay County's history. One innocent bystander, a student of William Jewell College (which James's father had helped to found), was shot dead on the street during the gang's escape. It remains unclear whether Jesse and Frank took part. After their later robberies took place and they became legends, there were those who credited them with being the leaders of the Clay County robbery.

This was a time of increasing local violence; Governor Fletcher had recently ordered a company of militia into Johnson County to suppress guerrilla activity. Archie Clement continued his career of crime and harassment of the Republican government, to the extent of occupying the town of Lexington, Missouri, on election day in 1866. Shortly afterward, the state militia shot Clement dead, an event James wrote about with bitterness a decade later. On May 23, 1867, for example, they robbed a bank in Richmond, Missouri, in which they killed the mayor and two others. It remains uncertain whether either of the James brothers took part, although an eyewitness who knew the brothers told a newspaper seven years later "positively and emphatically that he recognized Jesse and Frank James ... among the robbers." In 1868, Frank and Jesse James allegedly joined Cole Younger in robbing a bank at Russellville, Kentucky.

Jesse James did not become famous, however, until December 7, 1869, when he and (most likely) Frank robbed the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri. The robbery netted little money, but it appears that Jesse shot and killed the cashier, Captain John Sheets, mistakenly believing him to be Samuel P. Cox, the militia officer who had killed "Bloody Bill" Anderson during the Civil War. James's self-proclaimed attempt at revenge, and the daring escape he and Frank made through the middle of a posse shortly afterward, put his name in the newspapers for the first time. An 1882 history of Daviess County said, "The history of Daviess County has no blacker crime in its pages than the murder of John W. Sheets."

The 1869 robbery marked the emergence of Jesse James as the most famous of the former guerrillas turned outlaw. It marked the first time he was publicly labeled an "outlaw," as Missouri Governor Thomas T. Crittenden set a reward for his capture.

Meanwhile, the James brothers joined with Cole Younger and his brothers John, Jim, and Bob as well as Clell Miller and other former Confederates to form what came to be known as the James-Younger Gang. With Jesse James as the public face of the gang (though with operational leadership likely shared among the group), the gang carried out a string of robberies from Iowa to Texas, and from Kansas to West Virginia. They robbed banks, stagecoaches, and a fair in Kansas City, often in front of large crowds, even hamming it up for the bystanders.

On July 21, 1873, they turned to train robbery, derailing the Rock Island train in Adair, Iowa and stealing approximately $3,000 ($51,000 in 2007). For this, they wore Ku Klux Klan masks, deliberately taking on a potent symbol years after the Klan had been suppressed in the South by President Grant's use of the Force Acts. Former rebels attacked the railroads as symbols of threatening centralization. The James' gang's later train robberies had a lighter touch. In fact, in only two train hold-ups did they rob passengers, because James typically limited himself to the express safe in the baggage car. Such techniques reinforced the Robin Hood image that Edwards created in his newspapers, but the James gang never shared any of the robbery money outside their circle.

Allan Pinkerton, the agency's founder and leader, took on the case as a personal vendetta. He began to work with former Unionists who lived near the James family farm. On the night of January 25, 1875, he staged a raid on the homestead. Detectives threw an incendiary device into the house; it exploded, killing James's young half-brother Archie (named for Archie Clement) and blowing off one of the arms of mother Zerelda Samuel. Afterward, Pinkerton denied that the raid's intent was arson. But biographer Ted Yeatman located a letter by Pinkerton in the Library of Congress in which Pinkerton declared his intention to "burn the house down."

The raid on the family home outraged many, and did more than all of Edwards's columns to create sympathy for Jesse James. The Missouri state legislature only narrowly defeated a bill that praised the James and Younger brothers and offered them amnesty. Allowed to vote and hold office again, former Confederates voted to limit reward offers that the governor could make for fugitives. This extended a measure of protection over the James-Younger gang. (Only Frank and Jesse James previously had been singled out for rewards larger than the new limit.)

Downfall of the gang

Jesse and his cousin Zee married on April 24, 1874, and had two children who survived to adulthood: Jesse Edward James (b. 1875) and Mary Susan James (b. 1879). Twins Gould and Montgomery James (b. 1878) died in infancy. Jesse, Jr. became a lawyer in Kansas City, Missouri and Los Angeles, California.

On September 7, 1876, the James-Younger gang attempted a raid on the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota. After this robbery and a manhunt, only Frank and Jesse James were left alive and uncaptured. Cole and Bob Younger later stated that they selected the bank because they believed it was associated with the Republican politician Adelbert Ames, the governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, and Union general Benjamin Butler, Ames' father-in-law and the Union commander of occupied New Orleans. Ames was a stockholder in the bank, but Butler had no direct connection to it.

To carry out the robbery, the gang divided into two groups. Three men entered the bank, two guarded the door outside, and three remained near a bridge across an adjacent square. The robbers inside the bank were thwarted when acting cashier Joseph Lee Heywood refused to open the safe, falsely claiming that it was secured by a time lock even as they held a bowie knife to his throat and cracked his skull with a pistol butt. Assistant cashier Alonzo Enos Bunker was wounded in the shoulder as he fled out the back door of the bank. Meanwhile, the citizens of Northfield grew suspicious of the men guarding the door and raised the alarm. The five bandits outside fired in the air to clear the streets, which drove the townspeople to take cover and fire back from protected positions. Two bandits were shot dead and the rest were wounded in the barrage. Inside, the outlaws turned to flee. As they left, one shot the unarmed cashier Heywood in the head. Historians have speculated about the identity of the shooter but have not reached consensus on his identity.

The gang barely escaped Northfield, leaving two dead companions behind. They killed two innocent victims, Heywood, and Nicholas Gustafson, a Swedish immigrant from the Millersburg community west of Northfield. A massive manhunt ensued. The James brothers eventually split from the others and escaped to Missouri. The militia soon discovered the Youngers and one other bandit, Charlie Pitts. In a gunfight, Pitts died and the Youngers were taken prisoner. Except for Frank and Jesse James, the James-Younger Gang was destroyed.

Later in 1876, Jesse and Frank James surfaced in the Nashville, Tennessee area, where they went by the names of Thomas Howard and B. J. Woodson, respectively. Frank seemed to settle down, but Jesse remained restless. He recruited a new gang in 1879 and returned to crime, holding up a train at Glendale, Missouri (now part of Independence, Missouri), on October 8, 1879. The robbery was the first of a spree of crimes, including the holdup of the federal paymaster of a canal project in Killen, Alabama, and two more train robberies. But the new gang did not consist of battle-hardened guerrillas; they soon turned against each other or were captured, while James grew paranoid, killing one gang member and frightening away another.

With authorities growing suspicious, by 1881 the brothers returned to Missouri where they felt safer. In December, Jesse rented a house in Saint Joseph, Missouri, not far from where he had been born and raised. Frank, however, decided to move to safer territory, heading east to Virginia.

Death

, where his wife Zerelda stayed after his death. His house was subsequently moved to the Belt Highway and later to its current location on the Patee House grounds.]]

With his gang nearly annihilated, James trusted only the Ford brothers, Charley and Robert. Although Charley had been out on raids with James, Bob was an eager new recruit. For protection, James asked the Ford brothers to move in with him and his family. James had often stayed with their sister Martha Bolton and, according to rumor, he was "smitten" with her. James' two previous bullet wounds and partially missing middle finger served to positively identify the body.

The governor's quick pardon suggested that he knew that the brothers intended to kill James rather than capture him. Like many who knew James, the Ford brothers never believed it was practical to try to take him into custody. The implication that the chief executive of Missouri conspired to kill a private citizen startled the public and added to James' notoriety.

After receiving a small portion of the reward, the Fords fled Missouri. Law enforcement officials active in the plan also shared the bounty. Later the Ford brothers starred in a touring stage show in which they reenacted the shooting.

Suffering from tuberculosis (then incurable) and a morphine addiction, Charley Ford committed suicide on May 6, 1884, in Richmond, Missouri. Bob Ford operated a tent saloon in Creede, Colorado. On June 8, 1892, a man named Edward O'Kelley, went to Creede on a personal vendetta with avenging James. He loaded a double barrel shotgun, entered Ford's saloon and said "Hello, Bob" before shooting Bob Ford in the throat, killing him instantly. O'Kelley was sentenced to life in prison. O'Kelley's sentence was subsequently commuted because of a 7,000 signature petition in favor of his release. The governor pardoned him on October 3, 1902.

James' mother Zerelda Samuel wrote the following epitaph for him: In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here. This theme resurfaced in a 2009 documentary, Jesse James' Hidden Treasure, which aired on the History Channel. The documentary was dismissed as pseudo-history and pseudo-science by historian Nancy Samuelson in a review she wrote for Winter, 2009-2010 edition of The James-Younger Gang Journal.

One prominent claimant was J. Frank Dalton, who died August 15, 1951, in Granbury, Texas. Dalton was allegedly 101 years old at the time of his first public appearance, in May 1948. His story did not hold up to questioning from James' surviving relatives.

Legacy and controversies

James's turn to crime after the end of Reconstruction era helped cement his place in American life and memory as a simple but remarkably effective bandit. After 1873 he was covered by the national media as part of social banditry. During his lifetime, James was celebrated chiefly by former Confederates, to whom he appealed directly in his letters to the press. Displaced by Reconstruction, the antebellum political leadership mythologized the James Gang exploits. Frank Triplett wrote about James as a "progressive neo-aristocrat" with purity of race. Indeed, some historians credit James' myth as contributing to the rise of former Confederates to dominance in Missouri politics (in the 1880s, for example, both U.S. Senators from the state, Confederate military commander Francis Cockrell and Confederate Congressman George Graham Vest, were identified with the Confederate cause).

In the 1880s, after James' death, the James Gang became the subject of dime novels that represented the bandits as pre-industrial models of resistance.

Jesse James remains a controversial symbol, one who can always be interpreted in various ways, according to cultural tensions and needs. Although some of the neo-Confederate movement regard him as a hero renewed cultural battles over the place of the Civil War in American history have replaced the long-standing interpretation of James as a Western frontier hero. Some point to his absolute commitment to slavery and his vow after the Civil War to shoot any black in Missouri not fulfilling the role of a slave.

While his "heroic outlaw" image is still commonly portrayed in films, as well as in songs and folklore, recent historians place him as a self-aware vigilante and terrorist who used local tensions to create his own myth among the widespread insurgent guerrillas and vigilantes following the American Civil War. Jesse James Home Museum: The house where Jesse James was killed in south St. Joseph was moved in 1939 to the Belt Highway on St. Joseph's east side to attract tourists. In 1977 it was moved to its current location, near Patee House, which was the headquarters of the Pony Express. The house is now owned and operated by the Pony Express Historical Association. First National Bank of Northfield: The Northfield Historical Society in Northfield, Minnesota, has restored the building that housed the First National Bank, the scene of the 1876 raid.

Heaton Bowman Funeral Home, 36th Street and Frederick Avenue, St. Joseph, Missouri. The funeral home's predecessor conducted the original autopsy and funeral for Jesse James. A room in the back holds the log book and other documentation.

The Jesse James Tavern is in his father's birthplace in Asdee, County Kerry, Ireland, from where his father immigrated to the US in the 1840s as a young man. The parish priest, Canon William Ferris, says a solemn requiem mass for Jesse James every year on April 3.

Cultural depictions

featuring Jesse James.]]

Festivals

The Defeat of Jesse James Days in Northfield, Minnesota, is among the largest outdoor celebrations in the state and is held annually in September during the weekend after Labor Day. Thousands of visitors watch reenactments of the robbery, a championship rodeo, a carnival, performances of a 19th-century style melodrama musical, and a parade during the five-day event.

Jesse James' boyhood home in Kearney, Missouri, is a museum dedicated to the town's most famous resident. Each year a recreational fair, the Jesse James Festival, is held during the third weekend in September.

During the annual Labor Day weekend Victorian Festival at the 1866 Col. William H. Fulkerson estate Hazel Dell in Jersey County, Illinois, Jesse James' history is told in stories and by reenactments of stagecoach holdups. Over the three-day event, thousands of spectators learn of the documented James Gang's stopping point at Hazel Dell and of their connection with ex-Confederate Fulkerson.

Russellville, Kentucky, the site of the robbery of the Southern Bank in 1868, holds the Jesse James International Arts and Film Festival. The JJIAFF completed its second annual event in April 2008 and the third annual is planned for April 25, 2009. The festival has featured a bluegrass band from San Francisco and experimental bands from southern Kentucky as well as painters, sculptors, photographers, and comic artists. Children's activities are a mainstay of the festival. A highlight for adults is the film festival held at the Logan County Public Library in Russellville. Past entrants have included films from Norway and northwestern Kentucky, modern silent film projects, nature studies, and fan films.

In addition, the annual Tobacco and Heritage Festival in Russellville features a reenactment of the James-Younger Gang's robbery of the Southern Bank. Today used as a residence, the historic structure on South Main Street has been preserved by the town and county.

The small town of Oak Grove, Louisiana, also hosts a town-wide annual Jesse James Trade Days, usually in the early to mid fall. This is a reference to a short time James supposedly spent near this area.

Literature

Jesse James is often used as a fictional character in many Western novels, including some that were published while he was alive. For instance, in Willa Cather's My Antonia, the narrator reads a book entitled 'Life of Jesse James' - probably a dime novel.

In Charles Portis's 1968 novel, True Grit, the U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn describes fighting with Cole Younger and Frank James for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Long after his adventure with Mattie Ross, Cogburn ends his days in a traveling road show with the aged Cole Younger and Frank James.

During his travel to the "Wilde West," Oscar Wilde visited Jesse James' hometown in Missouri. Learning that James had been assassinated by his own gang member, "...an event that sent the town into mourning and scrambling to buy Jesse's artifacts," "romantic appeal of the social outcast" in his mind, Wilde wrote in one of his letters to home that: "Americans are certainly great hero-worshippers, and always take [their] heroes from the criminal classes."

Comics

In 1969, artist Morris and writer René Goscinny (co-creator of Asterix) had Lucky Luke confronting Jesse James, his brother Frank, and Cole Younger. The adventure poked fun at the image of Jesse as a new Robin Hood. Although he passes himself off as such and does indeed steal from the rich (who are, logically, the only ones worth stealing from), he and his gang take turns being "poor," thus keeping the loot for themselves. Frank quotes from Shakespeare, and Younger is portrayed as a fun-loving joker, full of good humor. One critic has likened this version of the James brothers as "intellectuals bandits, who won't stop theorising their outlaw activities and hear themselves talk." In the end, the at-first-cowed people of a town fight back against the James gang and send them packing in tar and feathers.

Music

In his adaptation of the traditional song "Jesse James," Woody Guthrie magnified James's hero status. "Jesse James" was later covered by the Anglo-Irish band The Pogues on their 1985 album Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, and by Bruce Springsteen on his 2006 tribute to Pete Seeger, .

A somewhat different song titled "Jesse James," referring to Jesse's "wife to mourn for his life; three children, they were brave," and calling Robert Ford "the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard," was also the first track recorded by the "Stewart Years" version of the Kingston Trio at their initial recording session in 1961 (and included on that year's release Close-Up).

Echoing the Confederate hero aspect, Hank Williams, Jr.'s 1983 Southern anthem "Whole Lot Of Hank" has the lyrics "Frank and Jesse James knowed how to rob them trains, they always took it from the rich and gave it to the poor, they might have had a bad name but they sure had a heart of gold."

Rock band James Gang was named after Jesse James's gang. Their final album, released in 1976, was titled Jesse Come Home.

Warren Zevon's 1976 self-titled album Warren Zevon includes the song "Frank and Jesse James," a romantic tribute to the James Gang's exploits, expressing much sympathy with their "cause." Its lyrics encapsulate the many legends that grew up around the life and death of Jesse James. The album contains a second reference to Jesse James in the song "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" with the lyric "Well, I met a girl in West Hollywood, I ain't naming names. She really worked me over good, she was just like Jesse James." Linda Ronstadt covered the song a year later with slightly altered lyrics.

In her album Heart of Stone (1989), Cher included a song titled "Just Like Jesse James," written by Diane Warren. This single, which was released in 1990, achieved high positions in the charts and sold 1,500,000 copies worldwide.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's album Uncle Charlie and His Dog Teddy features the song "Jesse James," ostensibly recorded on a wire recorder.

Jon Chandler has also written a song about Jesse and Frank James entitled "He Was No Hero," written from the perspective of Joe Hayward's widow cursing Bob Ford for cheating her out of killing Jesse James.

Around 1980 a concept album titled The Legend of Jesse James was released. It was written by Paul Kennerley and starred Levon Helm (The Band) as Jesse James, Johnny Cash as Frank James, Emmylou Harris as Zee James, Charlie Daniels as Cole Younger, and Albert Lee as Jim Younger. There are also appearances by Rodney Crowell, Jody Payne, and Roseanne Cash. The album highlights Jesse's life from 1863 to his death in 1882. In 1999 a double CD was released containing The Legend Of Jesse James and White Mansions, another concept album by Kennerley about life in the Confederate States of America between 1861-1865.

Films

There have been numerous portrayals of Jesse James in film and television, including two wherein Jesse James, Jr. depicts his father. In many of the films, James is portrayed as a Robin Hood-like character.

* 1921: Jesse James Under the Black Flag, played by Jesse James, Jr.

1921: Jesse James as the Outlaw, played by Jesse James, Jr.

1927: Jesse James, played by Fred Thomson

1939: Jesse James, played by Tyrone Power with Henry Fonda as Frank James and John Carradine as Bob Ford

1939: Days of Jesse James, played by Don 'Red' Barry

1941: Jesse James at Bay, played by Roy Rogers

1947: Jesse James Rides Again, played by Clayton Moore

1949: I Shot Jesse James, played by Reed Hadley

1950: Kansas Raiders, played by Audie Murphy

1951: The Great Missouri Raid, played by Macdonald Carey

1957: True Story of Jesse James, played by Robert Wagner

1959: Alias Jesse James, played by Wendell Corey in a comedy starring Bob Hope

1960: Young Jesse James, played by Ray Stricklyn

1965: The Legend of Jesse James, TV series starred by Allen Case

1966: Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, played by John Lupton

1969: A Time for Dying, played by Audie Murphy

1972: The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, played by Robert Duvall

1980: The Long Riders, played by James Keach

1986: The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James, played by Kris Kristofferson with Johnny Cash as Frank James and Willie Nelson as Gen. Jo Shelby

1994: Frank and Jesse, played by Rob Lowe

1999: Purgatory, played by J.D. Souther

2001: American Outlaws, played by Colin Farrell

2005: Just like Jesse James is the title of a movie that appears in Wim Wenders' Don't Come Knocking, in which Sam Shepard plays an aging western movie star whose first success was with that movie.

2005: Jesse James: Legend, Outlaw, Terrorist (Discovery HD), played by Daniel Lennox

2007: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, played by Brad Pitt, with Casey Affleck as Bob Ford

Television

*The actor Lee Van Cleef played Jesse James in a 1954 episode of Jim Davis's syndicated television series, Stories of the Century, the first western series to win an Emmy Award.

The ABC series The Legend of Jesse James aired during the 1965-1966 television season, with Christopher Jones as Jesse, Allen Case as Frank James, Ann Doran as Zerelda Cole James Samuel, Robert J. Wilke as Marshal Sam Corbett, and John Milford as Cole Younger.

In the episode of Little House on the Prairie titled "The Aftermath" (aired November 7, 1977), Jesse (Dennis Rucker) and Frank James (John Bennett Perry) took refuge in Walnut Grove after a failed robbery attempt.

In the American Western series The Young Riders (1989–1992), Jesse James is portrayed by the late actor Christopher Pettiet. He appeared in 17 episodes as a Pony Express rider.

An episode of Deadliest Warrior on "Spike TV" features the Jesse James gang vs. the Al Capone gang. The main weapons used by Jesse James was the Colt .45, the Pistol Whip, the Winchester rifle, and the Bowie Knife. The Jesse James gang came out victorious in the simulated match.

In Episode 33 of in a segment titled "Mysterious Strangers," a story is told about two men in 1870 who take refuge on a rainy night in an old widow's house. While there they find out that she is about to lose her home to foreclosure. The strangers disappear in the night, leaving her $900 to give to the banker, only to rob the banker of their own money after he retrieved it from the woman the next morning. The strangers, at the end of the story, turn out to be Frank and Jesse James. purports that the story is documented and true.

References

Bibliography

Fellman, Michael. Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri onto the American Civil War. Oxford University Press, 1990. ISBN 0195064712.

Settle, William A. Jesse James Was His Name, or, Fact and Fiction Concerning the Careers of the Notorious James Brothers of Missouri. University of Nebraska Press, 1977. ISBN 0803258607.

Stiles, T. J. Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. Knopf Publishing, 2002. ISBN 0375405836.

Yeatman, Ted P. Frank and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend. Cumberland House Publishing, 2000. ISBN 1581823258.

Further reading

Dyer, Robert. "Jesse James and the Civil War in Missouri,"University of Missouri Press, 1994

Hobsbawm, Eric J. Bandits, Pantheon, 1981

Koblas, John J. Faithful Unto Death, Northfield Historical Society Press, 2001

Thelen, David. Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri, Oxford University Press, 1986

Wellman, Paul I. A Dynasty of Western Outlaws. Doubleday, 1961; 1986.

White, Richard. "Outlaw Gangs of the Middle Border: American Social Bandits," Western Historical Quarterly 12, no. 4 (October 1981)

External links

*Primary sources and essays by Jesse James biographer T. J. Stiles

Official website for the Family of Jesse James

Death pics Jesse James

Death of Jesse James with pictures from the National Archives and Library of Congress

A 1901 newspaper interview with the Younger brothers

Category:1847 births Category:1882 deaths Category:1869 crimes Category:1882 crimes Category:People of the American Old West Category:People from Clay County, Missouri Category:American people of Welsh descent Category:American bank robbers Category:American murder victims Category:Outlaws of the American Old West Category:Bushwhackers Category:James-Younger Gang Category:Missouri State Guard Category:People murdered in Missouri Category:Deaths by firearm in Missouri Category:American folklore