Born: September 5, 1847
Died: April 3, 1882
AKA: “Dingus,” J. D. Howard
Together with his brother Frank, Jesse James made a career out of robbing banks and trains. Although he was a ruthless killer, he was also a religious family man. Even before he was murdered by a gang-member turned-traitor, the legend of Jesse James was larger than life.
Zerelda Cole was just sixteen when she left a Catholic convent to marry Robert James, a well-educated Baptist minister. The couple left Kentucky in the early 1840s to try their luck at running a small farm in Clay County, Missouri, about twenty miles northwest of Kansas City. The couple’s first son, Alexander Franklin James, was born in 1843. Nearly five years later, on September 5, 1847, Jesse Woodson James was born.
Robert James left his family to join the California gold rush. Jesse, who was three years old at the time, never saw his father again. A few weeks after he arrived in California to seek his fortune, Robert James died of pneumonia, at the age of twenty-six. Zerelda soon remarried, but quickly divorced her fifty-year-old second husband. She gave her boys a religious upbringing, and in 1857 married her third husband, Reuben Samuel, who was a farmer and doctor.
