Jesse James Robs Train: Wild West's First Heist

A loose rail and a length of rope were all it took to invent a new American crime. The James-Younger Gang pulled a spike from the tracks near Adair, Iowa, tied a rope to the loosened rail, and waited in the darkness for the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad train to round the bend. When the locomotive hit the gap, it derailed and toppled into a ditch, killing the engineer instantly. Jesse James was twenty-five years old, a former Confederate guerrilla who had spent the Civil War riding with the notorious William Quantrill and "Bloody Bill" Anderson. He and his brother Frank, along with Cole Younger and several other ex-bushwhackers, had been robbing banks since 1866, but this was their first train job. The method was crude and violent, but it worked. The gang forced open the express car safe and made off with roughly two thousand dollars in cash and gold. Train robbery was not entirely new in concept, but the James Gang turned it into a repeatable criminal enterprise across the American frontier. Over the next decade, they would hit trains, banks, and stagecoaches from Missouri to Minnesota, generating newspaper coverage that transformed Jesse into either a Robin Hood figure or a cold-blooded killer depending on which editor was writing. Sympathetic coverage in the Kansas City Times, where editor John Newman Edwards romanticized the gang as Confederate avengers, built a mythology that outlived the crimes. The Adair robbery also changed how railroads operated. Express companies began hiring armed guards, reinforcing safes, and eventually funding the Pinkerton Detective Agency to hunt the gang. The railroad industry, suddenly aware of its vulnerability, invested heavily in security measures that reshaped American law enforcement. Jesse James survived another nine years before a member of his own gang shot him in the back for reward money.