194900961

I was born on September 5, 1847, in Clay County, Missouri, about 30 minutes northeast of Kansas City. My daddy was a slave-owning baptist preacher who helped found William Jewell College in nearby Liberty, Missouri. Unfortunately, he died in California during the gold rush while I was still a toddler.
After daddy died, my mamma Zerelda was married to Benjamin Simms, but he didn't like me, my older bother Frank, nor my little sister Susan much, and eventually mamma left him. Before they were divorced, ol' man Simms was killed when his horse threw him off.
I guess the third time's a charm, because Mamma married her third husband, Reuben Samuel, in 1855, and they remained together till Reuben died in 1908.
As for me, well I was just a young teenager when the stinkin' Feds started snoopin' around our farm. They came lookin' for my brother Frank once and hung my stepdad from a tree before they tracked me down working in a field, where they proceeded to beat me.
That's just the half of it, but needeless to say, we don't like Yankees or Jayhawkers around the James farm. That's why I joined my brother as a bushwhacker, roaming the state looking for Yankees or Missouri Unionists to kill.
After the war was over and Missouri passed a constitution that put a stranglehold on former Confederates like me and my family, I struck back at "the man" by robbing banks and trains and other "Northern" institutions. John Newman Edwards, the ol' Confederate editor at the Kansas City Star will back up my story.
Frank and me and the Younger boys, among others, robbed and killed for about 16 years before those sneaky Ford boys gained my confidence while plotting to kill me. On April 3, 1882, in a rare moment of weakness, I took off my holster and guns at my house in St. Joseph, Missouri, to tend to a picture on the wall. As I stood on a chair with my back to Bob Ford, I heard the click of a pistol trigger being cocked. That's the last thing I remember....