John Samuels, a half brother of the James boys, told me the story of how Jesse James came to join Quantrell.
"Jesse was out plowing in a field," he said, "when some Northern soldiers came to the place to look for Frank. Jesse was only sixteen years old. They beat him up. Then they went to the house and asked where Frank was. Mother and father didn't know, but the soldiers wouldn't believe them. They took father out and hung him by the neck to a tree. After a while they took him down and gave him another chance to tell. Of course he couldn't. So they hung him up again. They did that three times. Then they took him back to the house and told my mother they were going to shoot him. She begged them not to do it, but they took him off in the woods and fired off their guns so she'd hear, and think they'd done it. But they didn't shoot him. They just took him over to another town and put him in jail. My mother didn't know until the next day that he hadn't been shot, because the soldiers ordered her to remain in the house if she didn't want to get shot, too.
"That was too much for Jesse. He said: 'Maw, I can't stand it any longer; I'm going to join Quantrell.' And he did."
After the war the wilder element from the disbanded armies and guerrilla gangs caused continued trouble. Crime ran rampant along the border between Kansas and Missouri. And for many crimes committed in the neighborhood in which they lived, the James boys, who were known to be wild, were blamed.
"Mother always said," declared Mr. Samuels, "that Frank and Jesse wanted to settle down after the war, but that the neighbors wouldn't let them. Everything that went wrong around this region was always charged to them, until, finally, they were driven to outlawry."
"How much truth is there in the different stories of bank robberies and train robberies committed by them?" I asked.
"I don't know," he said. "Of course they did a lot of things. But we never knew. They never said anything. They'd just come riding home, every now and then, and stop for a while, and then go riding away again. We never knew where they came from or where they went."
It has been alleged that even after a reward of $10,000 had been offered for either of the Jameses, dead or alive, the neighbors shielded them when it was known that they were at home. I spoke about that to an old man who lived on a nearby farm.