Five months after his brother Jesse James was gunned down in 1882, Frank James boarded a train to the Missouri state capital and laid his revolver in the hands of Governor Crittenden. “I have been hunted for twenty-one years,” he said, “have literally lived in the saddle… It was one long, anxious, inexorable, eternal vigil.” He added that he had never let another man touch his gun since 1861.
Tried for only two of the gang’s robberies and killings, in Missouri and Alabama, James was acquitted both times, helped by testimony from a former Confederate general. He was never extradited over the infamous Northfield raid and never spent a day in prison. He spent his remaining three decades as a shoe salesman, a racetrack official and a tour guide on the old family farm, where he died in 1915 at the age of 72.
