Jesse Woodson James, born September 5, 1847, in Cay County, Missouri, became one of the most famous outlaws in American history, viewed by some as a vicious murderer and by others as a gallant Robin Hood. He and his older brother Franklin lost their father in 1849 when the Reverend Robert James abandoned the family and disappeared into the California gold fields, and after their mother Zerelda remarried, rumor held that their stepfather treated the boys poorly before a third husband entered the family. Whatever the causes, the brothers first learned to kill during the Civil War, when as Confederate sympathizers they joined William Quantrill's Missouri Guerilla Force, and Jesse took part in the murder of 25 unarmed Union soldiers in August 1863. After the war, unwilling to settle into farm life, Jesse and Frank joined former soldiers and thieves and on Valentine's Day 1866 carried out the first daylight bank robbery in U.S. history, stealing $56,000 from the citizens of Liberty, Missouri. Over the next decade the James Gang robbed banks, stores, stagecoaches, and trains, taking many thousands more. Their daring and public resentment of railroads and robber barons helped create a romantic image, reinforced by dime novels that turned the brothers into fictional Robin Hood figures who supposedly stole from the rich to give to the poor. In fact, their crimes harmed common people as well as the wealthy and left innocents dead or wounded, including a little girl shot in the leg during a failed robbery at the Kansas City Fair, a train engineer killed when the gang derailed his locomotive, and many other bystanders murdered or maimed. Even so, the legend of Jesse James as a hero of ordinary people endured, until Robert Ford killed him with a shot to the back of the head on April 3, 1882.