The James Brothers Adventures were written by divers hands in a variety of dime novels over the course of decades. The first dime novel story about Frank and Jesse James was written by John Roy Musick and appeared in “The Train Robbers; or, A Story of the James Boys” (Wide Awake Library no. 440, June 27, 1881). Musick (1848-1901) wrote a wide range of dime novels, usually frontier novels and westerns.

There was a real pair of James brothers, Alexander Franklin James (1843-1915) and Jesse Woodson James (1847-1882), who fought with Quantrill’s guerrillas during the American Civil War. After the war ended the pair turned to crime, robbing banks and later trains. The James brothers’ career as criminals lasted until 1876, when several members of their gang were killed during a failed attempt to rob the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota. The rest of the gang, except Frank and Jesse James, were soon captured. The James brothers began a normal life in Missouri, but Jesse’s attempt to return to crime in 1882 ended when his colleague, Robert Ford, shot him in the head. Frank James surrendered himself but was eventually acquitted of all charges due to a lack of evidence.

Through most of their fictional lives the James brothers were portrayed as outlaw heroes (see: The Deadwood Dick Adventures). Their appearances in the dime novels began when both of the real brothers were still alive and still active as outlaws, although most of the stories appeared after the death of Jesse James. In 1883 Walter Gresham, the Postmaster General, ordered the cancellation of the Wide Awake Library in response to the popularity of the series, which was (correctly) seen as subversive. But this cancellation did not permanently alter the portrayal of the Jameses, as it did to Deadwood Dick. Although writers portrayed the James brothers in a variety of ways and with a variety of attitudes, the heroic outlaw characterization of the brothers continued to appear in the dime novels, so that a second cancellation, in 1903, was ordered by the Postmaster General. Even this did not put a stop to the portrayal of the brothers as heroes, and when they returned in print in 1908 they were once again outlaw heroes.

In their original appearances in the Frank Tousey dime novels the James Brothers are relatively close to their real-life models, and many of the stories make use of the facts of the James’ lives, including the James’ experience in the Civil War, the maiming of their mother by a Pinkerton agent, and the death of Jesse James. But despite accurately portraying the brothers as bank and train robbers, the dime novel writers also presented them as heroes, similar to the German noble bandits (see: The Räuberroman). In their earliest portrayals Frank and Jesse James are Robin Hood-like characters who were forced into a life of crime by corrupt businessmen who used the law to enforce their will. In these stories the brothers are knights-errant on the frontier, chivalrous characters who help the weak and punish the strong. They are courtly, polished, respectable, and similar to Dick Turpin (see: Rookwood) and other traditional Gentleman Thief highwayman, down to their behavior toward women.

The second version of the brothers, published after 1883, emphasized both their criminality and their violence but also showed many of their antagonists to be both violent and cruel, a trait the James brothers were never shown possessing. In many of these stories the real-life detectives pursuing the James brothers became the stories’ protagonists, including the Pinkerton agent Carl Greene and the “Cherokee detective” Sam Sixkiller. These stories followed the more conventional hero-chasing-villain pattern. But in other stories the James brothers’ enemies were violent and ruthless vigilantes or organizations like the Ku Klux Klan which had a much worse reputation than the Jameses, so that the story structure became villains-chasing-antihero.

The Street & Smith version of the James brothers, which began appearing in 1881, was almost entirely created by the writers. These stories contained few references to the facts of the lives of Frank or Jesse James. Instead the pair are more conventional dime novel figures with little relation to the real brothers, and their stories have little relation to the real world. Typical Street & Smith plots include the brothers preventing the kidnapping of railroad developer Jay Gould (1836-1892) or gambling for high stakes with Mexican bandits. The tactics of the brothers are so marvelous that they are imitated by other bandits.

During their appearances in Boys of New York and New York Detective Library (1889-1897), the James brothers are portrayed as men whose primary concerns are honor and frontier justice without regard for the niceties of the law. In these stories, which often included Old King Brady as a protagonist or antagonist, the Jameses are guerrillas, fighting for the pastoral frontier against representatives of an encroaching, industrializing, modernizing Eastern civilization. The enemies of the brothers include bank managers, railway representatives, those who would mount telegraph wires, and even New York detectives.

Unlike other dime novel heroes based on real criminals, the James brothers were not fictionalized in an effort to exploit their fame for the dime novel publishers’ profit. Nor were their stories printed as cautionary tales. The popularity of the James brothers stories grew because of the legends told about the brothers in popular folklore and printed about them in popular fiction, especially the dime novels. Moreover, the early, pre-cancellation stories about the brothers were the opposite of cautionary tales. Like Deadwood Dick, the James brothers are the heroes of their stories rather than instructive examples for the readers. This was the truly subversive element of the early James brothers stories, and it was this, even more than a similar phenomena in the Deadwood Dick stories, that triggered the “moral panic” of the American authorities. Numerous articles appeared in the press, especially the New York Times, decrying the dime novels. These articles described the “Victims of the Dime Novels,” usually young boys whose reading of dime novels, especially the stories of the James brothers, were to blame for their attempts to run away to Florida, play detective, run away to the West and “fight Indians,” or commit armed robberies. Although the heroic aspects of the James brothers were minimized in the years following Gresham’s cancellation of Wide Awake Library, the outlaw hero aspect of the characters appeared again in the Boys of New York and New York Detective Library stories, triggering the second cancellation in August, 1903.

This post-1883 portrayal was the most subversive of the four versions of the James brothers. The pre-cancellation version was thematically simpler: the James brothers were heroic outlaws fighting against corrupt men who hid behind the law. The James brothers fought on behalf of the oppressed poor and the struggling workers and fought against members of the moneyed classes, including land barons, railroad tycoons, and politicians. However, the 1889 stories emphasized a theme which had been only implicit in the 1881-1883 stories. In the 1889 stories the James brothers are symbolic representatives of the frontier community, while the detectives attempting to apprehend the James brothers, including Old King Brady, are the symbolic representatives of the Eastern, urban community. In these stories the values of the two communities, manifested through their representatives, are inherently at odds, rather than being conditionally so. In the earlier stories the James brothers had represented the frontier communities and defended them against the threats from the East. In those stories the figures representing the East are always villainous, and the James brothers are heroic, if often ambiguously so. But in the later stories the figures representing the East are heroic, and the frontier community, both on their own and through their representatives, continue to reject the Easterners.

A common plot in these later stories is the attempt by an urban detective, usually an agent of the Pinkertons (see: The Great Detective), to infiltrate the James Gang. Another common plot is the eastern detective, often Old King Brady, traveling to the frontier and attempting to capture the Jameses. In both plots the Eastern detective is unsuccessful because he is incapable of understanding the values of either the James brothers or the frontier community. Nor does the Eastern detective understand that an appeal to law is doomed to fail in a community where right is equated with honor, courage, and manhood rather than written laws. The frontier community sympathizes and admires the James brothers because of their courage and primitive code of honor, and when Old King Brady attempts to gather a crowd to search for the James brothers, he fails. The frontier community rejects the urban detective’s request for help on moral grounds, and in doing so rejects the community values of urban America.

This conflict of community values also played out in the stories in which the James brothers went East, usually to New York City. In the city they fight against corrupt capitalists and similar enemies familiar to them, but when they attempt to rally crowds to help them and when they attempt to summon aid, based on the values of the frontier, they fail. The James brothers fail because they do not understand the values of the urban community. In New York City, a corrupt capitalist who has broken no laws is not a criminal, and urbanites will not help the James brothers to fight him.

Old King Brady appeared in thirty-one stories with the James brothers and occasionally caught them, although the brothers always escaped at the end of the story. But in the later stories featuring Brady and the James brothers, the characters began to take on the traits of their opposite, and in so doing deepened the subversive themes of the series. Old King Brady continued to travel the frontier in an attempt to capture the James brothers, but he began to see how the weak and poor were oppressed by the powerful and wealthy, and began to understand how good men, like the James brothers, might become criminals. Brady would discover situations in which sheriffs and other law enforcement officials were themselves corrupt, forcing Brady to become an outlaw in order to defeat them. In one story Brady even mourns the death of Sitting Bull, stating that he “learned things to make me ashamed to call myself an American citizen.”¹ The James brothers, meanwhile, would discover men and women being victimized by politicians and financiers and would be forced to become detectives in order to help these innocents. But the brothers would continue to use the methods of the frontier, with the implication being that extralegal vigilante tactics were just as effective, and just as acceptable, in fighting against crime in the city as the legal tactics of Old King Brady. In some stories the James brothers and Brady even worked toward the same goals, although independently of the other.

The racial dynamic of these stories was equally complex. Antisemitism appeared occasionally, and anti-Mexican sentiments were common. But Native Americans were treated far better, as with the aforementioned expressions of sympathy for Sitting Bull and the accompanying criticism of the American government’s actions toward him. In other stories Native Americans are portrayed as the victims of crooked Indian agents. These stories only allow Native Americans a far greater range of roles than was customary in dime novels. In the James brothers stories Native Americans are usually innocent, or victims, or allies or clients of either the James brothers or Brady or both. This portrayal reflected the changing reality of the Native American, an element of topicality that was unusual in dime novels at the end of the nineteenth century.

The James Brothers Adventures are historically significant as (with the Deadwood Dick Adventures) the foremost example of what Richard Slotkin called “dime novel populism.”²

The history of the outlaw-and-detective dime novel indicates that the media of commercial class culture have purveyed not only the mythologies of the cultural elite but mythologies of lower-class resistance—including a legitimation of the use of force and violence.³

The James Brothers and Deadwood Dick fall into the category of the “social bandit” that Eric Hobsbawm wrote about:

The point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped, and supported.⁴

The James Brothers and Deadwood Dick, and similar dime novel outlaws, are simply “the adaptation of social banditry to capitalism.”⁵

Print: D.W. Stevens, The James Boys in No Man’s Land, or, The Bandit Kings Last Ride. Brooklyn: Dime Novel Club, 1945.

Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

¹ Qtd. in Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1998), 151.

² Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 151.

³ Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 151.

⁴ Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits. Revised Edition (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 17.

⁵ Hobsbawm, Bandits, 153.