ABSTRACT
From the Old West have sprung anti-heroes of mythical proportions. Out of the once vast and untamed land that was the nineteenth century frontier came lawless men and women, who over time have shed their tattered and stained reputations. Jesse James unintentionally sated a populist hunger for anti-heroes.” To understand that anomaly, or how James somehow shed his past to rise as any type of hero, is to probe the depths of how myths and legends come to be. John P. Ferre writes that moralists decried the late nineteenth-century newspapers for their pandering to sensationalism, glorification of criminals and crimes, and fixations with murder. The James outlawry was a particular sore spot for nineteenth-century Missouri politicians. Missouri in the latter 1800s was reeling from the bloody border wars and guerilla tactics of Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson.
