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Today and tomorrow
I’m about half-way through the above book by T.J. Stiles. It really debunks the myth of Jesse James as some sort of Robin Hood. It shows up the myth for what it really is- a myth. I decided to get this book after I saw the movie “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”. In the movie, Jesse James is portrayed as a great hero “assassinated” by Ford, a coward. James was anything but a hero. As the book shows, if he was alive today he’d be considered a terrorist or an insurgent. The parallels between James and the Iraq insurgency are striking. Yes, the North won the Civil War, but folks like Jesse James didn’t surrender quietly. Also, one thing about the war in Missouri that this book brings out that I haven’t seen mentioned in other reviews is how personal the Civil War was in Missouri. Around where I live in Maryland, the war was fought in typical style with large battles involving thousands of people at a time. By contrast in Missouri it was fought by small local militias against bands of “bushwackers”. Sometimes it was simply neighbor against neighbor. Things were so unsettled that it was in Missouri during the Civil War that the practice of wearing a gun around all day began- you never knew when someone might decide to shoot you because you weren’t on the same side as them. This practice continued after the War ended out west, as we know from Western movies.