An Irishman's Diary

In the Protestant cemetery of my home town, there's a gravestone to a man who died in the 1930s. And instead of the standard epitaphs about how he was a loving husband or father (he may have been celibate for all I know), or how he bore his final illness with Christian fortitude, the brief inscription confines itself to his professional life. He was, the stone says proudly: "Manager, Ulster Bank".

One can only marvel now at the respect in which the banking system was once held, when a man could carry this and no other message with him as he passed into eternity, confident of being waved through customs with no questions asked. I don't suppose banks have ever been considered a good cause, exactly. Even the best-loved bank managers have always struggled to match the popularity levels to which bank robbers can aspire. But the profession's repute has definitely declined since the 1930s and bankers everywhere would think twice now of mentioning their line of work in that ultimate CV, the epitaph.

An exception might be found in Northfield, Minnesota, where one of the US's more unusual festivals gets under way today, marking an event 130 years ago in which locals combined to thwart a bank robbery. Entertainment includes a re-enactment of the raid, a carnival, a crafts exhibition, and a rodeo. The festival is partly explained by its ungainly title: "The Defeat of Jesse James Days". Yet the event still seems an odd reason for celebration, because no outlaw has ever so successfully exploited public ambivalence about bank robberies as the man who tried to hold up the First National in Northfield on September 7th, 1876.

Jesse James was among other things a pioneer of public relations. After a short spell as a confederate bushwhacker, joining his older brother Frank in a guerrilla war against union sympathisers in Missouri, he settled down to the career for which he would become famous. His early bank raids had a thin political veneer, portrayed as revenge against the winning side in the civil war and sometimes targeting old enemies. But it was only when he attracted the support of a confederate-sympathising Kansas City newspaper editor, John Newman Edwards, that the outlaw really began to cultivate his image.

The James brothers soon expanded their operations, joining with another former rebel, Cole Younger, to form the James-Younger gang, and robbing banks all over the US. By 1873, they had diversified into the railway sector, holding up trains while making a point (usually) of not robbing the passengers. They sometimes left notes - press releases, in effect - at the crime scenes, explaining their actions. Meanwhile, Edwards printed Jesse's letters enthusiastically. And where robberies took place in front of crowds, as they often did, the gang strove to add entertainment value where they could.

Their notoriety eventually earned them the attentions of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, to no great effect. The Chicago-based organisation's doomed pursuit culminated in a disastrous raid on the James family farm in 1875. When a bomb thrown by the detectives killed a half-brother of the outlaws and caused their mother to have her arm amputated, the bloodbath only added to the public's sympathy for the outlaws.

By the time of his death in 1882, Jesse James's image as "America's Robin Hood" (Theodore Roosevelt's description) was complete. But six years before that, he had temporarily run out of both luck and public ambivalence in Northfield, the place that marked the beginning of his end. The hero of the hour was a bank cashier called Joseph Lee Heywood, who, despite being assaulted and having a knife held to his throat, pretended he couldn't open the safe because it was time-locked.

His resistance gave the upstanding townsfolk of Northfield a chance to organise defence. By the time the raiders fled the bank, empty-handed, their look-out men had all been gunned down by locals firing from cover. The James Brothers escaped, just, and made it back to Missouri. The rest of their lives would be lived under aliases - "Thomas Howard" in the case of Jesse, who married his first cousin and tried to go straight for a time, before a doomed comeback attempt. But the huge manhunt that followed Northfield left the rest of their associates killed, wounded, or in jail, and the James-Younger gang was no more.

The Minnesota town's only other claim to fame is being just down the road from the Mall of America, where I once spent a gobsmacked afternoon when it was still the world's biggest shopping centre (the title has since been claimed by a place in Canada). Sadly, the cashier who made history in 1876 did not survive to join Northfield's celebrations. Murdered by one of the fleeing James brothers, he became a martyr to his profession. I don't know what it says on his gravestone, but I hope it at least mentions that he worked in a bank.