Adair, Iowa

On the night of July 21, 1873, about a mile and a half west of Adair, Jesse James and the James-Younger gang more or less invented the Wild West train robbery. Up to then they had mostly hit banks. This time they pried loose a section of Rock Island track, tied a rope to it, and yanked the rail aside just as the locomotive came around a bend. The engine slammed off the rails and rolled over, killing the engineer, John Rafferty, which was never part of the plan and hung over the robbery afterward. The gang, some wearing Ku Klux Klan style masks, swarmed the stopped train and cleaned out the safe and the passengers. They had been tipped to a gold shipment, but it had been delayed, so the haul came up thin. The method, though, was pure theater. The newspapers ate it up, Jesse James became a household name, cast by some as a kind of Robin Hood even though he was really a former Confederate guerrilla turned outlaw. The whole mythology of masked men robbing trains out West traces back to this spot.