November 24, 2025: Did Jesse James Rob “Our” Glendale Train?

Did Jesse James Rob “Our” Glendale Train?

By: Robert Koenig

You may have heard the old folk song, “The Ballad of Jesse James” – sung by performers including Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash – that begins:

Jesse James was a lad that killed many a man,

He robbed the Glendale train …

If you wondered whether James robbed a train in Glendale, Missouri, the answer is yes. But that particular Glendale was a tiny community on the other side of the state.

It is true that there was a Missouri Pacific station called Glendale here when the James robbery took place in 1879. That small wooden station, from which the city of Glendale later got its name, was built in 1870 at the southeast corner of Berry Road and the tracks.

But the James gang robbed a Chicago & Alton train, herding townsfolk into the rail depot at a small western Missouri town also named Glendale, dragging timbers across the tracks, and setting up an “emergency stop” signal. According to a 1973 article by Edward A Higgins in The Midwest Motorist:

“When the train stopped, they forced the engineer to beat open the locked door of the express car, pistol-whipped the express agent, and departed with some $6,000, firing their revolvers wildly in the air as they galloped away.”

James and his gang robbed numerous trains and banks in the Midwest, and it is not known why the unknown composer of “The Ballad of Jesse James” (thought to have been first sung in 1882) focused on the Glendale robbery. 

“Why the balladeer placed such emphasis on this holdup — it is the subject of the sixth stanza as well — is a mystery,” wrote Higgins. “It did follow the standard James gang modus operandi and perhaps was selected for that reason, along with the fact that it is a two-syllable word.”

A local mystery is why the rumor persisted that James had robbed a train near our Glendale, and the separate rumor that his gang had buried the loot nearby. After all, the St. Louis newspapers at the time would have been all over a local train robbery.

Local author R.T. Bamber wrote in the Glendale Historical Society Bulletin (March 1996) that a former Glendale city clerk had told him many years ago that James and his gang had indeed robbed a train at Glendale.

Bamber also wrote that a caddy at the Algonquin club had once told him that James had robbed a train at Glendale “and had hidden the loot in one of the many limestone caves that underlie this area. The money was reportedly still there – although many people had looked for it – as the robbers had never come back for the money, as far as anyone knew.”

After doing his own research, Bamber – like other writers – concluded that the James robbery had occurred across the state. “I would like to be able to tell you that the train was robbed at our Glendale, just for the romance of the tale,” he wrote. “But it was not.”

Even more interesting is that the tiny hamlet where the train robbery occurred – a mile east of the Little Blue River, west of Blue Springs – no longer even exists as Glendale.

“By 1910, the name had been changed to Selsa or Selsa Station,” Bamber wrote. And that site just off of Selsa Road, has since been incorporated into the city of Independence.

So, even though there is now only one Glendale in Missouri – our Glendale – all evidence points to the conclusion that ours is not the site of the infamous Jesse James train robbery.