A group of armed former Confederate guerrillas, believed to include members of the James-Younger Gang, held up the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri, making off with roughly $60,000 in cash and bonds. A bystander, George Wymore, was shot dead as the gang fled, marking one of the first violent bank robberies of its kind in the postwar United States and launching the outlaw legend that would surround Jesse James.
Liberty, Missouri, still raw from the Civil War, wasn't ready for what happened that afternoon. A dozen or so riders, many of them ex-Confederate bushwhackers who had ridden with William Quantrill, walked into the Clay County Savings Association, drew pistols, and forced the cashier and his son into the vault. They emptied it of gold, silver, and government bonds worth an estimated $60,000, an enormous sum for the era.
As the gang galloped out of town firing pistols into the air to scatter onlookers, a stray shot killed George Wymore, a young college student walking nearby. No one was ever convicted of the robbery, though local suspicion quickly fell on Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers, all of whom had fought as guerrillas during the war. The raid is widely regarded by historians as the first successful daylight bank robbery in American peacetime history, and it set a template of speed, firepower, and folk-hero mythology that Jesse James would ride for the rest of his outlaw career.