Wealth & Money Quote by Frank James

Poverty, in Frank James's telling, isn't a moral lesson or a rustic badge of honor; it's a practical constraint with teeth. "We sometime didn't get enough to buy oats for our horses" lands with the blunt specificity of somebody inventorying survival, not polishing a legend. Oats are unglamorous. Horses are the engine. If you can't feed them, you can't move, can't work, can't run. The line quietly reframes outlaw life as logistics: the romance collapses into a feed bill.

Then he widens the frame with a deceptively plain economic note: "Most banks had very little money in them". It's a small sentence that does a lot of reputational work. Popular mythology paints bank robbery as stealing from the fat and complacent. James insinuates the opposite: the institutions were thinly capitalized, cash-scarce, maybe more symbolic than wealthy. That subtext helps justify both desperation and resentment. If banks are already empty, then the "crime" reads less like grand predation and more like scrambling in a broken system where cash doesn't circulate and credit is a rumor.

Context matters: post-Civil War border-state economies were volatile, with shaky local banks and recurring panics. James, a celebrity by infamy, uses that instability as a backdrop to normalize scarcity and to sand down the moral edge of violence. The intent is not confession but calibration: make the audience see hunger and hollow vaults first, and judgment second.