As cameras rolled Thursday, there were guns blazing and horses galloping down dirt streets amid startled townsfolk dressed in Victorian attire.

It was the premise of a documentary on one of the Old West's most notorious outlaws -- Jesse James -- and, more specifically, what happened to James after his reported death in 1882.

Bill Kurtis, documentary host and producer of "Investigating History" for the History Channel, is following a lead from a family in Neodesha that is descended from a man named Jeremiah James. Family members contend that Jesse James faked his death and changed his identity to Jeremiah James.

On Wednesday, Kurtis and the film crew were at the Jesse James Museum at 555 W Douglas, doing interviews and filming artifacts on display.

Other scenes of the documentary will show parts of Kurtis' 10,000-acre Red Buffalo Ranch near Sedan -- generic horse and rider scenes along canyons and creek banks. And, there will be scenes filmed in St. Joseph and Kearney, Mo., of Jesse James' farm, house and grave.

Kurtis said Thursday that the History Channel would air the documentary as soon as possible -- meaning it may be shown in the next few months.

"Just because we read it in an encyclopedia or history book doesn't mean that an historical event really happened that way," Kurtis said. "History is constantly being rewritten, changed and re-interpreted according to the discoveries made by scientists and historians who study historical events from a different perspective."

He said, "This is a story of a family who has gone to great lengths to trace their lineage back to Jesse James."

This weekend, the film crew will be in a Neodesha cemetery filming the exhumation of Jeremiah James' grave. DNA tests will then be done.

And it is also why Wichita's Old Cowtown Museum on Thursday -- with its portrayal of frontier life in the late 1870s and 1880s -- played such an important part in the filming of the documentary, Kurtis said.

Cowtown, he said, "was made for movies and not just tourists.... I love Cowtown for its dirt streets and for the fact it has people who are careful to be historically accurate."

Jan McKay, executive director of the museum, said Cowtown provided 23 staff members and volunteer re-enactors to play the part of townspeople. Even the museum's draft horses, Tim and Barney, were filmed and had to be prepared for the shoot-em-up scenes.