by David Fisher
For more than a century, criminologists have debated why Black Bart left the poems. Maybe the best explanation is that he wanted people to know that he had outsmarted the great Wells Fargo; he wanted to rub the company’s nose in the dirt trails used by their stages. At the same time, he apparently took pride in the fact that no one ever got hurt during his holdups. He was the perfect gentleman robber: He was unfailingly polite, he never took anything from passengers, and he never used foul language. In fact, to reassure their passengers, Wells Fargo issued a statement pointing out that “[he] has never manifested any viciousness and there is reason to believe he is averse to taking human life. He is polite to all passengers, and especially to ladies. He comes and goes from the scene of the robbery on foot; seems to be a thorough mountaineer and a good walker,” then added, “[I]t is most probable he is considered entirely respectable wherever he may reside.” Although that statement may well have calmed passengers, it also helped to make Charles Bowles’s Black Bart into a romantic legend.
It was after his fifth robbery that authorities discovered their first real lead. Investigators found out that following the holdup, a stranger on foot had stopped at a farm and paid for a meal. The farmer’s teenage daughter described him as having “[g]raying brown hair, missing two of his front teeth, deep-set piercing blue eyes under heavy eyebrows. Slender hands in conversation, well-flavored with polite jokes.” It wasn’t much, but for the clue-collecting Hume it was a beginning.
The robberies continued through the early 1880s. Several stagecoach drivers reported actually having pleasant conversations with the bandit during the holdups. In 1881, for example, Horace Williams asked him, “How much did you make?” to which he replied, “Not very much for the chances I take.”
That so many people considered this thief a hero continued to rankle Detective Hume, and he committed considerable resources to the job of catching the elusive robber. He hired the sixty-man detective agency run by the renowned San Francisco detective Harry Morse, “the Bloodhound of the West,” and assigned that company to work on this case. Hume also personally visited the sites of many robberies and diligently scoured the area, looking for the smallest clues. At several of the locations, Hume’s team found the robber’s abandoned camp, which indicated he had waited there patiently, sometimes for several days, for the stage to arrive.
Bowles’s first close call came near Strawberry, California, in July 1882, when he attempted the biggest job of his career. The Oroville stage was carrying more than eighteen thousand dollars in gold bullion, although it isn’t known whether he was aware of that. But perhaps because that gold was on board, Hume had assigned a shotgun-armed guard to ride next to the driver. Black Bart suddenly appeared in the middle of the trail and took hold of the horse, which bolted, and the coach ran off the road. The robber’s attention was diverted, so he failed to see armed guard George Hackett lift his shotgun and let loose a volley. The buckshot lifted Bowles’s bowler off his head, grazing his scalp. Bowles had no desire—or ability—to shoot back; instead, he disappeared into the brush, leaving his bloodied hat lying in the dirt. The robbery had failed, but he had escaped. By the time a posse got there, he was long gone and had left no other evidence.
Bowles continued to lead two completely different lives: one in San Francisco, where he was Charles Bolton, a man of leisure and wealth, a socialite who slept comfortably on clean sheets and was always welcomed in the better establishments of the city; the other in the wilderness, where he camped alone as he waited for the next stage, sleeping on the hard ground, confronting the elements, eating sardines out of tin cans. Although he subsisted mostly on his ill-gotten gains, he did invest some money in several small businesses that apparently returned a small profit.
It probably isn’t accurate to claim that Hume pursued Black Bart with the same diligence and ferocity with which Victor Hugo’s classic Inspector Javert hunted for Jean Valjean, but his pursuit lasted more than eight years. Hume was head of investigations for a large company and responsible for solving many cases, but clearly this was the big one. From his investigations he began to develop a theory that was considered radical at the time—criminals will often return to the scene of their crimes. This was especially true of Black Bart, who required a specific set of circumstances for his crimes to succeed: Because he was on foot, he couldn’t pursue a stage, so he needed a secluded place where the stage was already moving slowly and thick foliage nearby through which he could make his escape without fear of pursuit. There were only a limited number of such locations, which made Hume believe he was destined to use the same site more than once.
And indeed, Black Bart’s end came in the place where he had begun, the summit of Funk Hill. On November 3, 1883, driver Reason McConnell and Jimmy Rolleri pegged four shots at the bandit. Although the first three shots missed, the fourth shot nicked Bowles’s hand. The robber ran about a quarter of a mile, then stopped and wrapped a handkerchief around his knuckles to stem the bleeding. He hid the four thousand dollars he’d grabbed in a rotten log and kept the five hundred dollars in coins, put his rifle inside a hollow tree, and made his walkaway. He covered the hundred miles back to the city in three days, then went by train to Reno to lie low for several more.
Hume and Morse rode to the scene of the crime as quickly as their horses would take them. The driver McConnell was certain he’d hit the robber; he’d heard him yelping. The two detectives carefully searched the entire area and eventually found several items that had been left behind in haste, including a derby hat, size 7¼; a tin of supplies, including sugar, coffee, and crackers; a belt; a binocular case; a magnifying glass; a razor; two flour sacks—and a bloodied handkerchief with the laundry mark “F.X.0.7.”
A century later, the DNA in the blood might have enabled Hume to identify his man, but in 1883, something much less scientific caught his attention—the laundry mark. In those days, many men had at most only two shirts or handkerchiefs, and few workingmen could afford to send them out to a laundry to be cleaned. Certainly, few common stagecoach bandits sent their shirts out to be laundered. Clearly Black Bart was not the type of holdup man Hume had imagined him to be. From that clue, Hume deduced that Black Bart was living in a big city, and the only big city within walking distance was San Francisco.
Harry Morse’s men began visiting each of the more than ninety laundries in San Francisco, trying to associate “F.X.0.7” with a specific person. It took more than a week, but eventually Thomas Ware, the proprietor of the California Laundry on Stevenson Street, only a few blocks from the Wells Fargo office, identified the laundry mark. The handkerchief belonged to one of his better customers, he said, a Mr. Charles E. Bolton, the mining engineer who lived at the Webb House, a hotel on Second Street.
When Morse investigated further, he found that people spoke highly of this Charles Bolton. He was “an ideal tenant,” his landlady explained, “so quiet, so respectable and punctual with his room rent.” He was a fine fellow, others said.
Morse assigned several detectives to stake out the hotel. About a week later his men spotted the nattily dressed Mr. Bolton emerging from his rooms. They noted that he appeared to have a wound on his hand. Morse took charge: One afternoon, as his suspect sauntered down the street carrying a fancy cane, Morse successfully made his acquaintance. He had been told that Bolton was a mining engineer, he explained, then asked for his assistance. He had in his possession several pieces of ore that needed to be identified. Perhaps Mr. Bolton would be so kind as to do so?
Remembering this event years later, the detective Morse wrote, “One would have taken him for a gentleman who had made a fortune and was enjoying it. He looked anything but a robber.”
Perhaps sensing a business opportunity, Bowles agreed and walked with Morse to the nearby Wells Fargo office, completely unaware that the man who had spent the past eight and a half years trying to capture him was waiting there. It was there that James Hume introduced himself to Charles Bowles and arrested him for the robberies committed by the ban
dit Black Bart. Bowles by this time had perfected his acting skills and appeared genuinely surprised by the accusation, continuing to insist that a mistake had been made, that he was a fifty-six-year-old mining engineer named Charles Bolton. The handkerchief? Perhaps he’d dropped it and the real Black Bart had picked it up. But any doubt that another mistake had been made was erased after Morse searched his rooms. There he found letters written in the same hand as the two poems left by Black Bart, as well as several shirts bearing the laundry mark “F.X.0.7.”
Bowles was taken to Stockton and arraigned. Although he continued to maintain his innocence, at one point he did ask if a man who confessed to a robbery and returned all the proceeds might avoid going to prison. That wouldn’t be possible, he was informed, but it was probable that a judge would look kindly upon a man who confessed to his robberies and had never hurt a soul. Finally Bowles/Bolton/Black Bart confessed—to the final robbery. He took authorities to the top of Funk Hill and handed over all the loot.
His arrest took place while San Francisco’s newspapers were fighting for circulation, and they all wanted Black Bart’s story. Late one night, Examiner reporter Josiah Ward got into Bowles’s cell. He watched as Bowles entertained a series of visitors, including his landlady, who dabbed the prisoner’s eyes as he cried. Eventually Bowles agreed to be interviewed. Ward’s article reported him as saying, “I never drink and I don’t smoke. All my friends are gentlemen and I never associated with other than gentlemen. I can’t claim to be perfect. They do say I will rob a stage occasionally. But no one can say that I ever raised my hand to do any harm. I merely carried a gun to intimidate the driver. As for using it—why for all the gold that road ever carried I would not shoot a man.”
In the middle of November, Bowles was convicted of only one robbery—the final job—and sentenced to six years in San Quentin prison. While he was imprisoned, the dime novel The Gold Dragon; or, The California Bloodhound: The Story of PO8, the Lone Highwayman was published, adding to his nationwide fame. He never admitted in court that he was Black Bart; he never confessed to another robbery or returned any of the stolen money. It was never determined exactly how much he stole, with estimates ranging between twenty thousand and one hundred thousand dollars, or about three million dollars in today’s money.
He was released in January 1888, an event covered by all the newspapers. He had served four and a half years and was released for good behavior. His eyesight was failing, he said, and he had gone deaf in one ear. Asked by a reporter if he intended to return to his “profession,” he smiled and said, “No, gentlemen. I’m through with crime.” When another reporter followed up by asking if he might write more poetry, he shook his head. “Now, didn’t you hear me say that I am through with crime?”
Detective James Hume, who established Wells Fargo’s own special-agent operation, relentlessly pursued the famous stage robber for eight years.
Wells Fargo agents followed him for several weeks as he moved from town to town, but in February he walked out of the Palace Hotel in Visalia and was never seen or heard from again.
Or was he? In November later that year, a Wells Fargo stagecoach was held up by a masked highwayman in a manner reminiscent of Black Bart. After he escaped, a poem was found:
So here I’ve stood while wind and rain
Have set the trees a-sobbin
And risked my life for that box,
That wasn’t worth the robbin.
The note was sent to Detective Hume for examination. He compared it to the original poems known to have been written by Bowles and announced that this holdup was committed by a copycat.
However, for several years, rumors of Bowles’s activities and whereabouts continued to surface. William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner claimed that after a few robberies in northern California, Wells Fargo had agreed to give Bowles some sort of “pension” in exchange for his promise to never rob another stage, with the figure varying between $125 and $250 a month.
Although the company firmly denied having struck any deal, it did continue to list the newly released “Bolton” as a suspect in several stage holdups, describing him as “a thorough mountaineer, a remarkable walker, and claims he cannot be excelled in making quick transits over mountains and grades,” concluding that he was “a cool self-contained talker with waggish tendencies; and since his arrest … has exhibited genuine wit under most trying circumstances.”
Other stories of his fate speculated that he lived the rest of his life in luxury in Mexico or New York or St. Louis with the proceeds he had secreted from his life of crime. A thief arrested outside Kansas City was identified by local authorities as Black Bart, but one of Hume’s men identified him as a different Wells Fargo robber who had served time in Folsom Prison. That same detective claimed he had discovered what had actually happened to Bowles—he had sailed to Japan on the Empress of China and was living there happily. One newspaper reported he had been killed holding up a stage from Virginia City to Reno and had been buried in a shallow grave at the side of the road. Detective Hume once said he’d heard that Bowles died while hunting game in the high Sierra. He was supposedly seen in the Klondike after the gold strike of 1896 in the Yukon. Reporter Josiah Ward wrote that Bowles had indeed been hired by Wells Fargo—to ride shotgun on stages, and eventually “saved and bought a ranch where he abode in peace and quiet until he died.” Finally, in 1917, The New York Times printed the obituary of Civil War veteran Charles E. Boles [sic], although no mention was made of another career. If that was Black Bart—and there is no compelling evidence to either confirm or deny that—he would have been eighty-eight years old.
Perhaps it’s appropriate that his fate remains unknown; the Gentleman Bandit Black Bart had effectively escaped again, living out the rest of his life in obscurity. No one would ever break his record of twenty-nine stagecoach robberies. Henry Ford introduced his Model T in 1908, thus putting an end to the profession of stagecoach robber forever.
After serving four years and two months in San Quentin, Black Bart was released and supposedly disappeared—although a year later, Wells Fargo issued his last Wanted poster, accusing him of committing two more robberies.
THE DIME NOVELS
The image of the rip-roaring, hard-riding, two-fisted, straight-shooting cowboy, standing up for Old West justice against villainous varmints was initially the creation of small paper books known as dime novels. Although the real skills and courage of the men who tamed the American frontier could often be awe inspiring, these very popular novels successfully turned these men into the near superheroes that have become a staple of popular culture.
There has always been something magical about the exploits of these brave men, but beginning with the minstrel shows and popular music of the mid-1800s, their feats of derring-do were greatly exaggerated. P. T. Barnum might have been the first to exploit the fascination with the frontier, when he presented live Indians as a curiosity at his New York City museum in the 1840s. But the real effort to make the West wilder began in June 1860, when Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter was published by the New York printing firm Beadle and Adams.
Technological advances in printing in the 1840s had made it possible to inexpensively produce numerous copies of a book. Cheap and easily carried, dime novels were extremely popular among Civil War soldiers looking for any diversion, and soon people everywhere were seeking them out.
The initial success of Beadle’s books caused competitors to rush to publish their own, which often were stories that previously had been serialized in three-penny dailies or story newspapers. Although these books were called dime novels, some of them sold for a nickel or less. The character of the virtuous cowboy fighting vicious Indians and ruthless outlaws grew out of the early stories of heroic frontiersmen, in particular, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. To compete, authors had to continuously up the ante, putting their characters into increasingly dangerous situations and then giving them the almost superhuman skills
needed to survive for another book. These sensationalized action-adventure stories often were based extremely loosely on real events and used real names—and turned men and women such as Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, Calamity Jane, and even Belle Starr into American celebrities.
Although inexpensive “yellow-backed” paper books had been published earlier, dime novels—and the nickel or “half-dime” novels that followed—generally were published as numbered volumes in series that featured recognizable characters. More than 40,000 different titles were published, many of them by Beadle and Adams, who warned potential authors, “We prohibit what cannot be read with satisfaction by every right-minded person—old and young alike.”
These books were the original pulp fiction, written to be devoured in one gulp and quickly forgotten. Millions of copies were sold. Edward Judson, writing as Ned Buntline, could write a book in a few days and published more than four hundred of them, transforming Buffalo Bill into a legendary figure. The most successful dime novelist was probably Edward Ellis, whose Seth Jones; or, the Captives of the Frontier, sold six hundred thousand copies in six languages.
By the time dime novels disappeared early in the twentieth century, the character of the valiant cowboy defeating evil at the last possible moment was forever enshrined in our culture and had become the symbol of the Old West recognized throughout the world. The movies picked it up from there, and the rest has become history!
WILD BILL HICKOK
Plains Justice
In the settling heat of an early summer evening, at six o’clock on the twenty-first of July, 1865, Wild Bill Hickok stood calmly in the center of the Springfield, Missouri, town square, his Colt Navy revolvers resting easy in a red sash tied around his waist, their ivory handles turned forward. About seventy-five yards away, the gambling man Davis K. Tutt stepped out of the old courthouse, where he’d been settling some fines. The two men stared at each other. Even at that distance, Wild Bill could see the old Johnny Reb Tutt slowly pull a gold watch out of his vest pocket and glance nonchalantly at the time—the very watch that Hickok had warned him not to display. Hickok yelled to him, “Don’t you cross the square with my watch!” Tutt responded by slipping the watch back into his pocket and stepping out into the middle of the square. Neither man was the type to back down from a challenge. They faced each other: Dave Tutt turned to his side; Wild Bill squared his shoulders and stood facing straight ahead. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then they went for their guns.
