The Ballad of Black Bart

Home > Mystery > The Ballad of Black Bart > Page 17
The Ballad of Black Bart Page 17

by Loren D. Estleman


  So here I’ve stood while wind and rain

  have set the trees a-sobbin’;

  and risked my life for that damn stage

  that wasn’t worth the robbin’.

  AFTERWORD

  My tale it is finished, and my race it is run;

  but there’s one more confession I owe everyone.

  I speak not of inventions, though admit to this crime;

  I own to the evils I’ve committed in rhyme.

  Well, I never claimed to be a poet; or even a “Po8” on the scale of Bart. But the seductive alliteration of the book’s title called for some verses to justify the presence of the word “ballad.”

  In the interest of reducing confusion, I’ve taken some small liberties with fact as it applies to Charles E. Bolton, né Boles, and known more infamously as Black Bart; but the most implausible portions of the narrative are a matter of historical record.

  I am hardly unique in playing fast and loose with some of the lesser details. Sources professing to be authentic contradict one another over such things as the names of Boles’s wife and daughters, and where he was born. One in particular provides two different addresses for both the Webb House and Thomas Ware’s tobacco shop, without claiming to be in confusion on the matter; they change without explanation. This is sloppy research, and I cherry-picked my way through it hunting down bits I could swallow, backing up what I could from other sources. The historical novelist has the privilege of improvisation and invention; the historian does not.

  I have applied creative license mostly to the investigating part of the narrative. Criminal forensics (and Bart’s is at least half a detective story) is a tedious business outside the world of entertainment, characterized by routine and repetition and complicated by false leads, bad tips, and unreliable eyewitnesses; it benefits from some telescoping in the retelling. Aside from such embellishments as appeal to the dramatic, the efforts of James B. Hume, Harry Morse, Benjamin Thorn, and others to identify and apprehend Black Bart are as reported. Sherlock Holmes brought nothing to the science of criminology that wasn’t already there.

  Where Charles E. Bolton is concerned (with the single exception of a Pilgrim’s Progress–like journey to the site of his domestic past—there’s no evidence it took place, but the melodramatist in me couldn’t resist), I’ve clung as scrupulously as possible to historical fact. (In the interest of balance, I sent James B. Hume off on a similar journey through the gold country, seeking to increase his knowledge of his adversary. Although there is nothing in the record to support this, it seems entirely within his method, and presents him with the prize of personally having retrieved the storied handkerchief; if I vouchsafed to allow Bolton the mercy of revisiting the haunt of his family desertion, I felt I should make a similar concession to his nemesis.)

  Reality is by necessity hard to accept. As Mark Twain said, “Of course truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.” That a middle-aged man traveling almost entirely on foot should manage to rob a national banking concern twenty-eight times over the course of eight years—with an empty shotgun, no less—before tripping himself up on something as trivial as a misplaced handkerchief would never fly in the rigid world of pure fantasy. Yes, he was as elaborately polite in the commission of his felonies as represented; yes, he acted without accomplices. And yes, he left some cheeky lines of doggerel at the scenes of robberies. This, even more than his astonishing record of success, guaranteed him a unique place in legend.

  He was no Robin Hood, mind; he robbed from the rich and gave to himself. Worse, he abandoned his wife and family, and for this indecency we must withhold pardon; but Paul Gauguin did the same in order to pursue his art, and history has forgiven him for the sake of his genius. Some daubs on canvas may outlast one’s sins; but so too many a romantic legend. If we are to commute a painter’s sentence because of his skill and talent, we should review a nonviolent highwayman’s record in view of his own unique gifts.

  Of Bolton’s life after he vanished from the Nevada House following his incarceration, we know next to nothing, theories notwithstanding. (He was reported to have exported his larcenous talents to such exotic places as Japan, China, and Australia.) He may have been responsible for a number of later stagecoach robberies that matched his modus operandi; James B. Hume seemed convinced that he was, although he later recanted, possibly for the simple reason that a thief-catcher is loath to admit that his thief is again at large and back to his old ways despite his drubbing. Wells, Fargo’s able chief of detectives remained in his position long after he’d achieved his greatest public triumph: he oversaw the recruitment of Wyatt Earp, just the kind of shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later lawman he distrusted, as an undercover operative for the Company throughout Earp’s turbulent time in Tombstone, Arizona—and with the decline of valuable stagecoach shipments in a settling West shifted his attention to train robberies. He continued in his position for many years until failing health forced him to retire.

  Rumors surfaced that a shotgun-wielding masked bandit gunned down by a shotgun messenger during an attempted robbery on the run between Virginia City and Reno, Nevada, in the summer of 1888 was Bolton. The man was buried mere yards from the spot where he expired, in a grave soon obliterated by wind, rain, and dust, and now impossible to locate. If this was indeed the finish of Black Bart, it would eliminate him as a suspect in the “wasn’t worth the robbin’” raid the following November. In any case, no record of Bolton’s existence extends beyond that year.

  To my knowledge (and with apologies to those who may have made the effort, which I failed to notice), this singular chapter of frontier history has never before been recounted in dramatic terms. In 1948, Dan Duryea—a talented and overlooked actor in westerns and films noir—starred in a programmer entitled Black Bart, but the storyline bore no resemblance to the more fascinating reality. In those days, with a few notable exceptions, frontier fiction on-screen and in print favored spirited gunplay, midnight rides, and fleeting romance over authenticity, superior though it was to the fevered imaginings of screenwriters on contract. In any event I thought it high time the man had his day.

  “Black Bart” acted partly from revenge, partly from a yearning for the finer trappings of wealth. He paid his debt to society—when it came due—and walked away from prison essentially unchanged by his four years and two months in incarceration. This was no small feat in those pre-rehabilitory days of inhuman punishment, barely sufficient meals, and sundry other atrocities unspeakable even today, which shattered the will of many a more obstreperous inmate. And he never took a cent from an individual, preying instead upon a commercial enterprise as large as some countries of the world. In view of recent discoveries regarding the practices of Wells, Fargo & Co. in our own day, one might ask, along with Bart: “After all, why not rob a bank?”

  BOOKS BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

  AMOS WALKER MYSTERIES

  Motor City Blue

  Angel Eyes

  The Midnight Man

  The Glass Highway

  Sugartown

  Every Brilliant Eye

  Lady Yesterday

  Downriver

  Silent Thunder

  Sweet Women Lie

  Never Street

  The Witchfinder

  The Hours of the Virgin

  A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

  Sinister Heights

  Poison Blonde*

  Retro*

  Nicotine Kiss*

  American Detective*

  The Left-Handed Dollar*

  Infernal Angels*

  Burning Midnight*

  Don’t Look for Me*

  You Know Who Killed Me*

  The Sundown Speech*

  The Lioness Is the Hunter*

  VALENTINO, FILM DETECTIVE

  Frames*

  Alone*

  Alive!*

  Shoot*

  Brazen*

  DETROIT CRIME

  Whiskey River

  Motown />
  King of the Corner

  Edsel

  Stress

  Jitterbug*

  Thunder City*

  PETER MACKLIN

  Kill Zone

  Roses Are Dead

  Any Man’s Death

  Something Borrowed, Something Black*

  Little Black Dress*

  OTHER FICTION

  The Oklahoma Punk

  Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula

  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes

  Peeper

  Gas City*

  Journey of the Dead*

  The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association*

  Roy & Lillie: A Love Story*

  The Confessions of Al Capone*

  PAGE MURDOCK SERIES

  The High Rocks*

  Stamping Ground*

  Murdock’s Law*

  The Stranglers

  City of Widows*

  White Desert*

  Port Hazard*

  The Book of Murdock*

  Cape Hell*

  WESTERNS

  The Hider

  Aces & Eights*

  The Wolfer

  Mister St. John

  This Old Bill

  Gun Man

  Bloody Season

  Sudden Country

  Billy Gashade*

  The Master Executioner*

  Black Powder, White Smoke*

  The Undertaker’s Wife*

  The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion*

  The Branch and the Scaffold*

  Ragtime Cowboys*

  The Long High Noon*

  The Ballad of Black Bart*

  NONFICTION

  The Wister Trace

  Writing the Popular Novel

  *Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LOREN D. ESTLEMAN has written more than eighty books—historical novels, mysteries, and Westerns. Winner of four Shamus Awards, five Spur Awards, and three Western Heritage Awards, he lives in central Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Thank you for buying this

  Tom Doherty Associates ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I. Shank’s Mare

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  II. Out in the Wash

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  III. Ballad’s End

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Afterword

  Books by Loren D. Estleman

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE BALLAD OF BLACK BART

  Copyright © 2017 by Loren D. Estleman

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Michael Koelsch

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8353-2 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-9211-8 (ebook)

  eISBN 9781466892118

  Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].

  First Edition: November 2017

 

 

 


‹ Prev