Remembering Pittsburgh

by Len Barcousky

  The thieves who entered the bank during the night somehow had obtained copies of the vault keys, according to the April 10 edition of the newspaper. “The persons suspected of having committed the robbery are two gamblers of the names of Pluymart and Emmons,” the paper reported. “They are supposed to be Yankees.”

  Among the loot stolen in a bank burglary in 1818 was a gold medal presented by Congress to Revolutionary War general Daniel Morgan. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

  “Pluymart goes by the title of Doctor, and is a professed gambler. Emmons is said to have formerly kept a store in New York.”

  The two men had told acquaintances they were leaving Pittsburgh for Virginia, but the newspaper reported they had instead traveled up the Monongahela River to Elizabeth. There “they purchased a skiff, in which they secured a false bottom to be made.” At least one of the men was seen in Pittsburgh on the night the bank was broken into.

  On April 17, the bank ran an ad offering a $1,000 reward for the capture of the robbers and return of its notes and precious medal. The amount of the reward was only $500 for the capture of the suspects alone. The Gazette reported April 24 that the bank had raised the reward amounts to $3,000 for the return of the stolen items and $1,000 for the capture of the robbers.

  While word did not reach Pittsburgh until April 28, Pluymart and Emmons had been captured in Ohio two weeks earlier and been taken to the nearest jail in Cincinnati. Their return to Pittsburgh for trial, however, was delayed for almost two months by an extradition battle between Pennsylvania and Ohio. Before the issue was resolved, both men broke out of jail. “Pluymart escaped, but Emmons was brought back, badly wounded,” the Gazette reported on June 9.

  After Emmons recovered from his injuries, he was returned to Pittsburgh. “He was at first quite obstinate, but when he understood that public opinion and evidence was so powerful against him, he…agreed to confess, on certain conditions,” according to the newspaper. Those conditions appear to have included an agreement whereby he would not do jail time if he showed bank officers where he and Pluymart had hidden the loot. The bankers, “taking into view the importance of a confession and discovery, agreed to those conditions.”

  “Emmons was then placed into a boat at night, and accompanied by a number of our most respectable citizens, was taken 37 miles down the river, where he pointed out the place of concealment….Here the whole amount, except for about $2,700 was found. The notes were much injured by the damp.” General Morgan’s gold medal also remained missing.

  After breaking jail in Ohio, Pluymart had remained on the loose for several weeks but was recaptured near the Canadian border in Ogdensburg, New York. “About $5,000 in gold and bills were found with him, which are in the hands of the magistrates,” the Gazette reported on June 19. Two days after his latest arrest, “Pluymart, with two other prisoners, broke the jail and effected their escape,” the newspaper said. “Immediately pursuit was made and an additional reward of 50 dollars was offered for [his] apprehension.”

  “He was re-taken about 15 miles from [Ogdensburg], and today has been lodged in jail, where we hope to retain him,” according to a June 3 letter sent by three New York justices of the peace to the newspaper. The magistrates wrote of Pluymart, “He appears to be a consummate villain.”

  Brought back to Pennsylvania, Pluymart was convicted of the bank break-in and sentenced to three years in prison. It’s unclear how long he served. Once again he escaped, according to Allegheny County’s Hundred Years, a community history by George H. Thurston published in 1888. While still a fugitive, Pluymart was pardoned by Governor John Andrew Schulze.

  1858: WOMAN WHO KILLED FACES THE HANGMAN

  The double-murder case that led Charlotte Jones to the gallows has as many twists and turns as a legal thriller by John Grisham.

  Jones was the first woman executed in Allegheny County when she and her lover, Henry Fife, were hanged on February 12, 1858, in the courtyard of the county’s second courthouse. Ruined by fire in 1882, it stood on the site of the current courthouse. The pair had confessed to murdering Jones’s elderly uncle and aunt, George Wilson and sister Elizabeth McMasters, on April 30, 1857. The victims lived in a log cabin across the river from McKeesport. Wilson was stabbed, and his sister was beaten to death with a poker.

  “The reason why I did this was the great love I have for Henry Fife, and in order to get money to go to housekeeping with him,” Jones dictated in what the Pittsburgh Gazette called her dying declaration. Jones was illiterate, and her statement was read by Mr. Williamson, described in the February 13 edition of the newspaper as “an English gentleman who has taken a great interest in Fife.”

  Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, a magazine published in Boston, featured an engraving of Allegheny County’s second courthouse as it appeared in 1851. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

  The competing Pittsburgh Post in that same day’s edition had words of praise for county sheriff Rody Patterson, who “in the performance yesterday of his most painful duty…followed strictly both the letter and the spirit of the law.”

  The sheriff had issued attendance cards to twenty-four witnesses—twelve for each prisoner—to observe the execution. Allegheny County commissioners, however, had more ambitious plans. They had issued “a large number of tickets” admitting people to the courthouse, where “many of the windows… overlook the sides of the jailyard where the execution took place,” the Post said. “These tickets, however, were refused at the avenues of entrance and considerable disturbance arose of this accord.”

  One of Patterson’s deputies quickly got an order from county judge Charles Shaler, confirming the sheriff’s decision to exclude gawkers. “The Commissioners had no authority over the public grounds and premises on this occasion, and hence the tickets of that board were rejected and the holders of them excluded.”

  The second county courthouse, a Pittsburgh landmark, was destroyed by fire on May 7, 1882. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published an artist’s rendering of the scene. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

  While reporters were to have been among those excluded, both the Post and the Gazette had what read like eyewitness accounts in their next-day editions. “And, oh, how often I have wished I could restore George Wilson and his sister back to life,” Fife said in the statement he read from the gallows, according to the Gazette. “Maddened by a thirst for gold and stimulated by drink I gave them the fatal blow that robbed them of life and sent their souls, without warning, to the bar of God.”

  Fife and Jones said they had planned their crime together, and they both swore that a third suspect, Monroe Stewart, was innocent. Stewart had been convicted and sentenced to death in the case. In her gallows statement, Jones said she had sought to implicate Stewart out of malice, because he had sought to persuade Fife to leave her.

  The Reverend John Brown “then offered up a feeling and appropriate prayer, during which Charlotte and Fife both knelt and seemed to be fervently repeating every world that was uttered by the minister,” the Post reported. “Two glasses containing liquor were then brought to the prisoners. Fife drank all out of the glass given to him; Charlotte merely tasted hers, and then handed it to Fife, who swallowed the remainder….Fife then kissed Charlotte affectionately.

  “The last words of Fife were: ‘Remember, gentlemen, I die game.’

  “The last words of Charlotte were a prayer to God for her salvation and a declaration of her love for Fife.”

  When Sheriff Patterson stepped upon a lever that activated the gallows, “the drop fell and the two unfortunate creatures were suspended in the air.” It was not a clean execution. When the bodies of the two were taken down thirty minutes later, doctors found that their necks hadn’t been broken by their initial falls, meaning both had strangled.

  The final twist in the story came twenty-two years later, according to a New York Times story published June 19, 1880. Wilson and McMasters had been killed for the gold a
nd silver coins they had kept at their cabin, according to the Times. When two McKeesport youths found coins buried on the banks of the Youghiogheny River, the Times reported that “the treasure uncovered by the two boys is believed to be a portion of the wealth the possession of which was so fatal” to its elderly owners.

  The boys, however, did not benefit from their find. They told police their newly found cache was taken from them by a menacing red-bearded, red-haired stranger. “No trace of him has yet been found,” the Times said.

  1869: A SHADY STRANGER ON A TRAIN

  While serious news from Harrisburg and Washington, D.C., dominated the front page of the Pittsburgh Gazette on April 15, 1869, inside pages featured lighter fare. Tales of a financial scam, purloined cash and a rocky romance were among the local stories competing for readers’ attention that morning.

  “Mr. Perry C. Dean, a farmer, was swindled out of four hundred dollars yesterday,” the Gazette reported. Dean and his wife, on their way home to Wisconsin, had boarded a cross-state train in Philadelphia.

  Just before the train started[,] a genteel looking young man stepped into the car and took a seat directly in front of the pair. The train moved on and the young man’s tongue commenced to move also….Being an exceedingly agreeable conversationalist, he succeeded in winning the confidence of his two auditors long before the train reached Pittsburgh.

  The man called himself J.B. Austin.

  When the trio arrived at Pittsburgh’s Union Depot,

  stranger No. 2, merchant of Pittsburgh, stepped up and politely requested Mr. Austin to pay a little bill.

  Austin pulled out his pocket book, but found himself short of ready cash, having only a draft for three thousand four hundred dollars and six twenty dollar gold pieces.

  After some consultation, Dean, the farmer, was prevailed upon to loan his friend four hundred dollars to pay the bill, taking in exchange the draft and the gold pieces as security, both of which the supposed Pittsburgh merchant pronounced all right.

  Austin and the merchant then disappeared “for the purpose of getting the account perfectly squared.”

  Dean and his wife “waited for some time” before contacting the authorities, who “pronounced the affair a swindle.” The draft, which gave the bearer the right to collect the $4,300 at a bank in New York City, was a fake. “The supposed gold pieces were composed of a good quality of brass.”

  “The victim was swindled thus out of all his money, except twenty dollars….He has, now, a…disregard for affable strangers,” the story concluded.

  Following a pattern that would be repeated by future generations of journalists, Gazette reporters made regular stops at courts and police stations in Pittsburgh and in Allegheny, now the city’s North Side.

  In one case, rooming house operator Patrick Kearney found himself answering a theft charge before Allegheny mayor Simon Drum. Kearney was accused of taking $ 10 from a letter sent to one of his former boarders. The amount in dispute was equal to about $ 160 today. The unidentified tenant had disappeared, leaving an unpaid bill, the paper reported. “Soon after a letter was left at the boarding house for the missing man, which Kearney opened and found to contain thirty dollars.” After Kearney removed $10 and sent on the rest, his former tenant complained to police. Kearney explained at the hearing that he had been told that the letter would be sent with the money. “As he appeared to have no evil intent and expressed himself willing to refund the money, the Mayor dismissed the case.”

  Allegheny County district attorney Alfred L. Pearson, whose gravestone is in Allegheny Cemetery, let a defendant choose marriage over jail in 1869. Courtesy Lake Fong of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

  Another report on the first marriage in Allegheny County Criminal Court relieved “the dull monotony of trials and sentences.”

  Charles Burgess was accused of seducing Mary Jane Bagshaw. Both lived in Temperanceville, now part of Pittsburgh’s West End.

  The indictment in the case set forth, with other alleged facts, that in the pursuance of the intimacy which had existed between them, a child, now living, was born.

  They had affection enough for each other, but Charles, like many other young men, felt that he could not well afford to make the honorable reparations due the fair and blushing Mary. But the law is a stubborn thing, and rather than go to jail, Charles agreed to…enter into matrimony.

  District Attorney Alfred L. Pearson dropped a charge of fornication and bastardy, and a city alderman, E.S. Morrow, immediately performed the wedding. “This was the first case of a wedding in open court in this County,” according to the newspaper. “And Charles has received the first sentence for life ever imposed on any poor criminal by that Court.”

  CHAPTER 3

  WARS, REVOLUTIONS AND REBELLIONS

  1755: LIFE AND SUDDEN DEATH AT FORT DUQUESNE

  Death came quickly—and sometimes violently—on the Pennsylvania frontier in the 1750s.

  Babies born at the French settlement of Fort Duquesne often died within days of birth. Healthy young men were carried off by fevers. A stroll in the forest could end with a gunshot and the flash of a sharp knife. Father Denys Baron, chaplain at Fort Duquesne, presided over “the customary ceremonies” following the death on July 5, 1755, of Pierre Simard. He had been killed and scalped, the priest wrote. His assailants were most likely Indian allies of the British, whose army was bearing down on the French fort. His death was soon avenged.

  On July 9, the British commander, Edward Braddock, was fatally wounded and his army was destroyed. Braddock’s defeat, in the area east of Pittsburgh that now bears his name, meant the Forks of the Ohio remained in French hands for another three years. One source of information about that period is the Register of Fort Duquesne. In that document, which was discovered in Montreal archives in the mid-nineteenth century, Father Baron and other priests recorded births, marriages and burials at French outposts in western Pennsylvania. A translation of the register by the Reverend Andrew Arnold Lambing was published in Pittsburgh in 1885. The pamphlet was reprinted in 2004 to mark the 250th anniversary of the first Catholic Mass celebrated at the Point.

  Fort Duquesne, built by the French in 1754, was burned by them in 1758. Architect and architectural historian Charles Morse Stotz offered his vision of how the outpost would have appeared. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

  Braddock was not the only distinguished casualty in what is often called the battle of the Monongahela. The French commander of Fort Duquesne, Leonard Daniel de Beaujeu, also was killed in early fighting.

  Beaujeu had led fewer than three hundred French and Canadian soldiers, supported by about six hundred Indian allies, to face Braddock’s fifteen hundred regulars and militia. “At the third volley from the English, de Beaujeu fell, pierced through the forehead, it is said, with a ball,” according to one of the notes that accompanies Lambing’s translation. Despite the loss of their commander, the French and Indians, firing from the woods, killed or wounded more than half of Braddock’s force, including almost all the officers. The remainder fled in panic. George Washington, who served on Braddock’s staff, was in the thick of the fighting but escaped injury. French losses were estimated at fewer than fifty.

  Father Baron wrote in the register that Beaujeu had “been at confession and performed his devotions”—preparing himself for possible death—on the morning of the battle. “His remains were interred on the twelfth of the same month, in the cemetery of Fort Duquesne under the title of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin at the Beautiful River…with the customary ceremonies by us,” he wrote. In the coming days, Father Baron recorded the burials of other French casualties.

  The register makes no mention of the deaths of British prisoners, just outside Fort Duquesne, as described by James Smith. Smith, who was just eighteen, had been captured a few days earlier by Indians loyal to the French.

  “About sun down I beheld a small party [of Indians] coming in with about a dozen prisoners, stripped naked, with their ha
nds tied behind their backs, and their faces and part of their bodies blacked—these prisoners they burned to death on the bank of the Alegheny [sic] River opposite to the fort,” he wrote in a memoir first published in 1799 and reprinted several times. “As this scene appeared too shocking for me to behold, I retired to my lodgings both sore and sorry.”

  The French claimed they came to North America as much to convert Native Americans to the Catholic faith as to trade for furs. The Register contains reports of Indian baptisms, including that of Jean Christiguay on December 17, 1756. Father Baron calls him “Great Chief of the Iroquois, aged ninety-five years, or thereabout, who being dangerously sick, earnestly desired Holy Baptism.”

  Too often baptism was followed by interment. Jean Daniel Norment was baptized on September 18, 1755, the day he was born to Jean Gaspar Norment, a trader at the fort, and his wife, Marie Joseph Chanier. Six days later, Father Baron buried little Jean Daniel.

  The following spring, the priest baptized two-month-old Ellen Candon, daughter of John and Sarah Choisy Candon. Ellen’s parents, he wrote, were “Irish Catholics, who were captured by the Shawnees in coming here to join the Catholics.” Ellen’s godmother at the ceremony on May 15, 1756, was Marie Norment, who had lost her little boy eight months earlier.

  All that remains of the French Fort Duquesne is a stone outline showing its approximate location in Point State Park. The French controlled what is now Pittsburgh’s Point from 1754 to 1758. Courtesy Darrell Sapp of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.