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 One
of the most unusual stagecoach robbers in American history was an old man
known in the annals of the West as Black Bart. He used many aliases,
including Charles E. Bolton and Charles E. Boles, the latter, most
probably his true name. Bart, in addition to being an expert lone bandit
who robbed more than two dozen stages in California in 1877-78, he was a
jokester whose laughing nature endeared him even to his victims.
Bart first struck on a mountain pass called Funk Hill,
four miles outside of Copperopolis, Calif., on July 26, 1875. The driver
of the Wells Fargo stage, John Shine (later a U.S. marshal and a
California state senator), brought up his team short, startled at the
strange apparition before him. Bart wore a long, white duster over his
clothes, and over his head was a flour sack with holes that had been cut
for the eyes. A deep voice commanded: "Throw down the box!" The
driver reached beneath his seat and withdrew the Wells Fargo strongbox
containing several thousand dollars. He tossed down the wooden box,
reinforced with iron bands, which was padlocked. Bart grabbed the box and
slipped into a nearby woods. Shine drove off some distance and then
stopped the stage, walking back down the road to see a half dozen guns
leveled at him from outlaws positioned behind boulders. He stood rock
still and then realized the outlaws were not moving. Shine approached one,
and then another boulder, to discover dummies with sticks for guns pointed
at him. (Bart accomplished his robberies by pretending to have a large
gang positioned behind several large boulders, and when he first stopped
the stage, he would call out to his imaginary gang: "If he dares to
shoot, give him a solid volley, boys!")
The lone bandit continued to stop Wells Fargo stages with
regularity, always along mountain roads where the driver was compelled to
slow down at dangerous curves. (It was later estimated that Bart robbed as
much as $18,000 from Wells Fargo stages over the course of four years,
striking twenty-nine times.) He left no clues whatsoever, although he did
leave a spare gun after one robbery, and he was always extremely courteous
to passengers, especially women travelers, refusing to take their jewelry
and cash, telling them: "I don't want your money, only Wells Fargo
boxes." He made a favorable impression on drivers and passengers
alike as a courteous, gentlemanly robber who apparently wanted to avoid a
gunfight at all costs. On Aug. 3, 1877, the lone bandit, again appearing
in his duster and flour sack, stopped the Arena stagecoach, en route to
Duncan's Mill on the Russian River. He took the strongbox and its contents
of $300 in cash and a check for a similar amount.
Some days later a posse found the empty box, and inside of
it was a note reading:
I've labored long and hard for bread,
For honor and for riches
But on my corns too long you've tred,
You fine-haired sons-of-bitches.
The stage robber had signed the note with a name that
would go down in Western history: "Black Bart, PO-8." The
letters and number mystified lawmen as much as the name Black Bart.
Tracking posses found no trace of the elusive bandit, and superstition had
it that the stage indeed had been robbed by a ghost. For a year the robber
was not to be seen. Then, on July 26, 1878, Bart held up another Wells
Fargo stage, one traveling between Quincy and Oroville, Calif. Again, he
wore the same weird outfit, the long flowing duster and the flour sack,
and again, his voice, described as "hollow and deep," ordered
the driver to "throw down the box!" This time Bart made off with
$379. He also helped himself to a passenger's $200 diamond ring and a gold
watch worth $25.
Once more, pursuing lawmen found the empty strongbox with
another note which stated:
Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the coming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat
And everlasting sorrow.
Yet come what will, I'll try it once,
My conditions can't be worse,
And if there's money in that box,
'Tis money in my purse.
Again there were no clues to follow. The bandit seemed to
have vanished into thin air. Bart himself was responsible for a trail that
led nowhere. Wells Fargo drivers noticed that when he stopped a stage, he
wore large socks over his boots so that he would leave no heel marks in
the dirt to be followed. Moreover, he never used a horse but slipped into
the wilderness on foot and thus left no trail of horse tracks. Bart, it
was later discovered, was an excellent hiker and outdoorsman who traveled
great distances on foot, camping out for weeks to get to and from his
robbery sites which he scouted carefully. He used a shotgun most times in
his robberies, but not once in all of his many robberies did he ever fire
it. As it turned out, he could not have fired the weapon since he never
loaded it, or at least that is what he told arresting officers later.
Bart was not a rampant pillager of Wells Fargo. He only
robbed stages periodically, sometimes with as much as nine months' time
between robberies, and he later stated that he "took only what was
needed when it was needed." Most stagecoach drivers were submissive
to Bart, seldom defying him with a cross word and obediently tossing down
the strongbox when ordered to do so. This was not the case with hardcase
George W. Hackett who, on July 13, 1882, was driving a Wells Fargo stage
some nine miles outside of Strawberry, Calif. Bart suddenly darted from a
boulder and stood in front of the stage, stopping it and leveling a
shotgun at Hackett. He politely said: "Please throw down your
strongbox." Hackett was not pleased to do so; he reached for a rifle
and fired a shot at the bandit. Bart dashed into the woods and vanished,
but he received a scalp wound that would leave a permanent scar on the top
right side of his forehead.
Robberies became increasingly difficult for Bart, and his
last, on Nov. 3, 1883, almost spelled his doom. He stopped another Wells
Fargo stage on that day, almost in the exact spot where he robbed the
first stagecoach in 1875. A lone rider following the stage, Jimmy Rolleri,
fired a shot at Bart as he was dragging the strongbox into the underbrush,
and wounded him in the hand. Bart used his handkerchief to wrap around the
wound; this was later found with a San Francisco laundry mark on it. The
men assigned to track down Black Bart were two shrewd, tough detectives,
James B. Hume and Henry Nicholson Morse, one-time
sheriff of Alameda County. Harry Morse realized that there were ninety-one
laundries in San Francisco, but he set out to visit each one of them and,
at Ferguson & Bigg's California Laundry, his search was rewarded with
an identity, that of Charles E. Bolton, a mining Fengineer. Morse and
Hume, accompanied by local police, arrested Bolton-Bart in his hotel. He
would not admit to being the bandit, and denied that his name was either
Charles E. Bolton, the name under which he had been living in San
Francisco for years, or his supposedly given name, Charles E. Boles. When
booked, he gave his name as T. Z. Spalding.
Found in Bart's hotel room was a Bible which had been
given to him by his wife in 1865. It bore the name of Charles E. Boles. He
was born and raised in upper New York State and had been a farmer, until
he married and moved to Illinois just before the Civil War. He served as a
sergeant in 116th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. When his family members
died, he moved to California to seek his fortune. He had tried a number of
jobs and even tried panning for gold before he turned to stagecoach
robbing. With his loot, he had invested in several small businesses which
brought him a modest income, but he could not resist the urge to go back
to robbing stages when money became short. After days of denying he was
the famous Black Bart, the bandit finally admitted that he had committed
several robberies of which he stood accused, but only those occurring
before 1879--mistakenly believing that the statute of limitations would
protect him against prosecution. Bart was convicted and given a six-year
prison sentence in San Quentin Prison, arriving there on Nov. 21, 1883.
Bart served about four years and was released on Jan. 21,
1888. By then he had aged considerably, with one ear gone deaf, his
eyesight failing, his shoulders stooped, and his hair whitened. His spirit
was crushed, and he sought only to escape the newsmen surrounding him when
he stepped from the prison gates. He disappeared and was later thought to
have returned to his bandit ways, especially since another Wells Fargo
stage was robbed on Nov. 14, 1888. The lone bandit left a note that read:
So here I've stood while wind and rain
Have set the trees a'sobbin'
And risked my life for that damned stage
That wasn't worth the robbin'.
Detective Hume examined the note and compared it with the
genuine Black Bart bits of poetry of the past. He declared the new verse a
hoax and the work of another man, declaring that he was certain Black Bart
had permanently retired. This gave rise to the later notion that Wells
Fargo had actually pensioned off the robber on his promise that he would
stop no more of its stages, paying him a handsome annuity until his death,
which was reported in New York newspapers as being sometime in 1917,
although this was never officially confirmed. The last time Detective Jim
Hume heard of Black Bart's whereabouts was sometime in 1900, when he
received a report that the old man had died in the high California
mountains while hunting game.
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