by David Fisher
When fifty-nine-year-old Kit Carson died in May 1868, he had become among the most famous and respected men in the nation.
At the end of the Civil War, Carson was given command of Fort Garland, in the Colorado Territory. It was the proper choice, wrote General John Pope, because “Carson is the best man in the country to control these Indians and prevent war…. He is personally known and liked by every Indian … no man is so certain to insure it as Kit Carson.”
When he finally left the army in 1867, he resumed fighting to protect the Utes, whom he had long embraced as friends. Although his health was failing, he returned to Washington with several chiefs to negotiate a fair treaty, which guaranteed to that tribe peace, territory, and assistance. Carson and the Ute chiefs met with President Grant, and eventually a treaty was signed. Then he went home to be with his wife Josefa and their seven children. It was time for him to rest.
He had become one of the most honored men in American history. More than fifty blood-and-thunder novels had been written about him; Herman Melville compared him to Hercules in his novel Moby-Dick. He had been instrumental in the creation of an America that would eventually reach from ocean to ocean. But now he was suffering. In 1860, in the San Juan Mountains, he had been leading his horse down a steep hill when the animal slipped and fell on him; Carson became entangled in the lead rope and was dragged for some distance. The internal injuries he suffered caused chest pains, a persistent cough, and breathing difficulty, which plagued him for the rest of his life. In April 1868, Josefa died giving birth to his eighth child. Some believe his spirit died with her. Within weeks he was in bed in the quarters of the assistant surgeon general of the army, just outside Fort Lyon, Colorado. He had been diagnosed with a heart aneurysm, an enlargement of an artery, also believed to have been caused by that fall. As a legendary scout, he knew what lay ahead. Several times coughing attacks threatened his life, and the surgeon, H. R. Tilton, saved it by giving him chloroform. He wrote his will and made arrangements for his children. On May 23, almost exactly one month after his wife’s death, Kit Carson smoked his pipe, ate his favorite meal, and lay down. Late in the afternoon, as the doctor read to him, he suddenly called out, “Doctor, compadre. Adios,” and died.
Applying our moral standards to a man who lived in and helped shape a different time in our history is an impossible chore. Perhaps the only conclusion to reach is that by his courage and character he helped create this nation. Upon his death, an army officer who had served with him wrote what is perhaps the most fitting description: “Kit was particular to himself. No such combination ever existed in a man before … he united the courage of a Coeur de Leon, the utmost firmness, the strongest will and the best of common sense. He could weep at the misfortunes or sufferings of a fellow creature, but could punish with strictest rigor a culprit who justly deserved it.”
BLACK BART
Gentleman Bandit
The Wells Fargo & Company stagecoach was rumbling down the rugged Siskiyou Trail in November 1883, making about ten miles an hour. As the stage slowed to begin the steep climb up Funk Hill, not far from the aptly named copper-mining town of Copperopolis, a man dressed in a long white linen duster and a bowler hat, his face covered with a flour sack with holes cut out for his eyes and mouth, similar sacks covering his feet, and holding a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun, stepped out from behind a rock onto the trail. The driver, Reason McConnell, immediately began reining in his team. He knew instantly what was going on: He was being held up by the most famous stagecoach robber in the West, Black Bart.
The robber blocked the coach wheels with rocks to prevent the driver from making a run for it, then ordered McConnell to throw down the strongbox, a big, green, locked wooden box with metal bands around it, which often carried gold or coins from miners. On this trip, the Wells Fargo stage was transporting 228 ounces of silver and mercury amalgam, worth about four thousand dollars, and five hundred dollars in gold dust and coins. McConnell replied that he couldn’t throw down the box because the company had begun bolting it to the floor inside the stage to prevent robberies. Black Bart told the driver to climb down from his seat, then made him unhitch the horses and walk them down the hill. By the time McConnell was several hundred yards down the trail, the robber was hacking at the box with an ax.
What Bart did not know was that McConnell had been carrying a passenger, nineteen-year-old Jimmy Rolleri, whom he had dropped at the bottom of Funk Hill to do some hunting while the stage made the difficult climb. Rolleri was planning to catch up at the other end. McConnell found Rolleri and told him the stage was being robbed. The two men hustled back up to the top of the hill just in time to see the robber Black Bart climbing out of the stage lugging the strongbox. Grabbing Rolleri’s rifle, McConnell began firing. Once! Twice! He missed. Missed again! Bart raced for the thicket. Rolleri reclaimed his rifle and fired into the undergrowth. Twice more. This time, the robber stumbled. He was hit. He regained his footing and disappeared into the thick brush. The two men followed cautiously, knowing an armed and wounded bandit was dangerous. They pursued a trail of bloody droplets until it disappeared. Once again, Black Bart was gone.
But this time he had made a mistake.
Between 1875 and 1883 the mysterious rogue known across the nation as Black Bart, “the Gentleman Bandit,” held up twenty-eight Wells Fargo stagecoaches in northern California. His pattern never varied: He robbed only Wells Fargo coaches, he was always alone, he never fired a shot or made threats, and he always escaped on foot.
When the stagecoach robber Black Bart was finally identified and arrested by detective James B. Hume in 1883, he turned out to be a most unlikely suspect. The story begins in John Sutter’s sawmill, on the south fork of the American River in northern California, when Sutter’s partner, James Marshall, discovered a few flakes of gold. That marked the beginning of the American gold rush, and during the next seven years more than three hundred thousand men caught gold fever and rushed to the area to find their fortunes. Among them was twenty-one-year-old Charles Bowles, who had been born in Norfolk, England, and brought to America as a young child. Bowles and his two brothers had left their home in upstate New York and crossed the continent to pan for gold. At just about the same time, young James Hume and his brother left their home—coincidentally also in upstate New York—carrying with them the same dreams as Bowles. The difference was that Charles Bowles failed completely—and both of his brothers died in the effort—while Hume was able to eke out a living from his claim.
By 1860, Bowles had married and was living on a small farm in Illinois. In 1862, he volunteered with the 116th Illinois Regiment and ended up serving for three years under General William T. Sherman in the March to the Sea. Although many soldiers served in the cavalry, that was not the right assignment for him: “Whistling Charlie,” as he was known, was evidently afraid of horses. He apparently served with valor, seeing action in numerous battles, including the bloody Battle of Vicksburg—where he reportedly was seriously wounded—and by the time he was discharged in 1865 he had risen to the rank of lieutenant.
Like so many other soldiers who came home from the war, he found it difficult to return to life on the farm. In 1862, miners working Grasshopper Creek in Montana made a major strike. At the end of the war, a second gold rush began, and once again Bowles couldn’t resist it. Apparently he set out on foot for the West, covering as many as forty miles a day, walking all the way to Montana. When he finally got there, he staked a claim and began panning along a creek. On occasion he would write letters to his wife, but he eventually stopped writing, and after several months without any contact at all, she concluded that he had died.
That misconception might have marked the beginning of Charles Bowles’s life of grand deception—and retribution. There is much about Bowles that isn’t known, but historians have been able to put together a plausible explanation for his hatred of Wells Fargo & Company. To work his claim in Montana, he built a wooden contraption known as a “tom,” a d
evice able to separate nuggets from rocks and sand. But, as with most forms of panning, it required a steady flow of water. His claim was promising, and eventually two men approached him and offered to buy the property. When he rejected their offer, they purchased the land above him and shut off the flow of water, making his claim worthless. Apparently these men were affiliated in some way with Wells Fargo, which had been buying substantial amounts of land around mining towns. Bowles considered their depriving him of water an act of economic war and set out to get even. One way or another, he was going to get his gold.
James Hume, after earning a decent living, also turned to the world of crime—but he took the side of the law and became a detective. In the early 1860s, he was appointed city marshal and chief of police of Placerville, California, a gold rush settlement better known as Hangtown. At that time, little “detection” actually occurred. It was extremely difficult to connect a person to a crime through the use of evidence: It would be several decades before law enforcement appreciated the value of fingerprints, for example. And photography was a recent invention of little use to detectives. In most cases, witness testimony comprised almost all the evidence.
Under the name Black Bart, Charles Earl Bowles committed twenty-eight stagecoach robberies between 1875 and 1883—without a single person being injured.
But Hume set out to change that. He was among the very first detectives known to carefully explore crime scenes, searching for clues. He dug buckshot out of animals and walls to be used for comparisons. He analyzed footprints. He searched for connections between the smallest pieces of evidence and a suspect. In 1872, his stellar reputation earned him the job of Wells Fargo’s first chief detective. Hume was comfortably settled into his job when the bandit who would become known as Black Bart struck for the first time.
Wells Fargo had been founded in San Francisco in 1852, offering both banking and express services to miners. It used every possible means of transportation—stagecoach, railroad, Pony Express, and steamship—to carry property, mail, and money in its many forms across the West, and by 1866 its stagecoaches covered more than three thousand miles from California to Nebraska. Their famous green strongboxes, usually carried under the driver’s seat, weighed as much as 150 pounds and often held thousands of dollars’ worth of gold dust, gold bars, gold coins, checks, drafts, and currency. The long, hard, and isolated trails these coaches traveled made them desirable prey for bandits. In 1874, the Jesse James Gang committed its first stagecoach robbery, getting away with more than three thousand dollars in gold, cash, and jewels, a fortune at that time.
The legend of Black Bart began at the summit on Funk Hill on July 26, 1875, when a man stepped out from behind some rocks and ordered driver John Shine to halt. The bandit was dressed in a linen coat, had a bowler on his head, and, Shine noticed, wore rags on his feet to obscure his footprints. When the coach stopped, the robber shouted loudly to other members of his gang, “If he dares shoot give him a solid volley, boys!” Looking around, Shine saw what appeared to be the long barrels of six rifles pointing at him from behind nearby boulders. Shine didn’t argue; he tossed down the strongbox, which contained about two hundred dollars—the equivalent of about four thousand dollars today—and warned his ten passengers to stay quiet. According to the legend, one panicked woman threw her purse out the window, but rather than taking it, the bandit handed it back to her, explaining, “Madam, I do not wish to take your money. In that respect I honor only the good office of Wells Fargo.”
Black Bart sent the coach on its way. The last time Shine saw him, he was on the ground, breaking the chest open. The driver stopped his coach at the bottom of the hill and walked back to retrieve the broken box. The robber was gone without a trace—but Shine was shocked to see that the rest of his gang hadn’t moved from their positions behind the rocks. Curious, he moved closer and discovered that the “rifles” were actually sticks that had been placed there.
With the proceeds from this robbery, Charles Bowles settled in San Francisco, where he lived under the name Charles Bolton. It was the perfect disguise: He was hiding in plain sight, enjoying the life of a city gentleman. He lived in grand hotels, dined daily at fine restaurants, and dressed to fit the role. Perfectly groomed, he carried a short cane and favored diamonds in his lapel. He was welcome among the swells of the city. When asked, he described himself as a mining engineer, a profession that required him to take frequent business trips.
No one ever figured out that each of those trips coincided with another stagecoach robbery. In fact, there was not a lot of sympathy for Wells Fargo. Many people believed it was just another big company taking advantage of hardworking people. Some stagecoach robbers were glamorized; they were seen as brave bandits robbing the rich and … well, robbing the rich.
Bowles often waited months before staging another heist. Later he claimed that he stole only “what was needed when it was needed.” Those robberies took careful planning: Because he was afraid of horses, he couldn’t ride, so he had to walk to the scene and then walk away after the job was done. The robberies almost always took place on the uphill side of a mountain, because the horses had to slow to pull the load. And although no one knew it at the time, the rifle he carried was old and rusted and probably wouldn’t have fired even if he had loaded it, which he did not.
Black Bart’s success in robbing Wells Fargo stagecoaches eventually led the company to offer a reward—and when that failed, the company hired private detective Harry Morse, “the Bloodhound of the West,” to track down the bandit.
The second robbery took place more than five months after the holdup on Funk Hill. Once again, the driver reported a lone holdup man, with three armed accomplices hiding among the rocks. When investigators arrived at the scene, they found the sticks still in position.
Almost eighteen months passed before Bowles’s next crime. In the interim, he had accepted a teaching position in Sierra County. At that time the school year was only about three months long, and that job probably provided an acceptable diversion for him. Supposedly he was well liked by his students; he was known for reciting poetry and quoting Shakespeare, especially Henry V.
When not robbing stages, Bowles lived as a socialite in San Francisco.
At first, Detective Hume was so busy with other matters that he took little notice of these sporadic holdups. But that changed after Black Bart’s fourth crime, on October 2, 1878. His method hadn’t changed, but for the first time he left a clue. Investigators found a poem in the broken strongbox:
I’ve labored long and hard for bread,
For honor and for riches
But on my corns too long you’ve tread
You fine-haired sons-of-bitches
It was signed Black Bart, the P o 8.
A day later another stage was robbed. Once again a poem was left at the scene:
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
Once again, it was signed Black Bart, the P o 8.
The audacity of the robber who left poems at the scene quickly attracted the attention of newspaper editors and dime novelists, and Black Bart, the Gentleman Bandit, captured the fancy of the American public. All this publicity naturally brought him to the attention of James Hume. Wells Fargo’s analysis of the handwriting suggested a man who had long been employed in clerical work. An eight-hundred-dollar reward was posted for information leading to his capture, and detectives confidently announced he would soon be brought to justice. But the robberies continued without indication that detectives were closing in.
In 1880, Hume finally made an arrest in the case, but it was quickly discovered that the man they arrested actually had the perfect alibi—he had been in prison when several of
the robberies occurred.
The fact that Black Bart left his own poems, signed “the P o 8,” at the scenes of his crimes attracted national attention—although his reason for doing so was never determined.
In fact, no one had the slightest idea why this bandit left poems at these crime scenes, nor why had decided to call himself Black Bart, nor even what his signature, “the P o 8,” meant. Only years later was it revealed that the name had been taken from a dime novel published in 1871 entitled The Case of Summerfield. The book, which had been reprinted in the Sacramento Union soon after its initial publication, featured a robber named Black Bart, a villain who dressed all in black, had long, wild, black hair, and robbed Wells Fargo stagecoaches. Supposedly the story was based on the true exploits of Captain Henry Ingraham’s Raiders, a group of Confederate soldiers who robbed Wells Fargo’s Placerville stage of as much as twenty thousand dollars to purchase uniforms for new recruits—and left a receipt for the theft. There is some evidence that James Hume was involved in tracking down those soldiers and arresting them. If it was true that Hume was involved in that case, then Bowles might have picked that name to taunt him: You caught them but you can’t catch me.
Bowles never revealed the meaning of his signature, “the P o 8.” Some historians believe it meant simply “the poet,” honoring Bowles’s love of poetry, while others suggest it referred to “pieces of eight,” meaning booty taken by pirates, and was meant to honor the greatest pirate of the Caribbean, Bartholomew “Black Bart” Roberts, who captured more than four hundred ships before being killed in battle.