Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  After about four months at the paper Charley, now fourteen, became, as he put it, “restless.” Early one autumn morning he went down to the Randolph train station and slipped into a boxcar on a train heading north. In Omaha, Nebraska, he spent several fruitless days looking for work in stockyards and meatpacking plants before climbing aboard another boxcar and “beating” his way eastward, living by begging and doing odd jobs. It was not until he reached Chicago that he finally got a real job, on a Great Lakes steamer. During the seven days it took the steamer to reach Buffalo, New York, Charley made $3.50—enough to pay for a train ticket to Rochester, where his sister, Carrie, was living with a minister’s family.

  He stayed in Rochester longer than he was ever to stay anyplace else—except prison—after leaving the Booths. Through the influence of Carrie’s foster father, he got a job as a galley boy on the Rochester Advertiser. This was the best job he had ever had, and it was not long before he had earned enough money to buy himself (at last!) a new suit of clothes. But after eight months he apparently got “restless” again and decided to visit his “uncle” in New York City, whom he hoped would give him an advance on his inheritance and help him find a new job.

  This visit must have been very strange for Charley, if for no other reason than that, according to an article in the Daily Leader, the “uncle” was still operating the Miller family’s bar and living in the very same upstairs apartment where Charley had been born and where both of his parents had died. The article said nothing about how Charley felt being back in his old home and meeting this only dimly familiar man. In court testimony, all Charley himself had to say about the visit was that his “uncle” told him that he was not, in fact, a blood relative, and that he did not consider himself under obligation to help any of the Miller children until they had turned twenty-one. On June 17,1890, Charley went to the office of the CAS but was only told to go see a Mr. Sherman at the New York Orphan Asylum. Whether he actually made the visit, or got any help from Mr. Sherman, is not known.

  Two weeks after his arrival in New York Charley was riding the rails again, this time in the company of a young printer who had told him about an ad for temporary typesetters placed by a shop in Orange, New Jersey. Charley and the printer were hired by the shop and each earned $4.50 for three days’ work. When that job was finished, they were told that there were openings for printers in Philadelphia—but all Charley and his friend found there was trouble. No sooner had they hopped out of their boxcar than they were arrested for nonpayment of fare and thrown into an adult prison.

  Six weeks later, on August 11, 1890, Charley and his friend were released onto the streets of Philadelphia. They had each earned a couple of dollars boring holes in rocks while in prison, but they had no friends in town, no place to stay, and no job prospects. Eventually they found their way to a bar, where Charley’s friend got so drunk that he picked a fight with a policeman and was promptly thrown back into jail. Alone again, and deciding that he had had enough of the City of Brotherly Love, Charley took his chances by “stealing” a ride on a train heading west. He spent the next month begging, doing odd jobs, and riding the rails. He arrived in Kansas City, Kansas, on September 10, 1890—three days before his fifteenth birthday.

  This was all Charley had to tell the court about his stay in Kansas City: “I was there about a week. I got a job in a hotel washing dishes, but I was too slow so I lost that job after only one day. I couldn’t find any other work, so I left.” No word about his birthday. No word about why, with a whole country open to him, he had ended up within one hundred miles of his brothers on so emotionally freighted an occasion. No word about why he never journeyed that last one hundred miles. And, perhaps most significantly, no word about the fact that he had just spent a year traveling some 4,000 miles only to wind up almost exactly where he had started—except that he had no job and no money and had rejected or been rejected by every person in the country who might have offered him help. For Charley, Kansas City was just a place where he had gotten and lost a job in a single day and had not been able to find any other work. End of story.

  Or not quite. Under further questioning, he did provide the court with two additional details. First, it was during his stay in Kansas City that he started calling himself “Kansas Charley”—the moniker that, like other bums, he would scrawl onto the sides of water towers as he drifted from town to town during his remaining month of freedom. And second, the day before he left the city he went to a pawn shop and bought a nickel-plated, thirty-two-caliber pistol for $1.25.

  Having reached the end of the line in Kansas City, Charley seems to have felt he had no better option than to start his journey all over again. So early one morning he went down to the rail yards and caught the first train north to Omaha. The train traveled a pleasant route through Cottonwood groves and along grassy bluffs overlooking the Missouri River—a route that took him through Saint Joseph, Missouri, some two or three days before his future victims were to make their departure. In Omaha he went a second time to talk to the meatpackers, men with blood-soaked clothes and knives in their hands who worked in barns that stank of fat and flesh and feces, but he fared no better than on his first trip. Returning to the rail yards, he heard from a fellow tramp that there was work on Gleason’s ranch, near Cheyenne, Wyoming. So, on the morning of September 23, the day after Emerson and Fishbaugh left their hometown to seek their fortune, Charley climbed aboard a boxcar heading west along the Platte River valley.

  He did not run into the two young men until Julesburg, Colorado, where they all spent the night in the same hobo camp and boarded the same train at dawn, but rode in separate boxcars. At a fairgrounds just outside Sydney, Nebraska, a conductor threw all three tramps off the train, and they walked back into town together. Once in town, however, Emerson and Fishbaugh told Charley that they did not want to be seen with him because he was so raggedly dressed. Going off on his own, he found work carrying coal for a baker, who paid him with a pie and some bread.

  After leaving the baker’s shop, Charley wandered down Sydney’s main street, looking for a place to savor the fruits of his labor, and came upon Emerson and Fishbaugh standing on a corner. They asked him what he was carrying in his paper bag. When he held it out to them, they took the pie and left him the bread. In court Charley testified that the two friends had been drinking and carried a gun. After they finished their meal, they told him to wait on the corner while they went off, hinting that they had important business to attend to. A short while later, when he saw a blue-coated man running down the street, he assumed that they had been arrested.

  Around dusk Charley spotted a freight train about to pull out of town. He climbed on board a stock car, buried himself in hay, and fell asleep before the car was moving. When the train stopped at dawn in a town near the Wyoming border, Charley decided that he had had enough of the smell of cow excrement. He gathered an armful of hay and moved down to the nearest boxcar. Throwing the hay through the door, he grabbed on to the floorboards and hauled himself inside. He was still belly-down, with his legs sticking out of the car when he heard a voice: “Hello, kid.” Looking up, Charley found himself lying at the feet of Ross Fishbaugh.

  Here we enter a realm of almost pure speculation. Charley said in court that as soon as he got into the car he put his pile of straw in the corner, lay down upon it, and pretended to go to sleep. When asked how long he was with Emerson and Fishbaugh before the shooting, he said, “I don’t know. Five minutes. I did it right after the train started moving again. I waited until I knew they were asleep.” But a Mrs. Kaufman testified at the trial that Emerson and Fishbaugh had eaten breakfast in her hotel in Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, some three hours after Charley got into the boxcar. The coroner who examined both bodies in Cheyenne concurred that they had probably been shot after the train pulled out of Pine Bluffs.

  Charley’s motives were also decidedly unclear. He said in court that he was afraid of Emerson and Fishbaugh because of the way they had treated him in Sydney,
and because he knew they had a gun. He also admitted to robbing them right after the killing. But when the defense attorney asked him what he had been thinking when he fired the two shots (this being one of the very few times Charley was ever asked about his feelings), he said only: “I thought I was far away from my folks, and wanted to get back, and didn’t know how; and I was all ragged, and cold weather was coming on, and [I had] nothing to eat, and no money and I didn’t know what to do.”

  That is all that is known about the killing, except that the two young men probably had been asleep. They were both barefoot when Manafield found them, and their shoes were resting side by side in the middle of the boxcar floor.

  By contrast to his account of the murders, Charley was extremely forthcoming about the robbery, admitting that once he had shot both men, he went through Emerson’s pockets first, taking his silver watch, knife, and revolver, and left his own revolver beside Emerson’s head—although he did not say why. Then, while Fishbaugh writhed and “foamed at the mouth,” Charley also went through his pockets, extracting forty-five dollars in paper money and two silver dollars.

  Charley stayed on the train with his victims another two hours (or six—depending on whose account we accept) until Hillsdale, where he got off, had his distracted lunch with Engineer Brooks, and bought his ticket for the next passenger train to Cheyenne. While waiting for the train, he threw Emerson’s gun and knife underneath the railroad platform. On reaching Cheyenne, Charley spent the night at the home of a young man he met at a saloon. In the morning it is more than likely that he picked up a copy of the Cheyenne Daily Leader and found the following headline on page three:

  A BULLET IN EACH BRAIN

  The Awful Fate of Two Young Men

  Who Were Tramping

  If Charley finished the article, he would have read about how the bodies had been discovered, and about Fishbaugh’s prolonged suffering. He also would have read various theories about how the two young men had met their death. The one propounded at greatest length was that Emerson had been toying with his revolver, which, because he was “fresh from a town where the most exaggerated ideas of the land of the Rockies prevail,” he naturally considered “the most important portion of their equipment.” When the gun accidentally went off, killing Fishbaugh, Emerson put a bullet in his own temple out of remorse and despair. A second theory was that a quarrel had led to a murder-suicide. But the theory that seemed to have the strongest support was that the boys had been killed by a robber.

  Without even taking the time to buy breakfast, Charley walked straight out of town that morning, heading south. Some miles out in the country, he met a shepherd with whom he traveled for four days—stopping along the way to spend his stolen money on a new hat and gloves, into which he scratched his moniker, “Kansas Charley.” Parting from the shepherd in Grover, Colorado, he threw Emerson’s watch into a gopher hole and caught a train to Manhattan, Kansas.

  On October 6, just before closing-up time, Fred Miller was sweeping dust out the front door of the Leonardsville Monitor office when he saw his little brother walking down the street in a ripped-up jacket and a brand-new brown hat with a shiny black band. Fred was so astonished that he could not speak until Charley had drawn up right beside him and said, as if they had only seen each other yesterday, “Hello, Fred.”

  It was several days before Charley finally confessed the secret that had been weighing on his mind, and several more before the two boys finally made their journey to the office of the Manhattan Republic.

  Only after Charley had finished his story did Albert Stewart send for the Manhattan sheriff. Charley spent the night in jail, and the following afternoon was interrogated by Sheriff John Martin, who came down from Cheyenne. On their return to Cheyenne a day later, Martin and a team of deputies had to shove their way through a jeering crowd to get Charley from the train station to the county jail. Journalists lined up outside Charley’s cell. Others shouted questions to him through jail windows. Newspapers across the country carried stories about the “boy murderer”—and it was by this epithet, rather than “Kansas Charley,” that he would be known until the day he died.

  Charley’s trial commenced less than two months later, at nine in the morning on December 8,1890. At noon on December 11, after a scant fifteen minutes of deliberation, the jury found him guilty in the first degree of both murders. At a separate hearing a few days later he was sentenced to death by hanging.

  Charley’s lawyer, Frank D. Taggart, had hoped to get him off on the grounds of insanity and at one point during the trial tried to imply that Charley’s habit of masturbating as often as four times a day had so deprived him of his sanity that he could not tell right from wrong. The prosecuting attorney, a prominent local lawyer named W. R. Stoll, argued that “no case can be produced in any medical book written, or by any man posted upon the subject of insanity showing that a practice of that kind leads to homicide.” And the experts called in the case—both local physicians—testified that while Charley might be a little “eccentric” and possibly “slow” (although other witnesses thought him “exceptionally shrewd”), he had never been unable to distinguish between “right” and “wrong” and so had never been criminally insane.

  Taggart’s backup strategy had been to try for conviction on the lesser charge of second-degree murder, on the grounds that the double murder had been impulsive rather than premeditated—an act of extreme desperation and fear. But this defense fell apart when Mrs. Kaufman and the coroner made it seem that Charley had lied under oath about when he committed the murders.

  It was the three hours or more that elapsed between the time Charley boarded the boxcar and the train departed from Pine Bluffs that, when combined with the robbery, caused the jury to conclude that he had premeditated the murders and therefore deserved the first-degree conviction. His apparent lie on the witness stand did not, of course, help him with the jury or anyone else. It was referred to again and again, along with other more minor inconsistencies in his story, by the newspapers and in the decisions of the appeals court judges as evidence that Charley was a “hardened criminal.”

  Charley escaped from prison twice, both times simply taking advantage of jailbreaks engineered by other inmates. After his first escape, all he did was wander eastward down the Union Pacific railroad tracks until he came upon two tramps sitting by a campfire in a field outside of Hillsdale—the town where he had gotten off the train after the killings. As he sat beside the fire, sharing the tramps’ breakfast, he confessed with apparent pride that he was the famous “boy murderer” Charley Miller. Later that morning, when the tramps were themselves arrested a couple of miles down the track, they told the police that they had left Charley sleeping in a haystack. One of the police told reporters later on that he was in “great anxiety” as he approached the hiding place of the dreaded killer, and so was astonished when, at the sound of their footsteps, Charley rolled out of the stack and held his hands out to be cuffed, saying matter-of-factly, “I guess you’re looking for me.” After only forty-eight hours of freedom, Charley returned to prison on the exact anniversary of the shooting of Emerson and Fishbaugh.

  His second escape was in the company of a notorious cattle rustler named William Kingen, whom newspapers held to be a far more nefarious criminal than Charley, even though he had never killed anyone. Having been smuggled a gun by his lawyer, Kingen overpowered the jail’s only guard on New Year’s Eve, took his keys, and let Charley and a black man named Johnson out of neighboring cells. Under cover of darkness, Kingen led Charley and Johnson across the open prairie, avoiding all population centers and railroad tracks. His plan was to meet up with his gang at a remote barn some twenty miles from Cheyenne. But despite his six-foot-four stature and reputation for enormous physical strength, Kingen proved to be far less fit and resistant to the subfreezing weather than either Charley or Johnson. He could hardly go a mile without having to stop and rest for long minutes. The three escapees were supposed to arrive at the barn by the a
fternoon of New Year’s Day, but thanks to Kingen’s sluggish progress, they did not reach their destination until nearly dawn of the following morning, by which time the gang members had given up and fled to Nebraska.

  The weather was getting worse and worse. The three men knew that they would freeze to death if they remained at the barn, so they set out again, hoping to make it across the Nebraska line to the ranch of one of Kingen’s friends. But as they progressed across the windy, vacant prairie, Kingen’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Soon he could not go more than a couple of hundred yards without having to sit down on the frozen earth and rest. Finally, when they were about five miles from the barn, he fell to his knees and said he could not go any further. Johnson, who had been the most fit of the trio, maintained that Kingen was a “goner” no matter what happened, so there was no reason why he and Charley should stick around and die with him. Kingen’s only response to this eminently rational assertion was to draw Charley down beside him, place a five-dollar bill into the palm of his hand, and say, “Stick with me. I’ll see you through.” For reasons that Charley never confessed to anyone, he decided to cast his lot with the ailing, white cattle rustler and let Johnson walk off by himself.

  Once they were alone, Charley and Kingen huddled together in a slight depression, which offered them protection from the wind’s full ferocity, and soon fell into a deep sleep. Charley awoke in the night to hear Kingen groaning with pain. Awaking again at dawn, Charley found that Kingen was dead and that his own feet and legs were completely numb. When a rancher came upon the two men a couple of hours later, Kingen was frozen solid and Charley was unconscious.

  Charley lingered on the point of death for some hours but was finally revived and returned to prison with severely frostbitten feet. A month later his appeal was heard and denied by the state supreme court, and he was sentenced to die by hanging in just slightly over two months’ time, on April 22,1892.