If the mystery women had so far failed to appear, plenty of others had flocked to Butternut Street to see the famous outlaw. Perry's reactions to being expected to 'perform' ranged from angry resistance to charm. When men were allowed into the cellblock to see him, he often turned his face to the wall or covered his face, telling Sheriff Thornton that for all he knew they might be Pinkerton detectives. He was much happier to see the dozens of female visitors, both young and old, many of whom brought gifts of books, flowers, fruit, candies and other treats.
Among them was Mrs Goetzman who had apparently forgiven him for taking her favourite mare. While plenty of men expressed a grudging admiration for his daring, something made women in particular take to the young robber. Perhaps it was his looks and daredevilry, or the boyish charm that seemed to enrage the detectives. Whatever the attraction, here was a young man in trouble, a captive prodigal son who seemed to have no lover or mother ready to comfort him.
Not everyone approved. The Reverend Dr Ostrander, a local Presbyterian minister, roundly condemned the women of Lyons in his sermon for their wicked folly in gratifying the vanity of a criminal, and some reporters took their chance to reprimand the fairer sex whose appetite for news of Perry they kept feeding. One paper censoriously announced: 'Flowers for Perry: Woman's
Disapproving clerics and hypocritical reporters did little to stem public enthusiasm for Perry. While their parents could visit the jail, the local children busied themselves taking turns to play the robber or the lawman in noisy re-enactments. Or, as Theo dore Harry Fries remembered, they crowded the sidewalk outside Ed Walter's second-hand store. There, in the window, was a large crayon drawing of the scene of Perry's capture, showing the robber at bay behind the brick wall, brandishing his guns. To the nine-year-old and his friends, the picture was as good as the movies would be to their own children, and Perry was a real-life hero and villain rolled into one.
CHAPTER 5
'I lived a wild life . . .'
I N THE weeks when everyone waited for the trial that would decide Oliver Perry's future the young robber started to reveal more about his past. In his cell in Lyons, smoking cigars provided by grateful reporters, he began spinning together fantasy and reality in stories that would enthral an eager public who wanted to know everything about Oliver Perry.
Shortly after Perry's arrest, his father had claimed that he and his son were related to Oliver Hazard Perry, naval hero of the War of Independence, and to August Belmont, the influential New York financier. For many, this was final confirmation that Oliver Curtis Perry was no ordinary thief. He already had good looks, intelligence, daring and a kind heart, if the rumours of gifts to the needy were to be believed. Now he had an illustrious lineage. But while his father was certainly named after Commodore Perry, the kinship, if any, was distant. Yet if Perry's lineage was not as illustrious as his father asserted, his life, according to his own stories, was as dramatic as his crimes.
Few of these 'revelations', some of which were undoubtedly inventions, can be verified now, without reliable records to distinguish fact from fiction. But they fascinated press and public alike, building a mythology around Perry that tapped into the fantasies of his age: of a Wild West that was swiftly being tamed, of Mexico, a land of passionate rebels and sensual delights, and of the fateful act that propelled an ordinary working man out of his unrewarding daily grind into the world of wealth. Perry evidently shared, and lived, some of these dreams. But he also knew their power.
Amidst the exaggerations and the fantasies were the bare bones of the story of a short but dramatic life. Perry described a boy from upstate New York who ran away to start a new life out west, as a ranch hand and cowboy. He said almost nothing about his childhood and gave few details of his western days, saying simply, 'It was a wild life and entering heartily into it I became wild and reckless.' Years later he would describe turning to crime with a gang of 'mates' in Texas and Nebraska, and hint that he had learned to rob trains in the west. But in 1892 he would only say that two or three years earlier he had tired of his wild life and decided to 'reform'.
In the hope of living a respectable life he returned to New York. There the wanderer settled in the city of Troy. One day he was encouraged by acquaintances to attend a prayer meeting at the Helping Hand mission, run by Miss Amelia Haswell, the woman who infuriated detectives by destroying Perry's photographs when he was on the run.
Amelia Haswell.
Amelia Haswell took a shine to him and he gradually trusted her enough to tell her about his troubled past and even began to call her 'Mother', the name inscribed on the photograph of her he carried in his valise. Convinced that he deserved a second chance, she helped him to get a job with a local railroad company, the Fitchburg, and even let him stay with her while he looked for lodgings. Perry started work as a brakeman, a dangerous job that involved running along the tops of cars on moving trains in order to reach the brakes between them. Later this skill would be a key to his daring robberies. But his church friends in Troy saw no signs of his future fall from grace. He made no secret of his 'sinful youth, they said, but seemed to be genuinely trying to reform: he did not drink, would not tolerate swearing, joined the Railroad Young Men's Christian Association, and even asked to be excused from work on Sundays in order to attend services. He also showed early signs of his ability as a charismatic speaker to entertain and persuade an audience. Then he had been in demand at mission meetings, exhorting sinners to repent, while later he would charm the hardened men of the New York press and through them a growing band of supporters.'
The Trojans were not the only ones to be convinced of Perry's
sincerity. The Fitchburg line ran between Troy and North Adams in Massachusetts, through the newly built Hoosick tunnel. As a railroad worker, Perry lodged at both ends of the line and made a similar impression in both places. His North Adams landlady, Mrs Sutton, told the press that Perry was no trouble, and that another lodger, a young lady, had often played the organ and sung for him. He had given no hint of his criminal past, but his musical tastes might have offered a clue. His reading matter, Mrs Sutton recalled, was invariably devout, including a book, inscribed as a gift from Amelia Haswell, called Precious Hymns for Times of Refreshing and Revival. But his favourite song had been 'Seven Long Years I've Been in Prison'.
After about a year as a brakeman, Perry was seriously injured in an accident on the railroad. He was running along the top of a train when it entered the Hoosick tunnel and he was knocked on to the tracks, seriously injuring his back and fracturing his skull. When he was eventually discharged after a long stay in hospital, he was penniless and unemployed. Few jobs were held for injured employees and he received no sick pay. His church friends used their influence once again to find him a job, this time a less hazardous position on the New York Central passenger service between Albany and Syracuse, working inside the trains rather than on top of them. This meant a move to Albany, the state capital, where he worked until early May 1891 when he was given ten days' leave of absence for medical reasons. But at the end of that time, instead of returning to work, he handed in his notice and disappeared for some months. He never explained how or where he spent the summer months, but in mid-September he started work on the Central once more. Two weeks later he robbed the American Express Special.
Perry's explanations of his motivation in committing his first train robbery are an intriguing mixture of fact and fabulation. The immediate catalyst, he said, was a run-in with his trainmaster who had reprimanded him for a minor infringement of the company's uniform regulations. While being told off, he had, he said, experienced 'a feeling of rebellion which I was unable to overcome'. Clearly, being forced to conform and being rebuked by someone in authority had triggered more than normal levels of resentment. The young man who had lived a wild life out west was feeling increasingly trapped and exploited in the regulated world of the industrial east.
For a while he brooded on his situation, then saw a way of escaping it. 'As
I stood there thinking I saw the express boxes being loaded upon the train and I thought of the wealth in those safes in the express car. I knew that my position meant drudgery and hard work for small pay all my life. I resolved to do something desperate, and naturally the safes in the express car were the first objects of my ambition.'
His resentment about his apparent lot in life may have been fuelled by a new influence. Amelia Haswell, who insisted on the sincerity of Perry's attempt to live a good Christian life up to that point, believed that he had been led astray in Albany by someone she called an 'Ingersoll man'. Robert Ingersoll was a free thinker whose radical views of subjects from equality to prison reform and atheism were popular with those campaigning against social and economic exploitation. As Perry's hostility towards the Pinkertons who had broken the Fitchburg strike had revealed, he held some views that might have been seen as radical. He told one reporter, 'When going through the country I used to compare my condition with that of the rich. . . . Remember, I didn't plunder from those who couldn't afford to be despoiled. Look on these hands. They are hard with honest toil and I would wear them to the bones at work before I would inflict a loss on anyone unable to sustain it. But I thought the American Express Company could sustain a little plucking and I set about it.'
Perry certainly resented being exploited but he was also quite capable of using the rhetoric of oppression to win public sympathy, and his claim not to have robbed the poor was at best naive. It is, as ever in his interviews, hard to distinguish between truth and invention. Later he hinted that there had been another, far more personal, catalyst for his first train robbery.
'I wanted to settle down. I wanted to make a home. Of course, I had a reason for wanting to make that home. I wanted it to be as good as the homes I saw. I thought a great deal about it. I'd knocked about the world a good bit. I'd been earning my own living since I was eleven years old. I had never had a home of my own. I had never married, and I did not mean to marry until I thought I could make such a home as I'd thought about. I believed - I had reason to believe - that I should have the companion I wanted. I intended to go West and settle down and have a home. I intended to live a straight life and be an honest man. I'd been a wild boy, but I had come to the time when I was a man, when I would look my life over and think what I was going to make of it.' Realizing, he said, that an ordinary job would never pay enough, 'I thought this all over, and I saw the only way was a bold stroke, with big chances.' Tellingly, given his positively dangerous level of confidence, he added, 'I believed I was clever enough not to be found out.'
Perry only hinted at a romantic twist in his tale, and was always guarded in his references to it, but Amelia Haswell made it explicit. Towards the end of his time in the west, she said, he had worked for a time on a ranch in New Mexico where he had fallen in love with his employer's daughter and she with him. The young couple had gone riding together in his free hours and met in secret until her father found out, dismissed Perry and sent her away. Perry had resolved to prove he could be respectable and buy a decent home for them both. So he had moved back to New York, hoping to return for her when he had made enough money. According to Amelia Haswell, he 'could never speak of the girl without becoming nervous, and the tears would come into his eyes'.
But everything went wrong. Perry had already become disillusioned with the slow, small rewards of honest work when, sometime before the fall of 1891, he discovered that his 'sweetheart' was gravely ill and possibly dying. This, his friend assumed, was the reason for his leaving Albany in the summer months. In the early fall, Amelia Haswell received a letter from Perry that claimed he was enduring 'the greatest sorrow of my life' and was 'tempted almost beyond endurance'. She had been away on vacation when the letter arrived and by the time she had a chance to reply, her good counsel came too late. It was Perry's desperation to help his girl, Amelia Haswell believed, that made him take the greatest risk of his life and rob the express. Already convinced that he would never earn enough money honestly to match the gilded palaces of New York's robber barons, he now feared he would never be able to provide a modest home for his sweetheart. So he turned his railroading skills to his own, criminal, advantage. Then, evading capture in Utica, he made his way west, only to find that he was too late. His sweetheart had already died.
Perry told his own story of what happened next. 'I had the greatest disappointment a man can have. . . . So I never made that home and I never settled down. I was reckless then. The money was no good to me. I lived a wild life and I gambled the most of it away. I did not care what became of me, that is the truth.' A passing remark, possibly designed to test his audience's credulity, and certainly mischievous, led to a totally untrue story that Perry had tried to join up with the famous Mexican revolutionary Catarino Garza, struggling to overthrow the tyrannical President.
He certainly spent time in the border country where Garza fought, and then in Mexico, a country he loved: 'it is beautiful there - always summer . . . Everyone went promenading in the evening and there were bands of music and something going on all the time.' But Perry denied any involvement with Garza and talked instead about losing himself in his reckless life after the robbery and his sweetheart's death.
He insisted that he had never been a drinker, but admitted to having taken opium. His main diversion and vice, predictably in the light of his crimes, was gambling. Then, as Christmas approached, he decided to return to Troy. He was taking quite a risk, going back to one of the places where he was well known and where his friends were still being watched by the police and detectives. But it seems that Perry was tired of drifting, even in fine clothes, and wanted to see his 'Mother'.
On 22 December 1891 he turned up at Amelia Haswell's house and confessed the truth about his involvement in the robbery to her. She tried to persuade him to hand himself in, but he was afraid that his past record and the determination of American Express and the Pinkertons to make an example of him would guarantee a lengthy sentence in prison. He was particularly worried that he would end up in Clinton, the daunting institution in the far north-east of the state, known as 'Little Siberia'. In the end, he gave Amelia the jewellery to return to American Express, which she did, through a lawyer friend, and moved on.
If Amelia Haswell knew where he had gone, she said nothing. Her loyalty to Perry was extraordinary. She had not only destroyed her photographs of him when he was a wanted man, but had even called at the photographer's to ask that the glass negative be destroyed. In response, the detectives had her mail intercepted and kept her under almost constant surveillance from the first robbery and even while Perry was awaiting trial.
Perry spent the next two months in Canada, where he posted the letter exonerating Messenger Moore, and, sometime before the end of February, went to stay in Syracuse where he visited his family. There he decided on the biggest gamble of his life: robbing the American Express Special a second time. While he tried to explain the motivation for the first robbery at some length, Perry admitted that he committed the second on 'impulse', and to make money because 'I had lived a life that brought expensive tastes and unfitted me to go back to earning $2 a day.' As a wanted man, he must have had a stark choice: turn himself in and face a long prison sentence or live as an outlaw indefinitely. He clearly dreaded prison, so surrender was unthinkable. To live on the run cost money, to live even half-decently cost a great deal. Another robbery was the only solution, and why not try to repeat a success?
Perry's stories of his life up to the recent robbery made sensational reading in 1892 and throughout his life. Some parts were undoubtedly exaggerated, others made up. Over a century later it is not easy to establish the whole truth. Neither he nor Amelia Haswell ever named his doomed sweetheart and there is no documentary proof that she ever existed. But what respectable family would acknowledge that their daughter had planned to elope with a ranch hand, let alone one who became a notorious robber? The Pinkertons reported that Perry, as a man with a criminal record known to the eager agents, had
been followed from Deming, New Mexico to Flagstaff and Tucson in Arizona in the summer of 1891, before the first robbery, and was seen in El Paso, Texas on 28 November, shortly afterwards. Was he just meeting up with old mates from his wilder days or was he travelling to find his sweetheart? There was one tangible clue to support the story: the photograph of the young girl, with the lock of dark hair wound around it, in Perry's wallet. Amelia Haswell said that both belonged to his sweetheart and had been carried by Perry since their meeting. She may have been naive and the story certainly sounds like a romantic cliche designed to win sympathy, but it is possible to be too cynical. Some romances are true.
The stories of Perry's crimes, his tragic romance and shattered dreams made him an ever more appealing figure. Men and boys could imagine his wild cowboy days, as industrialization made the frontier seem more like a myth every day. Radicals and reformers could identify with the working man who had finally snapped under the weight of social and economic injustice. Romantics could feel for the sensitive but proud man, torn between right and wrong as he fought to build a life with the woman he loved. The man shackled in the Lyons cell was, if anything, even more alluring now than he had been as a handsome fugitive.
There were, of course, exceptions to the general enthusiasm, such as an anonymous letter sent to praise Deputy Collins and denounce Perry: 'I say most emphatically that if the Ladies will go to see this inhuman Toad, let them carry the Cross Bones and exhibit them, and for Dessert, paris green puddings, with strychnine flavoring, and to save the great vigilance of Watchmen, spike both feet solid to the floor, strip him naked, pack him in solid ice, smash of the hand he shot Mclnnery [sic] with, give him chop sticks in the other hand to eat with, shut out all light from his cell, and to add to the darkness shut the Nigger in with him, with a double barrelled shot gun, in this way you may rid yourselves of both.'
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