Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies (14 page)

It probably isn’t accurate to claim that Hume pursued Black Bart with the same diligence and ferocity with which Victor Hugo’s classic Inspector Javert hunted for Jean Valjean, but his pursuit lasted more than eight years. Hume was head of investigations for a large company and responsible for solving many cases, but clearly this was the big one. From his investigations he began to develop a theory that was considered radical at the time—criminals will often return to the scene of their crimes. This was especially true of Black Bart, who required a specific set of circumstances for his crimes to succeed: Because he was on foot, he couldn’t pursue a stage, so he needed a secluded place where the stage was already moving slowly and thick foliage nearby through which he could make his escape without fear of pursuit. There were only a limited number of such locations, which made Hume believe he was destined to use the same site more than once.

And indeed, Black Bart’s end came in the place where he had begun, the summit of Funk Hill. On November 3, 1883, driver Reason McConnell and Jimmy Rolleri pegged four shots at the bandit. Although the first three shots missed, the fourth shot nicked Bowles’s hand. The robber ran about a quarter of a mile, then stopped and wrapped a handkerchief around his knuckles to stem the bleeding. He hid the four thousand dollars he’d grabbed in a rotten log and kept the five hundred dollars in coins, put his rifle inside a hollow tree, and made his walkaway. He covered the hundred miles back to the city in three days, then went by train to Reno to lie low for several more.

Hume and Morse rode to the scene of the crime as quickly as their horses would take them. The driver McConnell was certain he’d hit the robber; he’d heard him yelping. The two detectives carefully searched the entire area and eventually found several items that had been left behind in haste, including a derby hat, size 7¼; a tin of supplies, including sugar, coffee, and crackers; a belt; a binocular case; a magnifying glass; a razor; two flour sacks—and a bloodied handkerchief with the laundry mark “F.X.0.7.”

A century later, the DNA in the blood might have enabled Hume to identify his man, but in 1883, something much less scientific caught his attention—the laundry mark. In those days, many men had at most only two shirts or handkerchiefs, and few workingmen could afford to send them out to a laundry to be cleaned. Certainly, few common stagecoach bandits sent their shirts out to be laundered. Clearly Black Bart was not the type of holdup man Hume had imagined him to be. From that clue, Hume deduced that Black Bart was living in a big city, and the only big city within walking distance was San Francisco.

Harry Morse’s men began visiting each of the more than ninety laundries in San Francisco, trying to associate “F.X.0.7” with a specific person. It took more than a week, but eventually
Thomas Ware, the proprietor of the California Laundry on Stevenson Street, only a few blocks from the Wells Fargo office, identified the laundry mark. The handkerchief belonged to one of his better customers, he said, a Mr. Charles E. Bolton, the mining engineer who lived at the Webb House, a hotel on Second Street.

When Morse investigated further, he found that people spoke highly of this Charles Bolton. He was “an ideal tenant,” his landlady explained, “so quiet, so respectable and punctual with his room rent.” He was a fine fellow, others said.

Morse assigned several detectives to stake out the hotel. About a week later his men spotted the nattily dressed Mr. Bolton emerging from his rooms. They noted that he appeared to have a wound on his hand. Morse took charge: One afternoon, as his suspect sauntered down the street carrying a fancy cane, Morse successfully made his acquaintance. He had been told that Bolton was a mining engineer, he explained, then asked for his assistance. He had in his possession several pieces of ore that needed to be identified. Perhaps Mr. Bolton would be so kind as to do so?

Remembering this event years later, the detective Morse wrote, “One would have taken him for a gentleman who had made a fortune and was enjoying it. He looked anything but a robber.”

Perhaps sensing a business opportunity, Bowles agreed and walked with Morse to the nearby Wells Fargo office, completely unaware that the man who had spent the past eight and a half years trying to capture him was waiting there. It was there that James Hume introduced himself to Charles Bowles and arrested him for the robberies committed by the bandit Black Bart. Bowles by this time had perfected his acting skills and appeared genuinely surprised by the accusation, continuing to insist that a mistake had been made, that he was a fifty-six-year-old mining engineer named Charles Bolton. The handkerchief? Perhaps he’d dropped it and the real Black Bart had picked it up. But any doubt that another mistake had been made was erased after Morse searched his rooms. There he found letters written in the same hand as the two poems left by Black Bart, as well as several shirts bearing the laundry mark “F.X.0.7.”

Bowles was taken to Stockton and arraigned. Although he continued to maintain his innocence, at one point he did ask if a man who confessed to a robbery and returned all the proceeds might avoid going to prison. That wouldn’t be possible, he was informed, but it was probable that a judge would look kindly upon a man who confessed to his robberies and had never hurt a soul. Finally Bowles/Bolton/Black Bart confessed—to the final robbery. He took authorities to the top of Funk Hill and handed over all the loot.

His arrest took place while San Francisco’s newspapers were fighting for circulation, and
they all wanted Black Bart’s story. Late one night,
Examiner
reporter Josiah Ward got into Bowles’s cell. He watched as Bowles entertained a series of visitors, including his landlady, who dabbed the prisoner’s eyes as he cried. Eventually Bowles agreed to be interviewed. Ward’s article reported him as saying, “I never drink and I don’t smoke. All my friends are gentlemen and I never associated with other than gentlemen. I can’t claim to be perfect. They do say I will rob a stage occasionally. But no one can say that I ever raised my hand to do any harm. I merely carried a gun to intimidate the driver. As for using it—why for all the gold that road ever carried I would not shoot a man.”

In the middle of November, Bowles was convicted of only one robbery—the final job—and sentenced to six years in San Quentin prison. While he was imprisoned, the dime novel
The Gold Dragon; or, The California Bloodhound: The Story of PO8, the Lone Highwayman
was published, adding to his nationwide fame. He never admitted in court that he was Black Bart; he never confessed to another robbery or returned any of the stolen money. It was never determined exactly how much he stole, with estimates ranging between twenty thousand and one hundred thousand dollars, or about three million dollars in today’s money.

He was released in January 1888, an event covered by all the newspapers. He had served four and a half years and was released for good behavior. His eyesight was failing, he said, and he had gone deaf in one ear. Asked by a reporter if he intended to return to his “profession,” he smiled and said, “No, gentlemen. I’m through with crime.” When another reporter followed up by asking if he might write more poetry, he shook his head. “Now, didn’t you hear me say that I am through with crime?”

Detective James Hume, who established Wells Fargo’s own special-agent operation, relentlessly pursued the famous stage robber for eight years.

Wells Fargo agents followed him for several weeks as he moved from town to town, but in February he walked out of the Palace Hotel in Visalia and was never seen or heard from again.

Or was he? In November later that year, a Wells Fargo stagecoach was held up by a masked highwayman in a manner reminiscent of Black Bart. After he escaped, a poem was found:

So here I’ve stood while wind and rain

Have set the trees a-sobbin

And risked my life for that box,

That wasn’t worth the robbin.

The note was sent to Detective Hume for examination. He compared it to the original poems known to have been written by Bowles and announced that this holdup was committed by a copycat.

However, for several years, rumors of Bowles’s activities and whereabouts continued to surface. William Randolph Hearst’s
San Francisco Examiner
claimed that after a few robberies in northern California, Wells Fargo had agreed to give Bowles some sort of “pension” in exchange for his promise to never rob another stage, with the figure varying between $125 and $250 a month.

Although the company firmly denied having struck any deal, it did continue to list the newly released “Bolton” as a suspect in several stage holdups, describing him as “a thorough mountaineer, a remarkable walker, and claims he cannot be excelled in making quick transits over mountains and grades,” concluding that he was “a cool self-contained talker with waggish tendencies; and since his arrest … has exhibited genuine wit under most trying circumstances.”

Other stories of his fate speculated that he lived the rest of his life in luxury in Mexico or New York or St. Louis with the proceeds he had secreted from his life of crime. A thief arrested outside Kansas City was identified by local authorities as Black Bart, but one of Hume’s men identified him as a different Wells Fargo robber who had served time in Folsom Prison. That same detective claimed he had discovered what had actually happened to Bowles—he had sailed to Japan on the
Empress of China
and was living there happily. One newspaper reported he had been killed holding up a stage from Virginia City to Reno and had been buried in a shallow grave at the side of the road. Detective Hume once said he’d heard that Bowles died
while hunting game in the high Sierra. He was supposedly seen in the Klondike after the gold strike of 1896 in the Yukon. Reporter Josiah Ward wrote that Bowles had indeed been hired by Wells Fargo—to ride shotgun on stages, and eventually “saved and bought a ranch where he abode in peace and quiet until he died.” Finally, in 1917,
The New York Times
printed the obituary of Civil War veteran Charles E. Boles [sic], although no mention was made of another career. If that was Black Bart—and there is no compelling evidence to either confirm or deny that—he would have been eighty-eight years old.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that his fate remains unknown; the Gentleman Bandit Black Bart had effectively escaped again, living out the rest of his life in obscurity. No one would ever break his record of twenty-nine stagecoach robberies. Henry Ford introduced his Model T in 1908, thus putting an end to the profession of stagecoach robber forever.

After serving four years and two months in San Quentin, Black Bart was released and supposedly disappeared—although a year later, Wells Fargo issued his last Wanted poster, accusing him of committing two more robberies.

THE DIME NOVELS

The image of the rip-roaring, hard-riding, two-fisted, straight-shooting cowboy, standing up for Old West justice against villainous varmints was initially the creation of small paper books known as dime novels. Although the real skills and courage of the men who tamed the American frontier could often be awe inspiring, these very popular novels successfully turned these men into the near superheroes that have become a staple of popular culture.

There has always been something magical about the exploits of these brave men, but beginning with the minstrel shows and popular music of the mid-1800s, their feats of derring-do were greatly exaggerated. P. T. Barnum might have been the first to exploit the fascination with the frontier, when he presented live Indians as a curiosity at his New York City museum in the 1840s. But the real effort to make the West wilder began in June 1860, when
Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter
was published by the New York printing firm Beadle and Adams.