The Plundering Po8

(Editor’s note: I usually reserve my writing about history for one of my other blogs, Limbo. But today marks an anniversary that is potentially as interesting to readers with a taste for crime as it would be to students of western Americana. It was 126 years ago that the California highwayman known as Black Bart [left] stopped his last stagecoach, intent on robbing it. I recalled that incident in my 1995 book, San Francisco, You’re History! For those of you not conversant in the legend and curious truth about this masked man, I offer my entire essay--with small additions--below.)

This legend begins at a desolate spot between what was then known as Punta Arenas and Duncan’s Mills on the Russian River, just north of San Francisco. It was there, on August 3, 1877, that a lone highwayman wearing a long, soiled white linen duster and a flour sack over his head, with slits cut out for his eyes, stepped boldly in front of a stagecoach, pointed a 12-gauge shotgun at the driver, and forced him to halt. With the horses still sweating and the stage’s dust settling in whorls about them all, the bandit gave the four-word instruction that would become infamous in Northern California over the next six years of his criminal career: “Throw down the box.”

It was a “deep and hollow” voice, as the coach driver later explained, the sort of voice that brooks no disobedience. But the shotgun was even more commanding. Without hesitation, the stage man tossed over the pine-and-iron strong box he was carrying for Wells, Fargo & Company, and he was relieved when the bandit, with peculiar politeness, told him to ride on. The masked man made no attempt to rob either the driver or his passengers.

The box was later found--empty. The mysterious brigand had escaped with $300 in coins and a check for $305.52, drawn on the Grangers’ Bank of San Francisco. But he had left something behind--a splenetic rhyme, penned on the back of a waybill, each sentence scribed meticulously in a slightly different manner, as if to confound handwriting analysis:

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 quatrain was signed “Black Bart, the Po8.”

Most people who heard about this crime must have gotten a hoot out of Bart’s clean getaway and his pretensions toward “Po8try.” Wells, Fargo, however, was anything but amused. Company managers put their offices up and down California on the lookout for this robber-poet, but their description of him could have fit thousands of men. The Grangers’ Bank check was never cashed. And Bart let his trail cool for almost a year before he reappeared.

* * *

This time he struck high in the Sierras, leveling his shotgun at the driver of a stage headed through the Feather River Valley, from Quincy to Oroville. Again, he told the driver to surrender his strong box, only this time Bart’s take was better--$379 in currency, a diamond ring allegedly worth another $200, and a $25 silver watch. He also absconded with a U.S. Mail bag, but the contents of that have never been delineated.

Bart’s doggerel on this occasion seemed more confident than confrontational:

Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the comming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,
and everlasting sorrow.
Let come what will I’ll try it on,
My condition can’t be worse;
And if there’s money in that box
’Tis munny in my purse!

California Governor William Irwin posted a $300 reward for Bart’s “capture and conviction.” Wells, Fargo added $300, and postal authorities threw in another $200. The price on his head only led Bart to take more chances, not fewer. He held up three more stages over the next week, all of them northwest of San Francisco. But contrary to legend, never again did he leave a calling card of verse, as if he was either suffering writer’s block or worried that his literary pretensions might offer some clue to his identity.

Bart’s modus operandi rarely changed. He made the 28 stagecoach assaults of his career in wide-open territory, near the crest of steep grades, where horses would be winded and slower than normal. He always had his loose coat and his flour sack mask, but there’s some dispute as to whether he also wore a derby on top of the sack or underneath it to make him appear taller. His rifle was in evidence but never fired. (It was later learned that he never even loaded the gun.) He always cut the mail sacks with a “T,” and he used an old ax to open the strong boxes, then left the ax behind.

Many of his victims described him as a gentleman. As the story goes, a frightened woman once tossed Bart her purse after he had ordered her stage driver to “throw down the box!” He kindly returned it to her, insisting that all he wanted was the Wells, Fargo strong box and the U.S. Mail bag. Such yarns made Black Bart a darling of the San Francisco press and, later, fine grist for penny-novel writers.

Although his crimes were committed far away from civilization, Bart never rode a horse, but instead walked with a blanket roll and camped out when necessary. Yet he covered a lot of ground, in three separate districts of Northern California: north of San Francisco, in Shasta County, and to the north of Sacramento. Even Wells, Fargo was impressed by his stamina, describing their masked adversary as a “thorough mountaineer.”

* * *

Ending this highwayman’s career would be difficult, but James B. Hume, chief investigator for Wells, Fargo, was determined to carry out the task. His first big break came in finding some people who thought they’d seen or even dined with a man who might be Black Bart. They’d encountered him walking cross-country in the general vicinity of Bart’s crimes. One said the stranger had graying brown hair, with patches of baldness at the temples, two missing front teeth, a mustache, and slender hands that showed no evidence of hard work. They all remarked upon his gentility and added that, surely, such a well-mannered soul could not be a bandit. Could he?

Hume’s second break came after what would prove to be Black Bart’s last holdup, on November 3, 1883.

In the predawn of that fateful morning, Reason E. McConnell, a driver for the Nevada Stage Company, left the town of Sonora, en route west to Milton. Along the way, he stopped first at Tuttletown, where he picked up 228 ounces of gold amalgam from the Patterson Mine and locked them into his strong box, which already contained $550 in gold coin and about 3.25 ounces of raw gold dust. Then McConnell made a second stop, for breakfast, at Reynolds Ferry, where he took on a passenger--a 19-year-old named Jimmy Rolleri, who wanted to do a little small-game hunting down the stagecoach road.

McConnell was happy to have the company. But Jimmy wasn’t seeing any animals, so when the stage had to go up one particularly steep hill, the teenager grabbed his repeating rifle and said he would rather walk around it, maybe flush some dinner out of the brush.

The driver, then, was alone at the top of the hill when Black Bart confronted him from behind a shotgun’s double barrels.

Bart, concealed as always beneath his flour sack, sensed immediately that things were wrong. First, he’d watched the stage coming and knew there had been two men, not one on board. Second, there was no strong box to be seen.

McConnell lied about Jimmy. He said the boy had gone off in search of stray cattle. Bart wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but had no time to ponder its implications. He had made friends with men at the Patterson Mine, knew there was gold to be had on board this stage, and if it wasn’t up top, then it must be secreted inside. So he ordered McConnell down from his perch and told him to unhitch the horses and lead them over the hill.

While McConnell was doing this, listening all the while to the sounds of Bart ransacking the stage for gold, he spotted Jimmy Rolleri coming around the hill with his rifle. McConnell couldn’t believe his luck! He immediately signaled Jimmy over, and together they crept back up the knoll.

Bart was just backing out of the stagecoach with the hidden booty when the sound of three shots exploded over the countryside. Bart sprinted for the brush, clutching his loot but dropping a bundle of papers. By the time the driver and his sidekick could hustle down the hill, the robber-poet had skedaddled. But there was fresh blood on the papers. Black Bart’s blood.

There was more, too. Bart had dropped his derby and failed to pick up some belongings that he’d sequestered behind a nearby rock--bags of crackers and sugar, a pair of field glasses, a couple of flour sacks, three dirty linen cuffs, a razor, and a knotted handkerchief filled with buckshot. Without too much trouble, the Calaveras County sheriff located the woman who had sold Bart his provisions, along with two other men who had seen a stranger matching the highwayman’s physical description. But the clue that broke the Black Bart case was a laundry mark on that abandoned handkerchief--F.X.O.7.

* * *

It took a week of searching through San Francisco’s 91 laundries before detective Hume’s special agent on the Black Bart robberies, Harry N. Morse, turned up an owner to correspond with that mark: C.E. Bolton, a resident of the Webb House, at 37 Second Street, Room 40. And that wasn’t all the luck Morse could claim. As he was talking with the owner of the laundry where Bart had taken his linens, who should walk by but the man himself.

At 54 years of age, Bart stood 5 feet 8 inches tall, bore his 160 pounds of weight in an arrow-straight posture, and had a light complexion. His deep-sunk eyes were bright blue. He sported a broad white mustache and an “imperial” (a pointed beard growing beneath his lower lip). He had small feet--size 6. Photographs show him looking very much like his pursuer, the dogged James B. Hume.

Morse later told reporters that his initial impressions of the unmasked outlaw were of a man “elegantly dressed, carrying a little cane. He wore a natty little derby hat, a diamond pin, a large diamond ring on his little finger, and a heavy gold watch and chain. ... One would have taken him for a gentleman who had made a fortune and was enjoying it.”

That was exactly the case, of course, although Bolton--whose real name was Charles E. Boles, according to a Bible found in his room--denied initially that his gains had been ill-gotten. (“Do you take me for a stage robber?” he said in mock amazement. “I never harmed anybody in all my life, and this is the first time that my character has ever been called into question.”) He claimed to be the proud owner of a mine on the California-Nevada border. Not until he was identified by people he had encountered during the planning of his final crime did the bandit admit that he’d stopped and robbed the Sonora-Milton stage. And even then, it was only because he surmised that with one confession he might escape sentencing for many others. The judge proved him right on that account: Bart-Boles was given just six years in San Quentin Prison for a crime spree that should’ve kept him imprisoned until his death.

* * *

Reporters slowly filled in the details of Charles Boles’ life. He had been born in Norfolk County, England, in 1829, but at 2 years old had moved with his family to Alexandria township, Jefferson County, in upstate New York. He had served with the 116th Regiment of the Illinois Infantry during the Civil War, either as a captain or a sergeant--the facts grew fuzzier each time they were given. When asked what sort of education he’d received, Boles dismissed thoughts of schools or grades and answered simply “Liberal!” in a proud manner that was characteristic of him. Coming west first to Montana (where he’d failed as a miner) and then to California, he had evidently left behind a family in the Midwest, including a wife, Mary, who for years before his arrest had thought her husband dead. After learning of his Black Bart incarceration, though, she began corresponding with him from her home in Hannibal, Missouri.

But there were still many questions remaining by the time Bart-Boles was released, after serving only four years and two months of his sentence. So it was no surprise that he was mobbed by ink-spotted newspaper reporters on January 21, 1888, as a prison boat ferrying him south from Marin County finally landed at San Francisco. Had prison life hurt him? they wanted to know. No, Bart said, he felt very well, although he was becoming a bit deaf and now required reading glasses. Did he intend to rob stages again? Bart shook his head almost violently and turned to go. One final question, said a newsie: Had he any more verses up his sleeve? At this, Bart seemed to perk up, to regain a bit of the self-confidence that prison had tried to sap from him. “Young man,” the old highwayman replied archly, “didn’t you hear me say I would commit no more crimes?”

At final report, the man who’d once been Black Bart was heading south from California’s Bay Area. He got as far as Visalia, where he stayed for a short while at a hotel, leaving behind a valise that contained some containers of food, a couple of neckties, and a pair of cuffs bearing the laundry mark F.X.O.7. He was last spotted on February 28, 1888. After that, the Po8 disappeared forever.

READ MORE: “Legend and Lore,” by Isaac Levinson (Bohemian.com); “The Flawed Gentleman Bandit,” by Daniel R. Seligman (True West).