In History
Black Bart was one of the most
unusual stagecoach robbers in American history. There is no
record of Bart every firing a shot in any of his robberies. Bart,
however, was not so lucky. During one robbery a bullet shot at
him grazed his head and left a scar. In his final robbery he was
shot in the hand. When Bart was arrested he was using the name
Charles E. Bolton, the name under which he had been living in San
Francisco for years. When he was booked, he gave his name as T. Z.
Spalding. However it is believed that Bart's real name was Charles
E. Boles. This was the name written in a Bible found in his room.
The Bible had been given to him by his wife in 1865.
Boles was born in 1820 in Jefferson County, upper New York State, and had been a farmer until he married and moved to Illinois just before the Civil War. He served as a sergeant in the 116th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. It is thought that he had also been a medicine drummer or salesman. When his family died, he moved to California to seek his fortune. Boles had tried a number of jobs and even tried panning for gold before he turned to stagecoach robbing. For Whatever the reason, Boles was in the San Francisco area without any visible means of support. He was a man who liked to live well and intended to do just that. He stayed in fine hotels, ate in the best restaurants and wore the finest clothes. Now all he had to do was find a way to earn a living to support his preferred lifestyle, and Charles E. Boles found a dandy.
Boles (Charles E. Bolton as he was known in San Francisco) was a man well into his 50s, about five-foot, eight inches tall, ramrod straight, with gray hair and a mustache. A natty dresser, he favored diamonds, and carried a short cane. People seeing him walk down the street in 1870's San Francisco would have thought him nothing more than a kindly, prosperous, old grandpa out for a leisurely stroll. No one could have imagined that this man was really the famous, or infamous, Black Bart the stage robber-poet of Northern California, or PO 8, as he preferred to refer to himself. Bart, in addition to being an expert lone bandit who robbed 28 stages in California between 1875-1883, was a jokester whose laughing nature endeared him even to his victims.
How did Charles Boles decide to call himself Black Bart? No one is sure. However, it is thought he patterned his character after a character in a dime novel called "The Case of Summerfield" (which appeared also in the Sacramento Union). This story was written by a San Francisco lawyer, William H. Rhodes, under the pen name "Caxton." The story, published in 1871 (four years before Boles' first robbery), talks about the misadventures of Bartholomew Graham, also called "Black Bart." The dime novel describes Black Bart as a person who wore all black, had a full black beard and a mess of wild curly black hair. He was an "unruly and wild villain." It should be noted that Charles Boles never wore black nor was his hair black. By using the name Black Bart, Boles took advantage of an established dime novel bad guy. So before his first robbery, Black Bart was already known as someone to be feared. If you were robbed by Black Bart, you didn't argue, you just gave up the loot.
Bart first struck on a mountain pass called Funk Hill, four miles outside of Copperopolis, Calif., on July 26, 1875. The driver of the Wells Fargo stage, John Shine, brought up his team short, startled at the strange apparition before him. Bart wore a long, white duster over his clothes, and over his head was a flour sack with holes that had been cut for eyes. All this was topped off with a derby hat. A deep voice commanded: "Throw down the box!" the driver reached beneath his seat and withdrew the Wells Fargo strongbox containing several thousand dollars. He tossed down the wooden box, reinforced with iron bands, which was padlocked. Bart grabbed the box and slipped into a nearby woods. Shine drove off some distance and then stopped the stage, walking back down the road to see a half dozen guns leveled at him from outlaws positioned behind boulders. He stood rock still and then realized the outlaws were not moving. Shine approached one boulder, and then another, to discover dummies with sticks for guns pointed at him. Bart accomplished his robberies by pretending to have a large gang positioned behind several large boulders. When he first stopped a stage, he would call out to his imaginary gang: "If he dares to shoot, give him a solid volley, boys!"
The lone bandit continued to stop Wells Fargo stages with regularity, always along mountain roads where the driver was compelled to slow down at dangerous curves. It was later estimated that Bart robbed as much as $18,000 from Wells Fargo stages over the course of four years, striking twenty-nine times. He left no clues whatsoever, although he did leave a spare gun after one robbery. He was always extremely courteous to passengers, especially women travelers, refusing to take their jewelry and cash, telling them: "I don't want your money, only Wells Fargo boxes." He made a favorable impression on drivers and passengers alike as a courteous, gentlemanly robber who apparently wanted to avoid a gunfight at all costs. On Aug. 3, 1877, the lone bandit, again appearing in his duster and flour sack, stopped the Arena stagecoach en route to Duncan's Mill on the Russian River. He took the strongbox and its contents of $300 in cash along with a check for a similar amount.
Some days later a posse found the empty box, and inside of it was a note:
The stage robber had signed the note with a name that would go down in western history: "Black Bart, PO-8." The letters and number mystified lawmen as much as the name Black Bart. Tracking posses found no trace of the elusive bandit, and superstition had it that the stage indeed had been robbed by a ghost. For a year the robber was not to be seen. Then, on July 26, 1878, Bart held up another Wells Fargo stage, one traveling between Quincy and Oroville, Calif. Again, he wore the same weird outfit, the long flowing duster, flour sack, derby hat and again, his voice, described as "hollow and deep," ordered the driver to "throw down the box!" This time Bart made off with $379. He also helped himself to a passenger's $200 diamond ring and a gold watch worth $25.
Once more, pursuing lawmen found the empty strongbox with another note which stated:
Again there were no clues to follow. The bandit seemed to have vanished into thin air. Bart himself was responsible for a trail that led nowhere. Wells Fargo drivers noticed that when he stopped a stage, he wore large socks over his boots so that he would leave no heel marks in the dirt to be followed. Moreover, he never used a horse but slipped into the wilderness on foot and thus left no trail of horse tracks. Bart, it was later discovered, was an excellent hiker and outdoorsman who traveled great distances on foot, camping out for weeks to get to and from his robbery sites, which he scouted carefully. He used a shotgun most times in his robberies, but not once in all of his many robberies did he ever fire it. As it turned out, he could not have fired the weapon since he never loaded it, or at least that was what he told arresting officers later.
Bart was not a rampant pillager of Wells Fargo. He only robbed stages periodically, sometimes with as much as nine months' time between robberies. He later stated that he "took only what was needed when it was needed." Most stagecoach drivers were submissive to Bart, seldom defying him with a cross word and obediently tossing down the strongbox when ordered to do so. This was not the case with hardcase George W. Hackett who, on July 13, 1882, was driving a Wells Fargo stage some nine miles outside of Strawberry, Calif. Bart suddenly darted from a boulder and stood in front of the stage, stopping it and leveling a shotgun at Hackett. He politely said: "Please throw down your strongbox." Hackett was not pleased to do so; he reached for a rifle and fired a shot at the bandit. Bart dashed into the woods and vanished, but he received a scalp wound that would leave a permanent scar on the top right side of his forehead.
With his loot, Bart had invested in several small businesses which brought him a modest income, but he could not resist the urge to go back to robbing stages when money became short. After so many successful robberies, the Po8 thought his luck would continue forever. But it was not to be. His last robbery, on November 3,1883, almost spelled his doom. He returned to Calaveras County and the site of his first hold-up. Stagecoach driver McConnell, however, was better prepared than most. He had fastened the Wells Fargo box to the bottom of the passenger compartment instead of the expected place beneath the driver's seat. Inside the strongbox was $550 in gold coin and some three and a quarter ounces of gold dust, the box also contained 228 ounces of gold amalgam from the mill at the Patterson Mine. You see, Black Bart knew about the amalgam. McConnell also had brought his friend Jimmy Rolleri who had brought his friend, a new Henry rifle, just in case he wanted to go "a-huntin." As the stage slowed down at the approach of Funk Hill, Jimmy jumped off the stage with his Henry rifle to do some hunting, planning to meet the stage on the other side of the hill. Right after Jimmy left the stage the Po8, adorned with his regular flour sack and derby hat, sprang from the bushes. But the strong box was bolted in a different place and it took far more time to rob. Black Bart had run out of time and luck. Jimmy somehow managed to meet McConnell away from the stage. The two took cover and watched as Black Bart backed out of the stage with his loot. McConnell then “seized the rifle from the boy and opened fire on the robber.” He missed, twice, after which Jimmy took the rifle and fired. Black Bart was seen to stumble before dragging the strongbox into the underbrush. Bart was wounded in the hand.
Sheriff Ben Thorn of Calaveras County reached the holdup site that afternoon and organized the posse to search for clues. Among the items found was a small round derby hat, two paper bags containing crackers and granulated sugar, a leather case for a pair of field glasses, a belt, a quartz magnifying glass, a razor, a handkerchief full of buckshot, three dirty linen cuffs, and two flour sacks. Black Bart would have undoubtedly taken his belongings with him had he not been run off by the Henry rifle. The handkerchief full of buckshot proved to be Bart’s downfall, for in one corner were four small letters: F.X.O.7., a laundry’s identifying marks. Sheriff Thorn took the evidence to Wells Fargo detective J. B. Hume in San Francisco. Hume and his partner Henry Nicholson Morse, a one-time sheriff of Alameda County, were two shrewd, tough detectives. Henry Morse realized that there were ninety-one laundries in San Francisco, but he set out to visit each one of them. At Ferguson & Bigg's California Laundry, his search was rewarded with an identity, that of Charles E. Bolton, a respectable mining engineer who was staying at Room 40, 37 2nd Street, San Francisco. Morse and Hume, accompanied by local police, arrested Boles-Bolton-Bart in his hotel. Hume in his report recorded that Black Bart was, "A person of great endurance. Exhibited genuine wit under most trying circumstances. Extremely proper and polite in behaviour, eschews profanity." Bart would not admit to being the bandit, and denied that his name was either Charles E. Bolton, the name under which he had been living in San Francisco for years, or his supposedly given name, Charles E. Boles. When booked, he gave his name as T.Z. Spalding.
After days of denying he was the famous Black Bart, the bandit finally admitted that he had committed several robberies of which he stood accused, but only those occurring before 1879--mistakenly believing that the statute of limitations would protect him against prosecution. After lengthy questioning Bart decided to confess to the robbery and show his captors where he had hidden the amalgam, hoping this would make it easier for him when he came to trial. After the amalgam was recovered, Bart appeared on November 17, 1883, before Superior Court Judge C. V. Gottschalk at San Andreas. Bart was convicted and given a six-year prison sentence in San Quentin Prison, arriving there on Nov. 21, 1883.
Bart's six-year sentence at San Quentin Prison was shortened to four years for good behavior. He was released on Jan. 21, 1888. By then he had aged considerably, with one ear gone deaf, his eyesight failing, his shoulders stooped, and his hair whitened. His spirit was crushed. Reporters swarmed around him when he was released. They asked if he was going to rob anymore stagecoaches. "No gentlemen," he smilingly replied, "I'm all through with crime." Another reporter asked if he would write more poetry. He laughed, "Now didn't you hear me say that I am through with crime?" He disappeared and was later thought to have returned to his bandit ways, especially since another Wells Fargo stage was robbed on Nov. 14, 1888. The lone bandit left a note that read:
Detective Hume examined the note and compared it with the genuine Black Bart bits of poetry of the past. He declared the new verse a hoax and the work of another man, declaring that he was certain Black Bart had permanently retired. This gave rise to the later notion that Wells Fargo had actually pensioned off the robber on his promise that he would stop no more of its stages, paying him a handsome annuity until his death, which was reported in New York newspapers as being sometime in 1917, although this was never officially confirmed. The last time Detective Jim Hume heard of Black Bart's whereabouts was sometime in 1900, when he received a report that the old man had died in the high California mountains while hunting game.
The information presented here is from many different sources. While many of the accounts of Black Barts exploits are slightly different in content, they all state many of the same basic facts. We tried to use as many facts as we felt were reputable. This is not the definitive story of Black Bart but we feel it is interesting. We welcome E-mail from anyone with more information or corrections to the story we have presented.
Boles was born in 1820 in Jefferson County, upper New York State, and had been a farmer until he married and moved to Illinois just before the Civil War. He served as a sergeant in the 116th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. It is thought that he had also been a medicine drummer or salesman. When his family died, he moved to California to seek his fortune. Boles had tried a number of jobs and even tried panning for gold before he turned to stagecoach robbing. For Whatever the reason, Boles was in the San Francisco area without any visible means of support. He was a man who liked to live well and intended to do just that. He stayed in fine hotels, ate in the best restaurants and wore the finest clothes. Now all he had to do was find a way to earn a living to support his preferred lifestyle, and Charles E. Boles found a dandy.
Boles (Charles E. Bolton as he was known in San Francisco) was a man well into his 50s, about five-foot, eight inches tall, ramrod straight, with gray hair and a mustache. A natty dresser, he favored diamonds, and carried a short cane. People seeing him walk down the street in 1870's San Francisco would have thought him nothing more than a kindly, prosperous, old grandpa out for a leisurely stroll. No one could have imagined that this man was really the famous, or infamous, Black Bart the stage robber-poet of Northern California, or PO 8, as he preferred to refer to himself. Bart, in addition to being an expert lone bandit who robbed 28 stages in California between 1875-1883, was a jokester whose laughing nature endeared him even to his victims.
How did Charles Boles decide to call himself Black Bart? No one is sure. However, it is thought he patterned his character after a character in a dime novel called "The Case of Summerfield" (which appeared also in the Sacramento Union). This story was written by a San Francisco lawyer, William H. Rhodes, under the pen name "Caxton." The story, published in 1871 (four years before Boles' first robbery), talks about the misadventures of Bartholomew Graham, also called "Black Bart." The dime novel describes Black Bart as a person who wore all black, had a full black beard and a mess of wild curly black hair. He was an "unruly and wild villain." It should be noted that Charles Boles never wore black nor was his hair black. By using the name Black Bart, Boles took advantage of an established dime novel bad guy. So before his first robbery, Black Bart was already known as someone to be feared. If you were robbed by Black Bart, you didn't argue, you just gave up the loot.
Bart first struck on a mountain pass called Funk Hill, four miles outside of Copperopolis, Calif., on July 26, 1875. The driver of the Wells Fargo stage, John Shine, brought up his team short, startled at the strange apparition before him. Bart wore a long, white duster over his clothes, and over his head was a flour sack with holes that had been cut for eyes. All this was topped off with a derby hat. A deep voice commanded: "Throw down the box!" the driver reached beneath his seat and withdrew the Wells Fargo strongbox containing several thousand dollars. He tossed down the wooden box, reinforced with iron bands, which was padlocked. Bart grabbed the box and slipped into a nearby woods. Shine drove off some distance and then stopped the stage, walking back down the road to see a half dozen guns leveled at him from outlaws positioned behind boulders. He stood rock still and then realized the outlaws were not moving. Shine approached one boulder, and then another, to discover dummies with sticks for guns pointed at him. Bart accomplished his robberies by pretending to have a large gang positioned behind several large boulders. When he first stopped a stage, he would call out to his imaginary gang: "If he dares to shoot, give him a solid volley, boys!"
The lone bandit continued to stop Wells Fargo stages with regularity, always along mountain roads where the driver was compelled to slow down at dangerous curves. It was later estimated that Bart robbed as much as $18,000 from Wells Fargo stages over the course of four years, striking twenty-nine times. He left no clues whatsoever, although he did leave a spare gun after one robbery. He was always extremely courteous to passengers, especially women travelers, refusing to take their jewelry and cash, telling them: "I don't want your money, only Wells Fargo boxes." He made a favorable impression on drivers and passengers alike as a courteous, gentlemanly robber who apparently wanted to avoid a gunfight at all costs. On Aug. 3, 1877, the lone bandit, again appearing in his duster and flour sack, stopped the Arena stagecoach en route to Duncan's Mill on the Russian River. He took the strongbox and its contents of $300 in cash along with a check for a similar amount.
Some days later a posse found the empty box, and inside of it was a note:
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.
The stage robber had signed the note with a name that would go down in western history: "Black Bart, PO-8." The letters and number mystified lawmen as much as the name Black Bart. Tracking posses found no trace of the elusive bandit, and superstition had it that the stage indeed had been robbed by a ghost. For a year the robber was not to be seen. Then, on July 26, 1878, Bart held up another Wells Fargo stage, one traveling between Quincy and Oroville, Calif. Again, he wore the same weird outfit, the long flowing duster, flour sack, derby hat and again, his voice, described as "hollow and deep," ordered the driver to "throw down the box!" This time Bart made off with $379. He also helped himself to a passenger's $200 diamond ring and a gold watch worth $25.
Once more, pursuing lawmen found the empty strongbox with another note which stated:
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.
Again there were no clues to follow. The bandit seemed to have vanished into thin air. Bart himself was responsible for a trail that led nowhere. Wells Fargo drivers noticed that when he stopped a stage, he wore large socks over his boots so that he would leave no heel marks in the dirt to be followed. Moreover, he never used a horse but slipped into the wilderness on foot and thus left no trail of horse tracks. Bart, it was later discovered, was an excellent hiker and outdoorsman who traveled great distances on foot, camping out for weeks to get to and from his robbery sites, which he scouted carefully. He used a shotgun most times in his robberies, but not once in all of his many robberies did he ever fire it. As it turned out, he could not have fired the weapon since he never loaded it, or at least that was what he told arresting officers later.
Bart was not a rampant pillager of Wells Fargo. He only robbed stages periodically, sometimes with as much as nine months' time between robberies. He later stated that he "took only what was needed when it was needed." Most stagecoach drivers were submissive to Bart, seldom defying him with a cross word and obediently tossing down the strongbox when ordered to do so. This was not the case with hardcase George W. Hackett who, on July 13, 1882, was driving a Wells Fargo stage some nine miles outside of Strawberry, Calif. Bart suddenly darted from a boulder and stood in front of the stage, stopping it and leveling a shotgun at Hackett. He politely said: "Please throw down your strongbox." Hackett was not pleased to do so; he reached for a rifle and fired a shot at the bandit. Bart dashed into the woods and vanished, but he received a scalp wound that would leave a permanent scar on the top right side of his forehead.
With his loot, Bart had invested in several small businesses which brought him a modest income, but he could not resist the urge to go back to robbing stages when money became short. After so many successful robberies, the Po8 thought his luck would continue forever. But it was not to be. His last robbery, on November 3,1883, almost spelled his doom. He returned to Calaveras County and the site of his first hold-up. Stagecoach driver McConnell, however, was better prepared than most. He had fastened the Wells Fargo box to the bottom of the passenger compartment instead of the expected place beneath the driver's seat. Inside the strongbox was $550 in gold coin and some three and a quarter ounces of gold dust, the box also contained 228 ounces of gold amalgam from the mill at the Patterson Mine. You see, Black Bart knew about the amalgam. McConnell also had brought his friend Jimmy Rolleri who had brought his friend, a new Henry rifle, just in case he wanted to go "a-huntin." As the stage slowed down at the approach of Funk Hill, Jimmy jumped off the stage with his Henry rifle to do some hunting, planning to meet the stage on the other side of the hill. Right after Jimmy left the stage the Po8, adorned with his regular flour sack and derby hat, sprang from the bushes. But the strong box was bolted in a different place and it took far more time to rob. Black Bart had run out of time and luck. Jimmy somehow managed to meet McConnell away from the stage. The two took cover and watched as Black Bart backed out of the stage with his loot. McConnell then “seized the rifle from the boy and opened fire on the robber.” He missed, twice, after which Jimmy took the rifle and fired. Black Bart was seen to stumble before dragging the strongbox into the underbrush. Bart was wounded in the hand.
Sheriff Ben Thorn of Calaveras County reached the holdup site that afternoon and organized the posse to search for clues. Among the items found was a small round derby hat, two paper bags containing crackers and granulated sugar, a leather case for a pair of field glasses, a belt, a quartz magnifying glass, a razor, a handkerchief full of buckshot, three dirty linen cuffs, and two flour sacks. Black Bart would have undoubtedly taken his belongings with him had he not been run off by the Henry rifle. The handkerchief full of buckshot proved to be Bart’s downfall, for in one corner were four small letters: F.X.O.7., a laundry’s identifying marks. Sheriff Thorn took the evidence to Wells Fargo detective J. B. Hume in San Francisco. Hume and his partner Henry Nicholson Morse, a one-time sheriff of Alameda County, were two shrewd, tough detectives. Henry Morse realized that there were ninety-one laundries in San Francisco, but he set out to visit each one of them. At Ferguson & Bigg's California Laundry, his search was rewarded with an identity, that of Charles E. Bolton, a respectable mining engineer who was staying at Room 40, 37 2nd Street, San Francisco. Morse and Hume, accompanied by local police, arrested Boles-Bolton-Bart in his hotel. Hume in his report recorded that Black Bart was, "A person of great endurance. Exhibited genuine wit under most trying circumstances. Extremely proper and polite in behaviour, eschews profanity." Bart would not admit to being the bandit, and denied that his name was either Charles E. Bolton, the name under which he had been living in San Francisco for years, or his supposedly given name, Charles E. Boles. When booked, he gave his name as T.Z. Spalding.
After days of denying he was the famous Black Bart, the bandit finally admitted that he had committed several robberies of which he stood accused, but only those occurring before 1879--mistakenly believing that the statute of limitations would protect him against prosecution. After lengthy questioning Bart decided to confess to the robbery and show his captors where he had hidden the amalgam, hoping this would make it easier for him when he came to trial. After the amalgam was recovered, Bart appeared on November 17, 1883, before Superior Court Judge C. V. Gottschalk at San Andreas. Bart was convicted and given a six-year prison sentence in San Quentin Prison, arriving there on Nov. 21, 1883.
Bart's six-year sentence at San Quentin Prison was shortened to four years for good behavior. He was released on Jan. 21, 1888. By then he had aged considerably, with one ear gone deaf, his eyesight failing, his shoulders stooped, and his hair whitened. His spirit was crushed. Reporters swarmed around him when he was released. They asked if he was going to rob anymore stagecoaches. "No gentlemen," he smilingly replied, "I'm all through with crime." Another reporter asked if he would write more poetry. He laughed, "Now didn't you hear me say that I am through with crime?" He disappeared and was later thought to have returned to his bandit ways, especially since another Wells Fargo stage was robbed on Nov. 14, 1888. The lone bandit left a note that read:
So here I've stood while wind and rain
Have set the trees a'sobbin'
And risked my life for that damned stage
That wasn't worth the robbin'.
Detective Hume examined the note and compared it with the genuine Black Bart bits of poetry of the past. He declared the new verse a hoax and the work of another man, declaring that he was certain Black Bart had permanently retired. This gave rise to the later notion that Wells Fargo had actually pensioned off the robber on his promise that he would stop no more of its stages, paying him a handsome annuity until his death, which was reported in New York newspapers as being sometime in 1917, although this was never officially confirmed. The last time Detective Jim Hume heard of Black Bart's whereabouts was sometime in 1900, when he received a report that the old man had died in the high California mountains while hunting game.
The information presented here is from many different sources. While many of the accounts of Black Barts exploits are slightly different in content, they all state many of the same basic facts. We tried to use as many facts as we felt were reputable. This is not the definitive story of Black Bart but we feel it is interesting. We welcome E-mail from anyone with more information or corrections to the story we have presented.
Back to Black Barts in History
For questions, comments and assistance with this webpage please call our Tech Support line at 800-762-3057 or e-mail bartinfo@blackbartdata.com.
About BlackBart | Contact Us | Press Room | Links | Terms of Use
Programming By E.M. Consulting - Site Design By 10 Sharp Design