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CHARLES "BLACK BART" BOLES

WITH A TASTE FOR FINE LIVING AND A WEAKNESS
FOR POETRY, "BLACK BART" CONFOUNDED WELLS
FARGO DETECTIVES DURING AN EIGHT-YEAR
STRING OF STAGECOACH ROBBERIES.

BY JOHN STANCHAK

Charles E. Boles lived and looked the part of a Gilded Age dude, " a gentleman who had made a fortune and was enjoying it." But his fragile prosperity bubble was about to burst. One day in 1883, sporting a new derby hat, diamond stick-pin, diamond ring, and a gold watch, Boles twirled his walking stick and stepped out the door of San Francisco’s Webb House hotel into the waiting arms of his laundryman. This was an ominous sign.

Standing beside the man who took care of Mr. Boles’s dirty linen was Harry Morse, a detective for Wells Fargo & Co., who wanted to meet the aging peacock the launderer knew as Charles Bolton. So did his superiors. For weeks they had gone to every other wash house in northern California trying to identify a handkerchief with the laundry mark F.X.O.7. It had been found knotted around some buckshot at the scene of highwayman Black Bart’s latest escapade, the repeat robbery of a Wells Fargo stagecoach near Copperopolis, California.

Morse and his boss, Chief of Detectives James B. Hume, believed in the office motto "Wells Fargo never forgets," especially as it applied to the Black Bart case. For some reason this stage-stopping professional had selected their firm as the exclusive outlet for his business and, since July 26, 1875, had robbed at least 28 of their coaches.

None of the affairs had been as embarrassing as the first. On that day, on a steep grade outside Copperopolis, a man in a full-length duster, wearing rags bound around his feet and a sack over his head, stepped in front of a Wells Fargo coach as it labored uphill. Staring calmly at the driver through holes cut in his mask, the man on the road leveled a menacing shotgun at him and called out "throw down the box." Coachman John Shine complied.

What happened next varies according to witnesses and legend, but supposedly, the bandit next said: "If he dares shoot, give him a volley." At that, Shine looked to the roadside and, seeing several gun barrels aimed at him from the brush, decided to cooperate. He remained seated and, still under the guns of the robber’s gang, coolly observed Black Bart’s method of operation, one the highwayman would almost never vary.

Keeping the shotgun trained on the driver, the man in the duster produced a hatchet, chopped open the wooden lid of the iron-banded strong-box, and began stuffing bags of coin and cash into his pockets. Then he stepped aside and gestured for the stage to drive on.

Shine had driven his coach a short distance over the hill when he decided to pull up his team and go back for the smashed strong-box; it could be useful as evidence. Returning boldly to the robbery scene, he walked up to where the box lay, then stopped, stunned. The gang’s weapons were still trained on him. After imploring the gunmen to show mercy, Shine waited for flying lead or a reply. When neither came, he timidly approached the bushes, but he confronted no one. There was no gang, there were no guns, just straight, tapered sticks arranged to look like a deadly firing line.

The phantom gang feature was dropped from the nervy bandit’s repertoire after the first hold-up. But for all the rest of his robberies during the next eight years of his career, Black Bart’s simple method remained the same, with two exceptions. These variations, however, gave a clue to the sack-covered man’s personality. Following his third outing against the minions of Wells Fargo–the August 3, 1877 robbery of the Russian River stage near Duncan Mills, California–he left a poem in what remained of the violated strong-box that read: "I’ve labored long and hard for bread, for honor and for riches, but on my corns too long you’ve tred, you fine haire sons of bitches."

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