Photo courtesy Heritage Auction Galleries, Dallas, Texas.

“I have no regret for killing or maiming a highwayman, but I should never forgive myself for firing on an innocent man”

The two masked men who hailed the Eureka-to-Pioche stagecoach near Ward, Nevada, on the evening of February 27, 1877, made two big mistakes: First, they chose a stage guarded by a shotgun messenger. Second, they chose a stage guarded by perhaps the most formidable expressman on Wells Fargo’s books—Eugene Blair.

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Blair later testified that as the coach climbed a grade, “a masked man stepped out from behind a tree on the right side of the stage.” Blair thought the man cried, “Holdup!” but he wasn’t certain. “At the same time,” Blair continued, “a shotgun was fired. I immediately fired a shot at the man coming from behind the tree, jumped from the front seat of the stage and saw another man, who shot twice with a shotgun at me. I returned the fire and followed him about 50 or 75 yards, when I lost sight of him. Returning back to the stage, I heard a man calling out that he would give himself up and that he was in a dying condition.”

The would-be robber was seriously wounded; one charge had almost torn an arm off, and the second had hit him full in the torso. Loading him onto the stage, Blair proceeded to Ward to seek medical assistance. A doctor amputated the remains of the shattered arm, but the man’s wounds were clearly mortal. Identified as John Carlow, a 23-year-old native Ohioan, he died the following evening before Blair could obtain information on the other holdup man.

Still, Blair asked questions in town and came up with a suspect, Jim Crawford. A few days later, Blair tracked him down in the hills some 30 miles from Pioche and arrested him without difficulty. Ward was full of lynch talk, so Blair took Crawford to Pioche and then to Hamilton. Crawford made a full confession and pleaded guilty at his June trial in Hamilton. A judge sentenced him to seven years.

Although one acquaintance described Blair as “a hair-trigger sort of fellow,” newspapers of the time praised the messenger for his actions in defense of the Eureka–Pioche stage. The Placerville Mountain Democrat called him “a hero,” the Eureka Sentinel said he was “one of the bravest men in the country,” and The Salt Lake Tribune opined, “Eugene is a brick, as he has got several of these road agents on previous occasions.” In March a grateful Wells Fargo presented him with a very handsome Remington breechloading shotgun “in partial recognition of past services.”

A good shotgun messenger needed to stay alert, identify danger in an instant and act on it accordingly, and Blair did just that time and again. Firing his shotgun was sometimes part of the equation. “I have no regret for killing or maiming a highwayman,” he once said, “but I should never forgive myself for firing on an innocent man.” Thus Blair gained recognition as a formidable guard with few notches on his shotgun. When asked later in life how many men he had killed, he replied, “Two.” One of them was Carlow, in the line of duty. The other, he said, had no connection with his Wells Fargo work. He declined to elaborate.

Eugene Blair was 31 when he thwarted the holdup attempt by Carlow and Crawford. One contemporary described him as “very tall, long-limbed and muscular, quick of motion, ready and perfectly brave,” while another recalled him as “wiry and powerful.” Born on a farm near Augusta in Kennebec County, Maine, in 1845, Blair ventured at age 20 to Virginia City, Nev., where he tried his hand at mining before becoming a jailer. In the 1870 census, he is listed as a policeman. Soon afterward, he became a Lincoln County deputy sheriff in the rowdy town of Pioche. By November 1872, Blair was doubling as a Wells Fargo employee. While helping to break up a saloon fracas in 1873, he broke a bone above the ankle. “His injuries were not severe,” reported The Pioche Daily Record, “though he will have to lay up for repairs.”

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