Did you know that Black Bart was a real man? And an interesting one, too.
Charles E. Bowles was born in England in 1829 and his family immigrated to the United States when he was two years old. Charles grew up on his family farm in Jefferson County, New York. He and a cousin headed to the California gold fields when he was twenty years old, arriving in 1850. They mined near Sacramento, but returned home in 1852, no richer than when they had left. After another trip to the gold fields, Charles returned to the east, married, settled on a farm in Illinois and had four children. When the Civil War started, he joined the Union Army and attained the rank of sergeant.
After the war, Charles left his family in Illinois and struck out for Montana and Idaho, hoping to strike it rich. He located a claim in Montana, which men from Wells Fargo tried to buy from him. He refused to sell, and Wells Fargo resorted to hardball tactics, cutting off their water supply, which made it impossible to mine. He wrote to his wife about his difficulties with Wells Fargo and said that he was going to take steps to right the wrong done against him. The last letter his wife received was from Montana in 1871. His wife never heard from him again and assumed he was dead.
This is where it gets good.
Charles became a new man. He changed his last name from Bowles to Boles, and adapted an elegant style of dress. He also targeted the Wells Fargo company for revenge. In fifteen years, Wells Fargo lost $415,000 in gold to outlaws. Charles intended to add to that figure.
In July 1875, Charles held up his first stagecoach near Copperopolis, California. Wearing a long duster, a
flour sack over his head with eyes cut out, and a dapper black derby hat, he jumped out from behind a boulder and stopped the stagecoach. He politely asked for the strong box to be thrown down, then he called over his shoulder to his “gang” to open fire if the driver shot at him. Seeing the barrels of rifles sticking out of from the brush, the driver complied. A woman offered her purse, but Black Bart told her he was only interested in Wells Fargo gold. After Charles had hacked open the strongbox and left with the contents, the stage driver realized that the rifle barrels where sticks tied to brush to look like rifle barrels.
He committed another robbery using this exact tactic five months later, and another six months after that. During his fourth robbery a little over a year later, he identified himself as Black Bart, leaving a humorous note and signing it with that moniker. He left a poem signed Black Bart after his next robbery a year later.
Black Bart robbed at least 28 stagecoaches over his outlaw career and netted at least $18,000. The interesting thing was that he always robbed on foot because he was afraid of horses. He never robbed a single passenger because his grievance was against Wells Fargo. On his last robbery, near the location of the first, he ran into trouble. The strongbox was bolted to the stagecoach, so he had to hack into it with an axe. The lone passenger on the stage, who had actually left the stagecoach while it lumbered up a steep hill just prior to Charles stopping it, saw what was happening and fired some shots. One hit Charles in the hand. He escaped with gold, but dropped a handkerchief with a distinctive laundry mark, which was used to hunt him down.
Wells Fargo only pressed charges for the final robbery, and Charles was sentenced to six years in San
Quentin. He was released early for good behavior and left behind his life of crime. He lived in San Francisco and Visalia California before disappearing in 1888.
There was a rumor that Charles once again started robbing Wells Fargo stagecoaches, stopping only when Wells Fargo paid him a $200 a month pension. Another rumor was that he became a pharmacist in Maryville, California, and the last was that he’d spoken of retiring to Japan, and that he may well have done just that.
So…hat’s off to Black Bart, the polite poet bandit with a fear of horses who refused to rob anyone except for the company that had cost him his mine in Montana.
Weather was also a danger. Freezing temperatures and blazing heat were both enemies to the herd and to the cowboys. Finding water along the trail was a matter of life and death. Traveling this way, a drive from San Antonio to Kansas would take about two months. No matter how careful the cowboys were, there was always a percentage of cattle that did not make it to the stockyards.
