On June 23, historians will mark the 125th anniversary of the robbery of the Ione-Jackson stage by Black Bart. That's why the city of Sutter Creek will celebrate its second annual Black Bart Days June 21 and 22 in commemoration of that heist. After all, it was the last successful holdup the legendary hooded robber pulled off and only one in Amador County. This is the first in a four-part series.
Black Bart went be many names - the "PO 8," aka Charles E. Bowles, aka Charles E. Boles, aka Charles E. Bolton, aka T. Z. Spaulding, and a few more aliases historians don't know or have paid less attention to.
That multi-named highwayman stopped and robbed the down Ione-Jackson stage on June 23, 1883. Later that November, as many know, teenager Jimmy Rolleri and brave stage driver Reese McConnell finally foiled Bart on Calaveras' Funk Hill. The surprised and bleeding highwayman dropped a handkerchief whose tell-tale laundry mark soon led to his capture, trial and imprisonment.
Without doubt, Black Bart was and is the most ballyhooed bad guy in Western lore. Why? He pulled off at least 29 stage robberies between 1875 and 1883 and maybe more after getting out of San Quentin in 1888. Wells Fargo's chief detective and Bart's dogged nemesis, James B. Hume, believed the ex-con needed money and probably robbed three more stages.
Thus, the sheer number of his successful stage holdups sets him apart. So did his modus operandi, holdup garb and manners. Never did a corps commander plan an attack more than Boles plotted each robbery and get-away. With various San Francisco lodgings as home base, he held up stages as far as southern Oregon and near as Amador and Calaveras and eluded pursuers and posses by long hikes overland. Also unique to Bart were the "unloaded" shot-guns he brandished, his refusal to rob passengers, and his gentlemanly, courteous manner.
Whence this pseudonym "Black Bart?" The press didn't bestow it; he named himself in the most famous poem or doggerel lines ever written in the West. After robbing the Sonoma County, Point Arenas to Duncan Mill's stage on 3 Aug 1877, heist four, he left this scribbled verse on a Wells, Fargo way-bill:
"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
Black Bart, the P0 8"
Just who were these "fine-haired sons of bitches" that "tred" on his corns too long? In a subsequent part the writer will suggest one theory.
In the mid-1870s, after studying scenarios of a series of holdups of Wells Fargo express boxes in Northern California, detective Hume knew his firm faced a cunning serial robber, a careful, indefatigable someone who left no clues. Thus did the almost mythical Black Bart, Wells Fargo's historic antagonist, become part of California and the West's lore.
Bowles (his family name) was born in England but came to the United States with family as an infant. With his English heritage, he surely learned about the infamous Black Bart, a Welsh, black pirate named John or Bartholomew Roberts. That brigand, between 1719 and 1722, swashbuckled 470 ships off the Americas and West Africa.
Besides the same nickname, seemingly they had similar character traits, too: relatively less cruel treatment of victims; a love of fine clothing; alleged teetotaling; and most importantly, the credo: "Better being a commander than a common man."
But that Black Bart, evidently, wasn't his namesake. Bart told detectives after his capture in 1883 that the name popped into his head from a character in a novel, "The Case of Summerfield."
Boles was an uncommon man during the war between the states. Like many other noncitizens, Boles fought in that epic civil war to preserve the Union and abolish slavery or, conversely, divide the Union and preserve the peculiar institution. His 116th Illinois Regiment marched with Sherman through Georgia. Though severely wounded, he survived in a company that lost most of its men.
The uncommoner tried being a "common man" after the war, but couldn't abide the thought of living out his life farming and existing in a small Illinois town. In the late 1860s, he fled family and commonness for the Montana gold fields. Though he wrote letters home and surely sent money, historians don't think he ever saw his family again.
There have been many books about the western Black Bart. Dr. Robert Chandler, a historian in the Wells Fargo History Room, San Francisco, said he favors "Black Bart …" by William Collins and Bruce Levene (1992). The late George Hoeper of San Andreas - in the town where Boles was tried, convicted and sent to prison over a century before - wrote "Black Bart, Boulevardier Bandit" (1995).
This writer wrote a brief account of the Ione-Jackson stage robbery in Vol. 2 of his "Logan's Alley" series and acquired a folder filled with Black Bart data from sleuth Rick Stevenson of Sacramento, both a quarter-century ago.
Next week we visit "mining engineer" Charles E. Bolton's neighborhood in the heart of San Francisco.
Larry Cenotto is a long-time Amador historian. He will revisit Black Bart and his infamous 29 or more holdups in a four-part series appearing Tuesdays in the Ledger Dispatch.