7. Black Bart, the Gentleman Bandit
The “Gentleman Bandit” Black Bart, real name Charles Boles (1829 – circa 1888), was one of the Old West’s most charismatic outlaws. He joined the California Gold Rush in 1849, and spent a few years prospecting before returning east and settling in Illinois. He enlisted in an Illinois regiment during the Civil War, became Company First Sergeant within a year, and was brevetted as a lieutenant before his discharge in 1865.
He returned to prospecting for gold after the war, but had a run in with Wells Fargo agents in 1871 that left him vowing vengeance. He got his revenge by changing his name to Black Bart, after a character from a dime novel, and taking up a career as a highwayman. He specialized in robbing Wells Fargo stagecoaches in northern California and southern Oregon.
He had an air of sophistication and polite charm about him while robbing people at gunpoint, and was thus viewed as a gentleman bandit. His modus operandi was to rob on foot, wielding a double barreled shotgun and clad in a linen duster and bowler hat, his face concealed by a flour sack with eyeholes cut into it. Halting the stagecoach, he would cover the driver with his shotgun while politely ordering him to throw down the strongbox. He would then order the driver to move on, recover the strongbox, and vanish. He never fired his weapon, and sometimes left behind handwritten poems, which further enhanced his notoriety and gained him yet another the nickname, “Black Bart the Poet”.
His career came to an end in 1883, when a robbery went bad and he was shot in the hand. Fleeing, he dropped some personal items, including a handkerchief with a laundry mark, that was eventually traced to a San Francisco laundromat and thence to Charles Boles. Under interrogation, he confessed to robbing Wells Fargo stagecoaches, but only before 1879, on the mistaken assumption that the statute of limitations had run out on robberies committed before that year.
Wells Fargo pressed charges only for the last robbery, and he was convicted and sentenced to 6 years, but was released early in 1888 for good behavior. In poor health, he did not return to his family, but wrote his wife that he was depressed and wanted to get away from everybody. He was last seen in a hotel in Visalia, CA, from which he vanished a month after regaining his freedom.