5 Habits of Highly Effective Outlaws

Guns? Check. Masks? Check. Poetry book? If you’re going to rob a stagecoach, here’s how to do it with flair.

If You’re A Poet, Show It

Even if you’re a no-good, law-flouting bandit, it pays to mind your manners -and your meter. In California, between 1875 and 1883, Charles E. “Black Bart” Boles held up more than two dozen Wells Fargo stagecoaches. Even though he seemed to have an intense private grudge against the bank, he was always polite to its employees, asking stage drivers to “please” throw down the money. Stranger still, Boles often left poetry at his crime scenes. This poem was his most well-known:

I’ve labored long
and hard for bread,
For honor and for riches,
But on my corns
too long you’ve tread,
You fine-haired sons of bitches.

In 1883, Boles was wounded during a holdup and accidentally left a handkerchief at the crime scene. When Wells Fargo detectives traced it back to him, he was arrested and imprisoned, and although Boles’ career as a robber was over, his literary influence was just beginning. During his imprisonment, several copycat stagecoach robbers left truly dreadful bits of poetry at the scenes of their crimes.

Spin the Media

Jesse James spent as much time honing his public image as he did robbing people. In fact, James frequently wrote letters to newspapers, stressing that his gang never attacked innocent farmers, only corrupt banks and railroad companies. He also claimed lawmen hounded James and his brothers because they had been Confederate soldiers, which won the gang sympathy in the South. His letters were widely reprinted, even in The New York Times, helping turn the Missouri bandits into national legends.

One night in 1875, Pinkerton detectives threw a flare into the James family home. The agents were trying to light up the dark house so they could shoot at the outlaws, but the flare exploded in the fireplace, killing Jesse’s young half-brother and maiming his mother, who lost her right forearm. James made the incident seem even worse than it was in his letters to the press, falsely claiming the detectives had tossed a 32-pound military shell into his mother’s home. The public was horrified, and after the explosion, Pinkerton agents received little help from Jesse’s neighbors, who were often happy to provide the James gang with food, information, and hiding places.
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The Meanest Towns in the West

The following is an article from the book History’s Lists from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.

From the archives of the Old West, we’ve culled a list of the most notorious places on the frontier. Here’s our countdown of the baddest of the bad, meanest of the mean, Wild West towns.

Some historians say that the Wild West wasn’t as dangerous as we’ve been led to believe by Hollywood, but there’s no doubt that some frontier towns were beyond the immediate reach of the law -places where mischief, mayhem, and murder were everyday occurrences.

8. FORT GRIFFIN, TEXAS

One of the wildest places in the old West, Fort Griffin sprouted at the intersection of the West Fork of the Trinity River and the Clear Fork of the Brazos River in northern Texas. Built in the 1860s on a hill overlooking the Brazos, the fort itself was designed to protect the folks -mostly farmers and ranchers- who lived below in the settlement of Fort Griffin.

The town was soon invaded by outlaws and cowboys driving their cattle north to Dodge City. By the 1870s, skirmishes with the Kiowa and Comanche in the north diverted the soldiers from Fort Griffin and, as a result, law enforcement broke down, which attracted even more rough types to the town.

Visiting Celebrities. The motley collection of buffalo hunters, gamblers, gunfighters, and “painted ladies” brought with them a penchant for violence. Among them were a gambler and prostitute named Big Nose Kate and her pal, the legendary gambler Doc Holliday. Also passing through were Wyatt Earp (who met Holliday for the first time at the fort), lawman Pat Garrett, and John Wesley Hardin -by some accounts the most sadistic killer to ever come out of Texas. Dustups and gun violence became so frequent that the commander of the fort finally placed the town under martial law in 1874.

7. RUBY, ARIZONA

From the days of the Spanish explorations prospectors had searched for veins of gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc near Montana Peak in southern Arizona close to the Mexican border. In 1891, high-grade gold was discovered. A local assayer judged it to be a bonanza, and the rush was on. The town of Ruby was born practically overnight.

Here Comes Trouble. Most of the miners lived in tents or rough adobe huts, and bought their meager supplies at George Cheney’s Ruby Mercantile, the one and only general store. The men provided for themselves and their families by hunting and rustling cattle. But the primary source of trouble came from Mexican bandits who frequently terrorized the settlement. By the early 1900s, Ruby was so dangerous that Philip and Gypsy Clarke, who owned a general store, kept weapons in every room of their house as well as the general store. When Philip eventually sold the store to a pair of brothers, he warned them of the danger. They didn’t heed Clarke’s warning and were soon found shot to death. Today, Ruby is a well-preserved ghost town.

6. DELAMAR, NEVADA

Delamar got its reputation as a notorious Wild West town not from gun violence but from dangerous conditions in the mines. The 1889 discovery of gold in nearby Monkey Wrench Gulch unleashed a stampede of miners intent on digging for the peculiar form of gold, encased as it was in crystallized quartz. A former ship’s captain named Joseph Raphael De Lamar bought most of the profitable mines in 1893 and built a mill to crack the quartz and refine the gold. Within a few years, the town had 1,500 citizens, a hospital, post office, opera house, school, several churches, and plenty of saloons. But then the deaths began to mount.
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Why Wyatt Earp is Buried in a Jewish Cemetery

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.

The incredibly happy marriage of Wyatt Earp and Josie Marcus.

Wyatt Earp a Jew? Well, no, but he is buried in a Jewish Cemetery. Why? Read on…

In 1867, Josephine Sarah Marcus moved with her observant, immigrant, German-Jewish parents from Brooklyn, New York to San Francisco. She said her prayers every day and was taught a by-the-books good Jewish education. In 1879, young Josie was exposed to the romance of the San Francisco gold rush era.

After seeing the Gilbert and Sullivan play H.M.S. Pinafore at the age of 18, Josie caught the show biz bug. She ran away with a friend and joined the company touring the U.S. When the troupe played Tombstone, Arizona, she fell in love with the corrupt city marshal Johnny Behan. Ironically, it was Behan who introduced Josie to Wyatt Earp.

Josie and Wyatt were to soon fall in deeply in love and be married for some 50 years. The marriage was, by all accounts, a joyous one.

While we know much, factually, of Josephine Marcus, Wyatt Earp, while a true legend, had a checkered, disputed, and much-debated life history. While it is certain that Wyatt, then a U.S. Marshal, participated in the legendary “gunfight at the O.K. Corral” in 1881, the facts of that historic day remain foggy.

Wyatt, along with his brothers Morgan and Virgil and friend Doc Holliday, did participate in the shooting of the Clanton gang. The fight injured both Morgan and Virgil, while three of the Clantons were killed. The Clantons claimed it was a deliberate set-up  and that the Earps waited for them and drew first, while the Earp side claimed the Clantons drew their pistols first.
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Getting Covered Wagons Over the Rockies

If you had all your family’s worldy possessions and supplies for a long trip inside a wagon, do you think a couple of horses or oxen could haul it up a mountain? Minnesotastan explains how it was done, at TYWKIWDBI. Link

(Image from the book Hard Road West, by Keith Heyer Meldahl)

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Did Butch Cassidy Live Long Enough To Tell His Own Tale?

As a mythic figure of the Old West, they don’t come much bigger than Butch Cassidy. The outlaw became a legend in his own time, and was thought to have died in Bolivia in 1908. But new evidence, in the form of a manuscript supposedly penned by the legend himself, shows that he may have lived another twenty odd years of peaceful anonymity in Washington state. Entitled “Bandit Invincible: The Story of Butch Cassidy”, this 200 page discovery was acquired by a rare book collector who feels that the work is the real deal. Other historians are quick to dismiss it as nothing more than a fake, but many of the facts contained within the pages seems to be knowledge only Butch himself would have been privy to, and sightings of the outlaw in America well after he was supposed to have died seem to support the books authenticity. Looks like historians have a gunfight on their hands! Read more about this fascinating new find over at ArtDaily.

Link -image via AP Photo/Nevada Historical Society.

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Four Neglected Wild West Figures

You’ve heard of Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, and Wild Bill Hickok, but there were plenty of other colorful figures who left their mark on the Wild West. This list tells us about four that you may never had heard of, like Texas Ben Thompson.

Texas Ben served in the Confederate States Army, then after the Civil War he headed south and served in Emperor Maximillian’s army in Mexico. When Maximillian fell Ben crossed back over the border into Texas, and spent the remainder of his life hiring his gun out to anyone who would pay, regardless of which side of the law it placed him on. Texas Ben even pinned on a badge as a legitimate lawman at times and supposedly put in time as a Texas Ranger at one point in his career. Thompson was even involved in the infamous Railroad War between the Atchison, Topeka  & Santa Fe RR and the Denver & Rio Grande RR. In 1884 Texas Ben shot and killed San Antonio saloon and bawdy house owner Jack Harris. Later that year, passing back through San Antonio with fellow neglected  gunfighter John “King” Fisher, he and his traveling companion foolishly  entered Harris’ former establishment and were riddled with bullets by several of the dead man’s friends. Texas Ben’s trademark tall silk hat was placed on his coffin.

Also learn about Luke Short, Pearl Hart, and Long-haired Jim Courtright in this post at Balladeer’s Blog. Link

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Five Historic Train Robberies

They make train robberies look so easy in the movies, don’t they? You jump on to a train with guns a-blazin’ and a bandana covering your face, rob the safe and jump off, never to be caught. But in real life, the gangs who robbed trains were almost always caught and brought to justice. Here are a few of their stories.

Jesse James’ First Train Robbery

On July 21, 1873, Jesse James and the James-Younger Gang robbed their first train in Adair, Iowa, of all places. They managed to derail the Rock Island train, turning the train on its side, killing the engineer and injuring a lot of its passengers. But that wasn’t enough terror for the passengers – the James-Younger Gang, clad in Ku Klux Klan garb, went up and down the length of the overturned train confronting them and demanding their watches and valuables (although some reports say they stole only from the men). They threw it all in bags along with the money from the train’s safe and ended up getting about $3,000. This was a bit unusual for Jesse James and his crew; after that they mostly stuck to robbing the express safe in the baggage car and left the passengers alone. Even though the gang killed the engineer of the train and wounded several passengers, Adair doesn’t hold it against him – every July, they have “Jesse James Days,” where they reenact the train robbery and celebrate with a parade and other festivities.

Photo from History of the James-Younger Gang

The Great Gold Robbery of 1855

One of the biggest train robberies of all time took place not in the American Old West, but in London, England. On May 15, 1855, three boxes of gold were put on a car on a South Eastern Railway train headed from England to Boulogne, France. The boxes were sealed, shut with iron bars, and locked with locks which had keys held by only a few trusted people. The problem? When the boxes reached their destination, one of them was a lot lighter than it should have been. Upon closer inspection, it was discovered that somehow, someone had substituted lead shot for gold.

Police had no clue what had happened and a two-month investigation ensued. Hundreds of people were questioned without any hope of a lead, but by August, suspicion fell on Edward Agar. Agar was sent to prison for passing a fake check, but wanted to make sure that the mother of his child had money to provide for the young one. He informed her that she would be receiving £7,000 from a colleague of his, and when the money didn’t show, he blew the whistle on the whole operation. He and the colleague, William Pierce, had hatched a complicated plot to steal the gold years earlier. They involved a clerk in the railway office when they found out that he briefly had possession of the keys that locked the boxes the gold was sealed in; the clerk was able to get the keys to Agar who made an impression of them in wax and later had the keys replicated.

There was a second key to the safes that wasn’t quite as easy to get. Agar ended up sending a £200 box of bullion on the same route (under an assumed name, of course), then showed up to collect it and watched the clerk carefully to see where he got the second key to the safe. Turned out it wasn’t quite as complicated as they thought – the key was simply stored in a cupboard that wasn’t very well guarded at all. When the time came, Agar and Pierce strolled right into the office when it was unoccupied and made a quick wax imprint of the key.

They brought the lead shot onto the train in carpet bags; Pierce got into a first class carriage and Agar boarded with the train’s guard, James Burgess, who was in on the whole thing. Agar took the iron bars off with a mallet and chisel, replaced the gold bars with lead shot, replaced the iron bars and stuck a new wax seal on the box to make it look like it had never been tampered with.

When Agar turned Pierce in, police recovered about £2,000 of the £12,000 worth of gold stolen.

Michael Crichton later based his novel The Great Train Robbery on the incident, which was turned into a movie starring Sean Connery as William Pierce. (pictured)
Photo from MGMHD.

The First Known Train Robbery in the U.S.

On October 6, 1866, the Reno brothers jumped onto an Ohio and Mississippi Railway train in Indiana and emptied one of the safes. They tossed another one out the window so they could take it with them, and then they jumped off of the train, completing the first train robbery in the United States. It was definitely a catching trend – in the two weeks following the Reno brothers’ first moving holdup, two more trains were robbed. A passenger testified that he saw the faces of two of the robbers from the first holdup, but after he was shot and killed, other passengers clammed up and none of the burglars were charged. At least, not at that time. After their fifth robbery a couple of years later, the Pinkertons finally caught up with the Reno brothers. Ten agents were waiting on the train to bust the boys, and although most of them escaped, they were arrested the next day.

Some members of the gang were hanged, but a lynch mob got to the others before official justice could be served.

The Great Train Robbery of 1963

The ’60s in England – you think of the Beatles and Twiggy, not train robberies, right? But one of the biggest train robberies in the history of the U.K. actually took place on August 8, 1963. A gang consisting of 15 guys hijacked the Royal Mail train going from Glasgow to London and stole the contents of the High Value Package – a carriage containing registered mail with cash contents. The robbers planned this carefully; normally the HVP carriage only carried about £300,000, but since there had been a bank holiday and this was the first shipment following it, the amount was much more than usual – about £2.3 million. They did so with no weapons other than an iron bar, which was used to hit the driver of the train on the head.

They didn’t pull it off, though – the gang left the train rife with fingerprints, and left all kinds of evidence littered about the farmhouse they took refuge in for five days in Buckinghamshire. Not only were fingerprints found, they were allegedly found on a Monopoly board that the robbers had used to amuse themselves with while they were holed up. They used real money, of course.

13 of the gang members were eventually caught (that’s a few of them in the picture), although at least one of them didn’t stay caught for long. Ronnie Biggs escaped about 15 months into his prison sentence and moved to Paris, where he had plastic surgery. Then he moved to Australia and lived under the radar for quite a few years, until his identity was exposed, forcing him to move to Brazil. He lived there until 2001, when a series of strokes made him want to return to England to buy a proper pint before he died, although most people suspect he wanted the healthcare. He was returned to jail to finish out his sentence and is still there – Biggs was just denied parole on July 2 because the Justice Secretary felt that “Mr. Biggs is wholly unrepentant.”

Photo from HowStuffWorks

The Train Robbery that Brought Down George Parrot

Big Nose George Parrot sounds like a character on Sesame Street or something, but he was the furthest thing from it. Big Nose George was a train robber who didn’t mind killing to get what he wanted. He had done just that in 1878 – after a botched train robbery, Parrot and his gang killed two men – a Union Pacific detective and the Wyoming deputy sheriff. The gang then robbed the corpses of their two victims, including one of their horses, and took off. Word of the double murders got around fast and a $20,000 reward was offered for apprehending the killers. They were, indeed, apprehended. Big Nose George Parrot was supposed to be hanged, but after he tried to escape, a lynch mob hunted him down and strung him up themselves. “It’s a lynch mob,” you might be thinking, “They’re prone to extreme behavior.” But the doctors weren’t any better – Parrot’s skull cap was sawed off and given to the doctor’s 15-year-old assistant, Lilian Heath. Throughout her life she used it as a pen holder, a doorstop and an ashtray. The doctor made a pair of shoes and a medical bag out of Parrot’s skin and he allegedly wore the shoes to his inaugural ball a year later when he was elected the first Democratic Governor of Wyoming. You can still see the shoes – they’re on display at the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins, Wyoming.
Photo from Sunderland Echo.

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Bizarro: Super Heroes of the Old West

I’ve been neglectin’ mah duties of posting our weekly Bizarro comic (Sorry, Dan!) Well, let’s get that fixed right now.

For more Bizarro, check out Dan Piraro’s website and blog!

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