June Task 1 Purple
Black Bart
The Wells Fargo Stagecoach Company was established in 1852 by Henry Wells and William Fargo. The coaches varied in size and could seat up to twelve passengers. They were pulled by teams of four or six horses. The coaches had a storage compartment under the driver’s seat for the strong box which held the money and valuables. An armed guard would sit at the front next to the driver. As well as passengers the coaches carried mail and gold bullion (gold in bars or ingots). These stagecoaches were sometimes stopped and robbed by outlaws. The most successful of these outlaws was Black Bart who, during a six year period, held up 30 coaches.
On 26 July 1875, the stagecoach travelling between Copperopolis and Milton in central California was stopped in a lonely spot by a man brandishing a shotgun. Wearing a long linen duster coat, his head covered with a flour sack with cut-out eyeholes and a bowler hat, the bandit politely requested the driver, John Shine, to throw down the strongbox. As Shine reached down, the highwayman shouted ‘If he dares to shoot, give him a solid volley, boys!’ Looking around, Shine saw what appeared to be rifle barrels pointing at him from the surrounding bushes. Taking no chance, he tossed down the strongbox; when a frightened woman threw out her purse the bandit refused it, saying he only wanted the Wells Fargo shipment. Told to drive the coach a short distance, Shine waited until the robber vanished into the woods, then went back to get the plundered express box. He found the ‘rifle barrels’ were nothing more than sticks rigged to suggest a well-armed band of thieves.
This robbery – which netted him only $160 – was the first of some twenty-eight hold ups (some sources put the figure even higher) carried out over the next eight years by the same softly-spoken, courteous man. At the scene of one robbery near Fort Ross in August, 1877 he left the following poem:
I’ve laboured long and hard for bread
For honour and for riches
But on my corns too long you’ve tread
You fine-haired sons of bitches
The note was signed ‘Black Bart the po-8’ and by that name the humorous highwayman became widely known, the most idiosyncratic and untypical of all Western highwaymen in that he always committed his robberies and departed on foot (it would later be learned he was afraid of horses) and never once, throughout all the years he plied his criminal trade, fired a shot.
A year passed before he reappeared, intercepting the Quincy-Oroville stagecoach on 25 July 1878 and getting away with $379 from the Wells Fargo box. Once again, he left a scrawled piece of doggerel.
Although Wells Fargo offered substantial rewards, it seemed Black Bart had a charmed life. He pulled four robberies in 1878 (two of them on successive days), three the following year and four the year after that, always choosing coaches with no shotgun guard, always near the top of a steep rise where the horses slowed to a walk. There was no pattern to his strikes, which ranged from Yreka near the Oregon border to the mining country south of Sacramento. He had a narrow escape in 1882 when he tried to hold up a stage en route to Marysville carrying $18,000 in bullion, only to be frightened off by a near miss from the shotgun guard’s gun that nearly put an end to his career.
Then on 3 November, when he again stopped the Copperopolis stagecoach at the same spot as his first robbery, Black Bart was wounded by one of the passengers that fled. When Calaveras County Sheriff, Ben Thorn, and Wells Fargo detective, John Thacker, arrived on the scene, they found the bandit had left behind his hat, three pairs of cuffs, an opera glass case and a handkerchief with a distinct laundry mark ‘F.X.O.7.’
Wells Fargo and Harry Morse – who had always believed the bandit was from the San Francisco area – began a systematic search of the laundries in the city, finally locating ‘the identical mark’ at a Bush Street agency, which also furnished the name of the owner, Charles E. Bolton, a mining man who had rooms on Second Street. Just two hours later, while Morse was still there, Bolton came into the laundry ‘elegantly dressed and sauntering along carrying a little cane. He wore a natty little derby hat, a diamond pin, a large diamond ring on his finger, and a heavy gold watch and chain,’ Morse wrote.
After introductions were made, Morse tricked Bolton into accompanying him to the Wells Fargo office, where he and Jim Hume questioned Bolton for three hours ‘until great drops of perspiration stood out on his forehead and nose,’ but could not break him down. At about eight that evening, Bolton was taken to his rooming house where they found letters written in a hand which matched the poems left at the robberies. He finally admitted his guilt, cut a deal with the detectives and lead them into the mountains where he had concealed about $4000 in a hollow log; on 17 November 1883, 48 year-old Bolton pleaded guilty in San Andreas court and was sentenced to a very lenient six years in San Quentin prison. It transpired that he had been using the proceeds of his stagecoach hold-ups to pose as a well-off mining man and live it up in San Francisco betting on horse races and speculating in mining stocks.
What he did after he was pardoned in January 1888 remains a mystery. It is possible Bolton may have committed three stage hold-ups before he dropped completely and forever out of sight, and that Wells Fargo offered him a pension of $200 a month if he would leave their vehicles alone. The company of course denied this, but the legend persists. Another story has it that after his release he returned east to marry a childhood sweetheart and died in New York in 1917. Whatever the truth, Bolton disappeared forever. It is one of history’s ironies that his name became something of a legend in California, whereas that of Harry Morse, the man who rid California of so many of its bad men, has largely been forgotten.
From The Wild West by Frederick Nolan. Reproduced by permission of Arcturus Publishing Limited.
[QUESTIONS ON FOLLOWING PAGES]
Section A
Underline the correct ending.
1. A highwayman is a robber who attacks travellers.
stagecoach operator.
person who robs banks.
man in disguise.
2. Wells Fargo was a detective.
stagecoach company.
coach driver.
mining company.
3. Black Bart was rude and humorous.
silent and dangerous.
sarcastic and arrogant.
well-mannered and amusing.
4. Black Bart’s crimes targeted transport vehicles.
wealthy individuals.
female passengers.
bank managers.
5. Black Bart’s poem suggests that he worked hard in his bread company.
was grateful to the stagecoach company.
had bad feet from walking long distances.
resented the wealth of Wells Fargo.
6. The passage uses the term ‘doggerel’, meaning bad handwriting.
a ransom note.
comic verse.
an empty box.
7. Black Bart’s real name was John Shine.
John Thacker.
Charles Bolton.
Harry Morse.
8. Black Bart used his loot to buy mining equipment.
fund a lavish lifestyle.
purchase racehorses.
pay Wells Fargo wages.
9. Black Bart’s style was to frighten victims with his disguise.
work cleverly on his own.
throw strongboxes at his victims.
work with a band of armed men.
Section B
1. Pick out two expressions from the first two paragraphs which make clear that Black Bart behaved like a gentleman.
i
ii
2. Black Bart’s rhyme refers to ‘you’. To whom is the rhyme most likely addressed?
3. Paragraph 3 claims Black Bart was ‘the most idiosyncratic and untypical of all Western highwaymen.’ Find three facts which support the idea that Black Bart was an unusual criminal.
i
ii
iii
4. Why would Wells Fargo ‘of course’ deny they had offered Bolton a pension (final paragraph?)
Section C
This is a summary of the last part of the passage. Complete the summary by putting one or more words in each gap. You may use words from the passage or your own words.
Black Bart was finally caught after being [ ] 1 during a robbery. A [ ] 2 tracked him to a San Francisco [ ] 3. He was a well-dressed gentleman, who appeared [ ] 4 claiming his money came from [ ] 5. A favourite hobby was [ ] 6.
He was [ ] 7 for some time by detectives, but only [ ] 8 to his crimes when they identified his [ ] 9. His [ ] 10 of six years in jail seemed rather [ ] 11.
He was [ ] 12 in 1888 and there was a [ ] 13 that he was [ ]14 by Wells Fargo to give up his life as an outlaw.