The Gentleman Highwayman of California--Black Bart

 

                                             Charles Boles a/k/a Charles Bolton, T. Z. Spaulding, and Black Bart after his arrest in San Francisco in 1883.

On July 23, 1878 the outlaw known as Black Bart robbed a Wells Fargo stagecoach.  Wells Fargo was a favorite target, and he was operating in the familiar territory in and around Calaveras County, California.  When the empty strongbox was found, it contained a little poem:

 

Here I lay me down to sleep

 

To wait the coming morrow,

Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,

And everlasting sorrow.

Let come what will, I’ll try it on,

My condition can't be worse;

And if there’s money in that box

‘Tis munny in my purse.

 

—Black Bart

PO8

The daring highwayman began his crime spree just shy of two years earlier on July 26, 1875.

It was the first of a string of daring hold-ups that would continue until he was finally captured following a botched robbery of the same stage in the same location in 1883.

Black Bart was one of the few Western bad men—or western lawmen for that matter—who lived up to his reputation.  Like others his adventures were exploited in dime novels and the popular press like the Police Gazette, but unlike others there was hardly any need for exaggeration.

Bart defied all of the stereotypes.   While stagecoach robberies were common across the West, most were done by mounted gangs who counted on their horses to outrun the law.   Deathly afraid of horses, Bart did all of his robberies and his successful getaways on foot taking advantage of the rugged territory of his preferred stage lines in northern California and southern Oregon.  He did not carry a pistol or a rifle.  He showed a shotgun which he never fired, and which may never even have been loaded.  He wore a raffish derby hat and long duster and disguised his face with a flour sack with eye holes.  He was unfailingly polite and courteous to drivers and passengers alike and never uttered a profanity.  On at least two occasions he left behind short poems celebrating his crimes. Yet he got away with tens of thousands of dollars of Wells Fargo gold and U.S. Mail in his long career.

 

Wells Fargo stagecoaches like this were Black Bart's favored target, perhaps because of some grievance committed by the coma.

If Bart’s appearance and methods were unorthodox, so was his background.  Born Charles Earl Bowles in Norfolk, England in 1829, his father relocated his large family to a Jefferson County, New York farm when he was two years old.

Like many a young man, he and two of his brothers were lured to the California gold fields in 1849. They worked claims along the stream then known as the American River in the heart of Gold Rush territory. After a discouraging year, Charley, as he was known returned east.  But the lure of gold got him again and returned with brothers David and Robert, who soon died of, probably of typhoid.  Charley continued mining with limited success until abandoning the fields in 1854

The same year Charley, now spelling his last name Boles, married Mary Elizabeth Johnson and established a home near Decatur, Illinois.  The couple soon had four children.

Whatever happiness the couple may have had was interrupted by the Civil War.   Boles enlisted in Company B, 116th Illinois Regiment, on August 13, 1862.  He was evidently an excellent soldier and quickly advanced through the ranks becoming First Sergeant by the end of his first year of service.  Boles saw action in many battles, including Vicksburg where he sustained major injuries.  Later he was a part of the Western Army under General William Tecumseh Sherman on his March to the Sea.  Boles was discharged having been brevetted to First Lieutenant in June 1865 in Washington and returned home.

Like many veterans, Boles found it difficult to adjust to the hum-drum of farming life.  In 1867 he lit out to Idaho and Montana to resume prospecting.  He remained in contact with his wife in Decatur until 1871.  A final letter in August of that year made cryptic reference to a grievance against Wells Fargo and a vow to seek vengeance.  He then stopped writing and seemed to vanish off the face of the Earth.  Eventually his wife gave him up for dead.

Nothing is known of his activities from that point on until that July day in California.  Perhaps he committed other, non-attributed robberies in Montana, honing his skills.  Perhaps he just went deep into the Northern California gold country once again prospecting and learning the lay of the land.  He evidently took his inspiration not from the dashing outlaw gangs of the plains but from the legendary solo highwaymen of his native England.

 

                                          

                                                              A cartoon imagining of a Black Bart ambush and robbery.

He typically hid behind an outcropping of rock or just beyond a curve, usually on an upgrade where the stagecoach teams would be laboring.  He calmly stepped into the road leveling his shot gun in the direction of the driver and politely asked for the strong box and mail.  He never robbed passengers or the driver.

Bart committed 28 holdups of Wells Fargo stagecoaches in Northern California, most of them on the Siskiyou Trail to Oregon.  On his fourth and seventh stick-ups Bart left behind poems. 

The first read:

 

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,

—Black Bart, 1877

 

These ditties, along with the outlaw’s cheerful disposition sparked the interest and attention of the press and public alike.  After the second note, he was famous.  Almost any robbery on the west coast was attributed to him, some by copycats.  Most of his robberies were successful; some resulted in only a few dollars when an anticipated Wells Fargo shipment was not on board.  On one occasion he was scared off and lost his derby when a guard fired on him.  Possies chased him, but he melted into the mountains time and again.

                                            Wanted posters like this made Bart feel like a marked man.              

By the 1880s the pressure to capture him was building.  And Bart felt it.  He told a driver that year, “Hurry up the hounds.  It gets lonesome in these mountains.”  In 1882 a driver asked how much he made as an outlaw.   “Not very much for the chances I take,” he said.

On November 3, 1883 Bart returned to the site of his first robbery on Funk Hill in Calaveras County.  That day a young passenger got off the coach to hunt in the brush, planning to meet back up with it on the other side of the hill.  He got to the road and waited.  When the stage failed to appear, he began to walk back.  He met the driver with the team, which Bart had ordered un-hitched from the wagon.  Armed with the boy’s rifle the two moved back to the coach, where Bart was struggling to get the strong box un-bolted from the floor—a new Wells Fargo security measure.  The driver fired at Bart with the rifle and missed.  Bart took off, grabbing some gold and a sack of mail.  The boy took the rifle and thought he shot Bart as he disappeared into the trees.  They found traces of blood and began to follow.

Bart stashed his some of his loot in a hollow log, stuffed about $500 in gold coins into his pocket, and wrapped a bloody hand, his only wound, with a handkerchief.  He lost both the handkerchief and his glasses as he ran.  Still, he once again eluded his pursuers and seemed to make a clean get away.

Pinkerton Detectives hired by Wells Fargo recovered the items left behind.  The bloody handkerchief had a laundry mark on it.  Displaying the dogged diligence for which the Agency was famous, detectives visited more than 90 laundries before finding a matching laundry mark at Ferguson & Bigg’s California Laundry on Bush Street in San Francisco.  By co-incidence the detective, James B. Hume bore a remarkable resemblance to Bart with his massive handlebar moustache, bushy eyebrows and graying hair.  The laundry man pointed out Bart’s residence, a modest rooming house near-by.

Boles had evidently been living there for some years as T. Z. Spaulding.  He told the proprietors of the rooming house that he was a mining engineer.  His frequent business trips coincided with Bart’s robberies up north.

Boles’ true identity was only discovered when a Bible inscribed to him by his wife was found among his possessions.  Eventually, he confessed to robberies committed before 1879 in the mistaken belief that he could escape prosecution by the statute of limitations.  The police report described him as, “a person of great endurance. Exhibited genuine wit under most trying circumstances and was extremely proper and polite in behavior. Eschews profanity.”

News of Black Bart’s arrest and trial drew national attention.  Boles was photographed several times and illustrations appeared in national as well as California publications.

Wells Fargo chose only to prosecute for the first robbery, for which they had a firm confession.  Boles was sentenced to six years in San Quentin.  He served only four with time off for good behavior.  None-the-less, harsh prison conditions broke his health.

Upon his release, he wrote at last to his abandoned wife.  He told her he was being constantly followed by Wells Fargo agents and felt helplessly harassed.  He expressed a desire to “get away from everything.”

 

Bart continued to fascinate and inspired books, fictional and historic, stories, songs, a comic book and this 1948 highly fictionalized Universal B-movie starring Dan Durey, Yvone DeCarlo, and Jeffery Lynn.

In February 1888 Boles checked out of the San Francisco hotel where he was living.  Detectives traced him to the Palace Hotel in Visalia in the San Joaquin Valley far from Black Bart’s old stomping grounds.  He checked in and then just disappeared.  He was never seen or heard from again.

Later other robberies were attributed to Bart, including one in which a poem was left behind.  But Pinkertons proved that Boles was not involved.  Some stories had Boles retiring quietly to New York City under an assumed name where he may have died in 1917.  Others think he went back to prospecting in Montana or Nevada and probably died in the wilderness.

Whatever the case, the legend of Black Bart the Gentleman lived on.

Emma Lazarus--The Poet of the New Colossus

 

                Emma Lazarus as a young woman.

Emma Lazarus was just 34 years old when she penned the lines that might be the most familiar verse to millions of Americans.  Odds were stacked against her ever achieving that kind of recognition.  She a woman at a time when most distaff poetry was confined to the pages of women’s magazines and the columns of newspapers desperate to fill inches at next to no expense.  Only a handful of women, almost unanimously WASP gentlewomen like Julia Ward Howe were taken seriously by the cultural guardians of the literary elite.

If that was not enough to overcome, she was also a proud and open Jew, which is to say a virtual automatic pariah.

Yet she was no product of the shtetel, one of the impoverished Eastern European refugees from pogroms who were beginning to flood American cities in 1883.  Indeed, she had deeper roots in the New World than most Colonial Dames.  On her mother’s side she was a Nathan, a Sephardic Jewish family with roots in Portugal via the Netherlands and Brazil who had settled in Manhattan when it was still Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam in the mid-1600s.  That side of her family was well established and prosperous and produced a distinguished line that included 18th Century poetess Grace Seixas Nathan and her distant cousin, Benjamin N. Cardozo, later a Justice of the Supreme Court.

The family of Emma father, Moses Lazarus, were German Jews who immigrated in the early 19th Century.  They did not come over in steerage.  They were middle class, well educated, highly cultured, and well assimilated in Germany.  They spoke German, not Yiddish.  In New York these Jews quickly established themselves as merchants, shopkeepers, and professionals.  These Ashkenazi assumed leadership of the still small Jewish community over the sometimes-resentful long time Sephardic residents.

That Emma, the fourth of seven children, was the product of both of the great lines of European Jewry was somewhat unusual.

The Lazarus summer home in Newport, Rhode Island.

She was born on July 22, 1849 in New York City, the year after a wave of European revolutions that sent another surge of Jewish immigrants to the city.  The family was upper-middle class, not terribly religious, and deeply interested in high culture.  They were comfortable enough to have a summer home at Newport, Rhode Island, home of the famous Sephardic Jewish Synagogue, the oldest in America, which later inspired one of Emma’s best-known poems.

At home they spoke English, which was her mother’s family language for generations, but she also became fluent in her father’s German.  He was eager to share with her all of the classics of German literature and of the Romantic movement.  Tutored privately, she also learned French and Italian and intently studied British and American literature.

Lazarus was writing poetry in her teens and published translations of German poets including the Romantics Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine in the early 1860’s.  Her proud father arranged to have her first collection of original poems in 1866 and the next year Poems and Translations had a successful commercial publication.  That volume drew the approving attention of no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson for whom the German Romantics were an important early influence.

Over the next decade, Lazarus published a second volume of poetry, Admetus and Other Poems in 1871; the novel Alide: An Episode in Goethe’s Life in 1874, and a play in verse, The Spagnoletto, in 1876.  If not a literary celebrity she earned the attention and approval in cultivated circles.  But most of her readers were not aware that the youthful female poet was Jewish.  In fact, the name Lazarus, familiar from the Jesus miracle story in the New Testament, probably gave many the impression she was Christian.

                                           

                                                 Henry George was a major inspiration for Emma.

Like many of the Ashkenazi elite in New York, her father was a political liberal, ardent abolitionist and Union supporter during the Civil War, and open to new and radical ideas.  His daughter was an apple that fell close to the tree.  When Henry George published his hugely influential Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy in 1879, Lazarus became an early disciple and soon a close personal friend of the visionary author.  She plunged into spreading the word about George’s vision of a communal society supported by a single tax on land which rivaled Marxist socialism as a model for a new society among radicals.  In addition to a laudatory poem published in the New York Times she wrote, “Progress and Poverty is not so much a book as an event. The life and thought of no one capable of understanding it can be quite the same after reading it,” and even that reading it would prevent such a person, who also “prized justice or common honesty” from being able to ever again “dine or sleep or work in peace.”

Yet in all of this literary and political activity, Lazarus did not seem much interested in her Jewish identity or advancing Jewish causes.  She was occasionally stung by anti-Semitism but like many others believed that assimilation would eventually overcome prejudice.  

That changed when she got her hands on George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda which was not well known in America.  The social satire contained a moving description of the plight of European Jews and painted an idealistic picture of a young man out to right historic oppression and save his people.  Although it was the final work of an important Victorian novelist and therefore a somewhat unlikely source, the book inspired a generation on both sides of the Atlantic to become what is now recognized as proto-Zionists. That term Zionism was not yet invented or became a formal movement until launched by Theodor Herzl in 1897.

This interest was further stirred by the news of Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.  That set off the first wave of massive Eastern European immigration of largely destitute refugees to the city.  While many of the established Ashkenazi elite were horrified by the crude peasants and laborers who they feared would evoke a harsh backlash from latent American nativism, Lazarus plunged into organizing aid and loudly advocating for the truly wretched refuse that were filling the tenements and slums.  It became the work of the rest of her life.

She wrote The Dance to Death, a dramatization of a German short story about the burning of Jews in Nordhausen during the Black Death.  In addition to articles published wherever she could place them, Lazarus published Songs of a Semite in 1882.

On a practical level Lazarus helped to found the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting and raised funds for other charities and relief programs.

The manuscript for the poem The New Colossus was offered in this auction catalog to raise money for the Statue of Liberty pedestal.

In that spirit she somewhat casually donated a new poem inspired by the French gift to an auction, conducted by the Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.  It was not until 1903 that the first verse of that poem, The New Colossus was installed on a bronze plaque on the pedestal it modestly helped finance.  The words subsequently reprinted in school textbooks and recited at patriotic gatherings became some of the most familiar and beloved lines of American poetry.

Lazarus traveled to Europe twice in in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887 to learn more of conditions there and to contact Jewish intellectuals and leaders as well as leading radicals like William Morris.

The memorial plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty was affixed there in 1903.

She returned from the second trip deathly ill.  Two months after she sailed past Lady Liberty which had finally been dedicated while she was abroad, Emma Lazarus died of what is now believed to have been Hodgkin’s lymphoma on November 19, 1887.  She was only 38 years old.

At the time of her death, she was still not well known to most of the American public.  She was eulogized most often in the Jewish and radical press, although due note was made in the New York Times which had published several of her essays over the years.  Many of her earlier admirers distanced themselves from her as she identified more urgently as a Jew.

She is widely recognized today mostly on the strength of The New Colossus.  She was honored by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March 2008, and her home on West 10th Street was included in a map of Women’s Rights Historic Sites. In 2009, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and The Museum of Jewish Heritage featured an exhibition on her in 2012. 

Emma never got her own stamp, but her portrait adorned the First Day Cover for a Statue of Liberty stamp.

The Postal Service has never seen fit to issue an Emma Lazarus stamp, but it did feature her portrait on the first day cover card of a 1978 16¢ First Class Statue of Liberty stamp that quoted a line from her poem.

Here is that famous poem and two more samples of her work that deserve to be remembered as well.

The Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, 1910.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

 

—Emma Lazarus

 

                                    

The Jewish Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island.
 

In The Jewish Synagogue at Newport

 

Here, where the noises of the busy town,

   The ocean’s plunge and roar can enter not,

We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,

   And muse upon the consecrated spot.

 

No signs of life are here: the very prayers

   Inscribed around are in a language dead;

The light of the “perpetual lamp” is spent

   That an undying radiance was to shed.

 

What prayers were in this temple offered up,

   Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,

By these lone exiles of a thousand years,

   From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!

 

How as we gaze, in this new world of light,

   Upon this relic of the days of old,

The present vanishes, and tropic bloom

   And Eastern towns and temples we behold.

 

Again we see the patriarch with his flocks,

   The purple seas, the hot blue sky o’erhead,

The slaves of Egypt,—omens, mysteries,—

   Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.

 

A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,

   A man who reads Jehovah’s written law,

‘Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare,

   Unto a people prone with reverent awe.

 

The pride of luxury’s barbaric pomp,

   In the rich court of royal Solomon—

Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains,—

   The exiles by the streams of Babylon.

 

Our softened voices send us back again

   But mournful echoes through the empty hall:

Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound,

   And with unwonted gentleness they fall.

 

The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,

   All found their comfort in the holy place,

And children’s gladness and men's gratitude

   ‘Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.

 

The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!

   We know not which is sadder to recall;

For youth and happiness have followed age,

   And green grass lieth gently over all.

 

Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,

   With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.

Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,

   Before the mystery of death and God.

 

—Emma Lazarus

 

                                    

Jews lining up to board exile ships from Spain and Portugal in 1492.

 

    1492

 

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,

Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,

The children of the prophets of the Lord,

Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.

Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,

The West refused them, and the East abhorred.

No anchorage the known world could afford,

Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.

Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,

A virgin world where doors of sunset part,

Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here!

There falls each ancient barrier that the art

Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear

Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!”

 

—Emma Lazarus